A Critical Pragmatic Analysis of illocutionary Acts in Political Conversations in Esiaba Irobi’s Post-Independence Text; Nwokedi

Abstract

This paper analyzes selected political conversational discourses in Esiaba Irobi’s drama text Nwokedi and aims to examine how meaning is generated, interpreted and understood in the context of conversations and how various political underlying ideologies were enacted in the text. Five conversations were selected from the text, using qualitative research method the conversations were studied and analyzed using speech acts theory as modified by Kreidler (1998) and Grice (1975) cooperative principle and conversational Implicature. Analysis shows that there are uses of various illocutionary acts such as assertive, expressive and verdictive acts for meaning explication and communication of the author’s implicit ideology, in addition such pragmatic tools like inference, reference and implicature were used to reveal meaning imbedded in the texts which helped the readers follow the theme and story line of the text.