Hudson 1999) or intensifiers (e.g. Ito & Tagliamonte 2003) in Canada and Britain.
The interpretation of language differences across age groups in African societies as either age grading or indicative of ongoing language change, however, appears more challenging: for example, age plays an important cultural role, and it is questionable whether older (retired) speakers in Africa use fewer standard forms than middle-aged speakers, who, as has been proposed for Western societies (e.g. Eckert 1997), feel the need to conform to expectations of standard language use in the workplace. Further research on language variation across age groups in Nigeria and other African coun- tries is needed to show whether our interpretation of the increase of progressives as a reflection of ongoing language change is valid. Conclusions on whether there are gen- eral mechanisms that distinguish ongoing language change in non-native Englishes from native Englishes will have to be postponed until then. Moreover, real-time studies
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384 Robert Fuchs & Ulrike Gut
on recent developments in other varieties can provide a suitable point of comparison.
For over 500 years, the progressive has been becoming more frequent in British Eng- lish (Aitchinson 1991: 99–100), and Leech et al. (2009) found that this trend continued between the 1960s and the 1990s across many registers. Collins (this volume) also found an increase in the frequency of the progressive in Philippine English for this period. Our data on NigE suggests that this variety is currently undergoing change in the same direction.
The use of the progressive in extended contexts, i.e. in habitual contexts and with stative and punctual verbs, appears to be a stable feature across NigE speakers of dif- ferent age groups. The fact that only about 1% of all progressives in NigE can be clas- sified as having an ‘extended use’ shows that the overall increase in the frequency of the progressive is not due to its use in new contexts. Equally, the higher frequency of progressives in NigE compared to BrE cannot be explained in terms of its use in these contexts. The lack of information on the speakers’ first languages (L1) in ICE-Nigeria makes it difficult to determine whether extended uses of the progressive in NigE are a result of L1 influence. However, Gut & Fuchs (2013) have argued that some extended uses mirror indigenous language structures, for example progressive forms that occur in sentences that would be marked by incompletive aspect markers in Yoruba and Igbo or the use of a progressive in analogy to the Yoruba anticipative aspect.
The results of the corpus analyses show that the use of the progressive in NigE also varies across text categories. Progressives are used less frequently in formal text categories, but more often in persuasive ones. Due to the lack of established linguistic criteria for formality in NigE text categories, however, these findings are based on our more or less intuitive categorisation of the different text categories and will have to be tested in future research. Our study confirms the significant role of ethnic group as a variable for language variation in NigE. Further evidence for this claim is provided by Jibril’s (1986: 61) study, in which systematic phonological differences were noted between Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa speakers of English. We found that Igbo and Yoruba speakers differ in the rate of their use of progressives, while Hausa and Yoruba speak- ers use progressives in extended contexts to a different degree. Conversely, no differ- ence across the two genders was observed.
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Appendix
ICE Nigeria text categories and word counts
Words total Progressives (absolute number)
Academic writing 80,045 84
Administrative writing 19,983 17
Broadcast news 40,916 109
Broadcast discussions 40,292 449
Broadcast interviews 20,357 208
Broadcast talks 40,138 133
Business letters 30,066 90
Class lessons 25,400 261
Conversations (private) 136,754 1,166
Commentaries 51,562 525
Editorials 20,014 60
Essays 20,005 19
Exams 19,762 86
Instructional writing/Skills & hobbies 20,008 65
Non-broadcast talks 20,156 24
Novels 40,031 176
Parliamentary debates 20,375 116
Phonecalls 15,680 186
Popular writing 80,144 232
Press texts/reportage 40,085 146
Social letters 28,780 303
Unscripted speeches 62,168 358
Total 872,721 4813
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doi 10.1075/scl.67.16hac
© 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company
American influence on written Caribbean English
A diachronic analysis of newspaper reportage in the Bahamas and in Trinidad and Tobago
Stephanie Hackert & Dagmar Deuber
University of Munich (LMU) / University of Münster
This paper presents a diachronic analysis of press news reports in the Bahamas and in Trinidad and Tobago with a view to shedding light on the question of Americanisation. We analyse four corpora, one from the 1960s and one contemporary from each country. The following features are studied:
(1) contractions of negatives and verb forms, (2) the be-passive, (3) relative that vs which, and (4) pseudotitles. Our results show that Americanisation is a factor to be reckoned with in Caribbean English, as are colloquialisation and densification;
at the same time, Caribbean journalistic writing definitely retains a distinct flavour of formality which distinguishes it from newspaper language not just in the US but also in Britain.
Keywords: Caribbean; Americanisation; newspapers; Bahamas;
Trinidad and Tobago
1. Introduction
Americanisation has been identified as a major force influencing present-day English.
According to Schneider (2006: 67), “an increasing impact of American English on prac- tically all varieties of English around the globe can be observed.” This impact is gener- ally taken to be at least indirectly related to the rise of the United States to a position of global dominance in politics, economic matters, and popular culture in the Post-World War II era (cf. McArthur 2002: 370–376; Svartvik & Leech 2006: 157–159). Some of the phenomena which may have contributed to the worldwide spread of American lin- guistic features are advertising, where “the English of American products […] rules”
(Crystal 2003: 94), broadcasting, where the US has long been “the leading provider of English-language services abroad” (2003: 97), movies, popular music, and the sweeping success of the personal computer and of American-developed computer software.
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390 Stephanie Hackert & Dagmar Deuber
Such phenomena do not primarily involve direct influence through speaker con- tact; rather, what is at stake is “distant” contact (Winford 2003: 26). As Winford notes, this kind of situation “typically results in lexical borrowing”, and in fact, lexical influ- ences have often been invoked in claiming the Americanisation of varieties of English around the world (e.g. Bayard 1989; Meyerhoff 1993; Leek & Bayard 1995; Vine 1999 on New Zealand English; Modiano 1996 on English in Europe; Taylor 1989 and Peters 2001 on Australian English; Awonusi 1994 and Igboanusi 2003 on Nigerian English;
Trüb 2008 on South African English; Sedlatschek 2009 on Indian English). As for grammatical change in recent English, the landmark study is still Leech et al. (2009).
The authors systematically mine the Brown family of corpora (i.e. the 1961 Brown and Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen (LOB) corpora and their 1991 Freiburg updates Frown and F-LOB) for a variety of categories such as the subjunctive, modals and semi-modals, the progressive, and the passive. They identify Americanisation as one of the major forces driving the changes described.
Owing to its proximity to the US, the Caribbean appears to be a world region par- ticularly susceptible to American linguistic influence, and, in fact, previous research has shown that contemporary English in Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Trinidad and Tobago – all former British colonies – shows a significant trend towards the use of American forms, especially in the area of lexis (Mair 2002, 2009; Bruckmaier & Hack- ert 2011; Họnsel & Deuber 2013). Deuber & Hackert (2013) present an overview of nine Caribbean territories, covering not only lexis but also grammar and orthography and find that the degree to which American features are employed varies considerably by level of language as well as by variety and depends, among other things, on a com- munity’s sociohistorical relations with the US.
What all of the above-quoted studies lack is diachronic evidence. This paper attempts to remedy this shortcoming for two Caribbean countries: the Bahamas, and Trinidad and Tobago. We investigate four corpora of press news reports, one from the 1960s and one contemporary from each country. The following features are studied:
(1) contractions of negatives and verb forms, (2) the be-passive, (3) relative that vs which, and (4) pseudotitles. Our results provide evidence for two different – and at least partly contradictory – processes of grammatical change: colloquialisation and densification. Neither must be directly equated with Americanisation, but both have been related to it.
Colloquialisation, or “the shift to a more speech-like style” (Leech et al.
2009: 239), has been well documented in the language of the news media during the second half of the 20th century. As part of this process, news reporting has “seen a definite trend away from the cool distancing of traditional written style and towards a kind of spontaneous directness which (though often contrived) is clearly supposed to inject into journalistic discourse some of the immediacy of oral communica- tion” (2009: 239). This, according to Leech et al., holds particularly for American
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comAmerican influence on written Caribbean English 391 newspapers; it may be viewed as part of a more general, long-term stylistic shift that has brought most written registers of the language closer to spoken norms than ever before (cf. Biber 2003: 169). With regard to public media discourse, this process has also been described under the heading of ‘democratisation’ (Fairclough 1992: 98, 204, but cf. also Section 7 below).
Densification, by contrast, consists in the compression of ever more meaning into as many or even fewer words and thus in the condensation of information. Densifi- cation has been described as a facet of “anti-colloquialisation – a movement further away from spoken English norms” (Leech et al. 2009: 245), and, in fact, as shown by Biber et al. (1999: 61), lexical density, defined as the proportion of lexical word tokens in any corpus (1999: 62), is almost fifty percent higher in newspapers than in conver- sation (63% vs 41%). According to Leech et al. (2009: 234), densification is restricted to written, informational text types such as news or academic writing and particularly affects the noun phrase, where an increasing use of proper nouns, attributive adjec- tives, ‘s genitives, and noun-noun sequences contributes to the ever more compact packaging of content.
Obviously, neither of the processes just described must be directly equated with Americanisation. Whereas the latter describes a sociolinguistic phenomenon caused by contact between different regional varieties of English, both colloquialisation and densification are discourse-pragmatic phenomena which reflect changes in the stylistic norms of particular registers, genres, or text types (cf. Leech et al. 2009: 237). Neverthe- less, at least with regard to the features discussed here, it has been shown that American English (AmE) has been leading the developments affecting them (2009: 252–259).
In the following, we first present a brief outline of the sociohistorical and socio- linguistic situation of the Bahamas and of Trinidad and Tobago. We then describe the data and methods employed for this study and discuss each of the features listed above. Finally, we draw some conclusions as to the Americanisation of English in the Caribbean.