Corpus onomasiology in world Englishes and the concrete verbs make and give

Traditional theoretical frameworks for world Englishes (WEs) such as Moag's (1982) and Kachru's (1985) have not explicitly noted a role for lexical semantics. Schneider's (2007) dynamic model, however, explicitly defines specific phases of WE development in terms of lexical semantics, and Brutt‐Griffler's (2002) model emphasizes semantic change. This paper fills a gap in the literature by presenting corpus studies into the concrete senses of the highly frequent, highly polysemous transitive verbs make and give, in the International Corpus of English (ICE) components representing Singapore, Hong Kong, and Great Britain. Via onomasiological corpus methods, I show that register differentiation for the alternation between Germanic, monosyllabic forms make and give and their Latinate, polysyllabic alternates is not as extensive in ICE‐HK as in ICE‐SIN and ICE‐GB. I interpret these findings in relation to the models of Brutt‐Griffler (2002), Schneider (2007), and Kachru (1985).