“You are quite funny paa!”: A corpus-based study of borrowed discourse-pragmatic features in Ghanaian English

Abstract

This study explores six borrowed discourse-pragmatic features – koraa/kraa, saa, paa, yoo, wai/wae, and waa, which are borrowed from indigenous Ghanaian languages into Ghanaian English, in order to investigate their sources, meanings, frequencies, positioning, syntactic distribution, collocational patterns, and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are obtained from the Ghanaian components of the International Corpus of English, the corpus of Global Web-based English, and News on the Web corpus are analysed within a postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The results show that most of the discourse-pragmatic features occur in clause-final position and are usually attached to declaratives. Koraa/kraa, paa, and saa function as emphasis pragmatic markers and emotive interjections, yoo as attention, agreement, and emphasis pragmatic markers, waa as an attention marker, emphasis pragmatic marker, and emotive interjection, and wai as a mitigation and interrogative marker. Thus, the paper highlights the contributions of indigenous Ghanaian languages to the discourse-pragmatic aspects of Ghanaian English.