Cognitive verbs and stance taking in Nigerian jobs and careers portals online

Abstract

This study investigates participants stance-taking in Nigerian job and career online discussion groups focusing on the use of the cognitive verb think. It explores the frequency of the use of the verb, its common positions, its clusters and some typical functions it performs in these discussion boards. The findings show that while the expression of cognition through the use of the verb think in the corpus may be similar to what obtains in English as a mother tongue speech context in terms of frequency of occurrence, its syntactic positioning and clusters mirror the patterns typical of some major Nigerian languages. The peculiarities of the Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) mode are also found to influence the clusters the verb takes in the discussions. The study therefore concludes that the use of think for cognition in online communication is shaped by the peculiarities of the Nigerian sociolinguistic context as well as the CMC context.

Keywords: Stance-taking, think, unemployment, online forum, cognitive verb, Nigeria