Non canonical structures they use them differently : information packaging in spoken varieties of English Zusammenfassung: This book contributes to the study of information structure in varieties of English around the world. Situated at the interface of dialectology syntax and pragmatics it examines structural devices such as left and right dislocation fronting existential there constructions and cleft sentences which help speakers change the rather fixed word order of present day English and organize sentence information in ways which are better suited to the discourse context.Approaching information structure from a cross varietal perspective this study compares speech data from nine varieties of English culled from the International Corpus of English and complemented by data from the Corpus of Global Web based English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. In its breadth and systematicity of coverage this is the most comprehensive study to date of the use of information packaging constructions across varieties of English. Through this comprehensive approach diverging patterns of use and frequency distributions can be identified. Factors impacting on the frequency of use involve substrate influence in language contact situations universal developmental processes in language acquisition and specific features of the socio cultural setting