| This work is a pragmatic analysis of congratulatory messages in selected Nigerian newspapers. It looked at how Pragmatics as a field of study, clarified written texts, that is congratulatory messages. It also analysed the language and pragmatic features of newspaper congratulatory messages. The data for the study came from three different Nigerian newspapers: Daily Trust, Nigerian Tribune and Vanguard. The data was collected from a media house and libraries in Kaduna and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria respectively. Congratulatory messages are literarily meant to express compliments but senders have used the avenue to achieve two motives; advertise and compliment. An eclectic use of Bach and Harnish‟s Mutual Contextual Belief (MCB), Austin‟s (1962) and Searle‟s (1965) Speech Acts Theory, and inference were used to analyse and explain how readers understood the hidden intentions contained in the messages and how the intentions were inferred through MCBs. Since the intentions and well wishes that the messages conveyed were tied to the illocutionary acts that were performed, the work adopted Austin and Searle‟s classification of speech or illocutionary acts to name the acts that were performed and how the acts conveyed the senders‟ intentions to the intended recipients and the general readership. The study reveals that context, inference alongside Mutual Contextual Beliefs play crucial roles in understanding senders‟ intentions and in interpreting the acts performed in the congratulatory messages. The study also revealed that the written congratulatory messages are to a great extent, a form of advertisement because of the features they posess such as; language of flattery and exaggeration, full addresses of the senders, photographs of both senders and intended recipients,senders‟ phone numbers and the adjectives used in describing the intended recipient(s). In addition,the study revealed that the messages were not just mere statements but conveyed several acts and mutual beliefs in them based on sender‟s choice of expression. They contain a lot of MCBs as revealed by the analysis because senders and readers of the messages share certain cultural, political, religious and social beliefs alongside a world view, language usage and communication. It is also revealed that the texts reflect world view and value system of both the sender(s) and the recipient(s). |
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