This study investigates the usage of the pragmatic focus particles even and still in Nigerian English (NigE). A comparison of ICE-Nigeria and ICE-GB showed diverging frequencies of both particles across different registers between the two varieties of English and a significantly higher overall usage of even in NigE. Qualitative analyses revealed that even has acquired a wide range of new pragmatic meanings in NigE, such as emphatic, affirmative, particularising and epistemic meanings, and that still can be used to express promises and predictions. It is shown that these usages mirror meanings of the equivalents of even and still in the Nigerian languages Yorùbá and Igbo; their spread across a wide range of speakers in Nigeria attests to the status of even and still as nativised structures rather than learner errors.
2023. Educated Nollywood artistes’ accent as a Normative Standard of English pronunciation in Nigeria. English Today 39:3 ► pp. 207 ff.
Olatoye, Temitayo
2023. Irregular verb morphology in Nigerian English. World Englishes 42:4 ► pp. 642 ff.
Unuabonah, Foluke Olayinka & Jemima Asabea Anderson
2023. “You are quite funny paa!”: A corpus-based study of borrowed discourse-pragmatic features in Ghanaian English. Corpus Pragmatics 7:3 ► pp. 267 ff.
2022. ‘Mehn! This wins the award’. English Today 38:3 ► pp. 143 ff.
van Rooy, Bertus
2019. English in Africa. In The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 210 ff.
Mehl, Seth
2018. Corpus onomasiology in world Englishes and the concrete verbsmakeandgive. World Englishes 37:2 ► pp. 185 ff.
Mehl, Seth
2021. What we talk about when we talk about corpus frequency: The example of polysemous verbs with light and concrete senses. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 17:1 ► pp. 223 ff.
Obiegbu, Ifeyinwa
2018. Errors in Educated Nigerian English Usage. Language Matters 49:2 ► pp. 107 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.