This volume showcases the merits of a corpus-based diachronic approach to postcolonial varieties of English, and thus extends the view on recent grammatical change in this area. After a general introduction by the editor, the reader finds two content sections labelled according to Kachru's categories ‘Inner Circle Englishes’ and ‘Outer Circle Englishes’, followed by a short subject index. It is one of the most extensive volumes in the Studies in Corpus Linguistics series, consisting of no less than eighteen contributions based on original research. In the following, I will present each individual chapter before coming to an overall assessment.

The first section has an emphasis on first-language Englishes in the southern hemisphere, with five chapters dealing with Australian or New Zealand English (henceforth AusE, NZE). Among them is Peter Collins’ contribution, an investigation of the quantitative development of a number of morphological, morphosyntactic and syntactic features in nineteenth- and twentieth-century AusE in contrast to American and British English (AmE, BrE). Collins offers an overview of studies of grammatical change in AusE before presenting the quantitative results of his analysis, based on news and fiction sections from the Corpus of Oz Early English (COOEE), the Corpus of Twentieth Century Australian English (AusCorp) and A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). His findings indicate that AusE shows increasing divergence from BrE and moves closer to AmE in its frequency patterns for the features under investigation. Thus, he concludes that (i) AusE is becoming independent from its colonial parent, (ii) an ‘exonormative shift’ (p. 38) towards AmE as the ‘centre of gravity of grammatical change’ (p. 5) has taken place and (iii) various types of processes have to be considered when describing the development of features in postcolonial Englishes, such as colonial lag and innovation, and also the less prominent ‘colonial revival’ and ‘survival’, as well as ‘divergence’, ‘parallel change’ and ‘overtake’.

Alexandra D’Arcy takes a close look at possessive have/(have) got in a predominantly British-influenced subvariety of Canadian English (Victoria English) from the middle of the nineteenth to the first third of the twentieth century. After a brief overview of the diachronic development of have (both as dynamic and stative verb), she reports that, contrary to BrE patterns, no shift towards the have got variant can be observed for the Victoria newspaper data, arguably due to the specific sociocultural circumstances of this speech community and also to the role that increasing rates of do-support for stative have may have played in blocking the expansion of have got. In her concluding discussion, D’Arcy contextualizes such a blocking as one instance of a ‘perplexing trend’ (p. 59) which runs counter to the general development of English towards more analyticity, and calls for further studies considering the very ‘crossroads of change’ (p. 60) in order to obtain additional explanations for synchronic variation.

Do-support in writing is also the topic of Marianne Hundt's chapter, in which she investigates variability and regularization in this domain in late nineteenth-century AusE and NZE with the help of data from COOEE and the Corpus of Early New Zealand English. She contrasts her findings with American and British material from ARCHER, using the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts as additional sources. Hundt provides information on the sociocultural and linguistic histories of Australia and New Zealand, and sums up the main arguments as regards do-support in extant work. Overall, her quantitative results suggest that the four varieties studied behave similarly as regards regularization in the sense of increasing do-support (vs bare negation) with full verbs in negative contexts. A second focus lies on lexical have, where a qualitative analysis of negatives reveals that AmE is more advanced in the regularization than the other varieties, while we can witness persistence of the bare form and thus one of ‘the few instances of parallel development’ (p. 83) of the four varieties in the area of affirmative interrogatives.

‘The progressive in Irish English’ is the chapter by John Kirk, in which he highlights the ‘Janus-like’ (p. 87) nature of this variety, that is, the dependence on both BrE and Irish, by way of a case study. He uses the Irish and British components of the International Corpus of English (ICE), the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence, and LOB and FLOB from the Brown family to link developments from the late eighteenth century to the present day. First, after providing an overview of twenty different progressive categories, he applies a form-to-function approach and concentrates on the changes in the ways the progressive can be used to express ‘basic’ and ‘special’ (p. 90), that is, non-aspectual, functions. In the second part of his analysis, he discusses some special uses characteristic of Irish English (such as the ‘extended-now’ progressive) and traces their origins and frequencies in the historical data. Kirk finds considerable overlap between Irish English (IrE) and BrE as regards the basic uses, and hints at Irish influence for the salience of special uses and the overall higher frequency of the progressive in IrE. He further raises the question whether IrE should also be viewed as an influential parent variety in the genesis of other postcolonial Englishes (and indeed of BrE) due to the global spread of this variety through a long-standing tradition of Irish migration.

The choice of corpus data (Brown-family corpora from three stages) used in Christian Mair's chapter suggests at first glance that this contribution may be slightly off the volume's theme. However, as he demonstrates, there are important lessons to be learnt for the diachronic study of postcolonial varieties from a comparison of BrE and AmE. The rationale for this claim is that they ‘remain the only two varieties for which we have corpus data in sufficient amounts and quality to make possible a comprehensive and systematic analysis of how regional diversification and diachronic change have interacted’ (p. 123). In his analysis, where he also draws from further corpora, Mair convincingly shows that rather than speaking of stable regional variation in the domain of modality it is more adequate to describe the diachronic developments as ‘cross-variety diachronic drift’ (p. 126), that is, movement into the same direction. In addition, he draws attention to genre as a confounding factor that has to be accounted for whenever allegedly broader diachronic trends are described and interpreted. He makes the case that it is essential to compile ‘historical and generically stratified corpora of as many of these varieties as possible’ (p. 141) in order to obtain reliable results for the various postcolonial Englishes.

Matthias Meyer's chapter, ‘Passives of so-called “ditransitives” in nineteenth century and present-day Canadian English’, starts by advocating the term ‘double-participant verb(s)’ as an alternative to ‘ditransitives’ and ‘double-object constructions’ (pp. 148–9), and then offers an overview of the emergence and development of the passive and double-participant verbs since Old English. Meyer discusses the three relevant passive types, ‘first passives’ (She was given the book), ‘second passives’ (The book was given her) and ‘prepositional passives’ (The book was given to her), and meticulously interprets the quantitative data obtained from two stratified corpora of Canadian English consisting of newspaper, fiction and non-fiction texts. Overall, the results indicate a decrease of passives in Canadian English, similar to findings for AmE and BrE. As to the passive categories, Meyer shows that the relative frequency of first passives increased in the period studied, and further states that the other two types can be viewed as functional complements that serve to locate subject-position themes.

Pam Peters treats ‘Dual adverbs in Australian English’, and compares nineteenth-century data from purpose-built AusE and BrE corpora with recent usage patterns as represented in the relevant components of ICE. After a theoretical discussion and an overview of previous work on the subject she presents her main result, which is that zero forms (i.e. suffixless, He left quick vs He left quickly) have been on the decline in both varieties, but less strongly in AusE. Peters attributes this to colonial lag or, alternatively, emerging independence of this variety from its parent. She also identifies a higher amount of free variation between zero and -ly forms in AusE as well as fewer restrictions on the combinability of verbs and zero forms in contrast to BrE. Peters further comments on the continuing development of a number of adverbs (such as highly) towards representing a fully abstract (intensifying) meaning, and on the alleged informality of zero forms, which could be confirmed for some items (e.g. bad), but not for others (e.g. close).

In her contribution, ‘The evolution of epistemic marking in West Australian English’, Celeste Rodríguez Louro probes a widely known grammaticalization phenomenon, the recent change of I think (and related constructions) from formulaic stance marker (I think that. . .) to what she calls ‘epistemic parenthetical[s]’ (p. 205), which occur in variable syntactic positions and lack a that-complementizer. She focuses on twentieth-century data stemming from interviews originally collected from Anglo-Celtic Perth residents (born 1874–1983). After identifying think as the most frequent verb in the relevant contexts, she contrasts four different age groups in a variable rule analysis, where she considers language-internal factors influencing the choice between think and a set of related verbs (guess, know, reckon, suppose). Rodríguez Louro interprets the overall results as a development of the I think construction into a formulaic pragmatic marker to express and mitigate opinion or doubt. This usage can only be traced in the youngest age cohort, and is accordingly understood as recent change.

Marije Van Hattum discusses the dissolution of the functional split between ‘May and might in nineteenth century Irish English and English English’, based on an analysis of a variety of corpus data from court proceedings (e.g. parts of the Old Bailey Corpus) and letters (e.g. from ARCHER). This rich material allows her to observe a strong influence of context on the development of might into an independent modal auxiliary. While the traditional difference between may (non-past, non-remote) and might (past, remote) is preserved in objective possibility contexts, they progressively converge in subjective possibility contexts, and are both used to convey past time propositions, combining with obligatory perfect forms. The perfect, grammaticalizing at the time, is viewed as natural partner in relevant contexts due to its analytic layout and its ‘back-shift[ing]’ (p. 241) function. Van Hattum further identifies a larger number of formulaic uses in IrE, and attributes quantitative differences between IrE and English English largely to Irish substrate influence. She thus proposes that the development represents genuine diachronic change rather than regional variation.

Developments of ‘The present perfect and the preterite in Australian English’ take centre stage in Xinyue Yao's contribution. She uses the same nineteenth- and twentieth-century data as Collins (see above), but she extracts the narrative portion of COOEE and focuses on fictional dialogue. After an overview of previous research on the diachrony of the time-reference forms in English, Yao compares the rates of the present perfect and the preterite in AusE to the ones in AmE and BrE, to show that the perfect has been on the decline across all three varieties throughout the time period studied. However, the decline is least notable in AusE. Yao further takes account of contextual factors (such as temporal specification and telicity of the main verb) by way of a variable rule analysis, which enables her to confirm previous research on increasing linguistic constraints on the present perfect, most strongly in AmE, and least strongly in AusE. Therefore, she attributes ‘conservative stylistic preferences’ (p. 263) to the latter.

Another chapter by Collins opens the second part of the volume. He regards his assessment as a contribution to the debate whether Philippine English (PhilE) continues to be exonormatively oriented towards AmE or has already reached endonormative stabilization. To this end, Collins contrasts the Phil-Brown corpus (1960s data with a layout parallel to Brown-family corpora) with parts of the Philippine component of ICE (1990s data). Rather than providing an unambiguous answer, the picture that emerges is an intricate one. PhilE and AmE match in their declining frequencies of progressive passives and increasing frequencies of progressives with stative verbs. In contrast, complex progressives have been increasing more markedly in PhilE. As regards text type effects, PhilE aligns with American patterns for some types (learned writing), but with British ones for others (fiction), and lags behind both native varieties for yet others (press reportage). The same intricacy applies to the results for non-aspectual progressives; hence, Collins concludes that neither position in the exo-/endonormativity debate is fully supported by his case study.

Julia Davydova describes ‘Linguistic change in a multilingual setting’ through the study of quotatives in Indian English (IndE). Hers is a sociolinguistic study of short-term real-time change, in which she mainly focuses on the variables gender and education/speaker type (acrolectal vs mesolectal). The data, elicited in 2007 and 2011 through sociolinguistic interviews, stem from the Hamburg Corpus of Non-Native Varieties of English, while dialogues from the Indian component of ICE (1990s) serve as an additional point of reference. Davydova identifies a large set of fourteen different quotative variants (including local innovations) and zooms in on the five most frequent ones in a variable rule analysis. The bottom line of her analysis is a divide between mesolectal speakers (mostly male) preferring traditional forms, such as verbs of reporting, and acrolectal speakers (mostly female) preferring innovative international and local variants, such as be like and okay (fine). She identifies the variable ‘year’ as a significant factor only for the latter variants, and the extended diachronic perspective confirms this tendency: the data from ICE yield none of the innovative forms at all, so that their emergence indeed should be interpreted as a phenomenon within very recent and ongoing change of the quotative system in IndE.

Bernard De Clerck and Klaar Vanopstal examine recent change in IndE in a set of verbs where both regular and irregular past (participle) variants can be found (e.g. spoilt vs spoiled), with the help of a combination of sources (Brown-family corpora, Kolhapur Corpus, writing from ICE, Corpus of Global Web-Based English). Their synchronic analysis indicates that IndE is to be viewed as a ‘variety with conflicting forces of progression’ (p. 350), as it shows higher preferences for irregular forms for some verbs, but not for others. In the overall diachronic perspective, however, IndE seems to be moving away from a predilection for irregular forms. The authors further discuss effects of frequency and of orthographic and phonetic salience, and find that (i) surprisingly, the retention of t-forms does not correspond to higher verb frequencies; (ii) there is a slightly higher proportion of retained t-forms if vowel changes are involved in the trajectory from the irregular to the regular variant; (iii) other factors, such as the pronunciation in nominal uses of individual items (e.g. dream), may also play a part in accelerating regularization.

The chapter co-authored by Robert Fuchs and Ulrike Gut presents ‘An apparent time study of the progressive in Nigerian English’. They use the recently completed Nigerian component of ICE and exploit the availability of sociolinguistic speaker information linked to the corpus files. Thus, they are in a position to adopt a quasi-longitudinal perspective, and further to report on variation along the factors gender, ethnic group and text type. Comparing different age groups, the authors attest an ongoing increase in the frequency of the progressive. On a more fine-grained level, they are able to trace effects of ethnicity, with Yoruba speakers using the progressive more than those with an Igbo background, and of the formality of text types, with progressives being more frequent in persuasive and informal texts. Furthermore, non-aspectual progressives (see also above and below) are relatively stable from a diachronic perspective, even if persuasive and informal texts again favour increased use of this progressive category. Fuchs and Gut also draw attention to the specific cultural role of age in African societies, which probably precludes the interpretation of their (and other) findings in terms of age grading.

Stephanie Hackert and Dagmar Deuber explore ‘American influence on written Caribbean English’ with ‘A diachronic analysis of newspaper reportage in the Bahamas and in Trinidad and Tobago’. They cover recent changes in four features (contractions, be-passives, relativizers that vs which, pseudotitles) by contrasting local news material from the late 1960s with contemporary data, and compare their findings to British and American English press reports to assess a potential ‘shift in norm orientation’ (p. 393). The authors thus relate their findings to the broad concept of Americanization and associated colloquialization and densification. They find evidence for all of these processes in their data, but to different degrees for different features, so that ultimately a unanimous verdict on the case of Americanization of the grammar of Caribbean varieties of English cannot be reached. Overall, however, Hackert and Deuber suggest that Caribbean reporting style remains more formal in contrast to its British and American counterparts, which they partly attribute to language ideologies on the local level in terms of a persistence of prescriptive forces.

The chapter by Joybrato Mukherjee and Tobias Bernaisch occupies an exceptional position in the volume in that it neither covers a core grammatical domain, nor is it based on genuinely diachronic corpus material. However, their survey of noun–verb collocations involving the keywords government, religion and terror in the South Asian Varieties of English Corpus (newspaper data) allows them to determine degrees of divergence of Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan English from BrE (as represented by the news portion of the British National Corpus). The authors further interpret diverging patterns as evidence for the ‘community-specific linguistic acculturation of the English language’ (p. 417), and thus for differing diachronic developments of the three South Asian varieties. They operationalize divergence via a diversity/unity ratio that establishes a coefficient of the variety-specificity of certain habitual combinations, and find that collocates largely converge for government, while divergence is more pronounced for terror, and most prominent for religion. Mukherjee and Bernaisch suggest that these results may map sociocultural realities in the respective areas, for instance as regards a common (linguistic) acculturation of government issues, but less so as regards the experience of terrorism, and least so as to religious matters.

Dirk Noël and Johan Van der Auwera analyse ‘Recent quantitative changes in the use of modals and quasi-modals in the Hong Kong, British and American printed press’ by ‘Exploring the potential of Factiva ^® for the diachronic investigation of World Englishes’. As implied by the subtitle, a main focus of their contribution is methodological: they draw on Factiva – a commercial tool originally designed for the search of business information in newspapers – to obtain quantitative data as to the dispersion of modals and quasi-modals across texts. With this innovative approach, they are able to cover the time span from 1990 to 2010 across the three varieties studied, and are in a position to qualify and extend the (partly conflicting) findings of previous corpus-based research. The main result of their study is that modality is on the rise in American news, a development that can be traced neither in British nor in Hong Kong publications. Even though British and Hong Kong press reports appear to align in tendency, the authors also note subtle differences between them pertaining to the development of modal categories (modals vs quasi-modals) and to individual items. They also caution that ‘sub-genre’ (p. 463) effects, that is, differences between printed press publications from the same variety, have to be considered in research of this type.

The volume is completed by a look at ‘The development of an extended time period meaning of the progressive in Black South African English’ since the late-nineteenth century, by Bertus Van Rooy and Caroline Piotrowska. Their analysis relies on a newly compiled historical newspaper and fiction corpus, which is compared to corresponding text categories of contemporary South African English. Their results suggest that the progressive, parallel to its expansion in native and other non-native varieties (see above), has become more frequent in Black South African English in the course of the twentieth century. However, the authors do not find evidence for a functional shift going along with the quantitative growth. In addition, their data substantiate the view of an early and persisting inclination of the progressive to co-occur with state and achievement verbs for the expression of an extended time period (e.g. the farmers are anxiously waiting – as they have been for twenty years) as a local pattern. To account for this, they discuss substratal influence from Bantu languages as a possible motivation, which underscores the importance of language contact in change.

Grammatical change in English world-wide is a highly welcome addition to the field as it represents the first comprehensive effort taking this perspective. Other publications (such as Nevalainen & Traugott Reference Nevalainen and Traugott2012 or Pfenninger et al. Reference Pfenninger, Timofeeva, Gardner, Honkapoohja, Hundt and Schreier2014) contain merely a few chapters with a similar focus. Apart from some minor slips (e.g. p. 271: 1998, read 1898; p. 394: change in line spacing; p. 400: missing clause in the first paragraph), the volume is carefully edited and produced, and highly accessible. The well-written introduction by Collins contextualizes the overall aim of the book and serves as an excellent point of reference for those who want to obtain a concise chapter overview.

The collection succeeds in providing a synopsis of the state of the art in the emerging area of corpus-based diachronic research of postcolonial varieties. It may be argued that some of the corpora employed in individual contributions leave something to be desired for a diachronic study (as they were not intended for this type of investigation in the first place; see also Mair's concerns). However, the breadth of the material presented indicates that scholars interested in pursuing research in this direction have something to which they can relate. Therefore, from a methodological point of view, it is noteworthy that contributors have started to tackle the notorious issue of how to obtain reliable historical data of postcolonial varieties with various innovative corpus-based strategies.

It remains to be seen whether obtaining such material will remain ‘a corpus compiler's nightmare’ (Hoffmann Reference Hoffmann2013; see further Mukherjee & Schilk Reference Mukherjee and Schilk2012) due to high administrative and technical hurdles or whether more diachronic sources will become available in the future. Ideally, these sources will take account of register differences, a recurrent issue in the contributions to the volume. Conceivable options are for instance (i) exploiting the opportunities offered through the continuing digitalization of historical archives (see, e.g., the chapter by Rodríguez Louro; but cf. Hackert & Deuber's comments on issues in using OCR), (ii) tapping into genuinely non-linguistic resources (see, e.g., the chapter by Noël & Van der Auwera), or (iii) the compilation of second-generation versions of extant corpora (think, e.g., of Australian and British components of ICE sampled around the year 2020 that can be compared to the existing ones from the early 1990s, covering a thirty-year span like the corpora from the Brown family; see also Collins’s chapter on PhilE). A host of grammatical and discourse features in postcolonial varieties of English – as well as theoretical concepts, for instance Mufwene's (2001) ‘founder effect’ – still await diachronic (re-)assessment, so this is most certainly an area with many future research opportunities, also in varieties not covered in the volume discussed.