The Pragmatics of Cooperation and Pursuit of Common Interest in the Discourse of Rural Igbo Community Meetings in Nigeria

Abstract

In the Igbo society, community meetings are taken very seriously. It is through such meetings that issues affecting the community are examined and decisions are taken, disputes between persons or groups are settled, development projects are proposed and debated, various forms of cultural education are promoted, etc. Members of the local community assemble to engage in discourses that promote mutual interest and consolidate interdependency, deploying linguistic and nonlinguistic forms that communicate shared values in the cultural context. This study aims to explothe nature of these strategies from a pragmatic theoretical standpoint to find out how assumptions in the local context contribute to the interpretation of the talk and particularly to the comprehension of the commitment to cooperation and the pursuit of common interest. Rural discourse is suffused with metaphors and verbal ironies, and in interpreting these, we find that the semantic meaning of a particular discourse recovered by interpreting (decoding) vastly underdetermines the pragmatic meaning latent in the context of the utterance. Thus, this researcher’s task in this study is to find the meaning speakers intend to convey. Towards this end, the analysis will be predicted on constructing or erecting a hypothesis. The route this research will take to the pragmatics of rural discourse is the trope of verbal irony.