Ordinarily, language is a means of
communication traditionally referred to as a means of transferring the
traditions of people from one generation to another. Presently, the role of
language has so expanded in this technological era to include the means of
storing, archiving and retrieving the stored information (Onuigbo (1990).
Pragmatics is the aspect of language function that embraces the use of language
in social contexts.
Meaning
of an utterance transcends the words contained in the utterance or sentence. A
sentence also has a meaning that goes beyond the words in the sentence. That is
to say that meaning
transcends the “signifier” – words, and the “signified” – the actual representation, which is context.
transcends the “signifier” – words, and the “signified” – the actual representation, which is context.
The
ideas expressed in this work are reminiscent to Wittgenstein’s position which
privileged meaning as “use”. We use language to do many things (Austin 1962). These
“things” include, to give and obtain, to persuade and to order, to interact and
create human meaning in context.
This
research appreciates the need to draw attention to theoretical procedure of
pragmatics for interpreting meaning, which goes beyond the grammatical level of
the sentence. To this effect, the work intends to show that pragmatics provides
a useful framework for analyzing literary texts, as well as interpreting
non-literary texts like political discourse.
Modern linguists have been trying to establish a general exhaustive,
comprehensive, and unified theory of the nature of language. This study sheds
light into an aspect of pragmatics.
The
study will also contribute to different domains of language in use, like
applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, political science, sociology, philosophy
of language, educational linguistics and linguistics in general. Widdowson
(1979:90) argues that language teaching and learning should “effect the
transfer from grammatical competence, a knowledge of sentences, to what has
been called commutative competence, a knowledge of how sentences are used
in the performance of communicative act of different kinds”. He believes
that grammatical competence will remain a perpetual state of potentiality
unless it is realized in communication. That is to say, that there are rules of
use without which the rules of grammar would be useless. It is imperative those
language users are aware and sensitive to sociolinguistic variables that play
important roles in different speech kind. This study provides the necessary
information for the awareness.
It is hoped that at the and of this work,
researchers will be encourage to delve more into the study of pragmatics and
the perlocutionary effect of political discourses in order to enrich the
literature in the field especially in the Nigerian situation.
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