Talk held at the Workshop on Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Postcolonial English Contexts (DVPEC), 6.-7.2.2025 at the UA Ruhr, College for Social Sciences and Humanities, Essen.

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in pragmatic phenomena in postcolonial Englishes. The inclusion of data from these multilingual and multicultural contexts (cf. e.g. Anchimbe & Janney, 2017) has shown that explanatory frameworks established for the analysis of Western speech acts may not be able to explain the use of speech acts in non-Western contexts. To date, there is still a regrettable lack of research into these patterns of speech act use in postcolonial Englishes. While there are some studies on speech acts and, more specifically, request realisation in postcolonial Englishes, many national varieties have not been studied at all or in sufficient detail. The few empirical investigations of requests indicate both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic differences between postcolonial Englishes and British English (BrE) (Degenhardt, 2023; Gut & Unuabonah, 2022; Kranich et al.,
2021). For Nigerian English (NigE), Gut & Unuabonah (2022) find that while the requests
sampled from the International Corpus of English (ICE) generally take similar linguistic forms in NigE and BrE, the evaluation of factors influencing contextual appropriateness differ. The authors report that the request per word ratio is higher in NigE than in BrE and that NigE requests are generally more direct across a wide range of text categories. Differences in sociopragmatic patterns are also reported for business and social letters in particular, a fact the authors explain with reference to cross-varietal differences in perceptions of social distance.
The present project seeks to complement Gut & Unuabonah’s (2022) analysis of NigE
corpus-based requests by focusing specifically on the forms and function of requests in the conversation text category in ICE-Nigeria and ICE-GB and adds a qualitative perspective in that we examine different types of requests (discourse-functional requests such as requests for floor management and requests for information) in order to be able to determine refunctionalisation of the speech act (Nair, 2022). To avoid relying on etic perspectives, we only include those requests in our database, that are responded to as such by the discourse participants. With this design, we are able to compare NigE requests with Variational Pragmatic research into requests in different varieties of English (e.g. Barron, 2008; Breuer & Geluykens, 2007; Flöck, 2016) and uncover request patterns that have not been described for inner circle varieties of English. Our initial results suggest that the vast majority of requests in NigE conversations are requests for discursive-verbal action (such as requests for
information and requests related to local turn-management). A cautious first analysis of the requests for action reveals that they are predominantly realised by direct linguistic means with mood derivable strategies being most frequent. A first qualitative analysis indicates that some request sequences tend to be quite extended with requesters repeating their requests even after several explicit indications of non-compliance were produced by the addressee.
Such patterns have not been reported for inner circle varieties of English and cannot easily be described in terms of existing politeness theories. Instead, such patterns may be explained by Nwoye's (1992) notion of ‘group face’. We also find instances of refunctionalisation of requestive acts in the form of frequent let me-requests with floor-holding and emphatic functions.