Creative Vulgarism, Oral Hawking and Entrepreneurship Discourse: A Radical Deconstructionist Approach

Abstract

Advertising discourses as forms of business communication strategies are used in entrepreneurial businesses to attract potential buyers to advertised goods and services. However, there exists an academic gulf that need to be bridged in the aspect of musical entertainment in advertisements that accommodate vulgarized exuberance for entrepreneurial purposes, especially in the aspect of local street hawking. This study, therefore, vigorously explores discursive elements in ‘gutter language’ as potential business stratagem if appropriately exploited in projecting, promoting and propagating some specific locally-produced wares in street hawking in Nigerian metropolitan cities. The study adopts eclectic theoretical approach including Postmodernism to complement a deconstructive reading of advertising talk-texts of oral street hawking enterprise, and provide for the overlap of opposites, where high art and advertising mix with such notions as documentary, history and theory to deny parochial ideas and perspectives of art. Narratology is deployed to disclose features of the narrative discourse contained in the vulgarized dramatic lyrics. The data, derived from an audio-visual recording was painstakingly transcribed, carefully sorted and converted to analysable units of sample-speech for qualitative content analysis. Findings reveal series of shaping of meaning of text-formation in the vulgarized dramatic lyrics by other texts to explicate myriads of discourse issues with the means of elements like vulgarized simile, symbolic representations and metaphors of sex and sexuality. Vehicular linguistic and discursive elements such as pluralized pronominal references, identity question, morphological processing of hyper-functional conversion, most of which are evidence of Nigerian castratorship of the enslaving medium – English, are narratologically deployed to drive persuasive messages of revolutionary and decolonization processes in the context of non-conventional advertisement such as street hawking. Language thus productively provides the “search engines” for detecting functional and interpersonal pragmatics whose inherent semantic information for effective entrepreneurship discourse are meant to manipulate, maximize and monopolize the market space for capitalist ends.