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Part of
New Approaches to English Linguistics: Building bridges
Edited by Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja and Sarah Chevalier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 177] 2016
► pp. 141–174

Future time marking in spoken Ghanaian English

The variation of will vs. be going to

editor
| University of Freiburg

This article investigates outcomes in the process of structural nativization in the evolution of New English varieties in the domain of future time marking, analyzing the constraints on variation of WILL and BE GOING TO in spoken Ghanaian English (GhE) as compared to British English (BrE), using mixed effects logistic regression models. The analysis shows that in spoken GhE future time markers are not as clearly distributed syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically as in spoken BrE, which reflects its learner variety history and its status in a highly multilingual society. However, it is also shown that different future marker-verb collocations in spoken GhE may reflect first nativization processes in the variety, which corroborates previous findings that innovations in New Englishes start at the lexico-grammatical level (cf. Schneider 2007: 86–88).

Keywords: Ghanaian English, World Englishes, corpus linguistics, mixed effects logistic regression model, nativization, future time marking
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Future time marking in English: Previous research
  • 3.Ghanaian English: Theoretical background and data
  • 4.Counting and coding the future
    • 4.1Sentence type
    • 4.2Polarity
    • 4.3Subject type
    • 4.4Temporal adverbial specification
    • 4.5Agentivity
  • 5.An analysis of WILL vs. BE GOING TO
  • 6.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 1 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.177.06sch
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