Sexual Discourse Among Students In Selected Tertiary Institutions In Lagos State, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Sexual discourse refers to sex-related verbal activities that many Nigerian tertiary institution

students engage in. Existing studies have addressed sexual discourse from socio-cultural,

sociolinguistic and critical linguistic perspectives but have not adequately studied its pragmatic

import, especially in relation to encounters centering on sexual intercourse. This study, therefore,

investigates the discourse forms, contextual features, pragmatic functions, and attitudes to and

perception of the language of sex among students of tertiary institutions in Lagos State, Nigeria.

This is with a view to identifying the context-determined roles of language in and the impact of

gender and religion on the students‟ sexual discourse.

The study adopted aspects of conceptual metaphor, together with pragmemic and contextual

beliefs theories. Forty purposive tape recordings of students‟ conversations were made, and

copies of a questionnaire were administered to 760 students in eight tertiary institutions in Lagos

State, selected on stratified and purposive bases: two universities, three polytechnics and three

colleges of education. Four hundred structured interviews were conducted with 50 students in

each of the institutions, and eight focus-group discussions were held with six students each in the

institutions. Participant observation was randomly undertaken on the students‟ interactions.

While the qualitative data were subjected to content-analysis, Pearson and student t-test were

used to test the hypotheses formulated at 0.01 and 0.05 levels of significance.

Two discourse forms characterise the encounters: plain euphemisms and metaphors. Plain

euphemisms bifurcate into sound indicative and sense indicative euphemisms; metaphors

trifurcate into euphemistic, dysphemistic and slangy metaphors. Euphemistic metaphors are

derived from five source domains: food/fruit, security, mysticism, leisure/sport and everyday

language; dysphemistic metaphors from the army, carpentry, food/meat and everyday language;

and slangy metaphors from sports, music, Internet and Nigerian cultures. Three main contextual

features are observed: Shared Cultural Knowledge (SCK), Shared Situational Knowledge

(SSK) and Shared Experiential Knowledge (SEK). SCK and SSK are characterised by the use of

slangy words, metaphors and indexicals, and SEK by attitudinal markers, and linguistic and

cognitive mappings. There are three practs in the interactions: amusing, informing, and

criticising. Six allopracts are identified: three for criticizing; two for informing; and one for

amusing. The quantitative analysis indicates that there is a significant relationship between

students‟ attitudes to and their perception of sexual discourse(r = .443, P