ABSTRACT
Political speeches usually have great influence on people because politicians use it to sell their views and reshape the minds of the electorate; therefore, an analysis of such speeches is very important. This study focused on the pragmatics of selected political speeches of Donald Trump. A number of works have been done by scholars on the study and interpretation of political speeches of some political leaders and Presidents of nations using the speech act theory and other theories. However, to the knowledge of this researcher, scant attention is paid to the use of Grice’s Cooperative Principles and its maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner in analyzing political speeches of Donald Trump. These maxims enjoin speakers to be informative to the expected degree, to say things that are well founded, to be relevant and to be clear. The study seeks to apply these maxims to Donald Trump’s political speeches and analyze the extent to which it obeyed or flouted the maxims. Analytic survey design was adopted while the documented speeches of Donald Trump, other published and unpublished works and library materials were the components of the instruments for data collection. Based on the analysis of data using Grice’s cooperative principles, it was found out that those selected political speeches of Donald Trump obeyed the maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner to a great extent and flouted same to a lesser degree. This gave rise to a lot of implicatures that affirm the need for the study. Observations from the analyzed data made the following conclusions obvious: Pragmatic principles should be used in analyzing political speeches.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
It is an undoubted fact that in every human affair, language is ranked first. Communication with one another is easy because they share a common code that makes up the language. The use of language distinguishes man from animals because man in the words of Pushpinder, Syal and D.V. Jindal (6) is called “a talking animal” (homoloquens). There are, however, other means of communication used by humans such as flags, horns, gestures, Braille alphabet, morse code, mathematical symbols, sirens, sketches, maps, acting, mining, dancing, and so on. All these systems of communication are extremely limited, they are not so flexible, comprehensive, perfect and extensive as language in structure, its own system of organizing its component units into meaningful patterns (Syal and Jindal 5). Human language is unique in the sense that it has its own structure.
Humans establish and maintain social relationship with the use of language. They equally express their thoughts, feelings and emotions through the use of language. It is through the instrumentality of language that our non-material cultural heritage is preserved, knowledge imparted and disputes settled. This implies that the language to be used must be clear and understood by both the speakers and recipients so that the objective of communication may be achieved. Saussure and Harris see language as a formal system of signs governing the grammatical rules of combinations to communicate meaning (5).This definition stresses the fact that human language can be described “as a closed structural system consisting of rules that relate particular meanings”. Femi Akindele and Wale Adegbite defines language as a system of sounds or the vocal symbols by which human beings communicate experience (2)”.
Pragmatics is a subfield of Linguistics and Semiotics developed in the 1970’s. It studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. It studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act of speech in a concrete speech situation which is usually a conversation (hence conversational analysis). It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act. One is the informative intent or the sentence meaning and the other is the communicative intent or meaning. (Leech, 1983; Sperber and Wilson 1986). Pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (example grammar, lexicon and so on) of all speakers and listeners, but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker and other factors. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity since meaning relies on the manner, place, time and so on of the utterance. The ability to understand another speaker’s intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. This often includes one’s knowledge about the social distance, social status between the speakers involved, the cultural knowledge such as politeness and the linguistic knowledge, explicit and implicit.
The Encyclopedia Americana (1994) traced the word ‘Prag’ as derived from the Greek word ‘pragma’ which means deed or action. In the light of this Greek origin, Kempson, (56) sees pragmatics as “…. The study of the general principles involved in the retrieval of information from an utterance…”. In essence, the goals of pragmatic theories should be to explain how utterances convey meaning in context, how meaning is decoded from utterances in context and how people respond to meaning.”
Gazdar (2) defines pragmatics as those aspects of meaning of utterances which cannot be accounted for by straightforward references to truth conditions of the sentences uttered”. This
position receives tacit confirmation from Levinson’s affirmation that “pragmatics is the study of those relations between language context that are grammaticalized or encoded in the structure of language. Pragmatics according to Saeed is the study of how we use linguistic knowledge in context. Pragmatics deals with aspects of individual usage and context meaning. In view of this, pragmatics is the study of how hearers, for example, have to combine semantic knowledge with other types of knowledge and make inferences in order to interpret the speaker’s meaning. However, when sentences are viewed as utterances of individuals engaged in communication, a pragmatic approach is assumed.
Some of the aspects of language study in pragmatics include:
Deixis
It is a noun from classical Greek “Deiknymi” which means “to show”, “point out”. It is a shorthand device which needs various forms of contextual support. John .I. Saeed sees it as “a shorthand naming system for the participants involved in a talk”. However, in verbal communication, deixis in its broad sense is what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context whereas in its narrow sense, it refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns.
Presupposition
In pragmatics, a presupposition is an implicit assumption about the word or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. To presuppose something means to assume it. Presuppositions are situations that must exist for utterances to be appropriate. Statements like “The River Niger and River Benue met at Lokoja”, presupposed the existence of the two rivers and the town. The presuppositions prevent the violation of the maxim of relevance. When presuppositions are ignored, there is confusion. Utterances like “take some
more tea or have another beer, carry the presupposition that one has already had some. A presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker or addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context. It will generally remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial or question. However, negation of an expression does not change its presupposition. Example; in the following examples, sentence ‘A’ presupposes sentence ‘B’.
1A: I don’t regret leaving London
B: I left London
2A: I do regret leaving London B: I left London. Performatives
Performatives are sentences that are in themselves a kind of action, thus by uttering a sentence, a speaker makes a promise rather than just describing one; giving information, stating a fact or hinting an attitude. The study of performatives led to the hypothesis of the speech acts theory which holds that a speech event embodies three acts: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act. (Austin, 1963; Searle, 1969).
Implicature
Implicature is a technical term in the pragmatic linguistics, coined by H.P Grice, which refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even though it is neither expressed nor strictly implied by the utterance.
Pragmaticians are also keen in exploring why interlocutors can successfully converse with one another in conversation. A basic idea is that interlocutors obey certain principles in their participation so as to sustain the conversation. One of such principles is the cooperative
principle, which assumes that interactants cooperate in the conversation by contributing to the ongoing speech event (Grice, 1975). Another assumption is politeness principle (Leech, 1983) which maintains interlocutors behave politely to one another, since people respect each other’s face. (Brown and Levenson, 1978). Sperber and Wilson (1986) provided a cognitive explanation to social interactive speech events, which holds that in verbal communication, people try to be relevant to what they intend to say and to whom an utterance is intended.
The pragmatic principles people abide by in one language are often different from another. Thus, there has been a growing interest in how people in different languages observe a certain pragmatic principle. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies reported that what is polite in one language is sometimes not polite in another. Contrastive pragmatics, however, is not confined to the study of certain pragmatic principles. Cultural breakdowns, pragmatic failures, among others are also components of contrastive pragmatics. In speech, the choice of words and sentences depend fully on the speaker, leaving the hearer with the information he has passed on.
1.2 Statement of the problem
Scholars focus on researches on political speech making using different pragmatic principles. Krisagbedo (2010) explores the pragmatics of former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s speeches on corruption in Nigeria. Igwedibia (2012) studied the pragmatics of Obama’s speeches using Gricean theory of conversational maxims. Similarly, Okoro (2016) did a pragmatic study of President Muhammadu Buhari’s political speeches. From the foregoing, it is obvious that a lot has been done on political speeches using pragmatic principles, but to the knowledge of this researcher, there seems to be little evidence of any scholarly work on the political speeches of President Donald Trump in this regard.
The gap in scholarship which this researcher recognizes, therefore, is that not much has been done on the political speeches of President Donald Trump using Grice’s cooperative maxims. The felt need to fill this gap has led the researcher to embark on the study of President Donald Trump’s political speeches using pragmatic principles.
1. 3 Research Questions
This research revolves around and attempts to give answers to the following research questions:
(a) To what extent can Grice’s maxims of the cooperative principles be applied to Donald
Trump’s political speeches?
(b) To what extent do Trump’s political speeches adhere to or violate the maxims of quantity
and quality?
(c) To what extent do Trump’s political speeches adhere to or violate the maxims of manner
and relation?
1. 4 Objectives of the Study
This study investigates the pragmatics of selected political speeches of President Donald
Trump. The following specific objectives guide this study:
(a) To find out the degree to which Grice’s cooperative principles could be applied to the political speeches of President Donald Trump.
(b) To find out the degree to which the political speeches of President Donald Trump adhere to or violate the principles of quantity and quality.
(c) To discover the degree to which the political speeches of President Donald Trump adhere to or violate the principles of manner and relation.
1.5 Significance of the Study
Politics and language cannot be separated. For one to be efficient in political practice, one needs to have a grasp of the language. Beard, A. (2000) suggests that it is necessary to study the language of politics because it enables one to “understand how language is used by those who wish to gain power, those who wish to exercise power and those who wish to keep power” (2). He buttressed this point by saying that, “making speeches is a vital part of the politicians’ role in announcing policies and persuading people to agree with it” (35). However, many people do not understand the underlying pragmatic import of these speeches.
The findings of this study would provide a comprehensive guide to linguists/teachers and learners of English as a second language on how to analyze political and other speeches using Grice’s cooperative principles and the maxims. This study would serve as a reference material to scholars who have interest in studying pragmatics as it would promote a better understanding of speeches. The findings would help immensely in shaping the minds of linguists and students of English as a second language to understand how the cooperative maxims help to project the implicatures in speeches. The study will help students to have a firm grip on the application of context of situation in determining the implied meaning in speeches.
This work, no doubt, will constitute a worthy addition to the inventory of political discourse in Nigeria. It is our hope that the study will awaken linguistic consciousness in Nigerian electorate.
1.6 Scope of the Study
This study will be limited to some political speeches of President Donald Trump. (a) Acceptance of Nomination speech
(b)The inaugural speech
(c) First speech to congress (d)Election victory speech. (e) 2017 U.N. speech
The area of enquiry was limited to the application of the principles of quantity, quality, manner and relation to the political speeches of President Donald Trump.
This material content is developed to serve as a GUIDE for students to conduct academic research
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