WHEN WORDS ACQUIRE A NIGERIAN LIFE: PRAGMATIC AND SOCIOCULTURAL MOTIVATIONS OF SEMANTIC VARIATION IN NIGERIAN ENGLISH
Abstract
Words acquire meaning through use, and use takes place within social worlds. This paper examines the pragmatic and sociocultural motivations of semantic variation in Nigerian English through a corpus-assisted analysis of selected content words. It draws on a preselected lexical dataset established from earlier documented scholarship and subsequently queried in the International Corpus of EnglishNigeria (ICE-Nigeria) through AntConc, with ICE-Great Britain (ICE-GB) serving as a comparative reference. The analysis combines frequency, concordance and collocational evidence with lexicalsemantic, pragmatic and sociocultural interpretation. Five representative items; go-slow, snap, hot, anyhow and now-now, illustrate different pathways through which familiar forms acquire locally salient meanings or pragmatic functions. The analysis shows that go-slow is strongly associated with traffic congestion and delayed movement; snap has a salient photographic use; hot participates in evaluative meanings; anyhow can carry recurrent interpersonal and evaluative force; and now-now uses reduplication to intensify temporal immediacy and expectation. These patterns are interpreted not as arbitrary departures from British English but as outcomes of recurrent usage within a Nigerian sociocultural and communicative ecology. The paper argues for an integrated account in which corpus evidence establishes recurrent distributional patterns, lexical semantics identifies the meaning relationship, and pragmatic and sociocultural analysis explains why particular interpretations become useful, recognisable and potentially conventionalised.