Being Politically Impolite: A Community of Practice (CofP) Analysis of Invective Songs of Western Nigerian Politicians

Abstract

Earlier linguistic studies of political discourse revealed that, not many works exist on pragmatic analysis of impoliteness in this genre. Apart from Mullany (2002), who employs relational and face works to analyses impoliteness in political discourse, Taiwo (2007), Adetunji (2009), and Ademilokun (2015), who employ discourse analytical tools in analyzing the political speeches, there exist very scanty works on invective songs of Western Nigerian Politicians. The present study, therefore, focused on filling the existing lacuna in pragmatic studies by exploring fourteen randomly selected invective songs of Western Nigerian Politicians (WNPs), utilizing the modified version of Eckert and McConnell-Ginet's (1992a) community of practice (CofP) as the pragmatic tool for data analysis. Our findings revealed that, invective songs of WNPs were characterized by impolite/belligerent utterances, indirect speech acts, politic confrontational behavior, lexical borrowing, code-mixing, direct speech acts, use of paralanguage, imagery, and symbolism. The paper concluded that, CofP clearly explicates the signification in invective songs of WNPs and shows the participants' intention in the discourse.