ABSTRACT

This study investigates errors of English usage among younger and older users of educated Nigerian English. Based on an electronic written language corpus of 64 129 words, written by 60 Nigerians and containing four different text types (academic writing, informal letters, formal letters and novels), several syntactic features described as typical errors occurring in Nigerian English (NE) in previous studies were analysed. The Chi-square test, used for the comparison of corpus counts, reveals that most of the syntactic features occur with a very low frequency rate among both groups of speakers and that none of these features is used significantly more frequently by younger compared to older speakers. It further reveals that the low frequency of errors indicates that the written English of educated Nigerians is minimally characterised by errors and that the occurrences of errors are affected by speakers’ age and level of education.

摘要

这项研究调查了受过教育的尼日利亚英语的新老用户之间英语使用的错误。基于由60名尼日利亚人编写的包含64 129个单词的电子书面语言语料库，其中包含四种不同的文本类型（学术写作，非正式信件，正式信件和小说），几种句法特征被描述为尼日利亚英语（NE）中发生的典型错误。以前的研究进行了分析。卡方检验用于比较语料库计数，结果表明，两组说话者中大多数语法特征的出现频率都很低，与较年长的说话者相比，年轻的人更不经常使用这些特征。 。