A Pragma-Stylistic Study of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Acceptance and Inaugural Speeches

This study investigates the pragma-stylistic features of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s acceptance speech of March 1, 2023 and inaugural speech of May 29, 2023, from the perspectives of Searle’s (1969,1975) Speech Acts Theory, Brown and Levinson’s (1978,1987) Politeness Theory and Levinson’s (1983) Deixis. A close analysis of the speeches reveals that President Bola Tinubu employs distinct pragma-linguistic strategies in line with context and purpose, whereas the acceptance speech emphasises positive politeness, inclusive deixis, expressive and commissive acts towards fostering solidarity and legitimacy among the citizenry. The inaugural speech prioritizes directive acts and authoritative deixis to assert institutional power. The study further observes that Tinubu’s commissive acts generate high public expectations, highlighting a critical tension between rhetorical promises and governance outcomes. The findings underscore the contextsensitive nature of politeness and deixis in political discourse and suggest that pragmatic competence, while evident in the speeches, must be evaluated against actual policy implementation.

Keywords: Language Pragma-Stylistics Linguistic Politeness Strategies Politeness Markers

Authors

• Rowland Simeon Noah
  Department of English, University of Uyo
  simeonrowland@gmail.com
• Esther Ekom Robert
  Department of English, University of Uyo
  estherobert2@yahoo.com