A CRITICAL PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF SELECTED TWEETS ON THE 2022 CHRISTMAS DAY MURDER IN NIGERIA
Keywords:
brutality, injustice, political systemAbstract
Police brutality among other forms of social injustice, has been a controversial issue generating mixed reactions from majority of the Nigerian citizens. While some perceive this vice as an adverse effect of indiscipline among the Nigerian police force, others view it as the failure of the Nigerian political system towards the maintenance of law and order. Critical pragmatics as an approach to critical linguistics studies the issues of power and ideology embedded in different communicative acts performed by interlocutors in different speech contexts. Interlocutors’ communicative intentions are discernible in critical pragmatics by virtue of the application of different pragmatic strategies. This study aims to examine selected tweets of the 2022 Christmas day murder from a pragmatic perspective. More specifically, the study adopts Critical Pragmatics as the conceptual framework for the study. Korta & Perry’s (2011) perspectives to Critical Pragmatics are adopted for the analysis of five (5) purposively selected tweets. The study also employs both the qualitative and quantitative research designs. The study found that implicature is the most preponderant pragmatic strategy used in the selected tweets. In conclusion, the use of the critical pragmatic approach for the analysis of the selected tweets has revealed the interrelationship between the variables of class, power and ideology which form the basis of the tweeters’ judgment.
References
Austin, J.L. (1962) How to do things with words. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (1997). English as a global language. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Grice, H.P. (1957). ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review, 66: 377– 388. in
Grice, H.P. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Grice, H.P. (1975). ‘Logic and conversation’, in Cole, P. and Morgan, J. (eds), Syntax and
Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press.
Kaburise, P. K. (2005). Speech act theory and communication: A Univen study. An Unpublished Thesis.
Oni, J. F. (2010). Lexicalisation and discursiveexpression of power in Olusegun Obasanjo’s speeches. Postgraduate Seminar Series, Department of English, University of Ibadan.
Ostman, J., Verschueren, J. & Zienkowski, J. (2011). Discursive pragmatics. Netherlands. John Benjamin Publishing Company.
Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. (1979). Meaning and Expression in theory of Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.
Van Dijk, T.A. (2001). Critical discourse analysis. In Hamilton,H.E., Schiffrin,D.,&Tannen, D. The Handbook of Discourse analysis.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Gambari-Olufadi Kifayat (Author)
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
- The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.