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This paper looks at variation in the expression of perfect meaning in Asian Englishes (Hong Kong, India, Singapore and the Philippines) as represented in the spoken component of theInternational Corpus of English. Findings confirm the existence of levelling between the present perfect and simple past in these varieties, and that the tendency of the present perfect to lose ground to the preterite is more pronounced in these New Englishes than in British English, especially in the expression of recent past. The occurrence of other variants in the corpus is accounted for in terms of the influence of the respective substrate languages, cognitive constraints characteristic of language-contact situations, pragmatic contextual factors such as the scant use of adverbial support, and, especially, diffusion from the input language, which is an earlier variety of spoken, non-standard English. Relevant intravarietal differences are also discussed and attributed to the different phases of development in which the four varieties currently find themselves.

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This paper seeks to explain the radical decrease in the use of the passive voice in Present-day English scientific discourse. A number of different linguistic factors having been discounted in previous research, it is hypothesised here that passives are being omitted for two reasons. Firstly, they became conventionalised in scientific discourse and subsequently lost the pragmatic function which originally justified their high frequency in scientific texts. Secondly, over the course of the twentieth century two sociocultural circumstances converge that exert pressure on conventionalised passives to disappear, namely (i) the increasing competitiveness in the scientific community, and (ii) the democratisation of discourse. This hypothesis is tested in the present paper by analysing the function of passives in scientific discourse before the drop in frequency began, that is, in Late Modern English . With data from ARCHER and other sources I will try to show that passives in Late Modern scientific English exemplify the conventionalisation and loss of contextual function of pragmatic strategies, a scenario that, given the right sociohistorical conditions, leads to linguistic change.

In this paper, we examine the diffusion of a syntactic change in a specialised text type in different World Englishes – in particular, the use of be-passives in academic discourse in nine contact varieties of English and six English as a Native Language (ENL) varieties. The Zürich-parsed International Corpus of English (ICE) makes it possible to retrieve automatically, for the first time, the two variants in the envelope of variation: active transitive constructions and be-passives. We apply regression analysis in order to gauge the effect of potential external factors that play a role in the choice between them: regional variety (with potential influence from the substrate in the contact varieties) and academic sub-discipline. The use of the passive has undergone change in the twentieth century (see, for example, Leech et al., 2009 ). As a necessary backdrop for variation found in the ICE corpora, we therefore use historical data from the extended Brown family of corpora, which have also been parsed at the University of Zürich. The results of our analysis show that regional variety is less important than academic sub-discipline: with the sole exception of American English, be-passives are about equally frequent in both ENL and contact varieties; moreover, they are distributed similarly across all varieties according to academic sub-discipline (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and technology).