A corpus-driven description of o in Naijá (Nigerian Pidgin)

Abstract

Widely attested in both creole and non-creole languages of the Atlantic basin, the function word o has been traditionally described as a ‘sentence/phrase final particle’, owing to its typical syntactic behaviour, rather than to its multiple grammatical meanings. Based on the corpus-driven analysis of the NaijaSynCor, a ~400K words corpus of spoken Naijá (i.e., Nigerian Pidgin), this study suggests that sentence-final o can be better described as an ‘illocutionary force indicator’ whose main pragmatic function is to modify the illocutionary force associated with directive and assertive speech acts. The study also provides evidence for the emergence of new coordinating and subordinating functions of o in intra-sentential position that are semantically harmonic with its assertive (i.e. epistemic) meaning in sentence-final position. The corpus-driven analysis further shows that the higher occurrence of sentence-final o in (formal and informal) dialogic texts in comparison to monologic texts is a reflex of its basic illocutionary function.