Preface

The complexities of English syntax first engaged my attention during the years I spent teaching the English language to young people and adults in German schools and colleges (from 1971 onwards). My studies and work in the English language departments at the University of Bayreuth (from 1985 to 1994) and the TU Chemnitz (since 1995) have enabled me to gain more insight into grammatical description and more experience in linguistic analysis. As Africa is a field of major interest within the faculties at the University of Bayreuth I soon became aware of issues related to English beyond the scope of teaching it as an international language. Working on my M.A. thesis ("Linguistic features of style in Kenyan English novels of the late 1980s") I noted obvious deviations from Standard British and American varieties of English in grammar, idiom and lexis. Deviations in grammatical usage could be seen to stem from 'mistakes' in the language learning or acquisition processes such as a lack of knowledge of the subrules of the standard variety, overgeneralisation, false analogy or confusion in usage. These may have established themselves firmly and be passed on from teacher to learner or in daily usage. Lexemes borrowed from African languages for items and concepts from traditional cultural spheres are a common feature in spoken and written texts. Semantic deviations are accepted more readily than syntactic 'mistakes', which are stigmatized as revealing lack of education. The enrichment of the English language with vivid proverbs taken from the local African cultural setting has been recognized as a successful creative device employed by a number of African writers. Thus there exists a continuum of variation from usage which would be considered incorrect to deviation as a creative device, which Spencer (1971: 3) has called 'rule-bending creativity'.

Since 1991 I have been co-ordinating the collecting and computerization of the spoken and written material from Kenya and Tanzania which will form the East African component of the International Corpus of English. My experience in this field of corpus collection, together with my interest in grammatical description and analysis, yielded the research questions and hypotheses of the investigation.