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Chapter 1.6. Addressing a coverage gap in African Englishes

The tagged corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English
  • Gabriel Ozón , Sarah FitzGerald and Melanie Green
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Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes
This chapter is in the book Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes

Abstract

This paper illustrates the uses of a tagged corpus of spoken Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), which has recently been finalised (Ozón et al. 2017) and made available online (Green et al. 2016). The corpus consists of 240,000 words, with mark-up and part-of-speech-tagging. Text categories and proportions of monologue/dialogue are guided by those of the ICE project (Nelson 1996), making the CPE corpus comparable with existing corpora of post-colonial Englishes. This tagged corpus offers an invaluable resource for the investigation of CPE, particularly in addressing issues of multifunctionality in pidgin or creole languages. We introduce the dataset and present case studies illustrating its potential uses, in order to highlight the usefulness of this freely accessible resource for research on African languages.

Abstract

This paper illustrates the uses of a tagged corpus of spoken Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), which has recently been finalised (Ozón et al. 2017) and made available online (Green et al. 2016). The corpus consists of 240,000 words, with mark-up and part-of-speech-tagging. Text categories and proportions of monologue/dialogue are guided by those of the ICE project (Nelson 1996), making the CPE corpus comparable with existing corpora of post-colonial Englishes. This tagged corpus offers an invaluable resource for the investigation of CPE, particularly in addressing issues of multifunctionality in pidgin or creole languages. We introduce the dataset and present case studies illustrating its potential uses, in order to highlight the usefulness of this freely accessible resource for research on African languages.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Preface ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Corpus linguistics and corpus building
  6. Chapter 1.1. What is corpus linguistics? 7
  7. Chapter 1.2. Corpus-based research on English in Africa 37
  8. Chapter 1.3. The purpose, design and use of the Corpus of Nigerian and Cameroonian English Learner Language (Conacell) 71
  9. Chapter 1.4. Introducing a corpus of English(es) spoken in post-independence Namibia 97
  10. Chapter 1.5. The historical corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana) 119
  11. Chapter 1.6. Addressing a coverage gap in African Englishes 143
  12. Chapter 1.7. Practical corpus linguistics 165
  13. Part II. Corpus-based analysis of African Englishes
  14. Chapter 2.1. Evaluating explanations for past-time reference with unmarked verb forms in African Englishes 185
  15. Chapter 2.2. The use of stance markers in West African Englishes 205
  16. Chapter 2.3. Namibian English on the web 231
  17. Chapter 2.4. Lexical expansion in Ghanaian English from a diachronic perspective 259
  18. Chapter 2.5. Capturing the lexicon of Ugandan English 293
  19. Part III. Applications of corpora in English language teaching and learning
  20. Chapter 3.1. A corpus-based analysis of conjunctive cohesion in English essays of Nigerian university learners 331
  21. Chapter 3.2. African corpora for standards in African academic English 355
  22. Chapter 3.3. Semiotic signature of transformation in a diachronic corpus of a South African political party 373
  23. Index 401
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.88.07ozo

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Preface ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Corpus linguistics and corpus building
  6. Chapter 1.1. What is corpus linguistics? 7
  7. Chapter 1.2. Corpus-based research on English in Africa 37
  8. Chapter 1.3. The purpose, design and use of the Corpus of Nigerian and Cameroonian English Learner Language (Conacell) 71
  9. Chapter 1.4. Introducing a corpus of English(es) spoken in post-independence Namibia 97
  10. Chapter 1.5. The historical corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana) 119
  11. Chapter 1.6. Addressing a coverage gap in African Englishes 143
  12. Chapter 1.7. Practical corpus linguistics 165
  13. Part II. Corpus-based analysis of African Englishes
  14. Chapter 2.1. Evaluating explanations for past-time reference with unmarked verb forms in African Englishes 185
  15. Chapter 2.2. The use of stance markers in West African Englishes 205
  16. Chapter 2.3. Namibian English on the web 231
  17. Chapter 2.4. Lexical expansion in Ghanaian English from a diachronic perspective 259
  18. Chapter 2.5. Capturing the lexicon of Ugandan English 293
  19. Part III. Applications of corpora in English language teaching and learning
  20. Chapter 3.1. A corpus-based analysis of conjunctive cohesion in English essays of Nigerian university learners 331
  21. Chapter 3.2. African corpora for standards in African academic English 355
  22. Chapter 3.3. Semiotic signature of transformation in a diachronic corpus of a South African political party 373
  23. Index 401
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