Trust-indicating pragmatic markers in selected African englishes

IF 1.8 1区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-01-01 DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2024.12.008

Toyese Najeem Dahunsi, Oluwayomi Rosemary Olaniyan, Ayobami Adetoro Afolabi, Richard Akano

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The study of language to understand social values and how they may vary among speech communities has received very little attention in scholarship. In this study, we examine how language reflects trust as a social value and the pragma-linguistic resources that index trust in discourse. We further determine the prevalence of such resources in five African English corpora. We examine sixteen commentary pragmatic markers. All instances of each are identified per corpus. For each, 200 concordance lines are extracted and sorted according to their use. Pragmatic presupposition and Gricean cooperative principle are used as analytical frameworks. The markers are found to have trust-assuring pragmatic functions, and are thus categorized as linguistic correlates of distrust. The Gricean maxim of quantity is found to be predominantly flouted in each use of the markers through over-informativeness of utterance propositions. The markers vary in the corpora, with the highest frequencies found in the Nigerian corpus, followed by Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa corpora. The markers appear to be pervasive linguistic resources that can be used to study social values through discourse. For such studies, however, a set of compatible and comparative corpora is recommended to ensure outcome objectivity, reliability and replicability of research procedure.

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来源期刊

Journal of Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

18.80%

发文量

219

期刊介绍： Since 1977, the Journal of Pragmatics has provided a forum for bringing together a wide range of research in pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Our aim is to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. The Journal of Pragmatics also encourages work that uses attested language data to explore the relationship between pragmatics and neighbouring research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. Alongside full-length articles, discussion notes and book reviews, the journal welcomes proposals for high quality special issues in all areas of pragmatics which make a significant contribution to a topical or developing area at the cutting-edge of research.