Young speakers and women have been identified as leaders of language change in the English language. However, sociolinguistic studies addressing grammatical variation according to the age and gender of speakers are infrequent in world Englishes mainly due to the dearth of corpora with explicit detailed metadata. In this paper we explore the effect of these two factors on language innovation and creativity as represented in the International Corpus of English (ICE). For that purpose, we have selected two high-frequency grammatical phenomena: (i) the expression of perfect meaning, which exhibits variability between different forms; and (ii) relative clauses, with variation in the use of relativizers. A preliminary analysis of the variable age shows that young speakers behave differently as regards both the expression of perfect meaning and the choice of relativizers. With this study we hope to contribute to this still small but growing body of sociolinguistic research on grammatical variation in world Englishes.

中文翻译：

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年龄和性别在世界英语语法变化中的作用

年轻的演讲者和女性已被确定为英语语言变革的领导者。然而，根据说话者的年龄和性别解决语法变化的社会语言学研究在世界英语中并不常见，这主要是由于缺乏具有明确详细元数据的语料库。在本文中，我们探讨了这两个因素对以国际英语语料库 (ICE) 为代表的语言创新和创造力的影响。为此，我们选择了两种高频语法现象：(i) 完美意义的表达，表现出不同形式之间的可变性；(ii) 关系从句，关系词的使用有所不同。对年龄变量的初步分析表明，年轻说话者在完美意义的表达和相对词的选择上表现不同。通过这项研究，我们希望为这个规模仍然很小但不断增长的关于世界英语语法变异的社会语言学研究做出贡献。