International Journal of English Language and Linguistics Research (IJELLR)

EA Journals

PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONS OF TRADITION-MOTIVATED DISCOURSES IN AHMED YERIMA’S AJAGUNMALE

Abstract

Studies on the use of language to refract societal realities in Ahmed Yerima’s dramas have largely examined stylistic and pragmatic features of some of his texts. Within the pragmatic domain, efforts have been concentrated on the examination of context-sensitive interpretations of proverbial meanings and the consideration of politeness features in Yerima’s plays. However, there is a dearth of work on the investigation of the pragmatics of Yerima’s use of language in cultural projections in linguistic scholarship. This study therefore fills this gap by examining the pragmeme-driven functions performed by Ahmed Yerima in tradition-motivated utterances in Ajagunmale, sampled for the evident preponderance of tradition-motivated discourses in it, towards determining his worldview on tradition-related issues in the society. These discourses were subjected to content analysis, drawing insights from Mey’s theory of pragmatic acts. The findings reveal the practs of explaining, warning/cautioning, advising, persuading, rebuking, praising, accusing, and pleading in traditional and emotive contexts of the discourses in Ajagunmale, to address thematic issues of culture, status/power, achievement, belief, social crisis, predestination, inquiry, and immorality with the advantage of contextual features of shared-situational knowledge (ssk), socio-cultural knowledge (sck), inference (inf), reference (ref) and voicing (vce). The interaction between the tradition-motivated discourses in Ajagunmale and Mey’s theory of pragmeme ultimately results in the understanding of tradition-related issues in the play and their context-driven dramatisation of the traditional orientations of the Yoruba in South-western Nigeria.

Keywords: Ajagunmale, Discourses, Pragmeme, Tradition- Motivated, Yerima

cc logo

This work by European American Journals is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License

 

Recent Publications

Email ID: editor.ijellr@ea-journals.org
Impact Factor: 7.79
Print ISSN: 2053-6305
Online ISSN: 2053-6313
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37745/ijellr.13

Author Guidelines
Submit Papers
Review Status

 

Scroll to Top

Don't miss any Call For Paper update from EA Journals

Fill up the form below and get notified everytime we call for new submissions for our journals.