No abstract

Reduplication has a strong presence in creoles and expanded Pidgins. It has been studied for the several grammatical functions it performs in these languages. The present study is based on morphopragmatics theory, and explores reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin with the goal of identifying the pragmatic meanings it conveys. To achieve this, we analysed data from Wazobia FM, a Nigerian Pidgin-based radio station in Nigeria. The analysis process involved interviews and a focus group discussion with native informants. Our results show that in addition to more prototypical iconic meanings, some categories of reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin convey secondary meanings that are often heavily pragmatically and pejoratively charged, and which speakers strategically use to mark in-group and out-group associations, as well as to neutralize or attenuate the inherent negative meanings of the simplex forms.

While it has largely been taken for granted by most linguists that the relationship between linguistic signifier and signified is arbitrary in nature, a growing number of studies suggest otherwise. In this article, we demonstrate that iconicity in total reduplicative constructions in Nigerian Pidgin is graded in nature, and that the degree of iconicity of any given reduplicative is largely correlated with the word class to which its simplex form belongs, with reduplicated ideophones and adverbials exhibiting the highest degree of iconicity, reduplicated pronouns the lowest degree of iconicity, and reduplicated adjectives, nouns, numerals and verbs intermediate degrees of iconicity. Our results shed light, not only on which word classes are more prototypically involved in reduplication than others in the world’s languages, but also on typical pathways that reduplicatives follow in processes of grammaticalization, whereby their isomorphic form-meaning relationship appears increasingly attenuated, albeit due to varying language-internal factors that are specific to individual languages.