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SPOTTING AND ANALYSING THE SPEECH ACTS ENSHRINED IN THE DISCOURSE OF KAMILU AMOOADENIYI’S TOO BEAUTIFUL TO DIE (2015)
Abstract
In their everyday life’s conversation, people produced utterances which commit others to partaking in actions. Those are speech acts which some writers, including Kamilu Amoo Adeniyi borrow to encode their message. The objective of this study is to undercover the novel “Too beautiful to Die” (2015) so as to associate the meanings encoded therein to the context of its production. That concretely has to do with identifying and describing those speech act types used in the discourse ingrained in the novel. To achieve this objective, it has been necessary to identify and select systematically four extracts based on the relevance of the theme around which they develop. Searle (1976) speech acts model serves as the theoretical backbone while the qualitative research method has been preferred to substantiate the data generation, collection and analysis components. The so generated and collected data have been disaggregated in table 3.1 which presents the various levels of preponderance in the frequencies revealed by the analyses respectively for Representative, Expressive, Declarative and Commissive speech acts in the four selected passages. The findings reveal that the writer has used unequally the speech act types in the four passages 1, 2, 3 and 4 (excerpt Declarative Speech Acts in passage 2). The findings also show the preponderance of Representative, Expressive and Commissive Speech acts in the four analyzed passages. This insinuates and indicates that Kamilu, through the utterances of the characters, the description of events gives pieces of advice, deplores and expresses his own view about those emergent and rampant cankers that take place in the past and continue to pollute today’s society. Those are, inter alia, cultish sacrifices, money rituals, and human ritual in Nigeria. The study concludes on the inopportuneness of those violence, human rituals and sacrifices as they do not engender development.
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