Pragmatic Acts in Selected Speeches of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu: A Jacob Mey's Pragmatic Act Approach

Language has a range of purposes beyond providing information; it also serves to persuade, legitimise, ideologise and actively negotiate social realities. In political communication, presidential addresses are strategic moments in which leaders communicate policies to citizens, share with them their vision of the role of government, explain to them what they are doing and encourage them to remain united in the nation. This study considers the pragmatic acts in some of the speeches of Mr President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu using the analytical framework of Pragmatic Act Theory of Jacob Mey (2001). The study uses a qualitative approach with content analysis techniques and focuses on purposively selected speeches, specifically: Presidential Inaugural Address (29 May 2023), 63rd Independence Day Address (1 October 2023), and 2024 Democracy Day Address (12 June 2024) statements, and Nationwide Broadcast on Economic Hardship Protests (4 August 2024). The speeches have been chosen because they touch on essential national matters concerning governance, economic reforms, democracy, national security and social development. The analysis of data is conducted using the Pragmatic Act Theory of Jacob Mey (2001) with the textual and activity components to determine the contextual resources that support the interpretation of data and the pragmatic acts that are realised in the speeches. The findings show that President Tinubu engages in a variety of pragmatic acts such as assuring, informing, directing, appealing, persuading, acknowledging, warning, encouraging, promising and mobilising. The contextual resources include inference, reference, relevance, shared situation knowledge, metaphor and voice, all of which interact with each other to create meaning beyond what is factored in the literal meaning of the utterances. The study also shows that the pragmatic acts are used strategically to legitimise government policies, to gain public trust, to negotiate political authority and to foster national unity. The study finds that the communicative effectiveness of President Tinubu's speech is rooted more in the interplay of language, context, and socio-political realities. Thus, the study contributes to the study of political pragmatics and discourse analysis literature as well as the application ofPragmatic Act Theory of Jacob Meys to the study of presidential discourse in Nigeria.