No abstract

Apart from the occurrence of now as a temporal adverb and as an attention pragmatic marker, there is the existence of a third type of now which until now has not been explored in Nigerian English. This paper, examines the phonetic properties, meaning, frequency, syntactic patterns, and extended discourse‐pragmatic functions of an indigenised now in Nigerian English. The paper takes its data from conversations in the International Corpus of English‐Nigeria and analyses this nativised now from a grammatical‐pragmatic approach. The results reveal that this third type of now has adopted the tonal structure of some indigenous Nigerian languages and occurs mainly at the final position of utterances. This Nigerian indigenised now performs only interpersonal functions as it serves as an emphasis marker and as a mitigation marker.

Nigerian English (NigE), like other new Englishes, possesses its unique features at various domains of phonology. This article examined aspects of connected speech processes (CSPs), the phenomena that account for sound modifications and simplifications in speech, with a view to establishing features that characterize Standard NigE connected speech. Natural phonology (NP), which provides explanations for substitutions, alternations, and variations in the speech of second language speakers, was adopted as theoretical framework. The subjects of the study were 360 educated NigE speakers, accidentally sampled from different language groups in Nigeria. The CSPs found in their semi-spontaneous speeches were transcribed perceptually and analyzed statistically, by allotting marks to instances of occurrence and converting such to percentages. Three categories of CSPs were identified in the data: dominant, minor, and idiosyncratic processes. The study affirms that only the dominant CSPs, typical of NigE speakers, are acceptable as Standard Nigerian spoken English.

Intonation is an important phenomenon in language believed to have strong effect on communication. It is often said in reference to the primacy of intonation meaning over lexical content that "It's not what you said, it's how you said it!". To this effect, a number of scholars have argued that intonation conveys different attitudes in English and is principally responsible for misunderstandings between native and non-native English speakers. This paper, therefore, attempts to ascertain the extent to which Nigerian speakers of English use English intonation tunes to express attitude as it is in Standard British English. Twenty-two subjects comprising television reporters using English for their professional assignments and confirmed to have been exposed to basic training in English intonation during their academic studies and/or in the course of their professional training were made to read five utterance items designed to test their knowledge of attitudinal function of intonation. The analysis shows that the respondents were deficient in the use of English intonation tunes to express attitude as they only scored 15.5% overall appropriate production of intonation tunes in the utterance items. It was concluded that the subjects demonstrated a restricted use of intonation in communication, as intonation was rarely used to express attitude. This confirms earlier claims that Nigerian English users make restricted use of the complex intonation tunes of English especially those tunes assigned to reflect the speaker's attitude to the listener or what is being said.

This paper examines six bilingual pragmatic markers: jare, biko, jor, shebi, shey, and fa which are borrowed from indigenous Nigerian languages into Nigerian English, with a view to examining their sources, meanings, frequencies, spelling stability, positions, collocational patterns, and discourse‐pragmatic functions in Nigerian English. The data for the study, drawn from the International Corpus of English‐Nigeria and the Nigerian component of the Global Web‐based English corpus, are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic perspective. The findings show that jare, jor, shebi, and shey are borrowed from Yoruba, biko is from Igbo while fa is from Hausa. Jare, jor, and biko function as mitigation and emphasis markers, shebi and shey serve as agreement‐seeking markers while fa is an emphasis pragmatic marker. The study, thus, contributes to the growing research on bilingual pragmatic markers in second‐language contexts.