PRAGMATIC PRESUPPOSITIONS IN PRESIDENT MUHAMMADU BUHARI’S CHANNELS TV MEDIA INTERVIEW

Abstract

So much political discourse scholarship has concentrated on speech acts, critical discourse analysis, or stylistic devices, while presupposition has rarely been the central focus of a full study. This study, therefore, investigates pragmatic presupposition in President Muhammadu Buhari's interview on Channels Television, aired on 5 January 2022, in which he was interviewed by Seun Okinbaloye and Maupe Ogun-Yusuf on insecurity, the economy, farmer-herder relations, electoral reform, and the politics of succession ahead of the 2023 election. The study adopts Yule's (1996) six-part classifications of presupposition as its framework and examines fifteen data purposively selected from the interview transcript since presupposition is one of the subtle ways political actors communicate meanings they never directly assert. Findings reveal that all six types of presuppositions identified by Yule are present, with existential presupposition occurring most frequently at 36 percent, followed by factive presupposition at 35 percent, lexical presupposition at 22 percent, structural and counter-factive presupposition at 3 percent each, and non-factive presupposition at 1 percent. The study shows that both the President and his interviewers rely heavily on assumed background knowledge to communicate positions taken for granted rather than stated outright. This paper concludes that presupposition is a significant pragmatic resource in Nigerian political interviews and recommends further study of other presidential interviews using the same model.