Abstract

This article provides a descriptive account of five multilingual pragmatic markers – nje, mara, kanti, vele and kaloku – which are borrowed from indigenous South African languages into South African English, with a view to investigating their frequencies, spelling stability, syntactic positioning, distribution across text types, collocational patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the South African component of the Global Web-based English corpus, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic perspective. The results show that the multilingual pragmatic markers are generally infrequent compared to their English counterparts, their spellings are generally stable and their positions in the utterances are based on their functions. The article identifies nje as an attitudinal marker, a focus particle, an emphasis marker, an intensifier and a marker of shared knowledge, mara as a contrastive marker and kanti as a contrastive marker, an inferential marker and an emphasis marker. Vele is an emphasis marker, while kaloku is an attention marker, a topic orientation marker and an inferential marker. In conclusion, these multilingual pragmatic markers contribute to the distinctive nature of South African English at the pragmatic level.

摘要

本文提供了五个多语言语用标记的描述性说明 - nje , mara , kanti , vele和kaloku 。– 从南非本土语言借用到南非英语中，以研究它们的频率、拼写稳定性、句法定位、跨文本类型的分布、搭配模式和话语语用功能。这些数据是从全球网络英语语料库的南非部分中提取的，从后殖民语料库实用的角度进行了定量和定性分析。结果表明，与英语对应物相比，多语言语用标记通常不常见，其拼写通常稳定，并且它们在话语中的位置基于其功能。文章识别了nje作为态度标记、焦点助词、强调标记、强化词和共享知识标记，mara作为对比标记，kanti作为对比标记、推理标记和强调标记。Vele是强调标记，而kaloku是注意力标记、主题方向标记和推理标记。总之，这些多语言语用标记有助于南非英语在语用层面上的独特性。