Grammatical Change in the Verb Phrase in Australian English: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

Studies of grammatical change in the Late Modern English period have concentrated almost exclusively on British and American English. This paper is the first to trace grammatical changes in Australian English across the approximately two centuries from the foundation of the first British colony in Australia in 1788 to the present day, using data derived from two recently compiled corpora, ‘COOEE’ (nineteenth century) and ‘AusCorp’ (twentieth century). The focus of the investigation is on selected categories of the verb phrase that are known to have undergone diachronic change in British and American English over this period: modals and quasi-modals (specifically must, will, have to and be going to), the progressive and the present perfect. Australian English is shown, via comparisons using data from the ‘ARCHER’ corpus, to be evolving in the same general direction over the same period as the two longer-established varieties, British and American English. However, there are at the same time a sufficient number of divergences in frequency and rate of change between Australian English and the reference varieties to suggest a degree of linguistic independence for the Antipodean variety: in its milder level of support for the two rising quasi-modals, the rising progressive and the declining present perfect, and in its more extreme aversion to the two declining modals.