Reviewed by Susanne Wagner, Chemnitz University of Technology
In the prologue, Peter Collins emphasizes the comparative nature of the nineteen chapters of this volume in two respects. First, practically all contributors used a combination of corpora from two corpus ‘families’, namely the written LOB/Brown and the spoken/written ICE corpora from Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Second, the studies focus primarily on the position of the antipodean varieties relative to ‘traditional’ first languages in Europe and America and to each other, but also discuss the position of Australian English (AE) and New Zealand English (NZE) varieties in light of theories such as Edgar Schneider’s dynamic model (Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Many of the authors here extend earlier research to AE and NZE varieties (e.g. Heidi Quinn, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair).
The studies are divided into five major sections, ranging from morphology and functional sentence units (nouns, verbs, and noun and verb phrases) to the clause and sentence level and beyond (discourse), though many chapters could have been included in more than one section. However, some of the placements are not intuitive, e.g. the inclusion of Janet Holmes, Robert J. Sigley, and Agnes Terraschke’s chapter on gender-neutral language under ‘noun phrase’. While the discussion focuses on nouns, it also includes adjectives and of course gender-neutral language is primarily not a formal but a sociocultural, pragmatic phenomenon.
Most of the studies suffer from an age-old problem in morphosyntactic comparison, lack of examples ( Pam Peters on irregular verbs; Quinn, Mair, Johan Elsness). Certain constructions and forms occur so rarely (in the single digits) as to not even permit the most basic statistical analyses. Tellingly, the only elaborate quantitative analysis (Kate Kearns on variable rules) is not based on the small one-million-word corpora. Low-frequency, genre-restricted items such as hypocoristics are almost non-existent in the small corpora, leaving the internet as the source of choice (Dianne Bardsley and Jane Simpson). Some authors also make use of the questionnaire-type results from Australian style (Peters, Elsness).
The small corpora can mostly only uncover tendencies and are clearly unsuited for generalizations. Sociolinguistic analyses, for example, which may help shed light on change in progress, are impossible, as is the qualification of dialect influence. Detailed evaluations also raise the question whether these comparative corpora truly are comparable (ICE US missing; ICE GB not representative, Mair, p.271; written part of ICE NZ ‘somewhat conservative’, Peters, p.135; time lag between corpus compilations; lack of diachronic data, etc.).
Only few truly antipodean patterns are identified: e.g. hypocoristics (Bardsley and Simpson) and clause-final like (Jim Miller) and but (Jean Mulder, Sandra A. Thompson, and Cara Penry Williams). Interestingly, NZE emerges as rather conservative in writing but highly colloquial in speech, in contrast to AE, where the two registers are closer together. Generally, parallels between AE and NZE are stronger than the differences, grouping the varieties closer to each other than to either American English or British English. A major next research step could involve the comparison of AE and NZE with Singapore English as a ‘neighbouring’ variety and South African English(es) as the third southern hemisphere variety (Peters, ‘Epilogue’).
Practically all studies suggest further research and extension beyond the varieties studied, and emphasize the need for larger corpora, particularly for colloquial spoken language. Nevertheless, a trend of increasing colloquialization can be identified in several studies. In the end, most authors conclude that variation within rather than between varieties is most decisive in their subfield: written vs. spoken data as well as different registers within subgenres show the most significant trends, but very often this cannot be confirmed due once again to a lack of data for genre comparisons.