 My research is generally in language in use, how people use language in their daily lives and questioning if colonization, especially British colonization of parts of Africa, led to some form of uniformization of the fundamental based structures of the societies. Previous research has looked at colonization, but focus has been on how these societies have changed due to the impact of colonization. Colonization led to some form of mixture of languages, of people, of culture, which today have impacts on how people conduct their daily lives. The particular focus is on offers and offer refusals. That is to say, how do people make offers of food, of services, of seeds in church, for instance, to others and how do the others react to these offers. The fundamental structure or the cultural norms of the societies expect that these offers be accepted because when they are accepted, it shows that cohesion is very good within the society. But when they are refused or when they are rejected, it shows that something is wrong. I wanted to look at how, when offers are refused, what is actually at stake. For this research, offers and offer refusals in post-colonial societies I adopted several different types of data collection methods. Of course, the most ideal would have been to have data from natural environments. People using language to do the things they do every day. This was not possible. Well, it was tricky. I tried it once. For instance, during my field trips in Cameroon and Ghana, I decided to do natural offering and refusal of offers. I tried with offering food and drinks and to my surprise, I expected people to say no, but everyone said yes. How was I going to cope then doing research on refusals when everyone says yes? But I realized saying yes was part of the social norm of the societies. You have to say yes and accept offers even if you don't consume them. This is because it's good, it's for politeness, it's for you to show the other that we still function normally as a society. Having filled with that strategy, I decided to fall back to the standard methods of data collection. The first was to turn to discourse completion task questionnaires. I came up with possible scenarios where people could offer and where offers could be refused and I asked respondents to construct dialogues in which they made offers to people, particularly interlocutors, and that these offers have to be refused. With this, I received a lot of interesting dialogues on which the research is based. I went beyond that to do interviews, to ask people, what would you say if you had to offer, for instance, an old man in a church, your seat? What would you do if the old man says no, I don't want your seat? How does that affect the societal cohesion of your group? That left me with two very important sources of data and I went a little bit further to do participant observation where I started in different contexts to watch people offer, accept offers, or refuse offers. From there, I moved on to analyze the data and as I said earlier, I used the emergent framework called post-colonial pragmatics to see how people's intentions in offering and the intentions in refusing these offers translate into the type of cohesion they want to achieve in their society as a group. There were several interesting findings from this research. First, it's actually true that colonization actually led to a strong uniformization of the basic fundamental structure of these societies. I'm going to talk about this at three levels. The first is that these societies, these post-colonial societies consider themselves as a unit, as a collectivist in group and for that, cohesion, the collectivist phase of this group is most important. I realized that most of the offers that were made were accepted because people felt they have to keep the group together. Refusing an offer would mean that something has broken down. On another level, it was clear from the interactions that were created by the respondents that the community, no matter how big it is, is considered a family. Society is family. And this was done most often through the use of kinship terms. Strangers meeting for the first time called each other father or son, mother or daughter, or brother and brother and so forth. Why? Because whatever happens in that interaction would not be as destructive, it would not be as threatening to the group if it's treated as family business. I also found out that post-colonial societies were already highly multilingual and multicultural even before the arrival of colonialism. This is perhaps one reason why they were able to quickly accept what colonialism brought in, like education, like religion, like systems of political administration, and of course also new languages. Having had this base structure already before, it was easier for this to be quickly assimilated and to be appropriated for their own individual usage. I found a very strong correlation between indigenous, Cameroonian and Nigerian cultures and some of the doctrines of Christianity. This has to do with how people treat parents, younger people treat parents. In both, it's considered whoever is old enough to be your parent should be treated as a parent. And we see this asymmetrical relationship being played out in most of the interactions. Both in just the way people name others, the use of kinship address terms and also in the way people behave when they are called according to those kinship terms. I want to give an example from one of the discourse completion situations that respondents had to fill out, interaction between a young person and an old man in church. And the young person was expected to see the seed to the old man. But the instructions of the questionnaire were that the old man is expected to refuse the offer. But over one third of the respondents constructed dialogues in which the old man actually accepted the offer. What does this tell us? This tells us that the group's social face and the respect for the social norms of the group are a lot stronger than one researcher who comes around trying to force people to behave differently. This study is relevant at three major levels. The first is a theoretical level. We were able to introduce or expand on a framework called post-colonial pragmatics as a means of studying the similarities and the homogenization of post-colonial societal structures through colonization. This of course offers a new perspective for researchers in this context to analyze their data in a way that it's more fitting than using Western theories. Post-colonial societies are in fact complete historical entities that are evolving in natural ways based on the complex nature of their evolution of the history. These patterns of interaction, hybrid or multilingual as they are in nature are actually existing is proof that members of these communities cope with them naturally. The third relevance of this research is that it gives us some of those tools that we need for intercultural communication, understanding intentions of others when they speak, having pre-knowledge of what to expect or how to react to what is said. For instance, in most post-colonial communities a promise is not always a strong commission to do something in the future as it is in the West. It is often just a way of politely showing the other that we are actually together. We form a group. There is no discord between us. The outlook I have for research in post-colonial contexts, especially pragmatics is that there should be a lot more done from emic perspectives that project the specificities of the societies. This has not been the case in the past but with frameworks like the one we've introduced post-colonial pragmatics this should be a lot more possible. A lot of intellectual work is done on different contexts and this usually ends up on the shelves of libraries, on internet platforms and so forth. Those who I actually studied don't have the chance to read them, don't have the chance to see what came out of the data they provided. It is my intention and my wish to take this back also to this context and to of course make them and make others know how interaction works there.