Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes

✍ Scribed by Alexandra Esimaje, Ulrike Gut, Bassey Edem Antia

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 415
• Series: Studies in Corpus Linguistics 88
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Corpus linguistics has become one of the most widely used methodologies across the different linguistic subdisciplines; especially the study of world-wide varieties of English uses corpus-based investigations as one of the chief methodologies. This volume comprises descriptions of the many new corpus initiatives both within and outside Africa that aim to compile various corpora of African Englishes. Moreover, it contains cutting-edge corpus-based research on African Englishes and the use of corpora in pedagogic contexts within African institutions. This volume thus serves both as a practical introduction to corpus compilation (Part I of the book), corpus-based research (Part II) and the application of corpora in language teaching (Part III), and is intended both for those researchers not yet familiar with corpus linguistics and as a reference work for all international researchers investigating the linguistic properties of African Englishes.  Read more...

✦ Table of Contents

Preface / Doug Biber --
Introduction: Corpus linguistics and African Englishes / Alexandra U. Esimaje, Ulrike Gut and Bassey E. Antia --
1.1. What is corpus linguistics? / Alexandra U. Esimaje and Susan Hunston --
1.2. Corpus-based research on English in Africa: A practical introduction / Robert Fuchs, Bertus van Rooy and Ulrike Gut --
1.3. The purpose, design and use of the Corpus of Nigerian and Cameroonian English Learner Language (Conacell) / Alexandra U. Esimaje --
1.4. Introducing a corpus of English(es) spoken in post-independence Namibia: Insights into corpus design and quantitative analyses / Helene Steigertahl --
1.5. The historical corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana): Motivation, compilation, opportunities / Thorsten Brato --
1.6. Addressing a coverage gap in African Englishes: The tagged corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English / Gabriel Ozón, Sarah FitzGerald and Melanie Green --
1.7. Practical corpus linguistics: Designing and exploiting a written corpus for research with special reference to Cameroon English / Daniel Nkemleke --
2.1. Evaluating explanations for past-time reference with unmarked verb forms in African Englishes / Bertus van Rooy --
2.2. The use of stance markers in West African Englishes / Ulrike Gut and Foluke Unuabonah --
2.3. Namibian English on the web: Lexical and morphosyntactic features in a Corpus of Namibian Online Newspapers (CNamON) / Alexander Kautzsch --
2.4. Lexical expansion in Ghanaian English from a diachronic perspective: A structural and semantic analysis / Thorsten Brato --
2.5. Capturing the lexicon of Ugandan English: ICE-Uganda, its limitations, and effective complements / Bebwa Isingoma and Christiane Meierkord --
3.1. A corpus-based analysis of conjunctive cohesion in English essays of Nigerian university learners / Adeyemi Iyabo --
3.2. African corpora for standards in African academic English: Case studies on prepositions / Josef Schmied --
3.3. Semiotic signature of transformation in a diachronic corpus of a South African political party / Bassey E. Antia and Tamsyn Hendricks --
Index.

✦ Subjects

English language -- Variation -- Africa;English language -- Africa;Languages in contact;Corpora (Linguistics) -- Case studies;Corpora (Linguistics);English language;English language -- Variation;Africa