Trust-indicating pragmatic markers in selected African englishes

Abstract

The study of language to understand social values and how they may vary among speech communities has received very little attention in scholarship. In this study, we examine how language reflects trust as a social value and the pragma-linguistic resources that index trust in discourse. We further determine the prevalence of such resources in five African English corpora. We examine sixteen commentary pragmatic markers. All instances of each are identified per corpus. For each, 200 concordance lines are extracted and sorted according to their use. Pragmatic presupposition and Gricean cooperative principle are used as analytical frameworks. The markers are found to have trust-assuring pragmatic functions, and are thus categorized as linguistic correlates of distrust. The Gricean maxim of quantity is found to be predominantly flouted in each use of the markers through over-informativeness of utterance propositions. The markers vary in the corpora, with the highest frequencies found in the Nigerian corpus, followed by Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa corpora. The markers appear to be pervasive linguistic resources that can be used to study social values through discourse. For such studies, however, a set of compatible and comparative corpora is recommended to ensure outcome objectivity, reliability and replicability of research procedure.