A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF PROVERBS IN SELECTED WORKS OF OLA ROTIMI
Abstract:
Language is a potent weapon through which ideas, thoughts, opinions, messages and information generally are exchanged between groups of people to ensure inter-personal relationship. It is a symbol of people‟s identity and a means of identifying people‟s value system. This is particularly true of proverbs which are generally believed to be words of wisdom, usually didactic, memorisable and therefore passed down easily from one generation to another. Proverbs are context dependent and culture specific. Since proverbs cannot exist outside of the context of use, pragmatics; the study of contextual meaning, is adopted as the tool of the study. To understand the prevailing context of the selected proverbs, the socio-cultural background and orientation of a group of language users are considered. This implies that culture occupies a vintage position in the study of proverbs in order to explore their contextual meaning and didactic significance. However, cultural diversity of language users, (particularly proverb users) has yet to be given adequate consideration in researches on proverbs. Therefore, the thrust of this study is to deploy the use of a linguistic theory for the analysis of literary texts with the aim of identifying the moral significance of the selected proverbs. One hundred proverbs from four works of Ola Rotimi, are analysed using a descriptive research approach based on modified version of Lawal‟s (1997) pragmatic model. The findings reveal the need for the primary and secondary levels of meaning, the existence of direct and indirect illocutionary acts, and the significance of four context/competence variables out of the six propounded by Lawal. The findings further affirm Malinowski‟s distinction between situational context and cultural context as a basis of meaning explication in pragmatics. In conclusion, the study reveals that selected proverbs perform certain didactic functions and that the functions are revealed through a careful exploration of the prevailing context.
A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF PROVERBS IN SELECTED WORKS OF OLA ROTIMI
