Verb Complementation Patterns in Nigerian English: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

This paper investigates innovative patterns of verb complementation in Nigerian English in terms of whether such patterns are different from those in British English, focusing on the patterns of the ditransitive verbs and to- infinitive marker in Nigerian English. The data is drawn from the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE), while the British component of ICE is used as the reference corpus. The results of the study show that Nigerian users of English use the prepositional dative pattern more often than British English users. Also, while there is evidence that Nigerian users of English sometimes omit to-infinitive in words that generally have it in native English varieties, this feature is not radically marked in Nigerian English, as claimed in earlier non-corpus-based studies.