Article published in:
Grammatical Change in English World-Wide
Edited by Peter Collins
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 67] 2015
► pp. 389–410

American influence on written Caribbean English

A diachronic analysis of newspaper reportage in the Bahamas and in Trinidad and Tobago

| University of Munich
| University of Munster
This paper presents a diachronic analysis of press news reports in the Bahamas and in Trinidad and Tobago with a view to shedding light on the question of Americanisation. We analyse four corpora, one from the 1960s and one contemporary from each country. The following features are studied: (1) contractions of negatives and verb forms, (2) the be-passive, (3) relative that vs. which, and (4) pseudotitles. Our results show that Americanisation is a factor to be reckoned with in Caribbean English, as are colloquialisation and densification; at the same time, Caribbean journalistic writing definitely retains a distinct flavour of formality which distinguishes it from newspaper language not just in the US but also in Britain. Keywords: Caribbean; Americanisation; newspapers; Bahamas; Trinidad and Tobago
Published online: 24 February 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.67.16hac
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 03 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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