Sociolinguistic Analysis of Lexical Reduplication in Undergraduates’ Utterances in Lead City University, Ibadan

Abstract

Reduplication is a product of interference, a major phenomenon in the interlingual study. Lexical Reduplication deals with a situation whereby a particular lexical item is repeated side-by-side in a sentence to express the speaker’s feelings or thoughts. Reduplication, often occasioned by interference, occurs mostly among speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL or L2), irrespective of their level of education, status and proficiency in the English Language. This paper, under the purview of socio-semantics, undertook to analyze lexical reduplication in Nigerian English in the utterances of Lead City University, Ibadan undergraduates. Using Alsamadani and Taibah’s framework of the typology and functions of reduplication, data were collected from two (2) departments, each across five (5) faculties. Using a voice recorder, structured interviews and focused group discussions of Ten (10) students were sampled from the selected departments. The findings show the occurrence of full reduplication in the forty-four (44) transcribed utterances where lexical reduplication was realized. Words, groups and clauses were reduplicated for emphasis/iteration purposes 6 times (54.55%), for pluralisation purposes 4 times (36.36%) and 1 time (9.09) for nominalisation purposes. There was, however, no instance of reduplication for the function of the distribution. Furthermore, asides from the functions identified by the framework guiding this study, the data analysis shows that educated speakers of Nigerian English also use reduplication for the purposes of hesitation, affirmation and disapproval.