The Deployment of Morphological Processes for SocioCultural Concepts and Experiences in Educated Nigerian English (ENE)

Abstract

Educated Nigerians express and store socio-cultural concepts and experiences in various linguistic ways, three of which are examined in this paper: lexicalization, compounding and reduplication. They are conceptualized as intraference in the main because educated Nigerians apply internal linguistic rules arbitrarily, taking a cue from similar instances in the language. This linguistic habit of intraference then works together with contexts and socio-cultural settings to generate intriguing lexical variations. Hence this paper is variationist sociolinguistic. Examples in this paper were gathered through observation, library research, interview, live recording of some linguistic events across Nigeria from 2005 to 2012. The examples of the three morphological processes give ENE some distinctive morphological features. They clearly show how the contexts of use and socio-cultural dynamics constrain educated Nigerians to deploy the extant morphemic and lexico-semantic rules of the language to produce lexical variations.

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