|
yesterday
in newspaper English, as in ‘X happened yesterday’, is much
higher in British English than in American English (according to the criteria of
Biber
et al
.); the point is reported on p. 795of their book.
(b) Specific adverb
+
adjective pairs showing differences in
conversational usage, after Biber
et al
. (1999: 545).
Occurrence
BrE
AmE
100
+
per million
very good
pretty good
very nice
really good
50
+
per million
quite good
too bad
really good
very good
20
+
per million
pretty good
real good
quite nice
real quick
too bad
really bad
fair enough
too big
very nice
150
The future of global English
where its approach established some sort of contrastivity, and at
many of these there is considerable lexico-grammatical variation.
An example of this variation is given in Table 3(a), where some of
the adverbial differences are noted; Table 3(b) takes the topic of
adverbs modifying adjectives, and extracts the relevant differences
for conversation. This kind of variation is found at several places
within the grammar. For example, older semi-modals (e.g.
have to,
be going to
) are noted to be ‘considerably more common’ in AmE,
whereas recent semi-modals (e.g.
had better
,
have got to
) are ‘more
common by far’ in BrE.
23
Variations are also noted with respect to
aspect, modals, negation, concord, pronouns, complementation
and several other areas. Although each point is relatively small in
scope, the potential cumulative effect of a large number of local
differences, especially of a colligational type, can be considerable.
It is this which probably accounts for the impression of Britishness
or Americanness which a text frequently conveys, without it being
possible to find any obviously distinctive grammatical or lexical
feature within it.
But whatever the grammatical differences between standard
American and British English, these are likely to be small com-
pared with the kinds of difference which are already beginning
to be identified in the more recently recognized New Englishes.
And areas which we might legitimately consider to be ‘core’ are
being implicated. Several examples have been identified in case
studies of particular regional varieties, as will be illustrated below;
but it is important to note the limitations of these studies. The
state of the art is such that the examples collected can only
be illustrative of possible trends in the formation of new re-
gional grammatical identities. There have been few attempts to
adopt a more general perspective, to determine whether a feature
noticed in one variety is also to be found in others, either nearby
or further afield.
24
Nor do the case studies adopt the same kind of
intra-regional variationist perspective as illustrated by Biber
et al.
23
Biber
et al
. (1999: 488–9).
24
This point is discussed in Crystal (1995a: 358ff.). An exception is Ahulu
(1995a), comparing usage in West Africa and India, and his two-part study
of lexical and grammatical variation in international English, as found in
postcolonial countries (1998a, 1998b).
151
ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE
(1999), or examine lexico-grammatical interaction. The studies
are often impressionistic – careful collections of examples by lin-
guistically trained observers, but lacking the generalizing power
which only systematic surveys of usage can provide. On the other
hand, during the 1990s there has been a steady growth in the use
of corpora and elicitation testing.
25
The absence of statistical data, in the literature referred to
below, means that the varietal status of features identified as non-
standard (with reference to British or American English) is always
open to question. There are so many possibilities: a variant may be
common as a localized standard form, in both written and spoken
contexts, or restricted to one of these mediums; it may be formal
or informal, or register-bound, occurring only in newspapers, stu-
dent slang,
26
or other restricted settings; it may be idiosyncratic, as
in the case of some literary creations; it may co-exist with a variant
from British or American English; and it may be locally stigma-
tized, or even considered to be an error (by local people). Given
that it has taken forty years for corpus studies of the main vari-
eties of English to reach the stage of comparative register-specific
analysis (as in Biber
et al
.), it is not surprising that relatively little
such work has taken place elsewhere. But this does not mean that
a compilation of sources, such as those listed in Table 4, is of no
value. On the contrary, such studies are an excellent means of fo-
cusing attention on areas of potential significance within a variety,
and are an invaluable source of hypotheses.
Table 4 illustrates a range of features which have already been
noted, some of which are very close to what anyone might rea-
sonably want to call ‘core’. A table of this kind needs very careful
interpretation. Its only purpose is to illustrate the kinds of gram-
matical feature being proposed as distinctive in studies of New
Englishes, and it makes no claim to exhaustiveness or representa-
tiveness. Providing an example from, say, Ghana, to instantiate a
feature, is not to suggest that this feature is restricted to Ghana:
Ghana is simply one of the countries in which this feature may
be found (as claimed by at least one of the authors identified at
the right of the table), and doubtless several others also display
25
As in Mesthrie (1992a), Skandera (1999).
26
Longe (1999).
152
The future of global English
Table 4
Some potentially distinctive grammatical features of
New Englishes
Construction
Illustration
Sample sources
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