A Pragmatic Analysis of Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari's Inaugural Speech (original) (raw)

2020, Kebbi Journal of Language and Literature

Language has been a powerful tool in the hands of political leaders as most of the ideas they communicate and the activities they perform are done through the avenues created by language. These include manifesto, campaign, inauguration, policy formulation, and implementation. Politicians use language as a tool to express views and feelings with the sole intention of reshaping peoples' opinions to agree with theirs. Taiwo (2009) submits that language is central to the explanation of political stability or polarization as it moves people to vote, debate, or revolt. This suggests that the concepts of "language" and "politics" are paths bound together. In any country, the office of the President or Prime Minister is the highest, yet the position needs constant touch or link with the citizens and one of the ways of achieving this is through speech making. The present study aims at analyzing Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari's 2015 inaugural speech. The data was extracted from the 2015 inaugural speech and analyzed using the Speech Acts Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1999). The findings reveal that the President relies more on expressions that perform commissive acts than other speech acts. The findings further reveal that there are intricate relationships that exist between language, power, and ideology, just as the President also tries to create a shared sense of responsibility in his inaugural speech.

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