Home > Language, Literature > Vol 11 No 1 June 2023 Abstract 8
Spelling and Syntactic Variation in Three Varieties of English: A Corpus-based Approach
Anjola ROBBIN, Eunice Omolara OLAREWAJU

Abstract
This exploratory study investigated spelling and syntactic variation in three varieties of English, namely Nigerian English (NE), British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). The data for the study were drawn from Global Web-based English (GloWbE), a corpus which consists of 1.9 billion words from twenty different countries. The present research was motivated by our observation that, though NE has a close historical association with BrE, AmE has been exacting great influence on NE. The spelling styles and some syntactic differences were compared in the three varieties with a view to determining which of BrE and AmE has an edge over the other in NE. The study demonstrated that the AmE spelling convention has an edge over BrE spelling in NE. It was also discovered that NE is tilting rapidly towards AmE in spelling. With respect to grammatical variation, it was shown that the preference for either regular or irregular verb forms after HAVE seems to be verb-dependent in NE. Finally, it was revealed that the structural pattern and the actual usage of simple perfect aspect are similar across NE, BrE and AmE.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v11n1a8