Impact of Cohesive Ties on Speech Acts Within Extended Discourse

Abstract

The main thrust of this research is to investigate the interaction of the speech acts with the cohesive elements evident in extended discourse, with the objective to determine the impact of the cohesive ties on the connectivity or relatedness of the speech acts within the texts. The texts under investigation in this study are some public-service advertisements concerned with Nigeria’s drive for a new socio-economic and political order. Thus, the analysis of the public-service advertisements is highly amenable to the speech acts theory. The public-service advertisements were extracted from Radio Nigeria, Lagos and Radio O-Y-O, Ibadan, respectively. Essentially, the methodology for this research is largely qualitative. The research findings show that cohesive ties play some role to relate speech acts to one another within an extended discourse. Moreover, it was observed that the impact of the concept of cohesion on the decoding of the speech acts contained in a text is such that it is only if and when the cohesively related items contained in the text are successfully interpreted that the appropriate speech acts can be properly understood.