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What are the large-scale patterns and generalizations that emerge when investigating morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a bird's eye perspective? To address this question, this study draws on the questionnaire-based morphosyntactic database of the Handbook of Varieties of English, utilizing a number of quantitative analysis techniques (frequency and correlation measures, multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis). We demonstrate (i) that the database yields a number of generalizations and implicational tendencies relating to vernacular angloversals and universals of New Englishes, (ii) that there is a surprisingly consistent typological division between English L1 vernaculars, on the one hand, and English-based pidgins and creoles on the other hand, and (iii) that World Englishes can, on aggregate, be seen to vary along two major dimensions which we interpret as being indicative of morphosyntactic complexity and analyticity. In conclusion, we offer that the Handbook's morphosyntactic database presents some interesting methodological challenges to dialectology and dialectometry. #

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In usage-based linguistic theories, the assumption that high-frequency language strings are mentally represented as unitary chunks has been invoked to account for a wide range of phenomena. However, neurocognitive evidence in support of this assumption is still lacking. In line with Gestalt psychological assumptions, we propose that a language string qualifies as a chunk if the following two conditions are simultaneously satisfied: The perception of the whole string does not involve strong activation of its individual component parts, but the component parts in isolation strongly evoke the whole. Against this background, we explore the relationship between different frequency metrics and the chunk status of derived words (e.g., "government," "worthless") in a masked visual priming experiment with two conditions of interest. One condition investigates "whole-to-part" priming (worthless-WORTH), whereas the other one analyzes "part-to-whole" priming (tear-TEARLESS). Both conditions combine mixed-effects regression analyses of lexical decision RTs with a parametric fMRI design. Relative frequency (the frequency of the whole word relative to that of its onset-embedded part) emerges as the only frequency metric to correlate with chunk status in behavioral terms. The fMRI results show that relative frequency modulates activity in regions that have been related to morphological (de)composition or general task performance difficulty (notably left inferior frontal areas) and in regions associated with competition between whole, undecomposed words (right inferior frontal areas). We conclude that relative frequency affects early stages of processing, thereby supporting the usage-based concept of frequency-induced chunks.

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This paper offers a broad empirical morphosyntactic study contributing to three debates in linguistics, one of long standing (the so-called equi-complexity axiom), the other two rather more recent, namely McWhorter's claim (2001aMcWhorter's claim ( ,b, 2007 that (pidgins and) creoles have the simplest grammars, and Trudgill's claim (2009) that high-contact varieties of English are characterized by structural simplification processes while low-contact varieties are the result of complexification processes. We will present the results of comparative analyses covering three notionally different morphosyntactic complexity metrics applied to two different data types for about 50 largely non-standard varieties of English (low-contact L1s, high-contact L1s, L2s, pidgins and creoles). Ultimately, we believe to be in a firm position to reject the axiom that the morphosyntax of all languages (and varieties of a language) is equally complex and to support both the claims by McWhorter and Trudgill.