Hamburg Talks on Current Issues in World Englishes

14. April 2022, von JH

Foto: rf

Borrowed discourse-pragmatic features in Nigerian English
Dr. Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah
Department of English, Redeemer’s University, Ede, Nigeria

Tuesday, April 19, 2022
2.15 ‐ 3.45 pm CET ‐ Webinar
Register under
https://bit.ly/37CULTr

- All are welcome -

Abstract
This talk explores discourse-pragmatic features including pragmatic markers (e.g. abi, shebi, oya), and interjections (e.g. haba, na wa, ehn), which are borrowed from indigenous Nigerian languages, such as Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, into Nigerian English. The study is situated within the sub-fields of postcolonial pragmatics (Anchimbe and Janney 2011) and corpus pragmatics (Rühlemann and Aijmer 2015), and utilises the theories of pragmatic borrowing (Andersen 2014) and Fusion (Matras 2000). The data for the study, which are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively, are extracted from the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English and the Global Web-based English corpus. The talk addresses the origins, meanings, frequencies, spelling adaptation, syntactic positioning, syntactic distribution, collocational patterns, and discourse-pragmatic functions of these discourse-pragmatic features. It also discusses social and cognitive factors that may have accounted for these borrowings in Nigerian English. The study shows that these borrowed items distinguish Nigerian English from other World Englishes.

References
Anchimbe, Eric & Richard Janney. 2011. Postcolonial pragmatics: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics 43(6). 1451–1459.
Andersen, Gisle. 2014. Pragmatic borrowing. Journal of Pragmatics 67. 17–33.
Rühlemann, Christoph & Karin Aijmer. 2015. Corpus pragmatics: Laying the foundations. In: Karin Aijmer & Christoph Rühlemann (eds.), Corpus pragmatics: A handbook, 1–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.