Changing english: global and local perspectives

This book examines the special nature of English both as a global and a local language, focusing on some of the ongoing changes and on the emerging new structural and discoursal characteristics of varieties of English. Although it is widely recognised that processes of language change and contact bear affinities, for example, to processes observable in second-language acquisition and lingua franca use, the research into these fields has so far not been sufficiently brought into contact with each other. The articles in this volume set out to combine all these perspectives in ways that give us a better understanding of the changing nature of English in the modern world.

Frontmatter --; Table of contents --; List of abbreviations --; Changing English: global and local perspectives --; Editors’ Introduction to Part I --; Crisis of the “Outer Circle”? – Globalisation, the weak nation state, and the need for new taxonomies in World Englishes research --; The Ecology of Language and the New Englishes: toward an integrative framework --; Editors’ Introduction to Part II --; The Present Perfect as a core feature of World Englishes --; Innovative structures in the relative clauses of indigenized L2 Asian English varieties --; Morphosyntactic typology, contact and variation: Cape Flats English in relation to other South African Englishes in the Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English --; Omission of direct objects in New Englishes --; The definite article in World Englishes --; Aspects of Verb Complementation in New Zealand Newspaper English --; Extended uses of the progressive form in Inner, Outer and Expanding Circle Englishes --; Editors’ Introduction to Part III --; A glimpse of ELF --; Lending bureaucracy voice: negotiating English in institutional encounters --; On the relationship between the cognitive and the communal: a complex systems perspective --; Transfer is Transfer; Grammaticalization is Grammaticalization --; Subject index --; Languages and Varieties index --; Author Index