Volume 24, Issue 2 (September 2024)

Nigerians’ reflection on the phenomenon of death equally captures their philosophy of life, which is patently articulated in their epitaphic discourse. Therefore, this paper argues that the epitaphic formula “Here lies...” is not merely locative but a pragmatic philosophical statement of embodied finitude that calls for existential reflection. Thus, this study, using a three-part theoretical framework of Embodied Finitude, Deictic Shift Theory, and Gricean Implicature, analyses fifty (50) epitaphs with the formula “Here lies/lie the body of...” from Atan Cemetery, Yaba and Vaults & Gardens, Ikoyi in Lagos. Existentially, “here” reduces the deceased from agent to coordinate, thus expressing a philosophy of “being-after-death” as “being-at-a-location.” Hence, the formulaic expression encodes what Heidegger calls “being-there,” existence in terms of spatial presence. Pragmatically, “here” is an indexical anchor that obliges deictic alignment, implying that the reader, by reading “here,” must have the same spatial “here” as the corpse. This situation results in the implicature, “You will be here too.” While collocates such as “sleep” and “rest” project a philosophy of continuity, “here lies” resets material realism, thus creating a productive tension that allows a lasting reflection. It shows that epitaphs achieve their philosophical significance with minimal deictic resources, drawing on spatial deixis to ground metaphysical claims about death in the reader’s lived experience of finitude. In view of the above, this paper contributes to death discourse studies by showing how deixis operates simultaneously as a philosophical claim and a technology of reflection in African memorial discourse.

Punctuation is commonly regarded as an orthographic system for organising written language, but its functions extend to grammatical structuring and the direction of textual interpretation. The Punch newspaper was selected because of its established role in Nigerian public discourse, while the editorial “Police and Ige’s Murder” was chosen because it presents a sustained account of competing institutional claims and investigative controversy. This study examines punctuation as a grammatical and meaning-directing resource in The Punch newspaper editorial, “Police and Ige’s Murder,” published on May 15, 2002. Situated within a pragma-semantic perspective, the study investigates how punctuation marks contribute to the organisation of grammatical structures, the interpretation of propositions, and the pragmatic construction of meaning in a politically charged editorial discourse. The analysis focuses on six punctuation marks: full stops, commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens, and question marks in selected textual segments. The study demonstrates that punctuation interacts systematically with lexical and syntactic choices to construct emphasis, contrast, doubt, accusation, interrogation, and evaluative positioning. In particular, question marks in rhetorical questions intensify the editorial’s demand for institutional accountability, while commas and full stops regulate information flow and establish relationships among successive claims. Quotation marks distinguish reported assertions from the editorial voice, creating pragmatic distance and foregrounding contradictions in official accounts. Apostrophes and hyphens further contribute to grammatical precision and textual cohesion. The study concludes that punctuation performs not merely orthographic but also grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic functions, enabling the editorial to encode evaluative meanings and guide readers’ inferences. Consequently, punctuation constitutes an important resource for examining meaning construction, ideological positioning, and accountability discourse in Nigerian newspaper editorials.

Political discourse is inherently competitive, with politicians deploying confrontational language to negotiate power, construct identities, and shape public perception. This study examines strategic impoliteness as a persuasive resource in Nyesom Wike's political discourse, arguing that his confrontational rhetoric extends beyond mere violations of politeness norms. The data comprise five politically significant discourse events involving Wike, purposively sampled from Nigerian newspaper outlets across a bounded period of intra-party and gubernatorial conflict spanning September 2022 to August 2026, from which 22 discrete pragmkatic excerpts were purposively selected based on strategic salience and representativeness, with sampling continued until saturation. Adopting a qualitative, corpus-informed discourse-analytical approach, the study draws on Culpeper's (2011) impoliteness theory and Reyes' (2011) strategies of legitimization to identify Wike's impoliteness strategies and the persuasive work they perform before the electorate. Findings show that Wike frequently employs bald-on-record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, and sarcasm to delegitimize opponents' competence and integrity, while legitimizing his own authority through appeals to experience, projected consequences, and emotionally charged solidarity. These strategies function as both face-threatening acts and persuasive mechanisms, positioning Wike as a decisive leader against untrustworthy rivals. The study concludes that impoliteness here operates as a strategic, audience-conditioned resource, extending impoliteness theory beyond its predominantly Western contexts.

This study examines maxim flouting in naturally occurring child discourse and explores how apparent departures from conversational norms remain meaningful in interaction. Guided by Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory, it adopts a qualitative discourse-analytic approach to 13 hours of recorded interactions involving 50 children aged 5–13 in classroom, playground, and youth fellowship settings in Nsukka Metropolis. The analysis identified 58 instances of maxim flouting, classified according to Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Findings reveal developmental differences in pragmatic behaviour. Younger children mainly flouted Quantity through over-elaboration, while children in middle childhood increasingly manipulated topics through Relation flouting. Early adolescents demonstrated more sophisticated Quality flouting, particularly through irony and hyperbole. Context also shaped the pragmatic strategies employed. Rather than causing communicative breakdown, maxim flouting enabled children to convey meanings through shared assumptions and inference. The study highlights the value of combining Grice’s taxonomy with Relevance Theory to explain pragmatic development.

This study reanalyses police interrogation in Kano metropolis through a rhetoro-pragmatic forensic discourse framework that explains how pragmatic actions acquire rhetorical force in institutional investigative encounters. Although previous studies of Nigerian police interrogation have examined discourse control, resistance, argumentation and responsibility negotiation, less attention has been given to a turn-level reanalysis that connects the distribution of recurring interactional functions with their rhetorical organisation across a documentary corpus. The study therefore revisits three appendix transcripts in Sadiq’s (2011) dissertation from Sabon Gari, Fagge and Nassarawa police divisions. The analysis covers 220 eligible police and accused, suspect or offender turns and examines elicitation, accusation, directive, prompt, denial, excuse, evaluation, threat, reassurance and negotiation, with Other retained as a residual category. Quantitative findings show that elicitation is the most frequent function, followed by denial and directive, while the qualitative analysis demonstrates how these actions combine in different sequences of information seeking, responsibility attribution, resistance, coercion, explanation and consequence management. The study contributes a turn-level account of forensic interaction that integrates descriptive quantitative evidence with context-sensitive rhetoro-pragmatic interpretation. It argues that the forensic significance of interrogation lies not only in obtaining information but also in how competing accounts are rhetorically organised and converted into potentially consequential records.

Pre-election activities and campaign speeches by Nigerian politicians have been well documented in media (humanistic and social scientific) studies; however, the ways citizens use online communicative platforms to express their (de)satisfaction with campaign moves have not enjoyed as much scholarly attention. The paper explores impoliteness strategies and linguistic forms deployed by the Nigerian Online Community (NOC) to interrogate the 'Balablu Bulaba' gaffe made by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (henceforth, BAT) during his 2023 presidential election campaign. This is motivated by the fact that online reactions, just like online voting, are not always considered a genuine platform for opinion; however, they cause a great shift in the NOC’s political stance. For data, 150 online trail comments on the reports of BAT’s gaffe were purposively sampled from three online media platforms (TVC News YouTube handle, Punch Online Newspaper, and Nairaland online community website), transposed to MS Word with line numbers, and subjected to pragmatic analysis, with insights from Culpeper’s impoliteness formulae and aspects of lexical semantics discourse. Four impoliteness strategies are revealed: negative impoliteness, positive impoliteness, bald on-record impoliteness, and mock politeness. All these are deployed through lexical resources with derogatory comparisons, negative associations, and laughing emojis to ridicule BAT, exaggerate his incompetence, challenge his supporters, and allude to better presidential candidates. With the noticeable predominance of negative impoliteness realised with multimodal linguistic forms, it can be inferred that the NOC may have been disappointed with BAT’s presidential candidacy and his general performance in the election campaign speeches.

This study investigates semilingualism in relation to linguistic proficiency in Yoruba-English bilinguals. The concept of semilingualism is a contentious issue in Linguistics. The general perception is that people who speak two languages vary in how much they use each language. However, some believe that some bilinguals have little competence in both languages. The study is based on the threshold hypothesis, which identifies the thresholds a bilingual undergoes in using the two languages in their repertoire. The study drew data from Yoruba-English undergraduates at Anchor University, Lagos, Nigeria. The researchers used oral interviews to collect data from 50 informants. For ease of analysis, the researchers used three of the six criteria Hansegård (1977) provided for identifying semilinguals to analyse the data. The study reveals that these bilinguals have more mastery of their L2 (English) than their L1 (Yoruba). While inadequate vocabulary is more apparent in the L1, incorrect grammatical expressions are more common in the L2.

This study examines Yoruba-English code-switching as a stylistic and pragmatic resource in contemporary Yoruba praise-and-worship music. Contemporary gospel music remains comparatively under-examined as a site of bilingual aesthetic and theological practice relative to classical Yoruba oral genres. Drawing on foregrounding theory and Myers-Scotton’s (1993) Markedness Model, the analysis classifies numbered excerpts drawn from eight purposively selected and fully transcribed songs, four by Tope Alabi and four by Adeyinka Alaseyori, according to structural form, textual position, and discourse function. The findings indicate that code-switching is concentrated at rhetorically prominent points, including refrains, testimonial passages, direct invocations, and climactic repetitions, rather than being evenly distributed throughout the lyrics. The songs display two broad compositional tendencies: English-anchored hooks set against Yoruba-dominant verses or ad-libs, and Yoruba-anchored refrains containing selective English insertions. English expressions in the Yoruba-dense song Arojinle cluster around themes of survival, mortality, divine intervention, and public testimony. The study argues that Yoruba-English code-switching in the selected corpus is a patterned stylistic practice through which gospel performers negotiate congregational participation, intimacy, indigenous theological specificity, and wider Christian intelligibility. The conclusions are corpus-specific and illustrative rather than statistically generalisable.

The Critical studies of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry have extensively examined questions of race, gender, identity, marginalisation, urban experience, and Black social life. Less attention, however, has been given to the ways in which the rhythmic organisation of her poems participates in the production of these meanings. This study examines rhythm as a formal principle in selected poems by Brooks, arguing that rhythm is not merely a sonic embellishment but an active element in the construction of poetic meaning. Drawing on literary Formalism and close textual analysis, the study investigates the effects of repetition, stress, pause, lineation, syntax, rhyme, and rhythmic variation on the movement and significance of Brooks’s poetic language. It focuses on how patterns of rhythmic regularity and deviation shape voice, emphasis, emotional tension, memory, identity, and representations of social experience. The analysis demonstrates that Brooks frequently adapts the rhythms of ordinary speech while modifying them through repetition, interruption, acceleration, and pause, thereby creating formal structures that intensify or complicate the meanings of her poems. The study concludes that attention to rhythmic form provides a more precise account of how Brooks’s poetry transforms lived experience into patterned poetic expression and demonstrates the interdependence of form and meaning in her work.