PROSODIC FEATURES AND PRAGMATIC MEANING CONSTRUCTION IN LIBOROUS OSHOMA’S THE ADVOCATE

Abstract

This study investigates the interaction between prosodic features and pragmatic acts in Liborous Oshoma’s televised political advocacy programme, The Advocate. Although political discourse has received considerable scholarly attention, much of the existing research has concentrated on lexical, syntactic, rhetorical and ideological features, with comparatively limited attention to the contribution of prosody to pragmatic meaning construction. The study therefore examines how intonation, stress, pitch, rhythm, tempo and pauses contribute to the realisation of communicative acts in five purposively selected episodes: Affluent Poverty, Fall of the Economy, Suffering and Adjusting, Arrogance of Power, and CBN and the Burden of Justice. A qualitative content-analysis design was adopted, supported by descriptive frequency counts and acoustic observation using Praat. The unit of analysis was the prosodically marked utterance or utterance sequence that performed an identifiable pragmatic act. Halliday’s Systemic Phonology and Mey’s Pragmatic Acts Theory provided the analytical framework. Forty coded instances were identified and classified into five mutually defined categories: condemnation, warning/foreboding, mobilisation, mockery/satire, and education/clarification. The findings show that high pitch and emphatic stress were most frequently associated with condemnation; falling tone, reduced tempo and strategic pauses with warning; heightened intensity and staccato rhythm with mobilisation; rise-fall and fall-rise contours with mockery and satire; and relatively level tone with moderate tempo with clarification. Condemnation was the most frequent category, followed by mobilisation, warning/foreboding, mockery/satire and education/clarification. The study concludes that prosody is not merely ornamental in political advocacy discourse; rather, it is a significant resource through which contextual meaning, rhetorical force and civic orientation are constructed.