ABSTRACT
The chapter provides a number of successful examples of this kind of principled approach to world Englishes. It shows the question of methodology shares, with theory, a position at the heart of linguistics, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics. The chapter discusses a good sense of some of the different ways in which World Englishes (WE) are constructed within sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. Although corpora only provide distributional information, recently, scholars have demonstrated much creativity and research effort to develop quantitative methods that bring the best out of those distributions to better understand how the linguistic structure of WE varies systematically across individual Englishes. In founding the modern subject of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure made the observation that in linguistics, it is the point of view that creates object of study, ‘it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object’. Ethnographical approaches depend on a different set of assumptions from those of corpus linguistics, though interestingly there are common themes.
