Offers in Nigerian English

Abstract

This article is concerned with the speech act of offers in educated Nigerian English within a variational pragmatics approach. In particular, this study explores the offer strategies chosen by Nigerian English speakers and the effect the speakers’ and hearers’ social status and social distance, the type of offer and formality of the context might have on them. A total of 325 Nigerian respondents filled in questionnaires containing 13 discourse completion tasks varying in these variables. 782 valid responses were analysed according to the structure of the communicative act, the offer superstrategy and substrategy used as well as the use of multiple languages. Results show that the variables context, social status, social distance and offer type all influence the linguistic form of offers. Nigerian English speakers use little code-switching and differ systematically from speakers of other varieties of English in terms of using more directives.