What can corpus-based approaches tell about New Englishes?

Résumé ou Introduction

In the late 1980s Sidney Greenbaum, a British scholar of the English language and of linguistics, had a vision:

As the parallel corpora become available, new possibilities open up for rigorous comparative and contrastive studies. I envisage the search for typologies of national varieties of English: first-language versus second-language English, British-type versus American-type English, African versus Asian English, East African versus West African English. Researchers might explore what is common to English in all countries where it is used for internal communication, demonstrating how far it is legitimate to speak of a common core for English or of an international written standard.“ (Greenbaum in Sand, 2004: 281).

As a result of that breadth of view and building on his early experimental techniques investigating English grammar and usage, Greenbaum founded the International Corpus of English (ICE). The ICE is a major research project based at the Survey of English Usage to establish identically constructed corpora in different countries of the English-speaking world and provides linguists with a suitable database for their investigations regarding language usage and development, respectively.
This term paper attempts to demonstrate what corpus-based approaches can tell about New Englishes and Asian Varieties, respectively. At first I am going to demonstrate how lexical items (the definite article and the particle verb) are used for synchronic and diachronic analyses. I will then proceed to cultural and sociolinguistic aspects and eventually conclude with some desiderata pushing the subject beyond the boundaries of the prompt.