Abstract:
Political speeches usually have great influence on people because politicians use it to sell their views and reshape the minds of the electorate; therefore, an analysis of such speeches is very important. This study focused on the pragmatics of selected political speeches of Donald Trump. A number of works have been done by scholars on the study and interpretation of political speeches of some political leaders and Presidents of nations using the speech act theory and other theories. However, to the knowledge of this researcher, scant attention is paid to the use of Grice’s Cooperative Principles and its maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner in analyzing political speeches of Donald Trump. These maxims enjoin speakers to be informative to the expected degree, to say things that are well founded, to be relevant and to be clear. The study seeks to apply these maxims to Donald Trump’s political speeches and analyze the extent to which it obeyed or flouted the maxims. Analytic survey design was adopted while the documented speeches of Donald Trump, other published and unpublished works and library materials were the components of the instruments for data collection. Based on the analysis of data using Grice’s cooperative principles, it was found out that those selected political speeches of Donald Trump obeyed the maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner to a great extent and flouted same to a lesser degree. This gave rise to a lot of implicatures that affirm the need for the study. Observations from the analyzed data made the following conclusions obvious: Pragmatic principles should be used in analyzing political speeches.
