Magnus Huber

Ghanaian Pidgin English in its West African Context: A sociohistorical and structural analysis

This first published full-scale study of the Ghanaian variety of West African Pidgin English (GhaPE) makes extensive use of hitherto neglected historical material and provides a synchronic account of GhaPE’s structure and sociolinguistics. Special focus is on the differences between GhaPE and other West African Pidgins, in particular the development of, and interrelations between, the different varieties of restructured English in West Africa, from Sierra Leone to Cameroon. This monograph further includes an overview of the history of Afro-European contact languages in Lower Guinea with special emphasis on the Gold Coast; an outline of the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone, with a description of how and when the transplantation of Sierra Leonean Krio to other West African countries took place; an analysis of the linguistic evidence for the origin, development, and spread of restructured Englishes on the Lower Guinea Coast; an account of the different varieties of GhaPE and their sociolinguistic status in the contemporary linguistic ecology of Ghana; as well as a comprehensive structural description of the “uneducated” variety of GhaPE. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM which contains illustrative material such as spoken GhaPE and photographs.

Corpus Linguistics and Variation in English

The present volume includes a selection of 20 papers from the 31st Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), held in Giessen (Germany) in May 2010. The conference topic was “Corpus linguistics and variation in English”. All the papers included in the present Conference Proceedings capture aspects of variation in language use on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and/or new methods of utilising corpora for the description of language variation. Of particular interest are the five plenary papers that are included in the present volume, focusing on corpus-based approaches to variation in language from different disciplinary perspectives: Stefan Th. Gries (quantitative-statistical descriptions of variation and corpora), Michaela Mahlberg (stylistic variation and corpora), Miriam Meyerhoff (variational sociolinguistics and corpora), Edgar W. Schneider (regional variation and corpora) and Elizabeth C. Traugott (historical variation/grammaticalization and corpora).