Oral varieties of English in a literary corpus of West African and South East Asian prose (1954-2013): commitment to local identities and catering for foreigh readers - Archive ouverte HAL
Journal Articles Etudes de Stylistique Anlaise Year : 2016

Oral varieties of English in a literary corpus of West African and South East Asian prose (1954-2013): commitment to local identities and catering for foreigh readers

Percillier Michael
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Abstract

The analysis of a literary corpus of West African and South East Asian prose (1954-2013) reveals that what appears, at least at first sight, to be a mimetic representation of non-standardized varieties of oral English in fact belongs to the symbolic, if not stereotypical order. The representation of character speech and thoughts functions in a tension between a commitment to represent linguistic alterity and the necessity to be understood by foreign readers who are not familiar with the socio-historical and linguistic context. Systematic annotation and quantitative analysis of the corpus show that the strategies used in the two regions differ at different levels: linguistic and metadiscursive. At the linguistic level, South East Asian texts largely resort to code-mixing whereas West-African texts predominantly have recourse to grammatical representations of local varieties of Engish. At the metadiscursive level, lexical foreignness is marked by italics in South East Asian texts; West-Afriacn texts resort to italics, translation and commentaries.
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Dates and versions

hal-01306467 , version 1 (24-04-2016)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01306467 , version 1

Cite

Catherine Paulin, Percillier Michael. Oral varieties of English in a literary corpus of West African and South East Asian prose (1954-2013): commitment to local identities and catering for foreigh readers. Etudes de Stylistique Anlaise, 2016, Engagement/Commitment (9). ⟨hal-01306467⟩

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