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Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes
Edited by Alexandra U. Esimaje, Ulrike Gut and Bassey E. Antia
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 88] 2019
► pp. 119–142

Chapter 1.5
The historical corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana)

Motivation, compilation, opportunities

| University of Regensburg

This chapter discusses various aspects relevant to the compilation of the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana), a 600,000-word corpus of written Ghanaian English (GhE) from the period 1966 to 1975. The corpus captures written GhE in the early years of its nativization phase and by comparison to the relevant sections of the Ghanaian component of ICE makes it possible to trace structural nativization in real time. The paper addresses the motivation for such a corpus and shows how methodological and theoretical concerns and challenges have affected the final corpus design. The paper is rounded off with contemporary examples of GhE.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.English in Ghana
  • 3.Motivation for compiling a historical corpus of GhE
  • 4.The compilation of HiCE Ghana
  • 5.Digitisation and annotation
  • 6.Opportunities
  • 7.Conclusion and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.88.06bra
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