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Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 30:1 (2023) ► pp.120–151

Linguistic and pragmatic ways of committing oneself

Evidence from commissive shell nouns in Ghanaian English

| University of Perugia

In this study I focus on the complementation patterns of commissive shell nouns in Ghanaian English (GhE). Commissive shell nouns are a type of illocutionary shell noun, i.e. a noun that encapsulates a content that is usually expressed in a complement or even separate clause or sentence thereby ascribing it an illocutionary force. I use the usage-based approach to the study of language and investigate the behavioral profile of these nouns in GhE. I apply descriptive statistics to data that have been collected from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). The study provides evidence for the characterization of GhE usage norms, and thus contributes to the scholarly knowledge on this variety of English. It also sheds light on the contribution that the meaning-related and ultimately cognitive perspective can offer in describing the complementation patterns of illocutionary nouns in Postcolonial Englishes (PCEs).

Keywords: commissive shell nouns, complementation, conceptual structure, Dynamic Model, Ghanaian English, speech acts
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical underpinnings of the study
  • 3.Methodology and data analysis
    • 3.1Grammatical analysis
      • 3.1.1Major patterns
        • 3.1.1.1N-to inf
        • 3.1.1.2N-that
        • 3.1.1.3N-prep-Ving
      • 3.1.2Minor patterns
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22014.ver
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