A Pragma-Crafting Study of President Muhammadu Buhari’s 2022 Democracy Day Speech
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Date
2022
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HAYTEE PREE
Abstract
Political speeches have been studied from different perspectives and using different ways of analyses.
However, existing studies on these political speeches have largely been focused on interviews, inaugurals,
democracy speeches, media interviews, etc. using the tools of speech acts, pragmatic acts, critical studies
and stylistics. Despite these, there are still insufficient studies of analyses of political discourse using
Achoea’s Pragma Crafting Theory as a new paradigm of speech act theory. This paper, therefore
examines a pragma-crafting study of President Muhammadu Buhari’s 2022 Democracy Day Speech with
a view to seeing how politicians use language to win the support of the masses. The speech was
downloaded from the internet, and a total of eight (8) extracts were drawn from the transcript extracted
from NTA Station and were rigorously analysed using a random sampling technique. The speech
systematically uses Pragma crating theory as the theoretical framework underpinning the study. Findings
revealed that democracy speeches are structured in different ways to perform some indirect speech acts of
promising, and asserting facts about their integrity. The study also revealed that another notable feature
is the use of inclusive language, where President Buhari consistently used pronouns such as “we” and
“us” to create a sense of unity and shared responsibility with his target audience. The paper concludes
that by understanding the pragma-crafting features employed in this speech will further give an
understanding of how political rhetoric is shaped by cultural, historical and personal factors in political
settings.
Keywords: Pragmatics, Pragma Crafting, Democracy, Language and Politics