Eric A. Anchimbe
Postcolonial Pragmatics
Speaker
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Eric A. Anchimbe
Eric A. Anchimbe
Eric A. Anchimbe is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His main research interests are in pragmatics, with focus on postcolonial pragmatics, sociolinguistics, World Englishes and political discourse. He is the author and editor of several books, among them, Offers and Offer Refusals: A Postcolonial Pragmatics Perspective on World Englishes (Benjamins, 2018).
Together with Richard W. Janney, he introduced the Postcolonial Pragmatics framework for the investigation of pragmatic phenomena and social interaction patterns in postcolonial contexts. The framework departs from Western pragmatics frameworks that are founded on monolingual and monocultural societies. This framework is applied to data from Cameroon and Ghana in his 2018 monograph listed above.
Abstract →
Eric A. Anchimbe
Postcolonial Pragmatics
The framework, postcolonial pragmatics, emerged about a decade (Anchimbe & Janney 2011a, b, 2018). It builds on the reality that most western pragmatic monocultural and individualistic-based frameworks are insufficient in accounting for interactive phenomena in collectivist postcolonial contexts. Designed on the specimen of the history and societal set up of postcolonial communities, postcolonial pragmatics operates on the premise that just as colonialism led to the emergence of new varieties of colonial languages (cf. New Englishes, Postcolonial Englishes, etc.), it also triggered new forms of, and strategies in, social interaction that are peculiar to the mixes of languages, cultures, peoples, religions, etc. in these locations. What I will do in this talk is illustrate how the discourses produced in postcolonial societies could be appropriately and sufficiently analysed using postcolonial pragmatics. Focus is on analytical components like age, gender, sociocultural norms, religion and kinship relations and their indispensability in understanding speakers’ communicative choices.
References
Anchimbe, Eric A. & Janney, R. W. (eds.) 2011a. Postcolonial Pragmatics. Special issue Journal of Pragmatics 43(6): 1451-1539.
Anchimbe, Eric A. & Janney, R. W. 2011b: Postcolonial pragmatics: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics 43(6): 1451-1459.
Anchimbe, Eric A. and Janney, Richard W. 2018. Postcolonial Pragmatics. In: Barron, Anne and Gerard Stehen (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. London: Routledge, 105-120.