Due to his battle with cancer, Thadeus was not able to attend the autumn graduation ceremony earlier this year, and therefore could not experience the immense pride and jubilation that accompanies the conferring of a doctoral degree..
Accompanied by his wife, Thadeus was received on campus by Prof Linda du Plessis, the deputy vice-chancellor for planning and campus operations, Prof Susan Coetzee-van Rooy, acting deputy dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Prof Christopher Rabali, school director from the faculty, and Prof Bertus van Rooy, Thadeus’s study promoter.
In his thesis entitled “The linguistic features and variety status of Zimbabwean English”, Thadeus explored the morphosyntactic features of Zimbabwean English and identified a number of salient features that characterises this lesser-known variety of English.
Where previous research had been based on evidence of individual examples, this study makes an original contribution by adopting a corpus linguistic approach to analyse data from a representative corpus of Zimbabwean English, amounting to 390 000 words.
The compilation of the corpus itself, hailed by examiners as typical of a team of researchers rather than an individual, is a further substantive contribution of the study. Some features are found to be reasonable similar to other Southern African varieties of English, but a small number of typical Zimbabwean innovations are identified and explained with reference to factors such as the context of acquisition in schools and possible transfer from the indigenous languages of Zimbabwe. A number of features identified by previous researchers were shown to be attested with very low frequency, and thus not particularly indexical of Zimbabwean English.
Thadeus was born on 17 May 1974 in the Bikita district of the Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe. He completed his advanced level studies (considered to be comparable to the South African Senior Certificate) at Mashoko High School in Bikita in 1992. In 1993, he enrolled for a BA in English and linguistics at the University of Zimbabwe. Upon the completion of his degree, he joined the Ministry of Education where he worked as a secondary school teacher until early 2007.
In 2004 he obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the Midlands State University. He also obtained a BAHons in applied linguistics at the UNISA in 2006, He joined the Great Zimbabwe University, formerly known as Masvingo State University, in April 2007 as a teaching assistant. On completion of his master’s degree in applied linguistics with UNISA in 2009, he was promoted to lecturer.
During his tenure at Great Zimbabwe University, he had already published several research articles in international journals.
Prof Christopher Rabali, Dr Thadeus Marungudzi and Prof Linda du Plessis
