Abstract
This paper investigates the contextual dynamics and pragmatic strategies that underpin political meaning-making in Nigerian televised interviews. Anchored in Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Act Theory, complemented by Grice’s Cooperative Principle, and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory, the study examines how socio-political context and interactional cues shape the interpretation of pragmatic acts in political discourse. Data are drawn from Politics Today on Channels Television, featuring interviews with Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso during Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election. Adopting a qualitative pragma-discursive approach, the analysis demonstrates how contextual variables, such as participant roles, institutional setting, and the prevailing socio-political climate mediate meaning negotiation and ideological positioning. The findings reveal that pragmatic strategies including implicature, presupposition, hedging, and deixis are strategically deployed by politicians to manage face, control narratives, and subtly encode ideological stances. The study concludes that context operates not merely as background information but as a constitutive force that shapes the pragmatic realization and ideological consequences of political discourse in Nigeria.
Keywords: context, pragmatics, political discourse, inference, ideology, Nigeria
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2025.v01i01.026
author/Onuche, Joshua Ene'Ojo & Peter Ochefu Okpeh, Phd
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(1) | December 2025
