This project's theoretical framework is the cognitive model Usage-Based Theory (USB, cf. Croft 2000; Langacker 2000; Bybee 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013), based on the belief that “usage events create linguistic structure” (Bybee 2013: 68). This dynamic view of the emergence of grammar provides a useful means of encompassing the very wide array of variables at work in morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes: grammatical, sociolinguistic and cognitive, the latter including variation and change derived from second (or third)-language acquisition processes and language contact situations. Our methodology is corpus-based and mainly uses corpora from the ICE (International Corpus of English) project. In 2014 we joined the ICE, a project initiated in 1988 by the late Professor Sidney Greenbaum, the then Director of the Survey of English Usage, University College London, now coordinated by Professor Marianne Hundt (an affiliated member of our team) at the University of Zurich, in collaboration with twenty-six research teams around the world. Our team is in charge of the compilation of the Gibraltar component of ICE (ICE-GBR).
