“Mehn! This wins the award”: The discourse-pragmatic functions of mehn in Nigerian English.
| dc.contributor.author | Unuabonah, Foluke | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-07-31T13:32:51Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022-09-20 | |
| dc.description | N/A | |
| dc.description.abstract | This study extends the scholarship on discourse-pragmatic features of NigE by examining an emotive interjection, mehn, which has not received scholarly attention in NigE studies. Mehn appears to be an adaptation of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) pronunciation of man as an interjection. Although man can be used as an interjection (see Norrick, 2015: 260), a random sampling of 100 tokens of man in the Nigerian component of the Global Web-based English corpus (henceforth, GloWbENig) did not yield the use of man as an interjection. In AAVE, the <a> in man is pronounced as /æ/ but this sounds like /e/ to the NigE user. Hence, a number of NigE speakers appropriate the sound as /e/ and pronounce the word as /men/. | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | N/A | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Unuabonah, F. O. (2022). “Mehn! This wins the award”: The discourse-pragmatic functions of mehn in Nigerian English. English Today, 38(3), 143-151. | |
| dc.identifier.other | https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078421000122 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://repository.run.edu.ng/handle/123456789/6142 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Cambridge University Press | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | 38; 3 | |
| dc.subject | Mehn | |
| dc.subject | interjection | |
| dc.subject | Nigerian English | |
| dc.title | “Mehn! This wins the award”: The discourse-pragmatic functions of mehn in Nigerian English. | |
| dc.title.alternative | N/A | |
| dc.type | Article |