Pragmatic Functions of Selected Nigerian Supreme Court Judgements on Criminal Cases

Abstract

The understanding of the judges’ utterances plays a crucial role in achieving communicative goals in court judgements, including Nigerian Supreme Court judgements. Existing linguistic studies on court judgements approached them using narrative analysis, critical discourse analysis, stylistic analysis and the investigation of their grammatical features. However, scant attention has been paid to pragmatic functions of judges’ utterances in Supreme Court judgements. Therefore, this study considers the pragmatic functions of judges’ utterances in Nigerian Supreme Court judgements. John Austin’s Speech Act Theory, coupled with Srikant Sarangi’s Discourse types, serve as the theoretical framework. The data for this research are 2020 and 2021 Supreme Court judgements on criminal cases selected from Law Pavilion Electronic Law Reports. The years were purposively selected because of the significant expansion of the bench from 12 justices to 20 justices during the period, while the criminal cases were purposively selected because of their grave social implications in Nigerian society. It was discovered that the judges’ utterances are sites of layered illocutionary and discursive work. Judicial narratives do more than report events: they assert, state, disapprove and declare. It was also found that only institutional actors enabled by institutional procedures control shifts between discourse types. Thus, through the examination of the pragmatic functions of the utterances in Nigerian Supreme Court judgements, communicative goals are achieved.