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Although communication in medical practice is reputed for exactitude and objectivity, many doctors in several countries make equivocal, concealing utterances in certain situations when relating with clients. This phenomenon, despite its importance in doctor-client interaction, has received little attention from language scholars who have discussed concealment mainly as a strategy in news delivery. The present study examines concealment items in the interaction between doctors and clients in South-western Nigerian hospitals and their pragmatic implications for medical communication in Nigeria. Fifty (50) conversations between doctors and clients on several ailments were tape-recorded in the six states of South-western Nigeria. Structured and unstructured interviews were conducted with selected doctors and clients. The corpus was examined for the linguistic and pragmatic resources deployed by doctors in concealing information, and was analysed using Jacob Mey’s theory of pragmeme and insights from the literature on news delivery strategies. Concealment was found to take place between doctors and clients in a two-phase mode: Referential and pragmatic. Utterances which have descriptive forms at the referential level assume subjective and divergent shades in the context of concealment at the pragmatic level. Nine concealment strategies (jargonisation, veiling, forecasting, mitigation, stalling, normalisation, dysphemisation, euphemisation and doublespeak) were found to be employed to achieve four broad goals: Preventive, palliative, culture-compliant and confidential with respect to 25 diseases /medical procedures. Concealment in consultative encounters takes into account the socio-psychological security needs of clients and attends positively to clients’ cultural expectations.

The paper examines the pragmatic roles that locutionary acts play in understanding the communication between doctors and patients in Southwestern Nigeria. Working within John Austin’s locutionary acts, with restrictions to the lexical occurrences and lexical relationships observed in the discourse, it got data through tape recordings of doctor-patient conversations and interviews of both doctors and patients (and/or their relations).The findings revealed that two categories of locutions were engaged in hospital interactions, namely, locutions intended to be understood by non-professionals and locutions not intended to be understood by non-professionals. The paper observes that locutions in medical discourse in Southwestern Nigeria bring standard lexical choices and local linguistic initiatives of medical practitioners into a pragmatic union. It therefore concludes that the pragmatic engagement of these choices displays the tact the practitioners use in dealing with patients, and it recommends the need for the practitioners to master the locutions and their pragmatic adaptation for effective management of patients.

Abstract Existing studies on political discourse have investigated the role of language in propaganda, the emotive use of language by politicians, the ideological undertone of modal verbs in political speeches, often ignoring the discursive use of synonyms, especially in the Nigerian context. This paper thus examines the discursive construction of synonyms in selected speeches of former Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo with the aim of identifying the ideological implication of the synonymous construction in the speeches. His speeches are worth studying as he was the first military head of state to be elected a civilian president, thereby leading the country on two good occasions. Twelve speeches were purposively sampled comprising those he made as a military head of state and as a civilian president. These periods are important in Nigeria’s political history. The study adopted evaluative semantics and sociocognitive approach of critical discourse analysis as theoretical basis. The former accounts for the synonymous relations in the speeches and the latter, their ideological import. The findings show that the synonymous relations represent optimism and expectations from individual, society and institution. Synonyms related to optimism are characterised by government’s commitment to positive change, transformation and hope, while synonyms that relate to issue of expectation from the individual, the society and institutions are characterised by societal development, forbearance, disorder, healthy information management and dissemination, and negative practices and values. Thus, these synonymous relations, when considered together with the co(n)text, reflect Obasanjo’s reformist agenda.

The negotiation of patients’ therapy proposals often makes a strong statement about doctors’ consultative styles in Nigerian clinical encounters. This invites a search into the relationship between patients’ preferred treatment options and doctors’ and patients’ approaches to negotiating them. Analysis reveals the sequential and face orientation mechanisms deployed in negotiating patients’ proposals in predominantly doctor-centred clinics, the interactional moves made by them in negotiating the proposals in predominantly patient-centred clinics, and the pragmatic implications of the proposals negotiated in both clinics. The negotiations in the clinics are anchored to strategic rapport building, the colonisation of patients’ lifeworld and constrained joint decisions. Rapport is poorly built in the doctor-centred clinic with power-imbued strategies which stifle patients’ voice and lead to completely-constrained joint decisions on therapy proposals by patients. Participatory consultation enhances negotiation in the patient-centred clinic, but the physician’s misleading strategic sequences and exaggerated emotions somewhat weaken the ultimate consultative outcome.

Terrorist attacks in Nigeria have generated a huge body of conversations and debates on the Internet. This study investigates the contents of these online conversations on Nairaland and how such conversations exhibit stance and civic engagement in response to the attacks. Nairaland is an online community and public space that serves as a meeting place for Nigerians at home and in the Diaspora, who constantly follow-up on the events in Nigeria and participate in political debates about the country. This study argues that the frequent negative evaluations of Boko Haram and the attribution of the activities to Islam and the consistent constructions of northern Nigeria as ‘violent people’ and Islam as an ‘evil’ religion in Nairaland are potential to further worsen religious and ethnic relations in Nigeria.

This research explores how doctors and patients discursively track responsibility for patients’ poor health after treatment recommendations have been delivered in South-western Nigerian hospitals. Purposively sampling 10 audio-taped and five video-taped doctor–patient interactions in selected Nigerian hospitals, it takes a mid-course between aspects of the conversation analytic, exclusively bottom-up, and the discourse analytic, mostly top-down, approaches to clinical conversations. It argues that the discursive treatment of postrecommendation poor health, situated in common ground and sequentiality, is construed by participants as either patient- or doctor-induced. When construed as patient-induced, poor health is anchored to a patient-designed therapy plan and is co-constructed as a clear patient responsibility, necessitating a re-negotiation of an existing recommendation by doctors and patients. When construed as doctor-induced, poor health is co-constructed as a physician error, but responsibility for it is sequentially refused by the doctor, who negotiates a fresh therapy plan to neutralise physician blame. While the analysis shows that doctors’ simplified language which facilitates consultative exchanges proves useful in negotiating responsibility in poor health discourses and, consequently, instituting a more effective medical procedure on patients, it reveals doctors’ occasional communication of inadequate and misleading information, use of suppressive interactive power and or nonacceptance of clinical errors.

Studies on participation and spatial orientations of college students have examined aspects of university life, as projected through language, from a reportorial or narrative perspective, but hardly any one of these studies has been devoted exclusively to how students’ participation structure, together with the activities participants orient to at the participation space, evokes shared socio-academic backgrounds and cultural constraints, a major way to gain access into the students’ cognitive and pragmatic tendencies. This research, thus, addresses itself to Nigerian college students’ participation configuration, their participant roles, and the illocutionary goals of their encounters within the Goffmanian participation framework and discourse pragmatic parameters. For data, 100 interactions amongst students of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, were taped and scrutinised for participation forms and spatial descriptions. Two types of participation structure are manifest in the interactions, namely, unmarked and marked participations. The unmarked participation structure is the regular frame in which Goffman’s ratification and non-ratification framework is strictly observed. The marked participation configuration, an unexpected interactional frame which bifurcates into accommodated and non-accommodated structures, takes interruptions by unaccredited participants as appropriate or inappropriate. The paper contends that participation configuration and contextual elements prescribe participant roles together with the pragmatic functions assigned to language and actions in the interactions. Thus, the illocutionary goals of participants, rooted in socio-academic matters and enabled by participation structures, spatial orientations and body language manipulations are contextually negotiated.

Nigerian Pidgin is a popular informal communicative code in Nigerian social, economic and political experience. It is sometimes spoken in formal situations in the hospital setting when participants find it pragmatically convenient. Despite its communicative significance, little research has been carried out on the use of Pidgin in conversational interactions in Nigerian hospitals, a gap this study fills by investigating how Pidgin is used in constructing emotions relating to social and medical conditions in hospitals. Seventy five (75) interactions between doctors and clients in Nigerian Pidgin were sampled; the data analysis was based centrally on relevance theory. Nigerian Pidgin evokes negative and positive emotions. Negative emotions manifest as pain and fear, while positive emotions appear as excitement and relief. Doctors and clients gain access to each other’s intentions through their shared knowledge of Pidgin, their co-construction of ailments, and their contextually based local interactional resources. They thus negotiate emotions as cue-dependent variables that are steered with the help of cognitive processes.

The study of linguistics of literary discourse is a recent development in the global spread. Until 1982, efforts made in the seventies in this direction were by literary critics such as Chatman (1978), Ehrlich (1990), Fludernik (1993) and Mey (2000). No work that we are aware of has specifically studied how characters in fiction have been focalized through deictics alone. The common trend is that deictic features are taken along with other linguistic elements. Given the high place deictics occupy in human communication, it is essential to isolate them for study to explore the degree at which they influence character projection in fiction. This work will therefore not only add to the material on this area, it will also facilitate character appreciation in fictive works. The text, Ake, is extensively studied, and only the deictics that occur in conversations between characters are sampled. Examples of deictic usage are picked randomly to exemplify deictics of time, place and time as they occur in the text.

The chapter investigates the assumptions that academics in two universities in Southwestern Nigeria (namely, University of Ibadan- a federal government-owned institution- and Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso- a state government-owned institution) work with when sending GSM (Global System of Communication) text-messages. The research on this aspect of GSM interaction, which has received little attention from scholars in Computer-mediated Communication (CMC), is approached, in the present paper, by a random sampling of 400 text-messages from the ‘sent’ (out-box) compartment of cell phones of academics in the sampled universities. The analysis of the texts is based on insights from contextual beliefs, collaborative theory and implicature. The findings reveal that senders of text messages exploit two beliefs, namely, language-based beliefs and subject matter-based beliefs, which are constrained by participants’ conception of co-interactants’ relative status in inclusive or exclusive terms, itself a determinant of the degree of the assumptions made. The findings further show that the messages which are based on research and academic activities, themselves covering research and supervision, academic promotion and advancement, general academic matters and academic obligations and assignments, are characterized by a variety of short hands, context-driven indices of assumptions and flouts of quantity and manner maxims. It is concluded that with the high level of assumptions made, aided by various linguistic tools, messages communicated by academics could be exclusive to the in-group members. Finally, future research is invited to compare the beliefs of academics with those of other groups of professionals.

This paper examines the formation patterns and functions of names in Chinua Achebe\'s Anthills of the Savannah , motivated by the scanty scholarly studies on names in the text. All the personal names in the text are studied and analysed, using insights from contextual models. The paper identifies four types of names in Anthills : official names, first names, nicknames and institutional/titular names. It also picks out three dimensions of these names: branching, non-branching and active-mentioned, which are associated with the types. It shows that the names have structural and formation patterns such as + title prefixing, +first name, + surname, indigenous language form, coinage, abbronymy, clipping, qualification and full form representation. It also demonstrates that the names play contextual and ideological roles such as being interactional tools, address terms, weapons of criticisms and vision projectors. The paper concludes that names in Anthills are carefully chosen to serve particular thematic and stylistic purposes. Keywords : Chinua Achebe, Anthills , names, formation, context and function MARANG Vol. 18 2008 pp. 49-67