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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 44:1 (2023) ► pp.61–90

“He’s a lawyer you know and all of that”

General extenders in Nigerian English

 | Redeemer’s University
 | University of Bremen
This study examines the use of general extenders in Nigerian English, from a variational corpus-pragmatic framework, with British English as a reference variety. The data are extracted from the Nigerian and British components of the International Corpus of English . The results reveal that Nigerian English has patterns of use of general extenders that differ systematically from British English. Overall, Nigerian English users employ general extenders less frequently than British English users, as a result of a low preference for disjunctive extenders; there are no significant differences in the frequency of adjunctive and other general extenders between Nigerian and British English users. The study also identifies variants of general extenders unique to Nigerian English such as and all that one, and and other things (like that). In all, the results indicate that register and regional differences play important roles in determining general extender usage among English users.
Keywords: general extenders, International Corpus of English, Nigerian English, vague language, variational pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Variational pragmatics and general extenders
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1The frequency of GEs in ICE-NG and ICE-GB
      • 4.1.1Adjunctive GEs
      • 4.1.2Disjunctive GEs
      • 4.1.3Other GEs
      • 4.1.4Distribution of GEs in NigE
    • 4.2Register variation
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.21065.ola
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ICE Great Britain. International Corpus of English. Compiled at University College London.
ICE Nigeria. International Corpus of English. Compiled at the University of Münster.
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