Thematization in oral storytelling: A corpus-based comparison between speakers of American and Kenyan English
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- The present dissertation is a research on thematization in the oral narratives of personal experience told by women. It compares two varieties of English, i.e. American and Kenyan English. The podcasts of the narratives were retrieved from The Moth, an American initiative that aims to share real life stories. In this study, the thematic structures and the use of specific syntactic structures of both sets of data are investigated. Cultural aspects also represent a great part of the analysis. The theoretical framework of the research consists of M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, Biber et al (1999) grammar, Kachru’s model of World Englishes, and Rühlemann (2014) oral storytelling theories. Results show that the main difference in thematization was the use of personal pronouns as topical themes. Moreover, specific syntactic structures were not often resorted to by both groups. However, existential there was the most frequent structure. The classification of focused words or phrases into lexical fields revealed that Kenyan women tend to talk about their place in society, whereas American women talk about themselves. The main cultural difference thus resides in the choice of the topic of the story.