Offers and refusals: A postcolonial pragmatics perspective

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In linguistic studies of postcolonial communities, pragmatics has been significantly ignored. This project adopts a pragmatic approach to offering in two postcolonial countries: Cameroon and Ghana. From a contrastive-comparative perspective, it explores pattems of offering and refusing in the English varieties (and Pidgins) in these two communities with a bid to establish how the group or collective cultures and mix of languages of these communities influence speakers' response to offers. Offers are commissives which beside committing the offerer to some future action, are accepted or refused by the offeree depending on the amount of trust in the offerer, rules of (ethnic, social) group interaction, opening of (ethnic, social) group boundaries, choice of language used in the offer utterance, and levels of politeness of the language in which the offer is made. On this basis, this study, with a direct focus on patterns of refusing offers, seeks to achieve the following: 1) investigate and analyse the linguistic strategies through which offers (for services, assistance, and help) are made and how these are refused (e.g. mitigation, use of kinship terms, evasiveness, etc.), 2) explore and account for the impact of postcolonial collective or group cultural systems on the refusal of offers, 3) verify if the switch between languages in multilingual postcolonial communities (indigenous language, official language and pidgin) affects interactants' reaction to offers, 4) establish the place of age, gender and sociocultural hierarchy in speakers' refusal of offers, and 4) redress the existing paucity, however slightly, of works on pragmatic behaviour in postcolonial communities.