Being Politically Impolite: A Community of Practice (COFP) Analysis of Invective Songs of Western Nigerian Politicians. (Published)
Earlier studies on the language of political discourse have been focused on the theoretical bases of relational and face works with little emphasis on impoliteness. (Mullany, 2002:1). Also, scanty works that are specific exist on the pragmatic analysis of impoliteness in invective songs of politicians in south-western part of Nigeria. Hence, the present study explores the selected invective songs of Western Nigerian politicians, utilizing a modified version of Community of Practice framework (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992) as a pragmatic tool in analyzing the data. Fourteen randomly sampled invective songs of western Nigerian politicians were selected for the study through participant’s information. Our findings revealed that the invective songs of western Nigerian politicians are characterized by impolite utterances, politic confrontational behaviour, belligerent utterances, lexical borrowing, code-mixing, Implicative, turn-taking, use of paralanguage, imagery and symbolism. The paper concludes that the modified version of Community of Practice (CofP) theory clearly explicates the meaning and significances of political invective songs in Nigerian Southwest, and clearly showcases the intentions of the participants and the force of the utterances.
Keywords: Community of practice (CofP), Impoliteness, Invective song, Political language, Western Nigerian politicians.