EAST AFRICA GROUP PROJECT

Monday, November 30, 2009

Still no luck!

Well, I went back to the ICE Corpus to see what I could do and found I could do little. Today my strategy was to cut and paste the examples given to see if they worked. The first two and fourth did, but the third, fifth, sixth, seventh, etc. didn't. I was really hoping the third would work because according to one source there are certain nouns that are used as verbs in East African English and I wanted to check some of those. Oh well, I'll ask Professor Dillon about this in class tomorrow.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

A little frustrated

Today I finally turned to the ICE Corpus and tried to check some of the syntactic tendencies I've found cited in regards to East African English. I was able to check on single word inquiries like plural forms of words that I would usually use in the singular (e.g., bums, laps, bottoms, etc.). What I could never figure out was how to do multiple word inquiries. For example, if third person personal pronouns are variable between gender, how do I check for something like "my husband...she..."? I tried looking at the examples and user's manual and even cut and pasted some things, but that didn't get me anywhere. After spending more than an hour trying to make headway I've decided to move on to other work I need to do and give it another shot tomorrow.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

A syntactic tidbit

Melchers and Shaw (2003: 133) state that it is common in East African English to use the question tag "not so" as in, "You like the Kenyan singer Nameless, not so?".

Monday, November 23, 2009

Another quick interview

Here's another 3-minuted interview from a Kenyan living in Japan. He's talking about environmental issues in Kenya.

<http://www.elllo.org/english/0901/T921-David-Forest.htm>