Cultural discourse in the Corpus of East African English and beyond: possibilities and problems of lexical and collocational research in a one million‐word corpus

Abstract

This contribution discusses content as well as methodology. As far as content is concerned, it looks at culture-specific lexemes in East African English and compares it with the international reference varieties of English, British and American. As far as methodology is concerned, it uses the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-EA) and explores to what extent culture-specific lexemes (East Africanisms or Kenyanisms/Tanzanianisms) can be explored and described on the basis of these data and suggests other methods to complement them. 1

“I entirely understand” is a Blairism

“…Thus, even though variety-and register-specific collocations have been the focus of previous studies (Biber et al 1999, Gledhill 2000, Granger 1998, Mair 2007, Ooi 2000, Schilk 2006, Schmied 2004, Skandera 2003, these mostly rely on the comparison of frequencies in corpora, without bringing into play more sophisticated measures of collocational strength. The present study, in contrast, benefits from three statistical measures: normalised frequency, Mutual Information and log-likelihood, making a more focused selection of what are considered to be true collocations here possible.…”