Department: Linguistics African and European Languages
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Driving Entrepreneurial Acumen through Language Resourcefulness: A Speech Acts Analysis of Selected Radio Jingles in Pidgin
The fact that advertisement serves as a vital component of entrepreneurial exertions remains indubitable. Consequently, the role of language in driving an effective process of advertising informs this research. The paper aims at analysing some radio jingles in Pidgin, using J.L Austin’s Speech Acts Theory with the intent of explaining the role of utterances in arresting the attention of the target audience. Speech Acts, as a theory, explains the roles of utterances in shaping the attitudes of participants in interpersonal communication. It reflects the intentions of the speaker and the effects that the speaker’s expressions have on the hearer. Radio jingles are not cool, reasoned prose, but deeply emotional works that use wrenching language, dramatic exaggeration and figurative speech. The selected jingles, collected from the electronic media (radio), all of which were done in Pidgin, were transcribed and analysed for the purpose of this paper, using the quantitative method of analysis. It is revealed in the findings that Pidgin, based on its perceived popularity particularly in the business environment and in Nigeria as a whole, is a resourceful ally to entrepreneurial avenues for promoting goods and services through advertisements as Pidgin advertisements reflect some characteristics of the general Nigerian speech community in their forms like code-switching, etc. The paper concludes that since the target audience of an advert in Pidgin is incredibly large, advertisers can take advantage of the creativity embedded in Pidgin due to its numerous lexico-semantic processes.
Key words: language, pidgin, speech acts theory, advertisement, entrepreneur
