Narratives are the product of a basic human tendency to make sense of real or imagined experiences. The research question posed in the dissertation is: how is narrativity encoded in East African English? Can the narrativity model in the dissertation distinguish between registers that prototypically focus on narration versus registers that do not primarily focus on narration? The narrativity model consists of four main groups of features, namely Agency, Causation, Contextualisation and Evaluation. These groups are representative of the fundamental structure of narratives: things happen to people at a specific time and place. Agency concerns the people who either instigate or are affected by the events. The things that happen can be denoted by Causation when they are the result of cause and effect in the world. Contextualisation refers to the grounding of events in time and space. Lastly, Evaluation concerns the reactions and attitudes people have towards the events. Eighteen linguistic features such as third person pronouns (part of the Agency group) and past tense verbs (part of the Contextualisation group) were analysed as micro-level indicators of narrativity. The corpus-based investigation analysed the linguistic features used to encode narrativity across 22 spoken and written registers of the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-EA) using WordSmith Tools 4.0. The raw scores for each feature were standardised across all registers to enable comparisons between features, as well as between registers. The results indicate that narrativity is a gradient phenomenon that occurs across a variety of East African English spoken and written registers. After the initial analyses were done, the narrativity model was revised to include only 11 core narrativity features. These features are past tense verbs, third person pronouns, proper nouns for persons, activity verbs, time and place adverbials, perfect aspect, emotional stance verb feel, first person pronouns, evaluative adjectives and non-finite causative clauses. ICE-EA registers that focus on narration as a MEANS to make sense of experiences (the objective or END) are Fiction, Social letters, Oral narratives, Face-to-face conversation and Legal cross-examination. In other words, the core narrativity features are the MEANS and the END is to make sense of experiences and facilitate understanding using narration. Twelve registers have an intermediate focus on narrativity. Narration is a secondary or simultaneous objective in these registers alongside primary objectives such as scientific exposition, persuasiveness, information presentation or interpersonal interaction. There are five registers with low scores for the core narrativity features: Student writing, Business letters, Popular writing, Academic writing and Instructional writing. These registers do not primarily focus on narration and have other primary and even secondary objectives such as scientific exposition and persuasiveness. The narrativity model sheds light on the way narrativity is encoded using linguistic features and gives insight into East African English register variation / Thesis (M.A. (English))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2011
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:nwu/oai:dspace.nwu.ac.za:10394/7173 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Terblanche, Elizabeth Deborah |
| Publisher | North-West University |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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