This paper advocates the theory of 'Complex Dynamic Systems', developed in the sciences as a suitable framework for the understanding of the evolution of varieties and uses of English through time and space. After looking into earlier applications of this theory in linguistics, it surveys core properties of such systems and illustrates their relevance by applications to specific processes of change in the history of English. It then investigates processes of lexicosemantic diffusion and syntactic restructuring in World Englishes within this framework, trying to document its applicability.

This chapter discusses the data and method applied in the present study. It gives a concise overview of the ICE corpus project and the ten national sub-corpora that enter the analysis as well as describing how the Twitter (TwICE) corpus was sampled. Following this, the catalog of 236 linguistic features extracted from the corpus data is introduced. The chapter concludes with a description of the individual steps and parameter settings of the statistical procedure and a bird’s eye view of the resulting space of variation.