Pragmatic Analysis of Invectives in Fela Anikulapo’s Shuffering and Shmilling, Sorrow, Tears and Blood

Abstract

Invective is the critical, unmitigated, non-euphemistic and non-attenuating manner of casting aspersion on a recipient. While invective is generally considered a base, undesirable form of expression, its potential as the most direct form of satire has equally been acknowledged in certain contexts such as music genre. The deployment of invective as a tool of satirical criticism is axiomatic in Fela’s songs. This study is concerned with the pragmatic interpretation of Fela’s penchant to use invectives as a satirical tool to lampoon the government, and also with the potential of invective as an aesthetic form. Some pragmatic tools subsumed in a modified theoretical framework of Mey’s (2001) “Pragmatic Act Theory”, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) “Politeness Principles”, and the canonical classifications of context are used to analyse purposively selected Fela’s songs viz., Sorrow, Tears and Blood and Shuffering and Shmiling. Findings from the analysis indicate that Fela overtly uses some high pejorative invectives as a direct-derogatory attack on the government as a result of the latter’s bad policies. Results from the analysis indicated that Assertive, Expressive, and Directive are the kinds of instantiated pragmatic acts performed in the selected songs. These acts reflect the subject matters of the songs. Similarly, two types of face acts were identified in the data: face threatening without redress and face threatening act using off-record politeness strategies. These show that Fela does not mitigate the propositional contents of the message in his songs. In other respects, context is pivotal in helping readers understand the physical, sociocultural, psychological and linguistic scaffolds underpinning each song. The researcher concludes that the aesthetics of invective yields a multiplicity of analytical possibilities and more so, that the pragmatic analysis of songs is enriching, and can give important insights into how language is deployed in music lyrics.