Top-Ranking Grammatical Keyword in Hong Kong English

Most grammar research of Hong Kong English has been conducted from perspectives of error analysis and interlanguage studies. The present corpus-based study investigates the top-ranking grammatical keyword in Hong Kong English in relation to other English varieties to identify one-of-a-kind morphosyntactic attributes of Hong Kong English systematically. The grammatical keyword with the highest keyness in the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English was identified through comparison with a reference corpus comprising six other components of the corpus with the corpus analysis software WordSmith 5.0. The modal auxiliary verb “will” was identified as the top-ranking grammatical keyword in Hong Kong English and discovered to possess the highest keyness in the text category of private dialogue. It is frequently used to delineate generic characteristics or habits as well as intention or volition in Hong Kong English. Findings suggest a plausible influence of language transfer on Cantonese-English learners’ acquisition of the semantics of the modal auxiliary verb “will,” and that the analysis of grammatical keywords in corpus linguistics provides a means for a systematic analysis of the grammar of a language variety.