I Belong to Everybody yet to Nobody: Pragmatic Acts in President Muhammadu Buhari’s Inaugural Speech

Abstract

An inaugural speech, which expresses the agenda of an elected candidate’s reaffirmation of the electioneering campaign promises and the goals, is made on the occasion of official inauguration or swearing-in of the candidate. Speeches of presidents and heads of states have always been subjected to linguistic and non-linguistic analyses. However, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Inaugural Speech has not enjoyed much documented analysis because it was recently delivered. This paper, therefore, investigates the use of words by the president from a pragmatic perspective in order to identify the pragmatic acts involved and the goals of the acts. Applying aspects of Jacob Mey’s (2001) pragmatic acts theory for descriptive analysis, and statistical details for quantitative analysis, nineteen practs were identified from the total of ninety-nine (overlapping) acts found in the speech, and were meant to achieve four goals. While proposing, promising, stating and assuring achieved the goal of revealing intention; acknowledging, thanking, remarking, saluting achieved the goal of admitting and appreciating; appealing, reminding, instructing/calling, advising, hoping, charging, informing, extending achieved the goal of direction/directives; and identifying, describing and defining achieved the goal of giving details on issues. In addition, the pragmatic acts were marked with some pragmatic tools, including shared situation knowledge, relevance, reference, inference. This paper adds to the understanding of rhetoric and the political agenda of President Muhammadu Buhari.

Keywords

• inaugural speech
• language of politics
• muhammadu buhari
• pragmatic acts