Influence of Indexicals in President Muhammad Buhari’s Speech at the First National Executive Congress (NEC) of All Progressives Congress (APC) At the Party’s Headquarters, Abuja.
- October 8, 2021
- Posted by: RSIS
- Categories: IJRISS, Language and Literature
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue IX, September 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186
Abdullahi Muhammad Sani
B. A. Ed. (Language Arts), M. A. (ESP)
Department of English Language Education, Adamawa State Polytechnic, Yola, Nigeria
Abstract: This work investigates the use of Indexicals in the speech delivered by President Muhammad Buhari at the first national executive summit of All Progressive Congress (APC) held on 14th of July, 2015 at Abuja. Though, Indexicals are expressive words that signal the appropriate use of information in text. They serve to point to objects, personalities and ideas particularly in art works. This paper was targeted at examining the characteristic indexical used as text creating linguistic features in the selected text. The corpus for the study consists of fourteen paragraphs. The method of data analysis was descriptive. The findings show that Indexicals are significant features in the printed text. Pronoun Indexicals point at personalities and topics, while adjectives describe events, and adverbs point at times and manners in which such events occur. The paper, suggests students of ESP and journalists should be encouraged to use Indexicals as they undergo formal writings.
Key words: indexical, summit, APC, speech, deixis.
I. INTRODUCTION
Linguistics and philosophy define indexical as the features of a language that refer directly to the circumstances or context in which an utterance takes place. An indexical expression (such as today, that, here, utterance, and you) is a word or phrase that is associated with different meanings (or referents) on different occasions.
In conversation, interpretation of indexical expressions may in part depend on a variety of paralinguistic and non-linguistic features, such as hand gestures and the shared experiences of the participants.
