A Comparison of ICE Nigeria and ICE Ghana Using AntConc Software

Authors

  • Mary Daniel Nimram

Abstract

“World Englishes” is another concept used for emerging localised or indigenised varieties of English. This study compares the data from ICE Nigeria and Ghana respectively that are used the same way. A total of 240 data (120 NE and 120 GhE) were purposely selected for analysis using Bamiro’s classifications which are analogical creation, coinages or neologisms, loan shift, semantic under-differentiation, lexico-semantic duplication and redundancy, ellipsis, conversion, clipping and translation equivalents with the exception of acronyms. Corpus linguistics as a method of analysis is also used in the analysis. The study found out that the number of hits of each lexical item also varies. From the 15 NE lexical items in the table, 13 items have more hits in ICE Nigeria than ICE Ghana while only 1 kinship term “uncle” has more hits in ICE Ghana. The item “exam” has 45 hits each in both corpora. It is evident from the AntConc result that these NE lexical items have more hits in ICE Nigeria than ICE Ghana. On the other hand, 13 lexical items “bride price, aha, brother, sister, bottom line, you people, bye bye, very very, can be able to, us we, so so, man u, bro” have more hits in ICE Nigeria while 10 lexical items “fufu, palm wine, koko, for real, feeding, connection, little little, big big, barca, sec” have more hits in ICE Ghana than ICE Nigeria. It is evident from the AntConc result that these GhE lexical items have more hits in ICE Nigeria than ICE Ghana.

Key words: comparison, Nigerian English, Ghanaian English, ICE, Corpus linguistics

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