Studies in Literature and Language
Pragmatic roles in Wole Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis
Abstract
Performance of role is central to the understanding of any discourse or activity because, through it, the implicit meaning is made obvious. Previous studies have considered the role of context in understanding interaction or discourse but they have neglected pragmatic roles in the understanding of any discourse, especially literary discourse. Thus, this study, therefore, examines how pragmatic role contributes significantly to the understanding of discourse and how it reveals participants’ intentions in Wole Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis. The study adopts Jacob Mey’s 2001 Pragmatic act theory. Data were sourced from relevant utterances in the text and were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Two broad categories of roles: social-informed and religious-informed roles, characterised Wole Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis. Social-informed role divides into a deceiver, debtor and creditor roles; while religious-informed role splits into prophet, discipler and disciple roles. Denying, forecasting, impersonating, lying, insisting, predicting, instructing and submitting are various practs used to foreground these roles. The paper concludes that studying various pragmatic roles in any discourse will not only contribute to the understanding of the discourse but will also reveal the interactants’ covert intentions.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/11436
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