The Pragmatics of Nigerian English in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Novels

Aboh, Romanus; Uduk, Happiness

doi:10.17323/2411-7390-2016-2-3-6-13

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…The speech in this present study is different from the ones in the studies above in the sense that it is a pre-election speech, while the ones in Ayeomoni and Akinkurolere (2012) and Akinkurolere (2015) are post-election speeches. Aboh (2016) deployed sociolinguistics as framework to evaluate Jega's speeches during the 2015 Nigeria's general election, which is a clear departure in the field of political discourse. Most studies focus on the political actors themselves, without concern for the umpire, whose speeches and activities even affect electoral processes.…”

Section: Important Scholarly Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2024

BJEL

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Chatham House, for the reason of its royalty, institutionalism and independence, has become a global beehive and platform where, especially Nigerian political actors articulate their ambitions and policies and prove the mettle of their deservedness for the nation's helmsman's job. Extant political discourse studies have largely examined conventional campaign speech-situations with stint considerations for political expressions offered on the postmodern globalised campaign platforms. This study, therefore, investigated Peter Obi's Chatham House speech (POCHS) with a view to examining the contextually referenced discursive strategies that project Nigerian presidential candidacy as more of offshore interest in the twenty-first century global politics. Martin and White's Appraisal Theory was used as the framework in analysing the elemental linguistic and non-linguistic strategies deployed in the electronically sourced POCHS. The data, processed into analysable extract-units, were subjected to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Mr. Peter Obi's (PO) unusual employment of attitude-demonstrated 'affect', 'appreciation' and 'judgement' was unique in relating his global audience to virtues and attributes that qualify him for the Nigerian topmost position, presenting him as an unconventional politician. Positive and negative appreciation and judgements were used for personal-self-evaluation, corporate-self-evaluation, 'others-self-evaluation', and nation-self-evaluation while the bases for appreciation and judgement were personal and party competence, problems, policy gaps and solutions. PO deployed engagement as monogloss and heterrogloss on top of 'graduation' with intensifiers and quantifiers as force that projected 'focus', 'emphasis' and 'analogies'. Thus, globalised political context influenced PO's exploitation of the rarely available global platforms (Chatham House) to articulate his political ambition and manifesto. Language is, therefore, revealed as dynamic force for presentation and evaluation of persons, problems, policies and panaceas that are capable of endearing him to the expectation of the audience at Chatham House, pointing to Nigerian presidency as a phenomenon of 21 st century's global interest.

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Section: Important Scholarly Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2024

BJEL

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“…The findings reveal that young people use lexically and contextually driven sexually explicit relation within their social universe and group dynamics. Aboh (2015) examines euphemistic expressions from the selected Nigerian novels to see how characters deploy politeness strategies to lessen the effect of an expression that might be termed threatening to the hearer. The findings reveal four (4) categories of sex euphemisms (sex as movement/journey, sex as food, sex as a biological process of maturity and the sex organ as a manipulative object) in the novel.…”

Section: Euphemism In Herbal Adsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cure for weak manhood: A persuasive euphemism strategies in selected Nigerian herbal medicines advertisements

Onipede

2023

Braz. J. of Sci.

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The study examined herbal medicines advertising discourse as unique terms of depicting weak manhood euphemistically in order not to sound vulgar. Twelve advertisements (ads) served as the data of investigation. The data were taken from Facebook advertisements (both texts and images) and analyzed from the purviews of Barthesian denotative and connotative annotations, Halliday's transitivity concepts, and critical discourse analysis. This study aims to examine how weak manhood is portrayed, the ideology behind its portrayal, and the persuasive techniques used in the ads. The study revealed concealments in form of sexual satisfaction (e.g. next match, lasting gbola, bigga gbola, better something, leg shaking) and power/activeness (e.g. big carrot, strongest bamboo, Manpower, 45 mins, inner chamber, excellence in the other room, power to do more, and extra time/large). The study suggested that further researches to analyze from a multimodal perspective on how different visual and linguistic choices deployed in the herbal cure for weak manhood ads contribute to the euphemistic and persuasive import of taboo-related advertising. Again, however acceptable euphemistic expressions may be in certain context; they are considered too explicit, pinged with negative connotation and therefore create war among readers.

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“…Pragmatic cues in the play have been alluded to in the earlier sections of this study. They include the various examples that consider the discourse participants and their discursive contexts, which are parameters that shape their language use and the mutually construed meanings in the communicative situation (Aboh & Uduk, 2016). This particular section focuses on Nigerians' infusion of honorific address and titles to express the cultural values for respect, deference and politeness.…”

Section: Pragmatic Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nigerian English Usage in Literature: A Sociolinguistic Study of Wole Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy

Uwen¹,

Nta²

2021

ELR

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This paper examined the imbalances created by social situations and captured in the English language usage by the characters in Wole Soyinka’s The beatification of area boy. The play, set in the busy city of Lagos, is a theatrical typification of the Nigerian society that creates variety differentiation in language use. The sociolinguistic data for the analysis were extracted from the primary text. The findings indicate that, in the play, Soyinka succinctly displays characters as linguistic pointers to showcase the peculiarities in Nigerian English usage that differentiate the linguistic behaviours of Nigerians from other Englishes. The study reveals the categorisation of the ‘spoken’ varieties into Nigerian Pidgin, Incipient bilingual, Local colour variety and the Nigerian literary variety. These features which manifest at the phonological, semantic, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic levels altogether combine to represent the typical linguistic situation in a non-native speaker environment. The linguistic variations, when juxtaposed with sociolinguistic variables, explicitly express the domestic adaptations and modifications in English language usage suggestive of the playwright’s representation of the Nigerian multilingual society.

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The Pragmatics of Nigerian English in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Novels

Cited by 9 publications

References 1 publication

Untitled

Untitled

Cure for weak manhood: A persuasive euphemism strategies in selected Nigerian herbal medicines advertisements

Nigerian English Usage in Literature: A Sociolinguistic Study of Wole Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy

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