Tense aspect and modality in Ghanaian English : a corpus based analysis of the progressive and the modal will Abstract: Throughout the last decades corpus based analyses of New English varieties have become extremely popular but African varieties have been largely neglected in this research domain for the lack of available data. This study focuses on morphosyntactic variation in Educated Ghanaian English more specifically on variation in the domains of tense modality and aspect (TMA). It analyzes the use of the Progressive and the modal WILL in Ghanaian English as compared to British English on the basis of a collection of spoken texts gathered during fieldtrips in Ghana in 2008 and 2010 as well as data from different text categories from the International Corpus of English (ICE).<br><br>Using methodologies from quantitative corpus linguistics probabilistic grammar and discourse analysis the study not only offers analyses of the frequency and the variation of TMA constructions across syntactic and lexical contexts but draws particular attention to their uses in discourse. <br><br>The results are discussed in the light of previous research on TMA use in contact varieties of English and New Englishes in particular. Particular usage patterns are suggested as potential candidates for typical West African English features which should be further analyzed in future comparative studies