ELLIPSIS, COMPRESSION AND HYBRID SYNTAX IN NIGERIAN DIGITAL ESL COMMUNICATION

Abstract

This study examines ellipsis, compression, and hybrid syntax in Nigerian digital ESL communication through the analysis of naturally occurring WhatsApp interactions among Nigerian undergraduate students. Situated within the theoretical domains of computer-mediated discourse and interlanguage studies, the paper investigates how digitally mediated communication reshapes syntactic performance within a multilingual second language environment. The study adopts a qualitative discourse-analytic design using purposively selected online interactions drawn from academic, interpersonal, and social communication contexts. The findings reveal that Nigerian digital discourse is profoundly characterised by contextual ellipsis, syntactic compression, graphological reduction, and hybrid English–Nigerian Pidgin constructions shaped by interactional immediacy, processing economy, multilingual resource deployment, and discourse recoverability. The study further demonstrates that many digitally reduced structures arise not from outright grammatical incompetence but from performance-based adaptation to technologically mediated communication conditions. At the same time, certain structures reveal genuine instability involving agreement, tense morphology, article usage, and countability distinctions within Standard English grammar. Particularly significant is the pervasive influence of Nigerian Pidgin tense-aspect systems, negation patterns, focus constructions, and discourse particles within digitally mediated ESL interaction. The paper argues that Nigerian digital discourse constitutes a complex interactional domain in which multilingual competence, technological affordances, discourse pragmatics, and variable grammatical control converge in the shaping of syntactic production. The study contributes to scholarship on digital applied linguistics, computer-mediated discourse, Nigerian English, and multilingual second language communication.