PRAGMATIC ACTS IN PRESIDENT BOLA AHMED TINUBU’S SPEECH ON END BAD GOVERNANCE PROTESTS

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the pragmatic acts deployed by
President Ahmed Bola Tinubu in his speech on End Bad Governance
protests. The speech of the President downloaded from the internet
served as the data for the study. The study adopted Mey’s (2001)
pragmatic acts theory as it theoretical framework and deployed
qualitative and quantitative methods of data analysis to analyse its data.
The results of the analysis show that the president employed pragmatic
acts of bothering, sympathising, promising, pleading, threatening,
directing, informing, assuring, ordering, aiming, advising, requesting,
thanking and praying in his speech. The dominant pragmatic acts
deployed by the President in his speech are pragmatic acts of informing
and advising; they occurred with a frequency of 5 or 17.86% each. The
second dominant pragmatic acts the President used in his speech are
pragmatic acts of directing and promising; they occurred with a
frequency of 3 or 10.71% each. The third predominant pragmatic acts
the president used in his speech are pragmatic acts of bothering and
assuring, they occurred with a frequency of 2 or 7.14% each. The
fourth predominant pragmatic acts utilised in the President’s speech
are pragmatic acts of sympathising, pleading, threatening, ordering,
aiming, requesting, thanking and praying; they occurred with a
frequency of 1 or 3.57% each. The study concludes that the President
deployed different pragmatic acts in his speech to unearth new
government’s policies to ameliorate economic crisis and hardship
Nigerians were experiencing.