Expressing gratitude in Nigerian English

Gut, Ulrike; Unuabonah, Foluke

Abstract

This study explores nativisation processes in the area of pragmatics. Focussing on expressions of gratitude, more than 1,300 thanking speech acts elicited from Nigerian speakers of English via Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) and 628 thanking speech acts identified in various text categories of the International Corpus of English-Nigeria (ICE-Nig) were analysed (i) regarding the use of thanking strategy, linguistic expression and structural form and (ii) compared with other varieties of English. The results show distinct strategies and forms of expressing gratitude in Nigerian English (NigE) that suggest nativisation processes as they reflect local cultural and communicative practices. Furthermore, systematic differences between thanking speech acts in the corpus data and those elicited in the DCTs were observed.