Abstract
Chuka Ononye (University of Nigeria) The (mis)management of rapport amongst groups in Niger Delta (ND) communities has become a significant issue, which Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground (HG) depicts as having the capacity to aid or control the conflicts in the region. Linguistic studies on Yerima’s drama from the perspective of pragmatics have tended to use pragmatic acts to identify the discourse value of proverbs and functions of characters’ utterances but have not accounted for the politeness strategies utilised for rapport management, especially in conflict situations. This article, drawing on a rapport management model of politeness and aspects of speech act discourse, identifies the face, sociality rights, and interactional goals that characterise the conflict-motivated dialogues sampled in HG, and reveals the rapport management (RM) strategies through which these are managed in the text. Three conflict situations can be observed as prompting different RM strategies: cause-effect identification (CEI), militancy support (MSP), and disagreement (DSG) situations. CEI is marked by incriminating (involving eliciting and informing acts) and exonerating (including complimenting and acknowledging acts) strategies; MSP is indexed by strategies of persuasion (realised with face-enhancing/threatening acts), whereas DSG is typified by requesting (featuring explicit head acts and alerters) and blaming strategies (including insulting and threatening, aggravating moves). Generally, the requesting, blaming, and exonerating strategies are largely used by the ND youth in HG to probe, threaten, or disagree on specific issues, while the incriminating and persuasion strategies are mainly employed by the women to indict, influence, and predict future actions. The study of RM in the conflict situations depicted in the play sheds light on the often neglected cause of conflicts in contemporary Africa.
Highlights
In interpersonal relations, individuals or groups normally have different subjective perceptions of communicative situations ofharmony, based on their different social identities or ideological positionings
Existing linguistic studies on Niger Delta conflicts have hardly paid attention to the communicative strategies utilised for managing relations among groups in conflict, much less considering the representation of conflict in dramatic texts (Adeoti 2007), but have rather unduly focused on both local and international media reports of the conflicts (Ononye 2017; Ononye and Osunbade 2015)
The paper examined how dramatic participants manage their face, sociality rights, and interactional goals in conflict-motivated situations in Hard Ground. The analysis of this play revealed that rapport management strategies were used across three conflict situations involving cause-effect identification, militancy support, and disagreement
Summary
Individuals or groups normally have different subjective perceptions of communicative situations of (dis)harmony, based on their different social identities or ideological positionings. This article, by contrast, draws on a more recent discursive model of rapport management, which – as the analysis will show – is able to reveal the conflictinduced pragmatic strategies exploited for managing social relations by different participants in Niger Delta conflict. It examines the pragmatic strategies and linguistic forms through which aspects of rapport are negotiated in Yerima’s play and reveals how discourse participants’ faces, sociality rights, and interactional goals are (mis)managed in it. This article contributes to the critical appreciation of Yerima’s dramatic work and extends existing work in literary pragmatics
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