Global feature — local norms?

This paper looks at the usage of the progressive passive in Inner and Outer Circle varieties of English. This syntactic pattern is a global feature in that it is found in practically all varieties of English world wide, but it is used with different frequencies in different Englishes and also shows differences at the micro-variational level (co-occurrence patterns, choice of subject, etc.). In other words, globally used grammatical patterns may display divergent behaviour locally, a phenomenon that has been labelled “glocalisation”. The evidence for this study comes mainly from relevant components of the International Corpus of English (ICE).