Verb patterning and acculturation in Nigerian English

Abstract Speech communities have the tendency to develop habits as to which words tend to co‐occur, in the form of coinages and collocational patterns, thus constituting an aspect conducive to the subtle emergence of language variation. As these co‐occurrence tendencies become lexicalised and confined to specific, rigid word combinations, new phraseological or fixed multi‐word units evolve. Our study aims to investigate the phraseological patterns of verbs in Nigerian English, focusing on the extent to which it has undergone a marked cognitive acculturation process. Utilising lexical keywords as search anchors in the Global Web‐based English corpus, we identified selected verb phraseological patterns indicative of innovations in Nigerian English. The richness of meanings and the unique collocational patterns of these verbs provide evidence of the ongoing acculturation process in Nigerian English.