The use of actually in spoken Xhosa English : a corpus study

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the semantic and syntactic characteristics of the discourse marker actually, and then to describe and explain how it is used by mothertongue (MT) Xhosa speakers who have learned English as an additional language. Such a description may provide a useful benchmark for comparison with MT norms. The source of data for the study is a corpus of approximately half a million words of transcribed spontaneous dialogue between Xhosa English speakers

Black South African English : where to from here?

Black South African English is generally regarded as the variety of English commonly used by mother-tongue speakers of South Africa's indigenous African languages in areas where English is not the language of the majority. This paper explores some of the problems involved in defining this variety, problems such as whether it is a `new' variety of English or a dialect, and problems relating to whose English it is: the English of those learners who have encountered only a smattering of English in informal contexts or the variety of English acquired during formal schooling. The second half of the paper focuses on the possible future of Black South African English (BSAE) against the backdrop of South Africa's new multilingual policy. Reasons for the continued appeal of English are examined, alongside the range of factors influencing the possible future growth of BSAE as a distinct variety. It is argued that South Africans are unlikely ever to be free not to learn English, owing to the huge economic, political and ideological constraints which make the `choice' of English inevitable. The success of current efforts to resist value judgements and recognise the worth of BSAE will depend not only on the goodwill of South Africans, and on the cooperation of all speakers of English, world-wide, but on the rate at which the variety drifts away from recognised standard forms of English

Codeswitching, borrowing and mixing in a corpus of Xhosa English

The paper analyses selected aspects of the codeswitching behaviour in a spoken corpus of the English of 326 people, all of them mother-tongue speakers of Xhosa (a local African language in South Africa), and all of whom would see themselves as Xhosa/English bilinguals. The corpus comprises approximately 550,000 transcribed words of spontaneous, relaxed, oral discourse in English between pairs of Xhosaspeaking interlocutors, discussing a wide range of topics. While the usual pattern in bilingual speech is to use the L1 as matrix language and the L2 as embedded language, in this corpus the opposite is the case, as interlocutors were interviewed in English (the L2). The corpus therefore offers a ‘mirror image’, in a sense, of normal codeswitching behaviour. Using Wordsmith (a concordancer programme), all incidences of codeswitching into Xhosa during these conversations were identified and analysed in an effort to reveal underlying patterns. Examination of the amount and nature of codeswitching in the corpus promised to throw some light on the extent to which participants are genuinely bilingual, in terms of their ability to converse comfortably in English

Power play and the changing face of English : inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University

Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes UniversityRhodes University Libraries (Digitisation

How taboo are taboo words for girls?

In the past five years, there has been much interest in the question of whether women are really as concerned about politeness and status as they have been made out to be by such writers as Baroni and D'Urso (1984), Crosby and Nyquist (1977), Lakoff (1973), Spender (1980), and Trudgill (1972). Despite the commonly held perception that it is only males who bandy about derogatory and taboo words (Bailey 1985; Flexner 1975), Risch (1987) provided counterevidence based on data obtained in the United States. The results of the present study, based on data obtained in South Africa, strongly support her findings and challenge the assumption that women stick to standard speech, citing evidence that young females are familiar with, and use, a wide range of highly taboo/slang items themselves. In particular, attention is devoted to the question of pejorative words applicable to males and females, respectively, and the view that there are only a few pejorative terms commonly used to describe males (particularly by females) is challenged. (Women's language, politeness, linguistic taboo, stereotypes, slang, expletives, prestige forms)

Towards a norm in South African Englishes: the case for Xhosa English

Black South African English (BSAE) is generally regarded today as the variety of English commonly used by mother-tongue speakers of South Africa's indigenous African languages in areas where English is not the language of the majority. Its roots lie in the history of the teaching of English to the black people of this country, where the role models who teach English are second language learners themselves. To date, BSAE has mainly been studied within an applied linguistic framework with emphasis on its character as a second language which is deviant from standard English. An alternative view is to see it as a variety in its own right, a new or world English (Coetsee Van Rooy and Verhoef, 2000; van der Walt and van Rooy, 2002). As a consequence, a new look at norms is becoming increasingly necessary, so that decisions about learners' language competence can be made in terms of this variety. This paper reports on preliminary analyses of a recently collected corpus of Xhosa English (XE) (a sub-category of BSAE) which consists of naturalistic spoken data, and comprises some 540,000 words of Xhosa English. This large database enables empirical analysis of actual patterns of use in language, making it possible to test earlier speculations which have been based on intuition, and to explore the possibility of systematic differences in the patterns of structure and use in this particular variety. The paper focuses on 20 separate linguistic characteristics, most of which have been previously identified in the literature as being features of BSAE, and analyses each of them in turn, in order to ascertain their usage patterns and frequency of occurrence in the corpus

Procedural meanings of well in a corpus of Xhosa English

This article explores the use of the pragmatic marker well in a large corpus of the discourse of non-mother tongue speakers of Xhosa English, which is a sub-variety of Black South African English. A brief overview of discourse markers in general and of well in particular is provided, and the problems they pose to linguists in terms of difficulties in defining their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties are examined. After a brief description of the nature of the corpus of Xhosa English on which the study is based, and of the methodological approach which was followed, the rest of the article focuses on a fairly detailed exposition of the overall trends in contextualised uses and procedural meanings of well in the corpus, along with examples. Some (limited) parallels are drawn between the use of well in XE and other English corpora, in order to highlight the problems experienced by L2 learners in acquiring discourse markers