USE OF DEIXIS IN THE 2015 ELECTION CAMPAIGN SPEECHES OF MUHAMMADU BUHARI

📄 Project Abstract

People engage in verbally mediated interactions under specific social conditions that both constrain and enable their abilities to relate to one another and to the world. These conditions are commonly treated in the literature under the rubric of context, a term that covers phenomena as varied as the immediate interpersonal setting, face-to-face interaction, the spatial, ideological, speech communities and discursive formations. Deixis occupies a central place in the study of context because, as William Hanks puts it, it is the single most obvious way in which the speech setting is embedded in language structure itself (6). There are various definitions of the term deixis. For George Yule (99) deictic expressions generally are bits of language which we can only understand in terms of speaker's intended meaning. Yule's contention above is that the reference of such expressions cannot be determined without knowing the extra-linguistic context of the utterance (who uttered them, where? a...