Bilingual creativity, multidimensional analysis, and world Englishes

Abstract

Research in world English literatures has concentrated on qualitative measures of analysis in order to understand what is meant by ‘bilingual creativity.’ These measures demonstrate that there are differences in rhetorical and literary style within world English literatures both in the inner and outer circle. Using Biber's multidimensional analysis (1988) to examine a large corpus of world English literatures written in Indian, West African, Britain, Anglo‐American and Mexican American varieties of English, this paper examines whether quantitative analyses can also be insightful and useful in the examination of world English literatures in expanding our understanding of what ‘bilingual creativity’ entails. The results of this study reveal that computational methods of analyzing texts both confirm former research comparing differences between texts written in different varieties of English and also shed new light on differences that exist between these varieties.