A Speech Act Analysis of Headline Captions in Selected Nigerian Dailies

Abstract

In every discursive situation, discourse producers tend to give off their intentions represented as a force of action in their discourses, which invariably creates impacts on the discourse consumers. This study investigates the acts of locution, force of illocution and effects of perlocutionary acts in discourses. Gathering data from Nigerian dailies, this study focuses on exploring the headlines of certain Nigerian dailies. Using the pragmatic theory of J. L. Austin's (1962) as the theoretical framework for investigative analysis, fifty headlines were collected but twenty (20) headlines were sampled from ten (10) different newspaper headlines. The captions of the newspaper headlines that were sampled were in May, 2023. The study reveals that, illocutionary acts (force) of Expositives, Verdictives, Behabitives and Exercitives are used in different ways. The expositive acts are used more while the Exercitives is the least used. The perlocutionary effects of being informed dominates.