The Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), released in April 2013, is freely available here. With 1.9 billion words from nearly 2 million web pages from 20 English-speaking countries, it uses the familiar interface of other Mark Davies corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English. For those not acquainted with the other corpora developed by Mark Davies, the site has brief explanations of the major features and a 5-minute tour that illustrates various types of searches.

The countries represented in GloWbE include inner, outer, and expanding circle Englishes: the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Jamaica. A helpful feature of the corpus is the ability to exclude countries and groups of countries to make comparisons. So it is possible to compare North American English—spoken in the United States and Canada—with British English, to focus on regions such as Southeast Asia, or to look at the English of the different circles.¹

To acquaint myself with GloWbE, I used it to investigate the use of more clear, a phrase which I have been hearing—and reading—frequently in the United States. I speculated that perhaps the outer circle countries were influencing the traditional formation of comparative adjectives in U.S. English.

My speculation was not supported. As seen in Table 1, in GloWbE both the absolute frequency and frequency per million words of more clear is greatest in the United States, but the countries with the least frequent occurrences per million words tend to be outer circle countries. Of the 10 countries at the bottom of the frequency list, only Ireland is not an outer circle country.

Table 1 Frequency of More Clear (click to enlarge)

(For a list of country codes click here)

Searching GloWbE for more clear and then clearer gave the results shown in Table 2. As seen, the traditional clearer is still more common in the United States as it is in all of the countries represented in GloWbE. Pakistan had the smallest frequency per million ratio, 3.31, meaning that clearer occurred in GloWbE only a little more than three times as frequently as did more clear. Pakistan was followed by the United States with a frequency ratio of 3.66. However, clearer occurs over 10 times more frequently than more clear in the Philippines, New Zealand, Tanzania, Australia, Nigeria, Ireland, Singapore, and Malaysia. Once again, it does not appear that the outer circle countries are influencing the United States.

Table 2 Comparison of the Frequency of More Clear and Clearer (click to enlarge)

So what was learned from this exercise with GloWbE? The traditional form of the comparative, clearer is still more frequent than more clear in U.S. web pages—over three times more frequent. Another way of saying this is that clearer is still more probable. And it is possible to state that clearer is much more probable in many other countries, with the ratio being over four times greater in Malaysia than in the United States. Furthermore, contrary to my initial speculation, there is no reason to believe that formation of the comparative in U.S. English is being influenced by outer circle countries’ English.

Jenkins (2006) noted several years ago that research into World Englishes “has immense implications for TESOL practice in all three circles and above all in terms of the kind of language we teach” (p. 171). TESOL (2008) has recognized in a position statement that,

as a result of complex economic, cultural, and technological forces, such as the growth of international trade and the Internet, the English language is now used worldwide, with a geographic spread unique among all world languages. . . . As a result, the vast majority of those using English worldwide are themselves nonnative speakers. This has had a profound effect on both the ways English language teaching (ELT) is practiced and the language itself.

GloWbE will be helpful to scholars and teachers interested in the “diverse users and uses of English” in inner, outer, and expanding circle countries (Bolton, Graddol, & Meierkord, 2011, p. 474). For me, GloWbE provided data to disconfirm my speculation that was based on intuition. I can now say with some confidence that although more clear is relatively frequent on U.S. websites, clearer still predominates, and that the use of more clear on U.S. websites does not appear to result from outer circle influences.

Yet I have not explained the reason for the variation in comparative forms apparent among the 20 different English-speaking countries represented in GloWbE. As pointed out some years ago by Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999),

the “rules” . . . for the comparative inflection are not as rigid as those for the plural or past-tense inflections. We regularly hear English speakers use a periphrastic form for emphasis . . . when the “rule” would predict the inflection. There is also some individual variation. (p. 721)

A follow-up to the quantitative analysis above would be a qualitative examination of the GloWbE data to investigate sociolinguistic variation in the use of more clear in web pages.

Note
1 Inner Circle countries are the traditional English-speaking countries; Outer Circle countries are those where English is used as an institutionalized, official language, though it may be an additional language for many; and the Expanding Circle countries are those where English does not have an official status, but is used in commerce and is studied as a foreign language. See Table 1 for a classification.

References
Bolton, K., Graddol, D., & Meierkord, C. (2011). Towards developmental world Englishes. World Englishes, 30, 459–480.
Celce-Murcia, M., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999). The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher’s course (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Thomson Heinle.
Jenkins, J. (2006). Current perspectives on teaching world Englishes and English as a lingua franca. TESOL Quarterly, 40, 157–181.
TESOL. (2008). Position statement on English as a global language. Retrieved from http://www.tesol.org/docs/pdf/10884.

Roger W. Gee is a Professor at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA where he is the Director of the Masters in TESOL and Literacy Program.  His interests are second language literacy, language and literacy assessment, and the use of corpora in teacher education.