Abstract
Abstract
This study explores nativisation processes in the area of pragmatics. Focussing on expressions of gratitude, more
than 1,300 thanking speech acts elicited from Nigerian speakers of English via Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) and 628 thanking
speech acts identified in various text categories of the International Corpus of English-Nigeria (ICE-Nig) were
analysed (i) regarding the use of thanking strategy, linguistic expression and structural form and (ii) compared with other
varieties of English. The results show distinct strategies and forms of expressing gratitude in Nigerian English (NigE) that
suggest nativisation processes as they reflect local cultural and communicative practices. Furthermore, systematic differences
between thanking speech acts in the corpus data and those elicited in the DCTs were observed.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company