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.