Pragmatic Facework and Economic Suffering in Nigerian Presidential Rhetoric: A Speech Analysis of Bola Tinubu (2023–2025)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36312/jolls.v5i3.3220Keywords:
Pragmatics, Facework, Politeness, Political discourse, Economic reform, Presidential rhetoricAbstract
This study investigates the pragmatic strategies employed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in constructing representations of economic hardship in official speeches. Grounded in Goffman’s theory of face, Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, and Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, the analysis explores how facework operates as a communicative tool for managing empathy, justifying reform, and performing political legitimacy during times of national crisis. Using a qualitative discourse-analytic approach, the study examines four national speeches delivered between 2023 and 2025. This includes two Independence Day addresses (October 1, 2023 and 2024) and two Democracy Day speeches (June 12, 2023 and 2025). A combination of deductive and inductive thematic coding was used to identify face-sensitive and inference-driven pragmatic strategies within the speeches. These strategies were found to jointly sustain self- and other-face, reduce interpretive resistance, and frame economic suffering as a moral, collective responsibility. Based on these findings, the study proposes the Legitimation-as-Performance Model—a three-part framework comprising relational calibration, inferential framing, and discursive buffering. This model conceptualizes how political actors perform legitimacy through coordinated facework and inference-rich rhetoric, particularly within fragile or transitional democracies. The study contributes to political discourse scholarship in the Global South by demonstrating how language serves as a pragmatic tool of governance, not only to persuade but to negotiate trust, deflect critique, and construct civic patience.
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