Register differentiation in East African English

Abstract

The article examines register variation in East African English by submitting the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to a complete multidimensional analysis (Biber 1988). A six-factor model was extracted using 67 linguistic features (Biber 1988). The results show that the extent of register variation is not less in ICE-East Africa than in Biber (1988). However, East African English displays unique stylistic features across registers. The overall effect is that East African English leans more towards the formal side (especially Dimensions 3, 5 and 6). There is a strong emphasis on the involvement of the addressee, more formal features for the encoding of information, and delineation of reference by textual rather than contextual means, even when the information is not very abstract. The paper establishes a baseline of the extent of register variation in East African English, and identifies certain typical features across all registers.

The present perfect in world Englishes

“…These results are in line with the findings of recent multidimensional studies of world Englishes such as Xiao (2009), who shows that BrE and IndE tend to mark the two opposite ends of the continuum from interactive, casual to elaborate, formal style, while the three Southeast Asian varieties display a high degree of similarity, lying between BrE and IndE. The result for KenE is also consistent with that of van Rooy, Terblanche, Haase, and Schmied's (2010) multidimensional analysis of East African English which noted the less frequent use of informal linguistic features in this variety compared with native English varieties.…”

Towards an understanding of contextual features that influence the linguistic formality of British Sign Language users

“…Early work, such as that of Joos (1961), presents five possible styles of spoken English ranked in order of their linguistic formality -from 'intimate' (most informal) to 'frozen' (most formal) -based upon certain contextual and linguistic characteristics. While studies would go on to evaluate and support these proposed styles (e.g., Broderick 1978), later studies have since superseded the notion of discrete levels of formality, demonstrating that formality is better schematised on a continuum ranging from 'informal' to 'formal' (Arndt and Janney 1987;Biber 1995;Rooy et al 2010;Li et al 2013). In these later studies, language is deemed more formal or more informal according to linguistic aspects, such as the frequency of deictic words (Heylighen and Dewaele 2002), and cognitive aspects including the amount of attention paid to speech (Labov 1984).…”