Morphological simplification in Asian Englishes : frequency substratum transfer and institutionalization Abstract: This book presents a corpus and usage based approach to morphological simplification in three Asian Englishes (Hong Kong English Indian English and Singapore English). The features of interest are omission of verbal past tense marking omission of nominal plural marking regularization of irregular verbs and the use of uncountable nouns as countable nouns. Usage frequency substratum transfer and institutionalization are investigated as potential determinants of simplification. Of particular interest is the question in how far substratum transfer and institutionalization constrain frequency effects. <br><br>To account for the production of the features of interest the International Corpus of English (ICE) and the Corpus of Global Web Based English (GloWbE) are used. A perception experiment accompanying the corpus studies on verbal past tense and nominal plural marking provides additional insights into the perception of morphological simplification in the Asian Englishes considered.<br><br>The impact of usage frequencies on feature development in World Englishes has received little attention so far. In pursuing a systematic quantitative approach to omission and regularization patterns the present study aims to establish usage based thinking within World Englishes research. The distinction between regular and irregular forms is a prime example of frequency driven language development which is why studying omission and regularization marks an ideal starting point for this endeavor