A LEXICO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED DISCOURSE IN SELECTED INSTANT AND TEXT MESSAGES OF NIGERIAN STUDENTS
Introduction
The advent of new information and communicatio technologies (ICTs) has ushered in a new era of new media,signalling unbounded possibilities for language and communication studies. In actual fact, the ever increasing mobility of the Internet the world over has opened yet other dimensions to the study of language use in computer mediated environment. This has been attributed to the upsurge in the world’s telecommunication market and its antecedent penetration and adoption of the technology by the populace, coupled with the improvement of the network with the third generation (3G) mobile technology, which facilitates the convergence of the technologies of the mobile phones and that of the Internet. For instance, in 2006, Nigeria had an estimate of about 8 million Internet users, many of whom relied on
equipment at cybercafés. In 2007, Internet hosts totaled 1,968. Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A. In 2006 more than 32.3 million mobile cellular telephones and 1.7 million main lines were in use (International Telecommunication Union 2007). However, in 2010 with an estimated population of 150 million, there were 72.78 million Nactive GSM subscribers on all the major networks, with 6.69 million active CDMA subscribers. Within the estimated population of the country, there were 10 million Internet users (Miniwatts Marketing Group 2009). Of this estimation, 1.72 million Nigerians are said to be on the Facebook, with penetration rate of 1.1%. Nigeria is thus among the leading subscribers in Africa which has a total Facebook population of 17,607,440, with global penetration of 1.7% as at August 31, 2010 (Internet World Statistics). These growing trends have provided opportunity to study human interactions as they occur across the computermediated environment. However, unlike before, when the study of human-human interactions through the new media technologies of the Internet and the cell phone restricted scholarship to the investigation of language use in the immobile technologies such as the world wide web, email, Yahoo/MSN’s instant messengers (IM or IM’ing), Listserve and short message service (texting) of the global system for mobiles (GSM). In Nigeria, these features have significantly been studied against theoretical frameworks of Conversation and Discourse Analysis Sociology of English in Nigeria (Herring 2004a, 2004b), Pragmatics (Odebunmi 2009), Stylistics (Taiwo 2008) and Semiotics (Shoki and Oni 2008). It is therefore very significant to explore the implication of the mobility and ubiquity of the Internet on textual constructs and (English) language use of Nigerian in their interactions over the IM and the GSM-SMS platforms. This approach represents one of the contemporary methods of investigating human language textual constructs in computer-mediated communication.
The approach in this chapter is to observe and quantify the lexical variations which afford mutual intelligibility and meaning making of the textual constructs of sampled
interactions. Earlier studies in Nigeria IM and SMS studies have focused on the forms and functions of textual messages (Taiwo 2008), to the best of our knowledge, little or no attention has been focused on differentiating IM and SMS compositions with a view of understanding pattern of usage especially as it concerns second language users of the English language (Nigerians in this case). The central thesis is thus, to understand the characteristics of textual constructs of Nigerians as second language users of the English language, especially the lexical/sentential differences afforded by the technologies of transmission against their socio-linguistic backgrounds. Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A. An Overview of CMC Studies in Nigeria Scholarship into human-human interactions across digital
platform did not start in Nigeria until the commercialization of
the Internet and the GSM networks as earlier mentioned. This
notwithstanding, Nigerians resident within and in the diaspora,
have contributed immensely to the linguistic and
anthropological researches of computer-mediated
communication. Specifically, within the linguistic circle, giant
strides have been made. Ifukor (forthcoming) has grouped
Nigerian textual CMC activities and studies between 1990-
2010 into three broad categories viz.
(i) Web 1.0 communicative exchanges (e.g.
Bastian, 1999; Blommaert & Omoniyi, 2006;
Chiluwa, 2009, 2010a; Deuber & Hinrichs, 2007;
Moran, 2000; Ofulue, 2010; Olateju & Adeleke,
2010; Oluwole, 2009), (ii) mobile telephony and
text messaging (e.g. Awonusi, 2004, 2010;
Chiluwa, 2008; Ekong & Ekong, 2010; Elvis,
2009; Obadare, 2006; Ofulue, 2008; Taiwo,
2008a, 2008b) and (iii) social media and multiplatform
Web 2.0 discourse (e.g. Ifukor, 2008,
2009a, 2009b, 2010; Jonathan, 2010; Oni &
Osunbade, 2009; Taiwo, 2010a, 2010b) (cf. Ifukor
2011a, 2011b). In terms of technological platform
or mode in Murray’s, (1988) term, examples of
Nigerian CMC include mobile phone text
messaging (Awonusi, 2004, 2010; Chiluwa, 2008;
Ifukor, 2011a; Ofulue, 2008; Taiwo, 2008a,
2008b); Instant Messaging (Oni & Osunbade,
Sociology of English in Nigeria
2009); email (Blommaert & Omoniyi, 2006;
Chiluwa, 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Ofulue, 2010;
Olateju & Adeleke, 2010); listserv (Bastian,
1999); Usenet newsgroup (Moran, 2000); Internet
discussion forums (Deuber & Hinrichs, 2007;
Ifukor, 2011b; Taiwo, 2010a, 2010b); blog
(Ifukor, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010); Twitter
(Ifukor, 2010, 2011c); Facebook (Ifukor, 2011d;
Jonathan, 2010), and surveys on CMC usage
(Ifukor, 2011a; Oluwole, 2009; Pyramid Research,
2010; Sesan, 2010).
It suffices to say that the year 2010 represents another landmark
in CMC scholarship in Nigerian due to the following four
reasons as pointed out in Ifukor (forthcoming),
First, Taiwo (2010c) published two edited
volumes of a handbook on digital behaviours
consisting of, among the collection, 16 papers
(single and co-authored) on various aspects of
text-based Nigerian CMC. Therefore, Taiwo's
(2010c) handbook represents the single largest
collection on Nigerian CMC to date. Second, it is
the same year that published works on Nigerian
social networking media (Ifukor, 2010; Jonathan,
2010) emerged. For instance, Ifukor's (2010)
paper on electoral activities by Nigerians in the
blogosphere and Twittersphere highlights the
relevance of blogging and social media to modern
Nigerian democratization. Thirdly, beginning
from his inaugural post on Facebook on June 28,
2010, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ)
experimented with what, for want of a better
Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A.
terminology, can be called the first Nigerian
Facebook presidency. On October 1, 2010 CNN
named GEJ the Facebook President. This is a
remarkable endorsement of not just the person of
the Nigerian president, but also of how a global
product (Facebook) is being appropriated for
internal governance in Nigeria. Eventually, a book
based on GEJ's interactions with Nigerian netizens
was published and titled My Friends and I:
Conversations on Policy and Governance via
Facebook (Jonathan, 2010). It is argued here that
the embrace of new media technologies by the
Nigerian government has ushered in a new era of
Nigerian politics, reflecting modern trends in
digitally-aided democratization. Finally, but not
the least, two national surveys on the digital habits
of connected Nigerians were released by Pyramid
Research (2010) and Sesan (2010) in the same
year.
Examining the thrusts of contents of the Taiwo's (2010c)
sixteen-chapter handbook in relation to Nigeria, 18.75% of the
papers (i.e. Chiluwa, 2010b; Ofulue, 2010; Olateju & Adeleke,
2010), examine aspects of Nigerian email communication for
identity construction, 419 or hoaxes, and code switching. 37.5
percent of the papers (i.e. Akande & Akinwale, 2010; Balogun,
2010; Odebunmi & Alo, 2010; Olaosun, 2010; Olubode-Sawe,
2010; Taiwo, 2010c) dwell on mobile telephony and SMS as
follows: with a view of stressing their positions on the
implications of the leprous compositions of the Nigerian
Sociology of English in Nigeria
45
students on written communication as well as contextual beliefs
in the 160-character discourse by Nigerian academics, an Ecosemiotic
examination of visual codes in mobile phone
directories, typography and orthographic conventions in
Yoruba NOKIA phone terminologies, and language mixing for
phaticity and invocations. The remaining papers (43.75%) are
concerned with pedagogical and systemic issues.
As rich as all the previous Nigerian CMC studies are,
none have focused on the differences in textual compositions of
Nigerian Internet users due to notable constraints and
affordances of the CMC, notably the mobility, synchronicity
and transmission capability of the technologies involve in IM
and SMS. This gap will hope to fill in this study.
A Brief Account of Lexico-semantic Studies in Nigeria
(English)
Lexico-semantics (lexical semantics) is an important theory of
linguistic description which has gained scholarly attention in
