ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACTS IN SPOUSAL CONFLICTS IN SELECTED NIGERIAN COMEDY SKITS

Abstract

Beyond the words deployed in conversations are their semantic realisations which determine the actions and inactions of interlocutors. At the base of domestic conflicts in Nigeria is the semantic value attached to the words used in exchanges during such conflicts. It is against this background that this study set out to interrogate the speech acts in selected Nigerian comedy skits spousal violence. To actualise this, four Facebook comedy skits were randomly surfed and subjected to analysis based on insights from J.L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory. It was found that Expositives (affirming, postulating, arguing, and challenging), Behabitives (challenging, criticising, and apologising) as well as Exercitives (ordering, warning, affirming) being the preponderant acts in the corpus. The study concludes that the identified speech acts align with the dictates of the discourse genre of domestic (intimate) violence, which the corpus represents. It is hoped that in examining the speech acts in domestic violence as done in this study, ESL and ESP instructors will gain more pedagogical resources which can empower discursive interventions to broker peaceful linguistic deployments among Nigerian couples.