ABSTRACT
Language is indeed a very powerful medium through which ideas, feelings, information, messages/meanings are communicated, thus it is also a machinery through which all concepts such as personal names are discusses/analysed. In view of this, the study/research is centred on A Pragmatic Analysis Of Personal Names In Yoruba. In the sense that there exist different aspects of Linguistic Analysis, thus Pragmatics is chosen for the purpose of the study to treat the subject matter above, because Pragmatics being a branch of Linguistics which studies concepts base on their context of use, hence, some selected Personal Names in Yoruba language are treated in this study. The language (Yoruba) is spoken by the Yoruba people who live in South Western part of Nigeria. The major aim of the study was to analyze some selected personal names in Yoruba based on their context of use. Their didactic imports(meaning) were accounted for in the study. The data collected for the study were drawn from oral interviews of some competent speakers of the language who possess robust understanding of the different kinds of names all the bearing the concept of “OLORUN” (meaning God) in Yoruba. Another source of the data collected were collected from scholarly documentation (books, journal) by some Yoruba scholars such as Taiwo Ehinemi (2019) 11 G. Fakuade (2019, Adekunle (2002) and some others who wrote about Yoruba personal names. Thus, the sources of the data were both primary and secondary as explained above. In the course of data analysis, the study adopted Lawal’s (1997) pragmatic theory as the theoretical framework. The Lawal’s model which postulates four core pragmatic variables, such as linguistic, situational, sociological and cosmological variables were used to account for the contextual explications of the selected personal names. In a nutshell, the study found out that Yoruba personal names can have exclusive interpretation rest on the situation of use, mutual contextual beliefs, influenced by the cultural beliefs, and worldviews of the people. It was found out that personal names Yoruba have different communication intended meaning, while some names given to the bearer has a direct effect of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the person, these personal names which rest on the concept of “OLORUN” send a very weighty messages in every Yoruba society they are used to demonstrate the influence of God in man’s life, such names are meant to glorify the supremacy of God
