No abstract

Studies on Nigerian English (NE) have largely focused on the variation of NE from Standard English. Few of these have investigated metaphors in NE and none, to the best of my knowledge, has worked on ideology and metaphor. This paper fills this gap by concentrating only on body part metaphors. Metaphors related to sexual organs were sourced from Nigerian university students through oral and written interviews. Insights for analysis were drawn centrally from the theory of embodiment and critical discourse analysis. Fourteen sexual organ metaphors, which relate to two major ideological issues: the institutionalisation of gender issues and religious, social and cultural allegiances, are identified. The former relates to gender-based cultural disapproval, gender dignification and gender valuation, while the latter is tied to morality/ decency constraints, and personality/social group constraints. Metaphors have great cognitive values in Nigeria, and their understanding requires knowledge of the social and cultural context.

The negotiation of patients’ therapy proposals often makes a strong statement about doctors’ consultative styles in Nigerian clinical encounters. This invites a search into the relationship between patients’ preferred treatment options and doctors’ and patients’ approaches to negotiating them. Analysis reveals the sequential and face orientation mechanisms deployed in negotiating patients’ proposals in predominantly doctor-centred clinics, the interactional moves made by them in negotiating the proposals in predominantly patient-centred clinics, and the pragmatic Implications of therapy proposals negotiated in both clinics. The negotiations in the clinics are anchored to strategic rapport building, the colonisation of patients’ lifeworld and constrained joint decision. Rapport is poorly built in the doctor-centred clinic with power-imbued strategies which stifle patients’ voice and lead to completely-constrained joint decisions on therapy proposals by patients. Participatory consultation enhances negotiation in the patient-centred clinic, but the physician’s misleading strategic sequences and exaggerated emotions somewhat weaken the ultimate consultative outcome.

The paper examines the pragmatic roles that locutionary acts play in understanding the communication between doctors and patients in Southwestern Nigeria. Working within John Austin’s locutionary acts, with restrictions to the lexical occurrences and lexical relationships observed in the discourse, it got data through tape recordings of doctor-patient conversations and interviews of both doctors and patients (and/or their relations).The findings revealed that two categories of locutions were engaged in hospital interactions, namely, locutions intended to be understood by non-professionals and locutions not intended to be understood by non-professionals. The paper observes that locutions in medical discourse in Southwestern Nigeria bring standard lexical choices and local linguistic initiatives of medical practitioners into a pragmatic union. It therefore concludes that the pragmatic engagement of these choices displays the tact the practitioners use in dealing with patients, and it recommends the need for the practitioners to master the locutions and their pragmatic adaptation for effective management of patients.