Semantic Innovation in Nigerian English Content Words: Corpus-Assisted Evidence from ICE-Nigeria

Abstract

English words may develop, extend, narrow or acquire locally conventionalised meanings as they are used in new linguistic and cultural environments. In Nigeria, sustained contact between English and indigenous languages, together with local communicative practices, has produced a range of lexical-semantic innovations. Although earlier scholarship has documented many such forms, there remains a need for corpus-based evidence showing how recurrently they occur in authentic discourse, particularly among content words. This study investigates semantic innovation in selected Nigerian English content words using data from the International Corpus of English-Nigeria (ICE-Nigeria). Twenty purposively selected lexical items, comprising five nouns, five verbs, five adjectives and five adverbs, were analysed with the Word List, Concordance and Collocates tools in AntConc (Version 4.3.1). The analysis considered frequency, concordance, collocation, semantic preference and semantic prosody to determine how the selected forms function in context. The findings indicate recurring patterns of semantic extension, semantic shift, semantic narrowing and pragmatic specialisation, alongside lexical developments involving borrowing and reduplication identified in the study. The recurrent corpus patterns provide evidence that these innovations are not adequately described as isolated deviations but as contextually established uses within Nigerian English. The study therefore contributes corpus-assisted evidence to the description of lexical-semantic variation in Nigerian English and to the wider study of World Englishes.