AN EXPLORATION OF PRAGMATIC ACTS IN THE SELECTED NIGERIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGNS

Abstract

In Nigeria’s political environment, the defamatory aspects of hate speech have sparked a variety of discursive responses. Studies that have already been done on hate speech have addressed its moral and semiotic implications with a focus on pragma-stylistic and a lack of sufficient scholary research into the  contextual features and pragmatic acts on hate speeches. This study, therefore, explored the pragmatics of hate speeches in selected Nigerian presidential election campaigns of 2015 and 2019,  with a view to revealing the contextual features and pragmatic acts in the speeches.  Textual aspects of Jacob Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Act, served as the framework. Data comprising five hate speeches, purposively extracted from presidential campaign speeches of  2015 and 2019 elections were sourced via the Punch Newspaper, and subjected to pragmatic analyses.  Findings revealed that the hate speeches manifested different pragmatic acts such as directing, forbidding, condemning, warning, cautioning, commanding, advising, vowing, rebuking, dreading,  regretting, threatening, inquiring, judging, reporting, insisting, and declaring that interact with the following contextual features: reference (REF), metaphor (MPH), shared situational knowledge (SSK), relevance (REL) voice (VCE), inference (INF) and metapragmatic joker (M).  The 2015 and 2019 Nigeria presidential campaigns predominantly featured pragmatic acts such as condemning, warning and informing.

As a proof of a country with social tensions and a nascent democratic experience, various hate speeches and their intrinsic pragmatic acts illustrate various disparaging words used to disdain aand scoff during Nigerian electioneering campaigns. Therefore, this calls for more research to explain the improvement of sick or destructive aspects in hate speeches in the process of building the nation of Nigeria.