"This word no get concrete meaning oo": Pragmatic markers in Nigerian online communication.

This paper deals with Nigerians' use of pragmatic markers in their computer-mediated communication. The investigated items originate from various languages but now seem to be used across ethnic boundaries in online interactions that take place in Nigerian Pidgin and Nigerian English. Relying on a large corpus from a Nigerian web forum, the study focuses on a set of common interjections and other textual and interpersonal pragmatic markers and their discourse-pragmatic functions. Their semantic flexibility allows these items to perform different functions depending on the context. I argue that they are vital in indicating emotional involvement and response and in contextualizing (Gumperz, 1982) the forum contributions. Furthermore, the particularities of employing, interpreting, and researching such items in text-based online communication are addressed. This paper contributes to a description of "pragmatic borrowing" (Andersen, 2014) in Nigeria, as well as to the rising field of pragmatics of computer-mediated communication. • Multifunctional Nigerian pragmatic markers have been borrowed into Nigerian English. • Pragmatic markers create coherence and conversationality in digital writing. • Strategic respelling acts as a contextualization cue in digital writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]