Capturing the lexicon of Ugandan English

Abstract This paper discusses corpus linguistics as one method to investigate the lexicon of Ugandan English, which is characterised by borrowing, calquing, semantic extension, narrowing, and shift. It documents how analysing a well-balanced corpus, such as the Uganda component of the International Corpus of English , allows for a contextualisation of observations made from current uses of English and for an assessment of the textual genres in which such innovations occur. At the same time, it critically discusses the limitations and biases associated with a comparatively small corpus and argues for a multi-method approach that involves using larger, though less well controlled, corpora as well as supplementing corpus analyses with experimental data, which tap into the spread of lexical innovations.