The use of articles, modal verbs, and selected discourse markers in Zimbabwean English

The supplementary data entail the use of articles, modal verbs, and selected discourse markers (so, well, and but) in Zimbabwean English (ZE) to determine whether there are variations and innovations in their use. Different morphosyntactic features that are reported by Kortmann, Lunkenheimer, and Ehret (2020) to show innovation were used as the basis for analysis. A comparative analysis was done on the ZE corpus totaling 356 007 words and the International Corpus of English-Great Britain (ICE-GB) totaling 608 235 words to determine whether there are statistically significant variations in the frequencies of articles, modal verbs, and discourse markers (so, well and but). A log likelihood test was used to check whether the observed variations between the corpora were statistically significant. The spoken and written registers and the different genres were compared for variations.