Extended discourse-pragmatic usage of now in Nigerian English

Abstract

Apart from the occurrence of now as a temporal adverb and as an attention pragmatic marker, there is the existence of a third type of now which until now has not been explored in Nigerian English. This paper, examines the phonetic properties, meaning, frequency, syntactic patterns, and extended discourse-pragmatic functions of an indigenised now in Nigerian English. The paper takes its data from conversations in the International Corpus of English-Nigeria and analyses this nativised now from a grammatical-pragmatic approach. The results reveal that this third type of now has adopted the tonal structure of some indigenous Nigerian languages and occurs mainly at the final position of utterances. This Nigerian indigenised now performs only interpersonal functions as it serves as an emphasis marker and as a mitigation marker.