Much of linguistic theory has been developed with the premise, that language contact is an exceptional phenomenon, and is not especially useful in determining the structures that are foundational to a language. As a result, variation that occurs within contact environments is frequently excluded from attention when developing grammatical descriptions of English. This exclusion, however, does not account for the demographic realities of who English speakers are and it overlooks the historical importance of contact. Language contact, as conceived by theorists like Thomason and Kaufman (1988), is neither rare nor exceptional. It is with this in mind that I begin to look for normative differences between multilingual and monolingual Englishes. As various historical examples have demonstrated, the processes at work within language contact that produce variation and ultimately change in a language reflect more general tendencies and movements within that language (Milroy, 1992). The results reported today suggest that further investigation into the structural characteristics and norms of various Englishes is likely to inform about the structure of English generally. Specifically, I begin with a structure that is closely related to the expression of transitivity within the language, the ditransitive "light verb" structure.