A dialectological approach to complement variability in global web-based English

Computer-Mediated Communication is part of the everyday lives of a great many people of all ages, cultures, social statuses, and geographical locations. In the present study, I explore non-categorical syntactic variability in internet language with data from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), which includes material from blogs, forums, comments, and other types of websites. The focus is on how the geographical area of internet users affects the use of the clausal complementation patterns available for the verb regret. The analysis of more than 10,000 examples from Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Singaporean, Malaysian, Philippine, Hong Kong, British, and American Englishes shows that geographical origin does have a bearing on the complementation system of this verb, in terms of both the factors that determine variability and the preferences for particular patterns. The varieties displaying more similarities are those that are geographically close, making the distinction between three geographical areas possible: South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), South-East Asia (with Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines) and East Asia (Hong Kong).