Pragmatic Choice of Diction and Deictic Elements in Select Covid-19 Media Discourse in Nigeria

Abstract

Recent scholarly works on Covid-19 media discourse and medical discourse have only focused on the use of neologisms within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and language use that investigates communication and exchange of shared background knowledge as important factors between doctors and their patients. This paper investigates the pragmatic choice of words and the various contexts in which deictic elements have been employed by members of Nigeria's Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 to convey meaning with the public. As a pragmatic study, attention is given to the mood aspect, using Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to elicit the potential motivations behind the pragmatic choice of words of the speakers. This paper analyses a total of 92 utterances from four speeches of the Nigeria's Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 members delivered at one of their live telecast press briefings on Tuesday, 27th April 2020, were taped and transcribed for analysis. The utterances were analysed with antconc software, which provided a frequency tally of the specific deictic elements used in the speeches. The findings of this study on the one hand, indicate that speakers at the press briefing used person deixis such as I, We, and Us in both inclusive and exclusive contexts to demonstrate pity for the public and to pragmatically connect with the public as if both the speech producers and the public are engaged in a serious battle against Covid-19. On the other hand, our grammatical analysis revealed the use of military diction, leading the researcher to conclude that the members of the Nigerian Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 assume State authority for themselves.