A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF NIGERIAN MILITARY COUP ANNOUNCEMENTS

A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF NIGERIAN MILITARY COUP ANNOUNCEMENTS

Abstract:

This study is concerned with the analysis of Nigerian military coup announcements within the ambit of pragmatics. It adopts the speech acts theory as developed by Austin (1962) and revised by Adegbija (1982) and (1999).The study demonstrates that despite their military background and format, the coup announcements have some elements of political language ingrained in them for specific purposes. Consequently, the data was subjected to textual and opinion analyses. For the textual analysis, the pragmasociolinguistic concept of theory of pragmatics was applied. In the opinion analysis however, three instruments were employed. The instruments are: questionnaire, sampled opinions from newspapers and oral interviews. The result shows that at the pragmatic context level, the speech acts in each coup event depend largely on the context that gave birth to them. The analysis at the social context level reveals that the social relationship between the interlocutors is both asymmetric and symmetric depending on the audience that is being addressed by the coupists.At the linguistic level, we found that diction is used to enforce or 7 attenuate illocutionary force. Also, most of the sentence constructions are in the passive as the coupists do not want to create the impression of arrogance or brute force. However, a few sentences in the active voice are employed to suggest that the coupists would apply brute force if need be. The conclusion of the study is that despite its peculiarities, the Nigerian Military Coup Announcement is essentially a subset of political language. Finally, the coup announcements are themselves a composite of direct/indirect speech acts.

A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF NIGERIAN MILITARY COUP ANNOUNCEMENTS