A Pragma-Crafting Study of President Muhammadu Buhari’s 2022 Democracy Day Speech

Abstract

Political speeches have been studied from different perspectives and using different ways of analyses. However, existing studies on these political speeches have largely been focused on interviews, inaugurals, democracy speeches, media interviews, etc. using the tools of speech acts, pragmatic acts, critical studies and stylistics. Despite these, there are still insufficient studies of analyses of political discourse using Achoea’s Pragma Crafting Theory as a new paradigm of speech act theory. This paper, therefore examines a pragma-crafting study of President Muhammadu Buhari’s 2022 Democracy Day Speech with a view to seeing how politicians use language to win the support of the masses. The speech was downloaded from the internet, and a total of eight (8) extracts were drawn from the transcript extracted from NTA Station and were rigorously analysed using a random sampling technique.  The speech systematically uses Pragma crating theory as the theoretical framework underpinning the study. Findings revealed that democracy speeches are structured in different ways to perform some indirect speech acts of promising, and asserting facts about their integrity. The study also revealed that another notable feature is the use of inclusive language, where President Buhari consistently used pronouns such as “we” and “us” to create a sense of unity and shared responsibility with his target audience. The paper concludes that by understanding the pragma-crafting features employed in this speech will further give an understanding of how political rhetoric is shaped by cultural, historical and personal factors in political settings.