Contextualisation in East African English: a corpus-based study of register variation

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Periodical article

Title:	Contextualisation in East African English: a corpus-based study of register variation
Author:	Terblanche, Lize
Year:	2012
Periodical:	Language Matters: Studies in the Languages of Africa (ISSN 1022-8195)
Volume:	43
Issue:	1
Pages:	21-38
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Kenya Tanzania
Subjects:	English language language usage
Abstract:	In this article, contextualization refers to the anchoring of discourse in a specific time and place. Five linguistic features associated with spatio-temporal contextualization are analysed: present tense verbs, past tense verbs, perfect aspect, time adverbials and place adverbials. The purpose is to identify whether these linguistic features are used equally across the board in East African English discourse, or whether certain features are more often associated with particular registers. Twenty-two spoken and written registers of the International Corpus of East African English (ICE-EA), which only contains data from Kenya and Tanzania, are analysed using a corpus-based methodology. Results indicate that social letters have the highest standardized score for the contextualization features of all the registers and instructional writing, such as administrative texts, has the lowest standardized score for these features. Overall, the different needs and uses for contextualization are reflected in the total standardized scores across registers. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]