Papers by temitayo olatoye
arXiv (Cornell University), Nov 15, 2023
Language matters (Pretoria), May 18, 2022
World Englishes, Jun 15, 2022
Language Matters
This study examines the attitudes of 102 Nigerians towards six varieties of English in terms of s... more This study examines the attitudes of 102 Nigerians towards six varieties of English in terms of status and solidarity: Southern British, Scottish, General American, Acrolectal Nigerian, Non-acrolectal Nigerian, and Ivorian. Using the verbal guise technique, attitudinal evaluations were obtained via an online questionnaire with a six-point semantic differential scale and eight traits. A speaker identification task was also included to examine dialectal awareness. Results indicate that the British, American, and Acrolectal Nigerian varieties received more positive evaluations in terms of status, while greater solidarity was expressed towards the American and both Nigerian varieties. An examination of participants' responses reveals that accent familiarity and the speaker's degree of accentedness enhance the listener's ability to make finegrained distinctions. These findings are discussed in relation to the acceptability of an endonormative variety in Nigeria.
World Englishes
Verb regularization is often characterized as a morphological Americanism in contemporary English... more Verb regularization is often characterized as a morphological Americanism in contemporary English. Using a synchronic approach, this study investigates the regular-ed vs. irregular-t alternation in preterites and past participles from British, American, and Nigerian Englishes. Although verb regularization patterns in Nigerian English are considered to be under the growing influence of American English, corpus evidence from the Global Web-based English corpus and the International Corpus of English reveals that irregular-t variants remain prevalent in the written data. To examine the conditioning factors, a dataset of 1,643 annotated observations was subjected to probabilistic modelling. The results indicate that significant predictors of verb regularization behave heterogeneously in the three varieties, and there is some evidence for probabilistic indigenization in Nigerian English. These findings suggest that the role of prescriptivism in shaping the usage patterns of Nigerian users of English as a Second Language (ESL) can hardly be overlooked. 1 INTRODUCTION In Present-Day English, irregular verbs are relatively few. They constitute less than 3 per cent of lexical verbs but are characterized by high token frequency (Lieberman et al., 2007). This paper focuses on irregular verbs with regular-ed variants as in learned, spilled and irregular-t variants as in learnt, spilt in their preterite and past participle forms. Jowitt (2019, p. 100) generalizes that 'Nigerian English tends to regularize irregular verbs.. . by adding-ed after the American model, instead of-t after the British model.' However, no study to date has systematically examined the factors that This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
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Papers by temitayo olatoye