Logicalization as a Strategy of Rectification: The Study of Some Cameroon English Usages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term logicalization, as used in this paper, is not new at all although it has not yet started gaining legitimacy in the literature on New Englishes. The term was coined and used by Simo Bobda (1997, 2001) who actually initiated the analysis. The concept is defined by the author as a strategy that “refers to the use of a feature which, according to the speaker, better reflects the semantic content of the utterance” (1997:299). It is a very common strategy in the sense that Cameroon English (CamE) speakers re-structure and re-organize some Standard British English (SBE, the variety the educational system of Cameroon is aimed at) features to suit the way they perceive, understand and interpret the world around them. The present paper revisits some aspects of this term as used by the author, but goes further to examine some crucial areas of everyday usage by the speakers of CamE, a non-native variety of English. The paper thus investigates such areas of language as idiomatic usages and style, prepositional usages, perception of tense, subject-verb concord, and plurality, all falling in the realm of grammar and usage. The features selected have been tested in the field with the informants being Form Four students (equivalent of Grade 9) of the Government Bilingual High School of Yaounde and LMA3 (Third Year English Modem Letters, i.e, final year for the undergraduate program) students of the Faculty of Art, Letters and Social Sciences, University of Yaounde. In total, there were 150 participants, both males and females. The test was aimed at determininging the rate of recurrence of both SBE and CamE features. One of the conclusions this paper arrives at is that the contrastive causes of deviation, which are frequently over-emphasised in the literature, are not the sole causes of peculiarities that account for the striking innovations observed in non-native Englishes in general and CamE in particular. ResumeLe concept de «logicalisation,» tel qu’utilise dans cet article, est loin d’etre nouveau, bien qu'il ne se soit pas encore popularise dans la litterature des nouvelles varietes d’anglais. Ce terme a ete utilise pour la premiere fois, en passant, par Simo Bobda (1997,2001), veritable initiateur de cette analyse. Il le definit d'ailleurs comme une strategie «liee a l’utilisation d’un trait linguistique, qui, d’apres le locuteur, reflete mieux le contenu semantique de renonce» (1997:299). C’est une strategie utilisee frequemment par les locuteurs de l’anglais du Cameroun dans la mesure ou ceux-ci restructurent et reorganisent certains traits linguistiques de l’anglais britannique afin de les adapter a la facon dont ils percoivent, comprennent et interpretent le monde. Rappelons que la variete britannique de l'anglais est la variete standard du systeme educatif camerounais. Cet article reexamine certain aspects de ce concept tel qu’utilise par l'auteur, mais pousse l'analyse bien plus loin en examinant quelques domaines cruciaux de l’usage quotidien de la langue chez les locuteurs de cette variete d'anglais. Ainsi, dans cet article, nous etudierons certains domaines de la langue comme les expressions idiomatiques et le style, les prepositions, la perception du temps, l'accord sujet-verbe et la perception du pluriel. Tout cela releve evidemment de la grammaire et de l’usage. Les traits linguistiques particuliers que nous avons selectionnes ont ete testes sur le tenrain. Les informateurs etaient des eleves de Form Four (equivalent de «Grade 9») du Lycee Bilingue de Yaounde d’une part, et d’autre part les etudiants de troisieme annee du Departement d’Anglais de la Faculte des Arts, lettres et Sciences Humaines, Universite de Yaounde I, Ils etaient au total 150, de sexe masculin et feminin. Le test visait a obtenir la frequence de l'anglais britannique et de l’anglais camerounais. L’une des conclusions auxquelles cet article est parvenu est que le fait d’invoquer les causes contrastives pour expliquer less particularismes grammaticaux de l'anglais parle au Cameroun, bien que cela soit tres populaire, ne constitue pas la seule explication de tous les particularismes et de toutes les innovations que l’on observe dans les varietes emergentes de l’anglais en general et dans l’anglais du Cameroun en particulier. 11 am highly indebted to A. Simo Bobda (1997,2001) who actually initiated the analysis I am following. Indeed, some of the data analyzed in this paper are extracted from his above-mentioned works.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".