A Sociolinguistic study of Humor and Pragmatics of Jenifa’s Diary
1.0 Introduction
The interdisciplinary relationship between linguistics and other fields of studies have been witnessed in Psycholinguistics, Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Computational Linguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, Neuro- Linguistics – the list is indeed endless. The closest or nearest way linguistics connects to literature is in the field of stylistics – which in the crude sense involves the application of linguistic knowledge to literary analysis. However, this marriage between linguistics and literature can be advanced even to the field of Pragmatics. Thus, just as Ayodabo’s ‘A Pragma-Stylistic Study of Abiola’s Historic Speech of June, 24, 1993’ essay dabbles into the benefits of combining Pragmatic and Stylistic analyses which he blends into ‘Pragma-stylistic Study’; one can also see a profitable venture in merging Pragmatics and Literary Analysis which can form a blend of ‘Pragma-literary analysis’ to create a symbolic benefits for both disciplines. In such a study, one can apply pragmatic theories to literary texts – a meaningful venture indeed.
The idea that language is used to do a lot of things, and that the meaning of forms used to accomplish such acts is highly dependent on socio-cultural context, was introduced into the discussion of Linguistic meaning by Malinowski (1923) and Firth (1968). Ever this time, Sociologists and Sociolinguists have been particularly concerned with the use of language to negotiate role-relationship, peer-solidarity, the exchange of turns and the saving of face in conversation (Ayodabo 1997:132).
Language reveals man’s socio-cultural beliefs and thoughts. This study is a product of the writer’s fascination with Funke Akindele’s (popularly called Jenifa) use of grammatical blunders in her speech forms as a deliberate meaning shift in her popular television sitcom, ‘Jenifa’s Diary’ to use humour in communicating certain social realities. In these utterances, several acts are performed, and there is the possibility of the actor’s deliberate attempt to humour or project the Yoruba speakers’ phonological problems in their use of English as a second language (ESL). This study is also premised on the belief that “any description of linguistic form should incorporate a knowledge and description of the broader social context of the text. In doing so, a language user needs to deploy his competencies to identify and understand entailments, implicatures, explicatures, presuppositions, and Mutual Contextual Beliefs (MCBs) through inference by invoking the relevant contexts and competences that produce them” (Ayodabo
1997:133).
So far, little appears to have been done on pragma-literary analysis as a theory of text analysis. Instead much works abound in Pragmatics, Stylistics, Literature and Conversation/Discourse Analysis as separate entities. The identification of a marriage point between Pragmatics and Literature has thus generated this study.
1.1 Pragmatics: Speech Act Theory
Pragmatic theory has drawn inspiration from logic. It draws mainly upon philosophy of language and ‘the theory of speech act’ in particular, as well as the analysis of conversations and of cultural differences in verbal interaction. Just as the rules governing semantic interpretation respect the classes of syntactic structure, the operation that turns discourse into acts might also be called a pragmatic interpretation of utterances (Dijk cited in Ayodabo 1997:133).
Blakemore (1982:18) opines that Pragmatic Theory is concerned with the mental structure underlying the ability to interpret utterances in context. The suggestion that Pragmatic Theory involves abstracting away from the particular properties of the situation in which it is put to use is not meant to conflict with the generally accepted view that Pragmatics is the study of utterances or sentences in use. The whole point of Pragmatic Theory is to explain how the context is used in the interpretation of an utterance.
According to Kempson (1986: 561), Pragmatics is the study of the general cognitive principles involved in the retrieval of information from an uttered sequence of words. Lawal (1995) sees Pragmatics as evolving as a result of the limitations of Structural Semantics to capture satisfactorily the sociological and other non-linguistic dimensions of verbal communication.
What is usually meant by saying that we do something when we make an utterance is that we accomplish some specific social acts (e.g. making a promise, request, giving advice, etc.) usually called speech acts (Dijk 1992:195), or more specifically, illocutionary acts. Dijk adds that a global differentiation between the various kinds of acts involved is made by the distinction between a locutionary act, a propositional act, and an illocutionary act, and in some cases, a perlocutionary act.
Speech act theorists have classified speech acts in different ways. Austin (1962), the forerunner of this field, classified them into five categories of ‘verdictives,’ exercitives, commissives, ‘behabitives’ and expositives. Searle’s (1969) categories is based on the argument that Austin’s classification is deficient, in that there was too much overlap in Austin’s (1962) classification, based on that observation and some others, Searle (1969) came up with the classes of Assertives, Directives, Commissives, Expressives and Declaratives, with various sub-categories and definitions (Ayodabo 1997: 134).
In Sadock’s (1974) view, the most straight-forward way in which our intended locution can be communicated is to mention directly what we are doing in making a particular utterance. He adds that the factors that determine whether a particular illocutionary acts succeeds are termed ‘felicity conditions’, maintaining that in the majority of cases, the illocutionary force of an utterance is not signaled by a perfomative formula. Bach and Harnish (1979) criticized certain aspects of earlier theories, claiming that intention and inference are basic elements to understanding. They also came up with the notion of presumption. In their opinion, both linguistic and communication circumstances are presumed. They recognized two main categories of illocutionary acts: communicative, with four main categories of constatives, directives, commissives and acknowledgements, and non-communicative class with two subcategories of effectiveness and verdictives.
Trauggot and Pratt (1980), classified illocutionary acts into Representatives, Expressives, verdictives, Directives, Commissives, and Declaratives, the sub-categories of which they also defined and explained. The centre-point of their theory as noted by Ayodabo is that a speaker’s communicative competence includes not just knowledge of what illocutionary acts can be performed in the language, but also, how, when, where and by whom they can be performed (134).
Adegbija’s (1982) major grouse with previous speech act theories is that they relegated the pragmatics of a situation of social interaction to the background. He states that at every stage of discourse, both speaker(s) and hearer(s) have to mobilize appropriate areas of the pragmatic, social, syntactic, semantic, and lexical competencies in order to be able to participate effectively in the interaction at hand. Leech (1983), writing under ‘varieties of illocutionary function’, classifies illocutionary functions into four types of competitive, convivial, collaborative and conflictive. To leech, a perlocutionary act is performed by saying something.
Allan (1986), relying heavily on the works of Austin (1962), Searle (1969), and Bach and Harnish (1979), observes that language comes into existence only because someone performs an act of speaking or writing. He presents a scheme for analyzing the meaning of a speech act, in which there is a hierarchy among the acts, that is, the perlocutionary act presupposes a denotational act which presupposes a locutionary act which presupposes an utterance act. Allan’s (1986) classification follows Bach and Harnish’s (1979) work in terms of identifying ‘interpersonal acts’ and ‘declaratory acts’. He however justifies the major category distinction between interpersonal and declaratory acts by sub-classifying interpersonal acts into constatives, predictive, commissives, acknowledgements, directives, authoritative; and declaratory acts into effective and verdictives, totaling eight categories of speech act, as against five found in Austin (1962), six in Searle (1975), and four of Bach and Harnish (1979).
Lawal (1992) identifies the pragmatic mappings of general factual knowledge of the world, local factual knowledge, socio-cultural knowledge, and knowledge of context as useful for constructing meaning out of an utterance. He adds that an understanding of the mapping helps to illustrate that a pragmatic interpretation of utterances goes beyond the meaning of lexical components and the structural semantic relations among them. Lawal’s (1995) ‘Aspects of Pragmatic Theory’ focuses on both the surface structure of an utterance as well as the background structure.
Ayodabo’s (1997) work was able to espouse the aspects of pragmatic theory captured by Lawal and how these can be applied to texts. Ayodabo noted that illocutionary acts, typically, do not come alone. They are part of a sequence of actions in general, or of a sequence of speech acts in particular. This sequence must satisfy the usual conditions for action sequence. Thus, it may be required that the final state of some speech act is a necessary condition for the success of a following act. In this sense, an illocutionary act may be an auxiliary act (135).
Just like another in general, Dijk (1992:238) opines that speech act sequencing requires planning and interpretation. In other words, certain sequence of various speech acts may be intended and understood, and hence function socially, as one speech act. Such a speech act performed by a sequence of speech acts is called a “global speech act” or “macro speech act.” (Ayodabo, 136)
Sequences in monologue or dialogue conversations may be assigned a global speech act through some conditions. Firstly, as Dijk says, by “deleting irrelevant or predictable information” (239). For such speech acts as well as for actions in general, this would mean that preparatory and auxiliary speech acts may be deleted, as well as those component speech acts which, taken together, desire the essential component of the resulting global speech acts. Similarly, Dijk adds that expressions of mental states and context descriptions may be deleted, although they may determine the acceptability of the speech act. Finally, those speech acts establishing, maintaining and concluding the sequence, that is the communicative interaction in general, may also be dropped in macro-interpretation.
1.2 Pragmatics and Literary Style: What Contributions?
Texts arise in specific social situations, and according to Kress and Hodge (1985:18), they are constructed with specific purposes by one or more speakers or text in concrete situations of social exchange. Any description of linguistic form appears to be inadequate without immediate and direct relations to the social context. The forms and functions of language are therefore not separable, bearing in mind that circumstance.
Style is really only definable in terms of the operations carried out by the producers and receivers of texts. When modern linguistics began to emerge, as Ayodabo cited Dressler (1993:16) as opining that, it was customary to limit investigation to the framework of the sentence as the largest unit with an inherent structure. Whatever structures might obtain beyond the sentence was assigned to the domain of stylistics. When we move beyond the sentence boundary, we enter a domain characterized by greater freedom of selection or variation and lesser conformity with established rules.
Perhaps, it may not be out of place to say that pragma-literature is derivable from the pragmatics of discourse which deals with the systematic relations between structure of a literary text and its context. The delimitation between pragmatics on the one hand and literature on the other hand presents an interesting discussion. The pragmatic condition would pertain to appropriateness of an utterance, whereas literary (or literary analysis) variations define the effective choice of diction in literary texts where the audiences are involved in the perlocutionary level. That is the point in the study of language use at which pragmatics, literature and sociology intermingle.
The contribution of pragmatics to literature, therefore, would be in the area of appropriateness phenomenon. Even with Quintilian’s (an early theoretician) four qualities of style, appropriateness still has a place, the other three being correctness, clarity and elegance. The appropriateness of language in literature is in the aspect of literary device called diction – which is the writer’s choice of words. One may begin to ask how appropriate is the writer’s diction in the conveyance of the ‘supposed’ message or thematic concerns to the audience? One thing is for sure – the literary writer has a stock of choiced vocabularies or dictions to pick from; whichever choice he makes directly or indirectly affects the transmission of his message to the audience. A study in pragma-literature should help the writer to understand the implications of his language choice and how it may affect his audience’s ability to deduce meaning in any given context.
Persistent and continuous attempts should be made to understand the dialectical relationship between linguistic choice and the social, economic, political and cultural environment determining this choice especially in literature. The writer is the macro-subject of a literary work who mediates between objective reality and its imaginative reconstruction. This role of the writer, according to Babatunde (1997:119), can be best analyzed and understood by studying how imaginative and realistic use of language functions to reveal the place of certain literary objective factors in mediating between man and his understanding of the external world. Babatunde goes on to list such objective factors as biography, class orientation, ideology, and political affiliation and orientation.
In his essay on ‘linguistic realism in emergent Nigerian dramatic literature’, Babatunde (1997:119) presents the role of linguistics in literature. Such terms as realism, naturalism, impressionism and other related concepts in the literature, he provides a working definition of realism that enables us see how a category of Nigerian playwrights use language to mirror the situation around them. The concept of realism is very important to literature because it forms the bedrock for which modern day literary artists mirror their environment. Simply put, realism described the degree to which literary works portray the basic realities of their times as a function of the perceptive power and the ideological insight of the writers. Babatunde cited
Leyifor (1985:58) as articulating realism succinctly:
Realism would apply to those plays that deal with ‘real’ people in ‘typical’ situation, with plots that seem credible or probable; a relation to the daily rounds of life and cycles and passage of time within a given human community (119).
Realism therefore implies accurate imitation of actual situation as a symbolic expression of the complexities of life of human responsibilities and heroic conduct. Realism as a mode of perception and creativity accommodates the objective and subjective vision of life. Indeed, as proposed by George Lukacs, realism examines how the slice of life is cut. Commenting on the usefulness of Lukacs’ view, in spite of the objections raised against it, Oko (1986:146) submits that:
His central category unites aesthetics with the historical or social moment. His theory of type defines type not as the average, as in naturalism. The type is nearly individual as in modernists’ subjectivism. The type is a unity of the subjective experience that holds also within its heart the highest condensation of general experience (cited in Babatunde 1997: 120).
A writer of the realist mode presents individual experience as an index of group and collective experience. The experience of the individual is continually shaped by the economic, political and social circumstances of his existence. The experience either limits or enlarges his opportunities.
Chidi Amuta (1989:128) has unidentified three types of realism in African literature: “animistic”, “ethical” and “socialist” realism. It is the concept of “socialist realism” that is relevant in this study for the emergent literary dramatists who are interested in linking the social environment of the character to their language and acts.
1.3 Pragmatics and Humour
The tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement can be termed humour. The term derived from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours (from Latin – body fluid) controlled human health and emotion. Most people are able to experience humour ̶ be amused, smile or laugh at something funny ̶ and thus are considered to have a sense of humour. The hypothetical person lacking a sense of humour would likely find the behaviour induced by humour to be inexplicable, strange or even irrational. Though intimately decided by personal taste, the extent to which a person finds something humorous depends on a host of variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, intelligence and context. For instance, young children may favour puppet shows or cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, whose physical nature makes it accessible to them. By contrast, sophisticated forms of humour such as satire require an understanding of its social meaning and context and thus tend to appeal to the mature audience.
Many theories exist on what humour is and what social function it serves. The prevailing types of theories attempting to account for the existence of humour include psychological theories, the vast majority of which consider humour-induced behavior to be very healthy; spiritual theories, which may for instance, consider humour to be a “gift from God”; and theories which consider humour to be an unexplainable mystery, very much like a mystical experience (Raymond Smullyan 2014:1). The benign-violation theory, endorsed by Peter McGraw, attempts to explain humour’s existence. The theory says, “Humour only occurs when something seems wrong, unsettling, or threatening, but simultaneously seems okay, acceptable or safe” (2).
Humour can be used as a method to easily engage in social interaction by taking away that awkward, uncomfortable or uneasy feeling of social interactions. Others believe that the appropriate use of humour can facilitate social interactions. Humour is a ubiquitous, highly ingrained and largely meaningful aspect of human experience and is therefore decidedly relevant in organizational contexts, such as the work place. The significant role that laughter and fun play in organizational life has been seen as a sociological phenomenon and has increasingly been recognized as also creating a sense of involvement among workers (Wikipedia: 2014). Sharing humour at work not only offers a relief from boredom, but can also build relationships, improve camaraderie between colleagues and create positive effect. It may also relieve tension and can be used as a coping strategy. Sharing a laugh with a few colleagues may improve moods and bring out quality of work.
Humour has a medicinal effect of decreasing stress, reducing tensions, killing boredoms and prolonging people’s life span. The financial benefit of humour is an understatement. Rich comedians are making a living off cracking jokes in Nigeria today. Humour can be made out of the most serious events or situations. For instance, Nigerian stand-up comedians today make jokes out of national situations or ridicules public figures to create jokes. A case in point is the former first lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, whose idiosyncratic language use has provided much reference points for Nigerian comedians at all levels. However, some of the jokes created out of this language situation have not been taken likely when they are used out of context. This explains the strained relationship between the former first lady and veteran standup comedian, Ali Baba. Context in humour is vital and this is where pragmatics may come in.
In literature, humour is mostly satiric as writers try to lampoon, satirize or use sarcasm to change certain societal excesses. The driving force of every humour is language or one of the basic aspects of humour is language. Language can be manipulated for stylistic and humorous effect. However, a joke made or words spoken as humorous must be context based. Jokes and humorous statements can stir up trouble if not applied to the right context. Therefore, the place of humour in pragmatics will be the application of humorous languages in their appropriate social context.
Our data for this study is drawn from Funke Akindele’s Jenifa’s Diary, a recent popular television sitcom that tells the story of Suliat, a razz village hairdresser who heads to the city to try and gain admittance into university, after feigning sickness to con money out of an admirer. She is squatting with her cousin, Toyosi in the University hostel. The show is built on addressing issues of gender and domestic violence, the pressure of Nigerian ladies to keep up with the life of the high and mighty and how university girls indulge in all kinds of social excesses to live the life of the rich.
What makes this show appealing are the grammatical blunders, sometimes deliberate meaning shift that characterized some of the Nigerian home videos to drive home their message. This process creates a lot of humour that keeps the viewers glued to their television. The most compelling thing about Jenifa’s Diary is the appropriate social context that goes with the intended humour. Apart from the language blunders, the typical Yoruba accent that goes with the pronunciation of every syllable gives the show its humorous effect.
