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

摘要

In the article, contextualisation refers to the anchoring of discourse in a specific time and place. Five linguistic features associated with spatio-temporal contextualisation were analysed: present tense verbs, past tense verbs, perfect aspect, time adverbials and place adverbials. The purpose of the research was to identify whether these linguistic features are used equally across the board in East African English discourse, or whether certain features are associated with particular registers more often. Twentytwo spoken and written registers of the International Corpus of East African English (ICE-EA) were analysed using a corpus-based methodology. Results indicate that on the one hand, social letters have the highest standardised score for the contextualisation features of all the registers. On the other hand, instructional writing such as administrative texts has the lowest standardised score for these features. Overall, the different needs and uses for contextualisation are reflected in the total standardised scores across registers.