A typical modus operandi for the description of a
‘variety’ of English in such works includes a brief
sociolinguistic sketch of the community in which
the variety is spoken, followed by a list of features
found in the variety, both at the phonological and
the grammatical levels, as well as, prominently, at
the lexical level. Often – though by no means
always – the data on which these descriptions are
based come from large corpora: the ICE
(International Corpus of English) is one such ambitious project aiming at gathering corpus data from a
large selection of geographical locales, all subjected to the same collection criteria, thus resulting
in a body of data that is easily comparable across