The non-standard in writing: A look at West African and Southeast Asian literature

The present paper investigates the representation of non-standard varieties of English in literary texts. Using a corpus-based approach focussed on Southeast Asian and West African texts while also drawing on texts from Scotland for purposes of comparison, the study performs a quantitative analysis...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Michael PERCILLIER
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA) 2018-06-01
Series:E-REA
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/erea/6312
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Summary:The present paper investigates the representation of non-standard varieties of English in literary texts. Using a corpus-based approach focussed on Southeast Asian and West African texts while also drawing on texts from Scotland for purposes of comparison, the study performs a quantitative analysis that empirically defines linguistic feature profiles, revealing that the regions under investigation follow clearly distinct patterns, albeit with a common underlying principle. A diachronic investigation of these linguistic feature profiles shows that far from being static or stable, practices of representation vary from decade to decade.
ISSN:1638-1718