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

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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
Published online: 24 February 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.67.16hac
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
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