“Grammatical change in Old and New Englishes: the role of colloquialisation and other ‘-isations’”

Peter Collins
UNSW

Colloquialisation – the increasing acceptance of colloquialism, particularly in more formal genres – has been a powerful discourse-pragmatic agent of grammatical change in English since the mid-twentieth century. Studies of recent diachronic change in British and American English (e.g. Leech et al. 2009) suggest that it has played a role in, for example, the rise of the quasi-modals (have to, have got to, be going to, want to, etc.), of the progressive aspect, and of the get-passive. Little is known, however, about the spread of this development through regional varieties of other than the two inner circle ‘supervarieties’, British and American English. Using data derived from a number of sources, including the International Corpus of English, Brown family corpora, and the Corpus of Historical American English, I shall explore the impact of colloquialisation on a number of grammatical features across a range of World Englishes of both the “Inner Circle” and the “Outer Circle”. Attention will also be paid to such complementary processes as grammaticalisation and Americanisation, and explanations pursued in the light of independent evidence of the relative evolutionary statuses of the Englishes (q.v. Schneider 2007) and their characteristic style orientations.

References
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, and Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schneider, Edgar. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.