Abstract
The paper examines the pragmatic functions that crisis-motivated proverbs play in Ola Rotimi's The Gods is not to Blame. It picks its inspiration from the little attention hitherto paid, in the linguistic literature, to both the specific proverbs that are spurred by crisis in the play and the pragmatic roles of such proverbs. For data, only the proverbs that are necessitated by the crisis-situations in the text are sampled, and these are analysed, using the recent theory of pragmatic acts (Mey 2001). The study reveals that crisis-motivated proverbs in The Gods are not to Blame, which are of two types: social and political, are characterized by practs such as those of counselling, cautioning, challenging, veiling, persuading, prioritizing, encouraging, threatening and admitting. These are psychological acts which exploit contextual features such as reference, metaphor, inference, shared situation knowledge, shared cultural knowledge and relevance. The paper concludes that studying literary proverbs used in crisis situations, from a pragmatic perspective, both throws additional insights into the paremiological pool and promises to provide a veritably helpful tool for language teaching.
Highlights
A large concentration of the studies on Ola Rotimi's The Gods are not to Blame, The Gods, come from the literary (e.g. Dasylva 2004) and sociological (e.g. Green/KoruboSolomon 2002) perspectives
It is expected that this paper provide additional paremiological insights into the literature and help in language teaching
Given that crises make a lot of demand on the psyche, all the instances of crisis-motivated proverbs (CMP) soc and CMPs pol are psychological acts, which interact with contextual features such as reference (REF), metaphor (MPH), inference (INF), shared situational knowledge (SSK), shared cultural knowledge (SCK) and relevance (REL) to produce the following practs: couselling, cautioning, accusing, challenging, veiling, persuading, prioritizing, encouraging, threatening and admitting
Summary
A large concentration of the studies on Ola Rotimi's The Gods are not to Blame, The Gods, come from the literary (e.g. Dasylva 2004) and sociological (e.g. Green/KoruboSolomon 2002) perspectives. Culture is "the way of life for an entire society" (Jary and Jary 1991: 101), which means that aspects of human life such as codes of manners, dressing, religion, ritual norms, behaviour, belief systems and language are subsumed under culture This large scope, which is outside the focus of this paper, has generated issues on the universalistic and relativistic dimensions of culture (cf Khadka 2000). Values, which control other components of culture, deal with what a society attaches importance to; norms relate to patterns of behaviour designed for individual members of a society in particular situations; institutions relate to the divisions of a society where values and norms are applied; artifacts are objects that are produced from the values and norms of a culture All these components are largely relativistic in nature, and they illuminate a society's systems, beliefs and worldviews. Akin Odebunmi: Pragmatik Functions of Crisis – Motivated Proverbs in Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not to Blame
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