The Speech of Ambassador George Obiozor: A Novel Position Paper

Abstract

Communication in society happens paramountly by means of language either by speech or writing. This study aims at analyzing one of the speeches of Nigerian diplomat, Professor George Obiozor, a former Nigerian Ambassador to Israel, High Commissioner to Cyprus, Ambassador of Nigeria to the United States of America and currently the president of Ohaneze ndi Igbo, an apex socio-cultural group. The study adopts the Speech Acts Theory by J.L. Austin with a particular reference to the five Illocutionary act classification. It is discovered by the researchers that over the years, only speeches of presidents, governors, military heads of state etc. have been investigated by scholars with little or no attention paid to speeches of other government officials like Senators, Members of the House of Representatives, Honourable Ministers, High Commissioners, Ambassadors, Local Government Chairmen etc. Hence, this paper is interested in discovering the speech acts of the Ambassador as the ambassador’s speech exhibits a high level of communicative import. For statistical purpose, the simple percentage is used to compute the frequency of the Illocutionary acts present in the speech. Our findings, therefore, show that the expositives were preponderant in the Ambassador’s speech.