This chapter investigates the extent of similarity in the use of stance markers in two national varieties of West African English, Nigerian English and Ghanaian English, and compares them to British English. The frequency and stylistic variability of four semantic groups of stance markers were examined in ICE-Nigeria and ICE-Ghana and compared with ICE-Great Britain. The results are mixed: the two West African varieties show an overall lower frequency of stance markers compared to British English but the speakers of the two West African English varieties do not demonstrate lower stylistic variability in the use of stance markers across different text types. Notwithstanding, there are systematic differences in stance marker usage between the two West African English varieties.
Article outline
1.Introduction
2.Stance markers within a variational pragmatic framework
1999Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Biber, Douglas & Staples, Shelley
2014Variation in the realisation of stance adverbials. In Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 61], Tommaso Raso & Heliana Mello (eds), 271–294. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Brato, Thorsten & Huber, Magnus
2012English in Africa. In Areal Features of the Anglophone World, Raymond Hickey (ed.), 161–185. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bucholtz, Mary & Hall, Kira
2005Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4–5): 585–614.
Bygate, Martin
2009Teaching and testing speaking. In The Handbook of Language Teaching, Michael H. Long & Catherine J. Doughty (eds), 412–440. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Chiluwa, Innocent
2013West African English in digital discourse. Covenant Journal of Language Studies 1(1): 42–61.
Conrad, Susan & Biber, Douglas
2000Adverbial marking of stance in speech and writing. In Evaluation in Text: Authorial stance and the Construction of Discourse, Susan Hunston & Geoffrey Thompson (eds), 56–73. Oxford: OUP.
Conteh-Morgan, Miriam
1997English in Sierra Leone: A description of the language as used in this West African Country and a consideration of its status there. English Today 13: 52–56.
Dako, Kari
2003Ghanaianisms – A Glossary. Accra: Ghana University Press.
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian, Sudhof, Moritz, Jurafsky, Dan, Leskovec, Jure & Potts, Christopher
2013A Computational Approach to Politeness with Application to Social Factors. [URL]> (16October 2017).
Dolphyne, Florence
1995A note on the English language in Ghana. In New Englishes: A West African Perspective, Ayo Bamgbose, Ayo Banjo & Andrew Thomas (eds), 27–33. Ibadan: Mosuro.
2015Does speaker role affect the choice of epistemic adverbials in L2 speech? Evidence from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. In Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, Jesús Romero-Trillo (ed.), 117–136. Dordrecht: Springer.
Gablasova, Dana, Brezina, Vaclav, McEnery, Tony & Boyd, Elaine
2015Epistemic stance in spoken L2 English: The effect of task and speaker style. Applied Linguistics: 1–26. .
Gray, Bethany & Biber, Douglas
2015Stance markers. In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, Karin Aijmer & Christoph Rühlemann (eds), 219–248. Cambridge: CUP.
Greenbaum, Sidney
1991ICE: The International Corpus of English. English Today 7(4): 3–7.
Gut, Ulrike
2012Standards of English in West Africa. In Standards of English: Codified Varieties around the World, Raymond Hickey (ed.), 213–228. Cambridge: CUP.
Gut, Ulrike
2017English in West Africa. In The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes, Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola & Devyani Sharma (eds), 491–507. Oxford: OUP.
Hunston, Susan & Sinclair, John
2000A local grammar of evaluation. In Evaluation in Text: Authorial stance and the Construction of Discourse, Susan Hunston & Geoffrey Thompson (eds), 74–101. Oxford: OUP.
Hunston, Susan & Thompson, Geoffrey
2000Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: OUP.
Hyland, Ken & Milton, John
1997Qualification and certainty in L1 and L2 students’ writing. Journal of Second Language Writing 6(2): 183–205.
Jaffe, Alexandra
2009Introduction: The sociolinguistics of stance. In Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, Alexandra Jaffe (ed.), 3–28. Oxford: OUP.
Johnstone, Barbara
2009Stance, style and the linguistic individual. In Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, Alexandra Jaffe (ed.), 29–53. Oxford: OUP.
Jowitt, David
1991Nigerian English Usage: An Introduction. Lagos: Longman.
Kärkkäinen, Elise
1992Modality as a strategy in interaction: Epistemic modality in the language of native and non-native speakers of English. Pragmatics and Language Learning 3: 197–216.
2006Stance taking in conversation: From subjectivity to intersubjectivity. Text & Talk 26(6): 699–731.
Kärkkäinen, Elise
2010Position and scope of epistemic phrases in planned and unplanned American speech. In New Approaches to Hedging, Gunther Kaltenböck, Wiltrud Mihatsch & Stefan Schneider (eds), 203–236. Bingley: Emerald.
Keteku, Nancy W., Adebayo, Folashade & Meyers, James P.
2008Anglophone West Africa: Education, Credentials, Recruitment & Resources. Paper presented at NAFSA Conference, Washington DC. [URL]> (8January 2017).
Martin, James R. & White, Peter R. R.
2005The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
McEnery, Tony & Kifle, Nazareth A.
2002Epistemic modality in argumentative essays of second-language writers. In Academic Discourse, John Flowerdew (ed.), 182–195. Harlow: Longman.
Omoniyi, Tope
2008West African Englishes. In Handbook of World Englishes, Braj Kachru, Yumuna Kachru & Cecil Nelson (eds), 172–187. London: Wiley.
Pichler, Heike
2016Introduction: Discourse-pragmatic variation and change. In Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change: Insights from English, Heike Pichler (ed.), 1–18. Cambridge: CUP.
Romero-Trillo, Jesus
2008Introduction: Pragmatics and corpus linguistics. A mutualistic entente. In Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics. A Mutualistic Entente, Jesus Romero-Trillo (ed.), 1–10. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rühlemann, Christoph
2010What can a corpus tell us about pragmatics? In Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, Anne O’Keeffe & Michael McCarthy (eds), 288–301. London: Routledge.
Rühlemann, Christoph & Aijmer, Karin
2015Corpus pragmatics: Laying the foundations. In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, Karin Aijmer & Christoph Rühlemann (eds), 1–28. Cambridge: CUP.
Rühlemann, Christoph & O’Donnell, Brook
2012Introducing a corpus of conversational stories: Construction and annotation of the Narrative Corpus. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 8(2): 313–350.
Schilling-Estes, Natalie
2006Dialect variation. In An Introduction to Language and Linguistics, Ralph W. Fasold & Jeff Connor-Linton (eds), 311–342. Cambridge: CUP.
Schneider, Klaus P.
2012Appropriate behaviour across varieties of English. Journal of Pragmatics 44(9): 1022–1037.
Singler, John
1997The configuration of Liberia’s Englishes. World Englishes 16: 205–231.
2015Speech act annotation. In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, Karin Aijmer & Christoph Rühlemann (eds), 84–116. Cambridge: CUP.
White, Peter R. R.
2011Appraisal. In Discursive Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights 8], Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman & Jeff Verschueren (eds), 14–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wolf, Hans-Georg & Igboanusi, Herbert
2003A preliminary comparison of some lexical items in Nigerian English and Cameroon English. In Studies in African Varieties of English, Peter Lucko, Lothar Peter and Hans-Georg Wolf (eds), 69–81. Bern: Peter Lang.
Wunder, Eva-Maria, Voormann, Holger & Gut, Ulrike
2010The ICE Nigeria corpus project: Creating an open, rich and accurate corpus. ICAME Journal 34: 78–88.
Zhang, Grace Q. & Sabet, Peyman G.
2014Elastic ‘I think’: Stretching over L1 and L2. Applied Linguistics 37(3): 334–353. .
Cited by
Cited by 9 other publications
Gut, Ulrike & Foluke O. Unuabonah
2022. Requesting Strategies in Nigerian and British English: A Corpus-Based Approach. In Current Issues in Descriptive Linguistics and Digital Humanities, ► pp. 687 ff.
Oladipupo, Rotimi O. & Foluke O. Unuabonah
2021. Extended discourse‐pragmatic usage of now in Nigerian English. World Englishes 40:3 ► pp. 371 ff.
2022. ‘Mehn! This wins the award’. English Today 38:3 ► pp. 143 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.
Unuabonah, Foluke Olayinka, Folajimi Oyebola & Ulrike Gut
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 september 2023. 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.