Into-causatives in World Englishes

Abstract

The paper analyses the frequency and use of the relatively rare, yet highly productive into-causative construction in twenty varieties of English on the basis of the 1.9-billion word Corpus of Web-based Global English (GloWbE; Davies 2013)1 and Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model. It hypothesises differences in frequency, variation in the preference for particularly frequent fillers as well as productivity differences in line with Schneider’s stages of linguistic evolution. However, it shows that only frequency differences reflect the Dynamic Model; with regard to the preference for frequent realisations and productivity, postcolonial varieties turn out to be very similar to British English. These results come as a surprise against the background of similar studies of the way-construction, where all of these effects have been documented convincingly. It is argued that the properties of into-causatives themselves (e.g. their idiomatic and semantic simplicity) might contribute to their more native-like usage patterns in postcolonial varieties of English.