Pragmatic Analyses of President Muhammadu Buhari’s 2015 Inaugural Speech

Abstract

Inaugural speech which is the first speech given by the new leader of an organisation or a country is a frontline issue in political discourse. Previous studies on political discourse in Nigeria have focused on pragmatics, semiotics and general stylistic features, but have not significantly explored the combination of discursive acts and communicative principles in meaning negotiation. This study, therefore, examines speech act types and communicative precepts in the inaugural speech to establish different roles in meaning negotiation. Data was collected via the Punch newspaper, and the inaugural speech consists of twenty-eight paragraphs, from which a total number of twenty sentences is being extracted and analysed. The study adopted aspects of Austin’s (1969) speech acts theory and Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle.  Findings reveal that the inaugural speech was uttered in different speech act forms such as behabitive acts, excercitives, verdictives, commissives, and expositive acts.  The study also reveals that the inaugural speech manifests different communicative principles such as maxims of quantity, quality, relation and maxims of manner which communicate politically sensitive meaning. The study concludes that language is a very important tool in politics, as it is used to persuade, instruct, promise, expose and inform at the beginning of a new administration, to make the new government welcoming to the people.