A PRAGMATICS ANALYSIS OF ENUANI NAME OF PERSONS

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on the Pragmatics Analysis of Enuani name of persons, a dialect of Igbo language spoken by the Anioma people of Delta State in Nigeria. The study aims to investigate the contextual meanings of names and the objectives of this research is to examine how they perform communicative functions. The method of data collection includes both primary and secondary methods. The primary data for the study was gathered using oral interviews by observation of the researcher who is a native speaker of the Enuani dialect and audio recordings, which was collected from native speakers of Enuani dialect. The informants were Enuani speaking women in a community in Aniocha local Government and they were between the age of 40-65. The theoretical framework adopted in this study is the speech act theory developed by British philosopher J.L Austin in 1962. Following the analysis, the speech act theory which consists of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary act were applied in the analysis of the data. To facilitate analysis, the data were categorized based on the various contexts of the names. The findings of this study demonstrate that Enuani name of persons serve as both a means of identification and communication. The study concludes that, names carry out a variety of speech acts that indicate emotional states, including asking, stating, questioning, asserting, or expressing thanks which express the emotional connection or anticipation of the name-giver.