Co-selection phenomena across New Englishes: Parallels (and differences) to foreign learner varieties

Similarities of the phraseology of institutionalized second language varieties and foreign learner varieties have gone almost completely unnoticed so far. In this paper, different types of co-selection phenomena are examined across ESL and EFL varieties on the basis of the ICE-corpora of Kenyan, Indian, Singaporean, and Jamaican English and of ICLE, the International Corpus of Learner English. Among the features investigated are the use of competing collocations such as play a role and play a part, the noun complementation of collocations (HAVE + INTENTION + of -ing vs. to + infinitive), and non-L1 (or “new”) prepositional verbs such as comprise of, demand for or emphasize on. The exploration shows that many co-selection phenomena do indeed recur not only across individual institutionalized L2 varieties but also across the two variety types. Certain kinds of language-internal irregularities in the phraseology of Standard English are shown to be a major reason for the observed parallels