📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
This study presents a corpus-based syntactic and pragmatic analysis of Nigerian Pidgin as used in social media posts on Instagram and Facebook, addressing the under-documented digitalisation of Pidgin as a major West African variety. Nigerian Pidgin has undergone significant structural and functional evolution in the digital sphere, yet corpus linguistic studies specifically targeting its social media manifestation remain scarce. The research constructs a 200,000-token corpus of Nigerian Pidgin social media posts collected between 2022 and 2024 from 50 public accounts with identifiable Nigerian Pidgin output. The corpus is annotated and analysed for syntactic structures including aspect marking, negation patterns, and noun phrase complexity, as well as pragmatic features such as speech act distribution, politeness strategies, and interactional sequencing in comment threads. Findings document several emergent syntactic features in digital Pidgin not previously described in written grammars, including novel aspect marker combinations and expanded negation strategies. At the pragmatic level, digital Pidgin comments show a high proportion of face-threatening acts in adversarial comment threads alongside elaborate solidarity expression in supportive contexts. The study contributes original corpus data to Nigerian Pidgin linguistics and recommends the development of a national digital Pidgin corpus for ongoing monitoring of the variety's evolution. Keywords: Nigerian Pidgin, corpus linguistics, social media, syntax, pragmatics.
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