A Pragmatic Study of Generalized and Particularized Implicatures in “The Arrangers of Marriage” from Adichie’s The Thing Around your Neck (Published)
This investigation seeks to make sense of Adichie’s “The Arrangers of Marriage”. In fact, as Yule (2010) put it, “ Our understanding of what we read doesn’t come directly from what words and sentences are on the page, but the interpretations we create, in our minds, of what we read”, (p. 151). Following the foregoing quotation, the study scrutinizes conversational implicatures in the above mentioned narrative story to disclose the subtly implied messages therein from a pragmatic angle. The study is premised on the hypothesis that a number of important messages are implied in the short story through both generalized and particularized implicatures out of consideration of the readers’ scripts of the scenes and events presented within, (Mey, 2001: 237). To attain the aim of the investigation, the study appeals to the descriptive qualitative methodology. Via this method, the various scenes and events presented in the narrative are appraised and related interpretations carried out on the basis of their schemata and scripts. The study has made important findings. Among several others, it is uncovered that hasty marriage brings undesirable, irrevocable, unbearable, and deadly consequences to the newly wedded couple. Moreover, marriage shouldn’t be premised on materialism especially as not all that glitters is gold. Indeed, material comfort doesn’t guarantee a couple’s happiness. The change of the key characters’ native Igbo names to English ones in a host country is evocative of their acculturation. Chinaza Agatha Okafor’s refusal to forsake her native language in favor of American English only, is her rejection of self-denial and loss of identity in a foreign country. Furthermore, her resistance to the English name given to her by her new husband, is revelatory of the writer’s feministic trend and her position with regard to cultural alienation
Citation: Daniel Tchorkpa Yokossi, André Cocou Datondji and Innocent Sourou Koutchadé (2022) A Pragmatic Study of Generalized and Particularized Implicatures in “The Arrangers of Marriage” from Adichie’s The Thing Around your Neck, International Journal of English Language and Linguistics Research, Vol.10, No 4, pp.1-18
Keywords: Implicature, Pragmatics, Schema, Study, script
The Speech Acts of Requests in Cameroon Francophone English (Published)
Cameroon Francophone English (CamFE) is a fast-growing sub-variety of English in Cameroon. The field of pragmatics and especially the speech acts of requests remain unexplored in this sub-variety of English. This paper aims to investigate the types of requests in CamFE, their structure, as well as the lexical and syntactic features. Data were collected through Discourse Completion Test (DCT) administered from some 40 students in the Department of English Language and Literature of the University of Maroua. The DCT was made up of six described situations, and 240 request utterances were elicited. The data were analysed through the coding scheme of the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Patterns propounded by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984). The results of the study show that CamFE speakers have six types of request content structures established as S1, S2, S3, S4, S5 and S6. The most preferred request strategy is the reference to preparatory conditions technique (81.67%) followed by the mood derivable technique (10%). In addition to this, the analysis further reveals that CamFE requests display some specific lexical and syntactic features.
Keywords: Cameroon Francophone English, Pragmatics, Requests, Speech Acts., varieties of English
Pragma-Stylistic Manifestations in Sport Discourse from Selected Radio Stations in Ibadan Metropolis (Published)
Language is a complex human-specific system of communication. It is the only means by which people in a speech community communicate among themselves. Pragma-stylistic is one of the types of context-oriented stylistics that has to do with speech act stylistics. Its contributions to the field of stylistics have made the study of language an interesting one. The need to ascertain whether sport presenters on the radio employ speech acts in their conversation motivates this study. A pragma-stylistic model of literary analysis is presented and applied to analyse the sport discourse from selected radio stations in Ibadan metropolis. The conversations are analysed as a cohesive chunk so as to examine the direct and indirect illocutionary acts, the perlocutionary effects, the various contexts and competencies that are inherent in the sport discourse. The major results of the analyses indicate that the participants engage in conversation so as to do things with words.
Keywords: Language, Pragmatics, Stylistics, Utterance, pragma-stylistics
Pragmatic Analysis of Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari’s Maiden Coup Address of January 1, 1984 And His Inaugural Address of May 29, 2015: A Comparative Appraisal (Published)
The quest for and exercise of power is characterized by ingenious use of language. Persuading and convincing the masses to obtain their support and acceptance, legitimizing political authority and policies, manipulating the citizenry towards accepting a particular ideology, etc, depends to a large extent, on the kind of language a political protagonist employs and its appropriateness to the context of use. The study is a comparative analysis of President Muhammadu Buhari’s Maiden Coup Address of January 1, 1984 and his Inaugural Address of May 29, 2015 from a general pragmatic perspective. Adopting the Speech Act theory of Austin (1962) as revised by Searle (1962, 1999 , the study was aimed at unveiling the ilucutionary forces of the speech acts employed in both speeches to manipulate and galvanize the populace into making the intended and desired inferences in the pragmatic contexts in which the speeches were made. The result showed that the speech acts used in each of the speeches, though used by the same protagonist, depend on the socio- political context in which the speeches were made. In a general term , our analysis revealed that President Buhari’s use of language in his maiden coup speech reflects his military disposition as his utterances were seen to be authoritative, forceful, preemptory, and direct as he needed to exercise a solid control through commands, orders, firm request, and threats. In contrast to the above, his use of language in his inaugural address which was made in the context of popular democracy, was relatively informative and persuasive ,and reflects ingredients of social relations and interactions.
Keywords: Comparative Appraisal., Inaugural Address, Maiden Coup Address, Pragmatics
A Pragmatic Survey of Nigerian Expression of Politeness (Published)
This paper investigates politeness as a pragmatic principle in the conversation venture. The paper explores the scholarly views on politeness and concluded in view of those submissions that Nigeria as a country has adopted English for use to meet it local needs. As a result, Nigerians pragmatically have developed unique and consistent ways of expressing politeness. So, the paper draws examples from actual speech situations of some Nigerians who speak popular Nigerian English in places of social interactions , uses them to show some of the strategies adopted by Nigerians to express politeness. The results of the survey shows that Nigerian ways of expressing politeness are in tandem with politeness strategies as generally postulated by scholars on the subject, thus, reconfirming politeness as a reality in most conversational discourse.
Keywords: Nigerian Expression And Politeness, Pragmatics, Survey
A USEFUL GUIDE TO THE TEACHING AND TESTING OF PRAGMATICS IN THE EFL/ESL CLASSROOM (Published)
This thorough analysis of the literature reviewed on pragmatics provides a practical and knowledge-based guide to EFL/ ESL teachers with the aim to assist them when they deal with the teaching and testing of pragmatics in the classroom. It also considers itself as an informational profile that might be of help whenever teacher-education and teacher-training are thought of as it reflects on an important aspect of language that seems to be overlooked in foreign language teaching/learning process and detached from real communicative language use. At first, an overview of how pragmatics is taught in the foreign/second language classroom is critically previewed so as to unfold the reality of the traditional pragmatics instruction in EFL/ESL contexts. Within this instructional perspective, an integration of the most up-to-date theoretical orientations to pragmatics instruction is shed lighted in order to better equip EFL/ESL teachers with the necessary knowledge, skills and instructional techniques and raise their awareness of pragmatics issues such as politeness, impoliteness, socio-pragmatic and pragma-linguistic failures. How to test pragmatics learning has been regarded in the second part as it deals with testing learner’s pragmatic proficiency and addresses some important practices in testing this aspect in EFL/ESL classroom as well as in examinations.
Keywords: EFL/ESL Contexts, Pragmatic Proficiency, Pragmatics, Teaching and Testing
A USEFUL GUIDE TO THE TEACHING AND TESTING OF PRAGMATICS IN THE EFL/ESL CLASSROOM (Published)
This thorough analysis of the literature reviewed on pragmatics provides a practical and knowledge-based guide to EFL/ ESL teachers with the aim to assist them when they deal with the teaching and testing of pragmatics in the classroom. It also considers itself as an informational profile that might be of help whenever teacher-education and teacher-training are thought of as it reflects on an important aspect of language that seems to be overlooked in foreign language teaching/learning process and detached from real communicative language use. At first, an overview of how pragmatics is taught in the foreign/second language classroom is critically previewed so as to unfold the reality of the traditional pragmatics instruction in EFL/ESL contexts. Within this instructional perspective, an integration of the most up-to-date theoretical orientations to pragmatics instruction is shed lighted in order to better equip EFL/ESL teachers with the necessary knowledge, skills and instructional techniques and raise their awareness of pragmatics issues such as politeness, impoliteness, socio-pragmatic and pragma-linguistic failures. How to test pragmatics learning has been regarded in the second part as it deals with testing learner’s pragmatic proficiency and addresses some important practices in testing this aspect in EFL/ESL classroom as well as in examinations.
Keywords: EFL/ESL Contexts, Pragmatic Proficiency, Pragmatics, Teaching and Testing
The Pragmatics of General Ibrahim Babangida’s Independence Day Broadcasts, 1985-1993 (Review Completed - Accepted)
This article examines the pragmatics of General Ibrahim Babangida’s Independence Day Broadcasts with particular attention to the speech acts that the speeches are used to perform. It is motivated by the paucity of work on independence day speeches most especially in Nigeria and the need to identify the categories of illocutionary acts performed with the broadcasts in order to enhance a better understanding of the broadcasts. Data were collected via the national archives. The data collected were analysed, using insights from the theory of speech acts. Considering the context in which the broadcasts were given and the communicative intention of the speaker, five categories of illocutionary acts namely; representatives, directives, comissives, expressive and declaration were found to characterize the data. Among these, only the representative and commissive acts were found to be predominant. These could be described as institutional acts associated with independence day broadcasts as a genre of political discourse. The article concludes that reading independence day broadcasts from the speech acts lenses has potency of enhancing a better understanding of the broadcasts.
Keywords: Context, Independence Day Broadcasts Ibrahim Babangida, Pragmatics