A Pragmatic Interpretation of Face and Acts in President Olusegun Obasanjo‘s Speech Text "A Clarion Call".
Abstract
This paper is a pragmatic analysis of the acts and face negotiation techniques deployed by former President Obasanjo in his letter to President Buhari, using Mey’s Pragmatic theory and face negotiation theory. Its objectives are to identify and interpret the direct and indirect illocutionary acts, perlocutionary, face threatening and face saving acts in former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s letter to President Muhammadu Buhari. The data adopted for this paper was collected from Daily Trust and Leadership Newspaper of January, 2018. The paper classifies the different acts and face mitigating acts. It was discovered that Obasanjo made use of negative face acts in representing Buhari, thereby raising fear and worry in the minds of Nigerians and positively presented himself. The paper concludes that linguistic structures are very important in politics and determines the mind of the populace at every given time.
Keywords: Pragmatic Interpretation; Obasanjo; Clarion Call
Metadata Record
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