‘‘I have headache in my stomach’’: The Pragmatics of Utterance, Relevance and Meaning

The emergence of pragmatics makes communicative competence a crucial subject in the literature of pragmatics, even though linguistic competence is also instrumental in the effective use of language to communicate messages. To explain the pragmatic underpinnings of an utterance in terms of relevance and meaning within any given context, this study examines the utterance "I have headache in my stomach" alongside other samples of expressions gathered from the Nigerian speech community. When an utterance is uttered, the physical (environmental), psychological, pragmatic or social nuances that generate are inevitable components of the inferential process. A speaker expects the "worldspoken-of" -as Allan This paper is hinged on a bipartite theoretical underpinning: the Pragma-crafting Theory; and the Relevance Theory of Communication. The study concludes that: the communicative value of an utterance is immersed in the ease and possibility of processing it for meaning (its topic relevance).