LITERARY PRAGMATICS

The need to understand how people use language within the context of real life necessitated the writing of this book by Rev. Sr. Dr. Adaoma Igwedibia.
In understanding how language is used within the context of real life, certain factors were put into consideration –factors such as time, place social relationship between speakers and hearers. These, according to the author, affect the ways in which language is performative.
Chapter one effectively answered the question: what is pragmatics? Chapter two dwelt on speech act, logical positivism and conditional semantics; chapter three examined the pragmatic approach to textual analysis, while chapters four and five were specific on pragmatic analyses of poetry and prose respectively.
The work, in studying the selected texts, makes one familiar with various cultural signs; but above all one gains insight into what the writer terms confessional implicature of things unsaid in the texts and cultural signs and by implication the implicature in human conversations.
The book possesses immense value for both readers and teachers through its delicate and insightful exploration of the cognitive environments of texts and by implication the cognitive environments of human beings through the deployment of maxims of quantity and quality, relevance theory, cognition, context and ostensive inferences in texts by looking at locution and illocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects in even understanding the implicature of burial rites. In fact, this is a masterpiece that is highly invaluable in both language and literary criticism.

Ile, Onyebuchi James (BA/MA, Duesseldorf, Ph.D, Muenster, Germany)
Former Head of English Studies and Associate Professor of Anglophone Literature and Critical Strategic Thinking and Development, Nigerian Turkish Nile University, Abuja
Visiting Associate Professor, English Seminar, Westfaelische Wilhelm University, Muenster, Germany and currently teaching at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka
Emails: ileonyebuchijames@gmail.com and oj.ile@unizik.edu.ng