Abstract:
In any given communicative event whether spoken or written, the speaker/writer makes use of certain verbs referred to as performatives or constatives to perform a speech act. Such speech act carries certain illocutionary force, which is adjudged felicitous or infelicitous depending on whether the illocutionary act resulting therefrom meets the felicity conditions as well as conforms to the four maxims as stipulated by the cooperative principles. In a discourse situation, the analyst seeks to ascertain the felicity or otherwise of a given speech act by using retrievable information from memory stored in the form of structures referred variously to as frames, scripts, scenarios, schemata, and mental models. In this paper, we shall seek to analyse discourse in the Nigerian print media, using the speech acts of Bayo Onanuga and Yakubu Mohammed of TheNEWS and Newswatch magazines respectively. Considered against the background of their professional antecedents as editors of these magazines, we shall analyse their speech acts during the reception of the 2005 winner of Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, Mr. Dele Olojede, to determine their status as felicitous or infelicitous and its implications for journalism as a profession in Nigeria.