Implicit Meanings in the Courtship-Driven Discourses in the “Morning” Part of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel (Published)
The process of inferencing in discourse events is an essential aspect of understanding communications. Most often, writers do not explicitly state the text’s message; they rely on the reader’s encyclopedic knowledge. Soyinka’s text The Lion and the Jewel is one of such texts, where the understanding of inherent meaning depend heavily on inference. However, the text has attracted extant studies both from literary and linguistic perspectives, but observably, none has addressed the implicit meanings in the discourses for better understanding of the text. Hence, this study examines the implicit meanings in its courtship-driven discourses in order to understand the characters’ ideology and projected themes. The data for the study are delimited to the interactions of the two major characters in the “Morning” part of the text. The data were analysed using insights from Grice (1975) Conversational Implicature theory. The findings reveal that they flout the maxims as a means of self-defense to one’s integrity and as resistance from imposition, thus projecting the themes of self-defense and resistance from imposition. It portrays the characters’ ideology as people who protect one’s ego and are always ready to defend oneself to shun intimidation. Maxims of manner and quantity are most exploited using literal and non-literal expressions, while quality maxim constitutes the least, no instance of relevance maxim is found.
Keywords: Cooperative Principle, Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, conversational implicature theory, courtship discourse, implicit meaning
A Pragmatic Approach to British and American Entertainment and Celebrity News Reports (Published)
Entertainment news reports are composed of news stories of interest taken from the entertainment industry, about filming and television projects, interviews with actors, musicians and other entertainment personalities and entertainment newsmakers. This type of news aims at amusing the audience and entertaining them by incorporating human interest stories about celebrities’ lives in addition to their activities. Despite the pervasive interest in this type of genre, it has not been thoroughly investigated from a pragmatic standpoint. Consequently, this paper endeavors to pinpoint the pragmatic aspects of the language utilized in British and American entertainment and celebrity news reports. Precisely, this work sets itself the task of answering the following question: what are the pragmatic aspects of this kind of discourse? Accordingly, the study aims at identifying the most prevalent pragmatic aspects utilized in the manufacturing of entertainment and celebrity news reports and finding the interdifferences between British and American news reports of this kind. In accordance with these aims, it is hypothesized that entertainment and celebrity news reporters exploit certain pragmatic techniques such as presupposition, allusion, and conversational implicature to achieve their ultimate goal of attracting as many viewers as possible. In order to achieve the aims of this paper and test its hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of the data under scrutiny. Besides, a statistical method represented by the percentage equation is utilized for calculating the findings of analysis. The analysis is conducted on five British news reports retrieved from the BBC online Entertainment & Arts news (bbc.com), and five news reports retrieved from the American TV show Entertainment Tonight (etonline.com). The findings of the analysis verify the above hypothesis in that entertainment news reporters exploit presupposition, allusion, and conversational implicature to help them attract the attention of the audience and take the news report out of its usual frame of boredom into being more interesting, amusing, and entertaining.
Keywords: Cooperative Principle, Entertainment and celebrity news reports, Implicature, allusion, pragmatic aspects, presupposition
A Pragmatic Approach to British and American Entertainment and Celebrity News Reports (Published)
Entertainment news reports are composed of news stories of interest taken from the entertainment industry, about filming and television projects, interviews with actors, musicians and other entertainment personalities and entertainment newsmakers. This type of news aims at amusing the audience and entertaining them by incorporating human interest stories about celebrities’ lives in addition to their activities. Despite the pervasive interest in this type of genre, it has not been thoroughly investigated from a pragmatic standpoint. Consequently, this paper endeavors to pinpoint the pragmatic aspects of the language utilized in British and American entertainment and celebrity news reports. Precisely, this work sets itself the task of answering the following question: what are the pragmatic aspects of this kind of discourse? Accordingly, the study aims at identifying the most prevalent pragmatic aspects utilized in the manufacturing of entertainment and celebrity news reports and finding the interdifferences between British and American news reports of this kind. In accordance with these aims, it is hypothesized that entertainment and celebrity news reporters exploit certain pragmatic techniques such as presupposition, allusion, and conversational implicature to achieve their ultimate goal of attracting as many viewers as possible. In order to achieve the aims of this paper and test its hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of the data under scrutiny. Besides, a statistical method represented by the percentage equation is utilized for calculating the findings of analysis. The analysis is conducted on five British news reports retrieved from the BBC online Entertainment & Arts news (bbc.com), and five news reports retrieved from the American TV show Entertainment Tonight (etonline.com). The findings of the analysis verify the above hypothesis in that entertainment news reporters exploit presupposition, allusion, and conversational implicature to help them attract the attention of the audience and take the news report out of its usual frame of boredom into being more interesting, amusing, and entertaining.
Keywords: Cooperative Principle, Entertainment and celebrity news reports, Implicature, allusion, pragmatic aspects, presupposition