Implicature and the Construction of Dramatic Irony: A Pragmatic-Literary Analysis of The Marriage of Anansewa

This study examines how conversational implicature contributes to dramatic irony in Efua T. Sutherland's The Marriage of Anansewa (1975). Dramatic dialogue communicates simultaneously within character-to-character interaction and between the dramatic text and its reading-audience. Drawing on Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Politeness Principle and Irony Principle, the study extends the scholarship on the pragmatics of drama by combining descriptive frequency counts with qualitative pragmatic-literary analysis of Act One. A total of 176 discrete utterances were identified and coded for observance and non-observance of the four Gricean maxims. Of these, 118 utterances (67.0%) exhibited non-observance of at least one maxim, producing 141 maxim instances and 75 identifiable implicatures. Thirty-one utterances were purposively selected for detailed contextual and literary interpretation. Manner was the most frequently non-observed maxim (73; 51.8%), followed by Quantity (46; 32.6%), Quality (19; 13.5%), and Relation (3; 2.1%). The analysis shows that ambiguity, indirectness, strategic omission, and figurative expression enable characters to communicate different levels of meaning to interlocutors and the reading-audience. The study argues that pragmatic and literary analyses are complementary in the interpretation of dramatic dialogue, characterisation, dramatic structure, and audience positioning. A pragmatic-literary approach thus illuminates the linguistic mechanisms through which dramatic effects are configurable in dramatic texts and demonstrates the significance of extending pragmatic-literary inquiry to African dramatic texts.