Pragmatic Analysis Of Congratulatory Messages As A Form Of Advertisement In Selected Nigerian Newspapers

📄 Project Abstract

This work is a pragmatic analysis of congratulatory messages in selected Nigerian newspapers. It looked at how Pragmatics as a field of study, clarified written texts, that is congratulatory messages. It also analysed the language and pragmatic features of newspaper congratulatory messages. The data for the study came from three different Nigerian newspapers: Daily Trust, Nigerian Tribune and Vanguard. The data was collected from a media house and libraries in Kaduna and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria respectively. Congratulatory messages are literarily meant to express compliments but senders have used the avenue to achieve two motives; advertise and compliment. An eclectic use of Bach and Harnishs Mutual Contextual Belief (MCB), Austins (1962) and Searles (1965) Speech Acts Theory, and inference were used to analyse and explain how readers understood the hidden intentions contained in the messages and how the intentions were inferred through MCBs. Since the intentions and well wishes...