The Pragmatics of Connectives in English and Igala

Abstract

This paper examined the pragmatics of connectives in English and Igala. The article revealed that pragmatic connectives usually express relations between speech acts. That is, it essentially handles the issue of how connectives perform their linking functions contextually or pragmatically to encode meaning in a language. When two propositions are linked by a connective, whether uttered by an interlocutor or between an interlocutor and a listener, pragmatics plays a pivotal role in influencing their meanings to be something different from what they should be denotatively. Data collection for this research was generated exclusively from secondary sources, which was drawn mainly from the existing material on pragmatic connectives in both languages. Thus, the pragmatic implications of propositions linked by connectives were clearly presented and analysed concurrently. The data comprised five utterances of both English and Igala, which also contained five connectives, namely: àmâ ‘but’, todúlɛ́ ‘so’, ʧájí ‘unless/until/till’, àbɛ̀kí ‘or’ and íʧɛun ‘if’ were selected, presented and analysed. The English data was labelled A while the one on Igala was marked B. The major result of the study indicated that connectives actually have pragmatic value, especially when linked with two propositions in both languages.

Key words: pragmatics, connectives, English, Igala.

DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/9-13-06

Publication date:July 31^st 2019