A CORPUS-PRAGMATIC STUDY OF SPEECH ACTS IN NIGERIAN ENGLISH

Deborah Abiola Fifelola

English Department, Redeemer's University, PMB 230, Ede, Osun State, Nigeria

Abstract
Scholars have examined different speech acts in formal and informal contexts and have compared
their usage between native and non-native speakers of English. However, there are limited corpus-
based studies on speech acts in Nigerian English. Thus, this study will investigate speech acts of
complaining, complimenting, promising and inviting in Nigerian English, with a view to exploring
the structure and different strategies used in performing these speech acts. The study will also
examine the influence of age, social distance, origin, par differential and gender on the use of these
speech acts. The data for the study will be extracted from the International Corpus of English-
Nigeria as well as discourse completion tasks. These will be analysed qualitatively and
quantitatively, using the speech acts theory and postcolonial pragmatics. The study is expected to
contribute to the research on speech acts in Nigerian English and World Englishes in general.
Key Words: Speech acts, Corpus pragmatics, ICE-Nigeria, Nigerian English, Postcolonial
pragmatics

1. Introduction
Nigerian English (NigE) emerged as a result of the contact between native speakers and
users of the English language in Nigeria. Nigeria is a multilingual nation with over five hundred
indigenous languages (Simons & Fennig 2017); hence the nation regards English as her second
and official language, due to her previous colonial contact with Britain and the multilingual nature
of the country (Awonusi 2004). In Nigeria, English is used as the language of education, the media,
governance, formal business transactions and law amidst other official functions (Taiwo 2009).
Nigerian English (NigE) is a variety of English which is influenced by Nigerian indigenous
languages and cultures (Adegbija 2004).
Several studies have described the the phonological (e.g. Oladipupo 2015; Gut & Fuchs
2017), lexico-semantic (e.g. Alabi 2000; Wolf & Igboanusi 2003), and morphosyntactic (e.g.
Fuchs 2016; Werner & Fuchs 2017) attributes of NigE. However, studies on discourse-pragmatic
features as well as speech acts in NigE (e.g. Fuchs, Gut & Soneye 2013; Unuabonah & Gut 2018;
Gut & Unuabonah, 2022) are still few, especially from a corpus linguistic perspective. What has
so far been neglected is a corpus-based study of specific speech acts such as complaining, inviting,
promising and complimenting acts in Nigerian English. There is, therefore, a need to investigate
the lexical and syntactic forms of speech acts as well as factors influencing them in NigE. In the

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research, the speech acts in NigE will be investigated in their entirety, including different factors
that condition their variation.

Aim and Objectives

This research will examine the speech acts deployed by Nigerian speakers of English. It will
explore their frequency, contextual constraints and discourse-pragmatic functions. In particular,
it addresses the following research questions:
(1) How do Nigerian speakers of English formulate invites, express complaints, promises and
compliments? Which lexical and syntactic means are employed to mark these speech acts?
(2) Which factors such as age, social distance, origin, par differential and gender of the
communicative partners determine variation in these speech acts? How do speech acts
vary with style/text type?

The research will provide an insight into how Nigerian English speakers, as multilinguals, perform
speech acts of complaining, complimenting, promising and inviting in different communicative
interactions. It will thus contribute to both the empirical description and theoretical modelling of
pragmatic and multilinguistic phenomena in Nigerian English and in World Englishes in general.

3. Theoretical background
Speech act theory/ postcolonial pragmatics, will serve as the theoretical basis for the study. Corpus
pragmatics deals with the examination of different pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts,
pragmatic markers, politeness and vagueness using a combination of horizontal (qualitative) and
vertical (quantitative) methods of analysis (Jucker 2018). Such pragmatic phenomena can be
examined using a form-to-function approach which is suitable for items such as discourse markers,
interjections, and hesitation markers (see Aijmer 2018), as well as the function-to-form approach
which is suitable for the study of speech acts and politeness markers (see O’Keeffe 2018).
Postcolonial pragmatics deals with the investigation of pragmatic phenomena in
postcolonial speech communities, which are characterised by ethnic, cultural, and lingual diversity,
due to their colonial histories (Anchimbe & Janney 2011). In these postcolonial communities (e.g.
Nigeria, Kenya and Singapore), there is the transfer of indigenous cultures and languages on the
European language used and vice versa, and these influence how different pragmatic phenomena
such as speech acts, politeness, discourse markers, and address terms amongst other features are
used.

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 Speech act theory, as formulated by J.L. Austin and further developed by John Searle, is a
linguistic framework that examines the capacity of utterances to not only convey information but
also to perform actions. The theory emphasizes that language is not solely a means of describing
the world, but also a tool for accomplishing social actions. According to Searle (1969), speech acts
can be classified into three categories: locutionary acts, which are the literal meaning of an
utterance; illocutionary acts, which express the speaker's intention and perform an action; and
perlocutionary acts, which bring about an effect on the listener. This framework allows researchers
to analyze the functions and effects of language beyond its surface-level meaning (Searle, 1969).

4. Methodology
This research employs a mixed-method approach that combines quantitative and qualitative corpus
analyses with data collection of speaker preferences via questionnaires. This approach combines
the advantages of both methodologies: corpus searches will yield large-scale quantitative
frequency data of the actual use of speech acts that Nigerian English speakers employ for
formulating compliments or expressing complaints such as the frequency of occurrence of
individual lexical items. This can then be investigated for possible difference with
speaker/addressee age, gender, social distance etc. However, due to the relatively small size of the
ICE corpora with 1 million words, there might be only few instances of some constellations under
investigation. The questionnaire data will address this problem of data sparsity and elicit responses
for specific communicative situations and speech acts. In addition, the preferred strategies by the
respondents will give us insight into the metalinguistic convictions of Nigerian speakers of English
and thus complement the data of actual language use contained in the corpus. The questionnaire
will consist both closed and open-ended questions that covered respondent’s demographics (age,
educational qualification). The questionnaire will be designed using Google Forms and
administered via various social media because the researcher needs responses from remote
locations. A total of 200 participants of different age, social class and status will be examined
through convenience sampling.
In detail, ICE Nigeria will be searched for lexical items used in the different speech acts,
for example, all expressions used for formulating promises such as I promise you, I’ll do it;
Qualitative analyses will ascertain that they are indeed used to formulate promises (and are not,
for example, used in an ironic way). In the questionnaires, specific scenarios will be described.
The utterances and sentences to be assessed will all be authentic utterances/sentences taken from

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the three corpora. Thus, the preferences and metalinguistic knowledge of Nigerians will be tested.
The data collection instrument that will be adopted for this study is Discourse Completion Tasks
(DCTs). What makes DCTs particularly valuable for this investigation is that research aiming to
establish culture-specific patterns in speech act realisation needs to draw on large quantities of data
and the DCT is the only available data collection instrument that generates sufficiently large
corpora of comparable, systematically varied speech act data, (Ogiermann, 2018).

Expected Contribution to Knowledge

This research will provide an insight into how Nigerian English speakers, as multilinguals, perform
speech acts in different communicative interactions. So far, research on corpus pragmatics has
centred on pragmatic markers, thus the study will open up research on other aspects of corpus-
based studies of speech acts in other African Englishes, where there is very limited attention on
corpus pragmatics as well as postcolonial pragmatics. The research will then contribute to the
research on pragmatic phenomena in World Englishes. Moreover, this study will help me to gain
new skills and knowledge in the field of corpus pragmatics and corpus linguistics in general. In
all, this study will boost the research in the field of corpus pragmatics, which are areas that have
not received adequate research attention among Nigerian linguists, as well as in the field of English
as a second language.

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