Pragmatic Acts in Characters’ Utterances in Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu

Abstract

Studies on Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu have examined the use of lexical choices and discourse markers in the drama text neglecting the choice of meaning negotiation in characters’ utterances. This paper, therefore, undertook a pragmatic investigation of how meanings and actions are generated in a play text using Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu. Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Act theory was used alongside implicature and presupposition as elements of pragmatics to analyse five (5) purposively selected extracts from the play. This is done to critically bring to the fore the practs performed in the utterances, the maxims obeyed and those flouted and the type of presupposition made. Findings revealed that the practs of informing, explaining, stating, naming, and influencing were used in the text unveil the thought pattern of the audience. The paper also revealed that the pivotal role context plays in decoding the exact meaning(s) conveyed in each of the extracted utterances. Context is instrumental to the performance of certain acts. From this, the paper concludes that in order to do things with words and to use characters to communicate effectively in any given context, especially in tradition based plays like Women of Owu, a writer needs to have the knowledge of grammar as well as the knowledge of how to use language from a functional perspective in the contextual and traditional backgrounds.