Comprehending Non-Standard Grammatical Comments on Facebook through Pragmatics: A Pragma-syntactic Analysis of Users in Nigeria

Abstract This paper investigates how pragmatics can be deployed to interpret non-standard usages in the context of the English language users. There are two important linguistics keys to interpreting meanings in English: pragmatics and grammatical competence. For effective communication, a decoder must be competent at the two levels. Many researchers in Nigeria have agreed that, Nigerian English has come to stay, therefore, we need to look beyond the grammatical rules and deploy a method of interpreting non-standard usages in the messages of these people. Decoding a message does not rely only on the linguistics or signs, there are extra linguistic properties that help the addressee to infer meanings from the message of the speakers which can be drawn from pragmatics. Pragmatics and grammar work hand in hand to provide meanings during an interaction.