AN ANALYSIS ON PRAGMATIC FORCE IN OLUSEGUN OBASANJO’S OPEN LETTER TO GOODLUCK JONATHAN

Abstract

Political language use is usually targeted at gaining advantage over political opponents. Inorder to achieve this desire, political leaders tactfully employ carefully chosen speech acts andparticular verbal and non-verbal exchanges through which they achieve their communicativegoals. This study investigated the pragmatic force, the illocutionary intention, which formerPresident Obasanjo strove to achieve in his open letter – Before It Is Too Late – to thenincumbent President Jonathan. The aim was to analyse how he maximally utilised the speechacts to convey his message to the electorates. Bach and Harnish’s model of Speech Act Theory,which accounts for the illocutionary intentions of a language user, served as its theoreticalframework. Thirteen sample utterances purposively selected from the data were subjected todescriptive qualitative analysis. The findings revealed that four speech acts kinds werepredominant in the open letter. These acts were generally used to persuade the Nigerian massescum electorates to accept Obasanjo’s intention which was to ensure the exit of then incumbentPresident Jonathan from the seat of Nigeria’s presidency. Critical analysis of the language ofthe letter revealed that the language of political leaders tended towards “anointing†and handingover power to candidates of their choice.