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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 31:3 (2021) ► pp.455–481

“Abeg na! we write so our comments can be posted!”

Borrowed Nigerian Pidgin pragmatic markers in Nigerian English

ORCID logo | Redeemer’s University
| University of Münster
| University of Münster

This paper examines three borrowed pragmatic markers from Nigerian Pidgin into Nigerian English, abeg, sef and na, with a view to exploring their meanings, frequencies, spelling adaptability, syntactic positions, collocational patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions in Nigerian English. The data which were extracted from the International Corpus of English-Nigeria and the Nigerian component of the corpus of Global Web-based English were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, using the theory of pragmatic borrowing. The results indicate that the three pragmatic markers differ distinctly in their frequency across text types, syntactic position, the range of pragmatic meanings, the number of spelling variants and their collocations: abeg is used as a mitigation marker which can also function as an emphasis marker, sef is an emphasis marker but has additive and dismissive functions, while na is used purely as an emphasis pragmatic marker. The study shows the influence of Nigerian Pidgin on Nigerian English.

Keywords: corpus pragmatics, global web-based English, international corpus of English, postcolonial pragmatics, pragmatic borrowing, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Pragmatic markers
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Abeg in NigE
    • 4.2Sef in NigE
    • 4.3Na in NigE
    • 4.4 Abeg, sef and na compared
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 8 March 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19038.unu
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