1.1 Introduction
Generally, Christian handbills are meant to invite people for programs in churches. Different handbills and posters have different meanings. It has been observed that there are other hidden meanings to these sentences, to this effect, the researcher hopes to highlight the meanings pragmatically. Christian handbills are well known by the people. It is here and there and people read them and just ignore some sentences that they see. In view of this, the researcher hopes to highlight these expressions and help bring out the meaning that they might have pragmatically.
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Research questions, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
1.2 Background of Study
Christian handbills are one of the leading non-verbal means of communication in the society today especially the church handbills and posters. Technically put, posters are very important forms of visual communication. It presents picture(s) with meanings lying behind it (Afolayan, 2011). Christian handbills are an efficient tool to influence the public opinion because they can reach wide and specific audiences (children, women, men and youths), and they are accessible to people who are otherwise isolated by illiteracy or poverty. They can also give written information in areas where there are few illiterates. This enables one to emphasize main messages and to give educational information (Schaap and Steenbergen, 2001). Hence, it is worth to note that underlying every handbill is language as they are very important forms of visual communication that persuades target audience to attend various church programmes and activities.
Pragmatic Analysis refers to the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected speech or written discourse. Roughly speaking, it refers to attempts to study the organization of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such as; conversational exchanges or written texts. It follows that Pragmatic Analysis is also concerned with language use in social contexts, and in particular with interaction or dialogue between speakers. Pragmatic Analysis is a hybrid field of enquiry. Its “lender disciplines” are to be found within various corners of the human and social sciences, with complex historical affiliations and a lot of cross-fertilization taking place.
Christian handbills are used by so many people; they are used by music industries, beauty pageantries, schools, Muslims, Christians etc. Christians are people who believe in the Almighty God and worship him in the church and at some other places. They are headed by pastors, deacons, elders, priests, bishops, reverend fathers, etc. We have different kinds of churches in Ughelli; they include; Catholics, Anglicans, Pentecostals, etc. and each of these want people/Christians to worship in their churches. In order to achieve this aim, they do things like evangelism, crusades, praise nights, sharing of handbills etc. telling them about upcoming event/events or about their church services.
Most of these handbills contain the names of their churches, host pastors, venue, time, themes, and other sentences to encourage them to come, some of these sentences include testimonies, words of encouragement etc. The main in general is to invite people to their churches in order to fellowship with them. Hence, this study seeks to examine the Pragmatic Analysis of Christian Handbills and Posters in Ughelli and its environment.
1.3 Statement of Problems
Investigation revealed that in every street of our urban and rural towns in Nigeria, there is one form of church or the other. In the case of church adverts, specifically, the main purpose is usually to get people to attend a programme in which the preacher, through persuasive strategies, influence on the audience’s belief, to modify or change it or to make him act in a certain way. Hence, church adverts on handbills, posters, and billboards are linguistically and most times, semiotically meant to invite people by creating suspense, making the readers to see lacks or needs in their lives and the church programmes as means of solving the perceived lacks and needs.
However, there exist some graphosyntactic errors, lexical, syntactic features and semantic features used in Christian handbills. The problem grapho-syntactic errors contravene syntactic and graphological norms of the language and are not recognized as such by most people. The errors are gradually and unfortunately becoming standard forms of usage for most Nigerians. Therefore, this present work will take a deep look at the discourse of Christian handbills (i.e. word captions, pictures, and headlines etc).
1.4 Aim and Objectives of Study
The aim of the study is to carry out a pragmatic analysis of Christian handbills using Ughelli in Delta State as a case study. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows:
- To identify the different graphosyntactic errors in the language used in Christian handbills;
- To identify the various syntactic features used in Christian handbills in Ughelli; and
- To analyze the possible semantic implications of Christian handbills in Ughelli.
1.5 Research Questions
The study came up with research questions so as to be able to ascertain the above stated objectives. The specific research questions for the study are stated below as follows:
- What are the possible semantic implications of Christian handbills in Ughelli?
- What is the various syntactic features used in Christian handbills in Ughelli?
- What is the different graphosyntactic errors in the language used in Christian handbills?
1.6 Significance of Study
This study will also help to promote the study of Pragmatic Analysis of Christian Handbills and Posters in the field of language study. It will also serve as a guideline for students who might be interested in this field to know the effect of pragmatics on the expressions used in handbills and posters.
This study will be of immense benefit to academic students and other researchers who intend to know more on this study and can also be used by non-researchers to build more on their research work. This study contributes to knowledge and could serve as a guide for other study.
1.7 Scope of Study
The scope of the research is focused on Pragmatic Analysis of Christian Handbills and Posters. There are so many handbills and posters in the world today, but, the researcher has limited this study to some of the handbills and posters in Ilorin and also the researcher has narrowed it down to twenty (20) Christian handbills and posters only.
1.8 Limitations of the Study
During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:
- Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
- Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
- Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
- Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection.
1.9 Methodology
The study adopts qualitative research method which is a type of scientific research this is especially effective in obtaining culturally specific information about the values, opinions, behaviors, and social contexts of particular populations. In order to be able to conduct this research, the major data for this study will be gathered from twenty (20) Christian handbills collected from some churches in Ughelli. These data are randomly selected and is subjected to Pragmatic Analysis.
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