Pragmatics of African English in Digital Discourse

full name / name of organization: 
Rotimi Taiwo
contact email: 

Editors: Innocent Chiluwa, Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria; Presley Ifukor, University of Osnabrueck, Germany & Rotimi Taiwo, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Nigeria

The proposed publication aims at harnessing research results in the pragmatics of the varieties of English in Africa in the context of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). We encourage papers representing current state of the art research in linguistics/discourse pragmatics seen in the broad sense as a functional (i.e. social and cultural) perspective on digital discourse.

We invite scholars doing research in any of the varieties of new world Englishes particularly of African origin (e.g. Nigerian English, Cameroonian English, Kenyan English, South African English, Sierra Leonean English, Kenyan English, Tanzanian English etc) and CMC to submit proposals in the following subject areas:

• Electronic Mailing (Email)
• Instant Messaging (IM)
• Internet Relay Chats (IRC)
• Text messaging (SMS)
• Blogging
• Discussion forum
• Virtual community
• Youtube
• Twitter
• Facebook, etc.
Papers should highlight features of African English and show how these manifest in any of the above forms of CMC applying the following pragmatic principles/approaches:
• speech act theory
• Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean analysis of linguistic performance
• relevance theory
• (im)politeness
• pragmatic presupposition
• deixis
• intercultural pragmatics etc.
Submission Procedure:

Interested scholars and researchers are encouraged to submit a one-page chapter proposal on or before November 30, 2011, clearly stating the purpose of the chapter, its contents and how the proposed chapter meets the overall objectives of the proposed publication. A proposal should include the following information:

(a) Title of chapter
(b) Name of author(s),
(c) Affiliation
(d) Email

Submissions should be in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by December 31, 2011. Upon acceptance of their proposals, authors will have until March 31st, 2012 to prepare their chapters of 5,000-7,000 words. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Guidelines for preparing chapters will be sent upon acceptance of proposals. The book is tentatively scheduled to be published in third quarter of 2012 by one of Europe's top language series publishers.

Please e-mail all inquiries and proposal submissions to: robineber@gmail.com

Full contact: Dr Innocent Chiluwa
Department of Languages,
Covenant University, Ota
Nigeria
+234 803 353 6952