Introduction to the Special Issue: Non-standard morphosyntactic variation in L2 Englishes world-wide: corpus-based studies

Abstract

Over the last few decades, a good deal of empirical research has been conducted on the distribution in the English-speaking world of morphosyntactic features considered to be non-standard (in the sense of not being part of the common core of standard written English). Insights have been achieved using elicitation methods (interviews and questionnaires), dialect corpora and open-access online atlases. There is, however, a dearth of large-scale corpus-based research, one that the present special issue seeks to address, with contributors drawing data from corpora – mainly derived from recordings of spoken English, and in some cases recently-compiled – representing mostly “New Englishes” (indigenised national L2 varieties, spoken in “outer circle” countries where English is established as an important language, even though it is not the native language of the majority of the population). Most contributions adopt a macro approach, investigating a set of features in a wide range of L2 English varieties, but some adopt a micro approach, zeroing in on a single feature or a small number of features.