Analyzing the style of East African newspapers in English

ABSTRACT: This case study looks at one important source of linguistic data ‐newspapers ‐and discusses related problems of text‐type classification and feature interpretation. With texts from the East African ICE components as a database an attempt is made to assess the influence of different production contexts on the formal composition of texts. The issue of house‐style and problems of text categorization are discussed, a distinction being made between different types of reportage (splash and brief articles) and popular informational and persuasive texts (editorials). These genre samples are analysed for the particularly polysemous and multivalued/multifunctional variable of ‐ ing constructions, ranging from obligatory and optional (adverbial) clauses to verbal progressives. The analysis exemplifies the possibilities and problems of stylistic variation studies in different sociolinguistic contexts and the importance of recording all possibly influential text‐production features during the corpus collection process for a valid interpretation of the data.