Saturday, March 18, 2006
English prepositions in Kenya
From a back issue of English Today:
Prepositions vanishing in Kenya
SERAH MWANGI
English Today, Volume 20, Issue 01, January 2004, pp 27-32
Abstract
ACCORDING to Schmied (1991a:52), ‘there is some evidence that language learners in general use simplification strategies at an early stage and try to reproduce memorized phrases from the target language later, irrespective of the linguistic and pragmatic context.’ The English prepositional system is well known for its complexity and language learners might well be inclined to simplify in order to reduce such complexities. Indeed, there is evidence from the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-EA) of such a process of simplification in the use of prepositions in the English of Kenya. As a result, some prepositions might well disappear from use in this second-language variety of English.
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1 For guys you just wash Now imagine like Flo’s hair yeah if that thing just decides to go in
it. (S1A001K)2 … but let us take the length and the width of
Zanzibar island and the people who are there
What do you think if there are so many
people just coming in the country.
(S1A018T)3 And in some government meetings we have a
tendency of defending our status as countries
I hope the NGOs will not fall in that problem
We have to be open and be united as East
African. (S2B030T)These examples indicate that the cause and
effect relationship between prepositions of
location and direction is not always maintained
in KenE. For example, in [1], the verb go
is dynamic and the preposition into would
therefore obtain in Standard English, especially
because hair (the hair of a lady called Flo
is the intended meaning here) should be seen
as a volume into which something goes. In [2],
the preposition into is not obligatory because,
“when a place is being regarded as a destination
rather than a position, it is more natural to
see it vaguely as a geographical point than as
an area. Hence the more frequent use of to
than of into in reference to countries” (Quirk et
al., 1985:677). This means that in BrE, only
the prepositions to or into may be used in such
a context.