A critical pragmatic study of stance in peter Obi's world press conference speeches

IF 1.7 1区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-08-29 DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.004

Felicia Oamen

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has dominated Nigeria's political space since 2015. However, Peter Obi's emergence as the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in 2022 challenged the hegemony of APC. This study, therefore, critically examined the pragmatic features of Obi's world press conference speeches, which were produced to contest Bola Ahmed Tinubu's (the APC presidential candidate) victory in the 2023 presidential election. Specifically, the paper analysed the pragmatics of stance-taking to examine the ideological framing of resistance in Nigeria's political discourse. Data comprised three media speeches delivered by Obi after Tinubu's victory. The study adopted Mey's (2001) critical pragmatics, notions from van Dijk's approach to critical discourse analysis, and Hyland's (2005) stance theory, with focus on the metaphorical characteristics, speech acts, implicatures, presupposition and politeness norms deployed to represent self as the ideal leader. The representations were achieved through strategies of victimisation, delegitimisation, blame allocation, subtle criminalization of others, and self-glorification. The study concluded that stance taking by Nigerian politicians is moderated by speaker's background knowledge of the country's restive democratic environment.

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彼得·欧比世界新闻发布会演讲立场的批判性实用主义研究

自2015年以来，全进步大会（APC）一直主导着尼日利亚的政治空间。然而，彼得·奥比在2022年成为工党总统候选人，挑战了APC的霸权。因此，这项研究批判性地审视了奥比世界新闻发布会演讲的实用主义特征，这些演讲是为争夺博拉·艾哈迈德·蒂努布（APC总统候选人）在2023年总统选举中的胜利而制作的。具体而言，本文分析了立场采取的语用学，以研究尼日利亚政治话语中抵抗的意识形态框架。数据包括奥比在蒂努布获胜后发表的三次媒体演讲。本研究采用了Mey（2001）的批判语用学、van Dijk的批评话语分析方法和Hyland（2005）的立场理论，重点研究了隐喻特征、言语行为、含意、预设和礼貌规范对理想领导者自我表现的影响。这些表现是通过受害、非法化、指责分配、对他人的微妙犯罪化和自我美化等策略实现的。该研究得出结论，尼日利亚政治家的立场受到演讲者对该国动荡的民主环境的背景知识的影响。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

18.80%

发文量

219

期刊介绍： Since 1977, the Journal of Pragmatics has provided a forum for bringing together a wide range of research in pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Our aim is to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. The Journal of Pragmatics also encourages work that uses attested language data to explore the relationship between pragmatics and neighbouring research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. Alongside full-length articles, discussion notes and book reviews, the journal welcomes proposals for high quality special issues in all areas of pragmatics which make a significant contribution to a topical or developing area at the cutting-edge of research.