A Pragma- Stylistic Analysis of the First Speech of President Muhammad Buhari on Coronavirus Pandemic

Abstract

Scholarly works abound on President Muhammadu Buhari’s political speeches but very few have been done on Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, this paper aims at investigating a stylo-pragmatic study of President Buhari’s First speech on Coronavirus Pandemic with a view to exploring how he uses language to express and convince people of their thoughts about the issues happening in the nation. To achieve this, ten (10) utterances relating to themes of economic effect, palliative measures, world power measures, security measures, preventive measures, and importance of human lives were purposively selected from the speech and analysed from the points of Mey’s (2001) pragmatic acts and a stylistic tool of foregrounding as the theoretical framework. The study revealed that the president’s language is characterised by the practs of securing and informing the readers about the covid-19 pandemic and government’s efforts to secure the nation, and contain the virus against further spread. This is drawn on contextual features such as Shared Situational Knowledge (SSK), Metaphor (MPH) and Relevance (REF). The study also revealed that other instantiated pragmatic acts of securing, preventing, updating, relieving, easing, promising, pacifying, confirming and authenticating were found in the selected utterances of presidential briefing on covid-19. Keywords: Covid-19, Pragmatics, Stylistics, Practs, Political speech.