The present study seeks to contribute to two sparsely examined areas of World Englishes research by (i)

We sketch a project that marries probabilistic grammar research to scholarship on World Englishes, thus synthesizing two previously rather disjoint lines of research into one unifying project with a coherent focus. This synthesis is hoped to advance usage-based theoretical linguistics by adopting a large-scale comparative and sociolinguistically responsible perspective on grammatical variation. To highlight the descriptive and theoretical benefits of the approach, we present case studies of three syntactic alternations (the particle placement, genitive, and dative alternations) in four varieties of English (British, Canadian, Indian, and Singapore), as represented in the International Corpus of English. We report that the varieties studied share a core probabilistic grammar which is, however, subject to indigenization at various degrees of subtlety, depending on the abstractness of the syntactic patterns studied.

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In this paper, we are exploring the history of the genitive alternation (of-vs. s-genitive) in Singapore English based on corpus data covering both British English (as the historical input variety) and Singapore English (as the target variety whose diachronic development we are interested in). Specifically, while earlier research has produced partly diachronic accounts of genitive variability, the diachronic development of the genitive has so far not been studied in ESL contexts, a gap which this study attempts to fill. Nearly 6000 instances of of-and s-genitives were annotated for a large number of predictors including phonetic variables (e.g. final sibilancy of possessor), semantic variables (e.g. animacy of possessor/possessum), syntactic variables (e.g. length of possessor/possessum), and pragmatic variables (e.g. discourse accessibility of possessor/possessum). We then applied the method of Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis with Regressions/Random Forests to the data to explore (i) how genitive choices in Singapore English differ from those in British English and, after a methodological interlude, (ii) how genitive choices changed over time in Singapore English. We conclude with some important recommendations regarding diachronic studies of structural nativization and their theoretical implications in models such as those of Moag (1982) or Schneider (2003, 2007).

This special collection brings together research exploring and evaluating probabilistic variation patterns from a comparative perspective, thus highlighting current work situated at the crossroads of research on usage-based theoretical linguistics, variationist linguistics, and sociolinguistics. The contributions in the collection advance our understanding of the plasticity of syntactic knowledge on the part of language users with diverse regional and/or cultural backgrounds, and demonstrate how a probabilistic approach to grammatical variation can offer insight into the scope and limits of language variation. In this general introduction to the special collection, we provide some essential background for perspective, and subsequently summarize the contributions in the collection.