“Abeg na! we write so our comments can be posted!”

Abstract

This paper examines three borrowed pragmatic markers from Nigerian Pidgin into Nigerian English, abeg, sef and na, with a view to exploring their meanings, frequencies, spelling adaptability, syntactic positions, collocational patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions in Nigerian English. The data which were extracted from the International Corpus of English-Nigeria and the Nigerian component of the corpus of Global Web-based English were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, using the theory of pragmatic borrowing. The results indicate that the three pragmatic markers differ distinctly in their frequency across text types, syntactic position, the range of pragmatic meanings, the number of spelling variants and their collocations: abeg is used as a mitigation marker which can also function as an emphasis marker, sef is an emphasis marker but has additive and dismissive functions, while na is used purely as an emphasis pragmatic marker. The study shows the influence of Nigerian Pidgin on Nigerian English.