A Critical Pragmatic Analysis of Selected Tweets on The 2022 Christmas Day Murder in Nigeria

Abstract

Police brutality among other forms of social injustice, has been a controversial issue generating mixed reactions from majority of the Nigerian citizens. While some perceive this vice as an adverse effect of indiscipline among the Nigerian police force, others view it as the failure of the Nigerian political system towards the maintenance of law and order. Critical pragmatics as an approach to critical linguistics studies the issues of power and ideology embedded in different communicative acts performed by interlocutors in different speech contexts. Interlocutors’ communicative intentions are discernible in critical pragmatics by virtue of the application of different pragmatic strategies. This study aims to examine selected tweets of the 2022 Christmas day murder from a pragmatic perspective. More specifically, the study adopts Critical Pragmatics as the conceptual framework for the study. Korta & Perry’s (2011) perspectives to Critical Pragmatics are adopted for the analysis of five (5) purposively selected tweets. The study also employs both the qualitative and quantitative research designs. The study found that implicature is the most preponderant pragmatic strategy used in the selected tweets. In conclusion, the use of the critical pragmatic approach for the analysis of the selected tweets has revealed the interrelationship between the variables of class, power and ideology which form the basis of the tweeters’ judgment.