Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes: An Analysis of Xhosa English / Edition 1

by Vivian de Klerk, Michaela Mahlberg, Gavin Brookes

Overview

English is a global language which has spread historically through imperialism and more recently through communication networks throughout the world. In each location in which English is spoken it absorbs some of the idiosyncracies of the language native to that region, and one of the most fascinating areas of research for World Englishes is the African context. This research monograph examines English as it is spoken in South Africa, and is based primarily on an extensive spoken corpus of Xhosa English. Vivian de Klerk presents a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the historical development of this language, and of English in South Africa more generally. The book outlines how the corpus of spoken language was designed and built, and discusses the criteria relating to informants, spoken categories, codes and transcription conventions. The syntactic, phonological and pragmatic features of Xhosa English as demonstrated by the corpus are described in detail, and two chapters focus on discourse markers such as 'actually' and 'well'. The second section of this book examines the sociolinguistic implications of the corpus findings. Vivian de Klerk looks at language in educational, legal, social, cultural and everyday contexts. The final chapter of the book speculates as to the future of this fascinating variety of English in a globalised world. This cutting-edge study will be of interest to researchers in world Englishes, language variation and corpus linguistics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826488411
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/20/2007
Series:	Corpus and Discourse
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Professor Vivian de Klerk is the Head of the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is the editor of Focus on English in Southern Africa, John Benjamins: 1996.

Michaela Mahlberg is Humboldt-Professor and Professor of Digital Humanities at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.

Gavin Brookes is Senior Research Associate within the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK.

Table of Contents

Introduction
SECTION A: THE CONTEXT
1: Xhosa English as a World English
2: The need for norms: building a spoken corpus
3: The structure of the Xhosa English corpus
SECTION B: CORPUS STUDIES & SOCIOLINGUISTIC INSIGHTS
4: Topic choices and lexical characteristics
5: The role of APPRAISAL resources in discussing AIDS
6: Formulaic utterances
7: Codeswitching in the corpus
8: Informal conversation versus legal discourse
SECTION C: CORPUS STUDIES & LINGUISTIC DESCRIPTION
9: The syntactic features of Xhosa English Chapter
10: The use of discourse markers: the case of 'actually'
11: Procedural meanings of 'well' in the corpus.
12: Expressing levels of intensity in Xhosa English
SECTION D: OVERVIEW
13: The future of Xhosa English: Social and Educational issues
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Here DeKlerk confronts us with an issue that goes beyond the concerns of corpus linguistics and the description of World Englishes as such...Corpus Linguistics is an intriguing and challenging book in many ways." -International Journal of Corpus Linguistics” —Angelika Breiteneder

“"This book should be of great interest to students and researchers... [it] offers inspiring discussions on issues of linguistic identity and language attitude in the speech community...this book is beautifully written, well-structured, and extremely accessible. It is an exemplary work for students interested in pursuing corpus-based language studies and a valuable resource for researchers interested in studying BSAE and XE as world Englishes." Xiaofei Lu, The Linguist List, 2007” —Xiaofei Lu, Linguist List, The

From the Publisher