A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF PROVERBS IN SELECTED WORKS OF OLA ROTIMI

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dc.contributor.authorZAKARIYAH, MOSHOOD
dc.date.accessioned2017-02-13T10:52:57Z
dc.date.available2017-02-13T10:52:57Z
dc.date.issued2016-06
dc.descriptionA DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE SCHOOL OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES, AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA, IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE AWARD OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (PHD) DEGREE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND LITERARY STUDIES, FACULTY OF ARTS, AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA-NIGERIAen_US
dc.description.abstractLanguage 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.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/123456789/8694
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.subjectPRAGMATIC ANALYSIS,en_US
dc.subjectPROVERBS,en_US
dc.subjectSELECTED WORKS,en_US
dc.subjectOLA ROTIMI,en_US
dc.titleA PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF PROVERBS IN SELECTED WORKS OF OLA ROTIMIen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US
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