Abstract

The paper examines the potency of pragmatic theories in the analysis of female writings in northern Nigeria. As a literary genre, poetry is unique for deploying enchanting language in the communication of the poet’s thematic preoccupations. In using language to communicate themes or subject matter, the poet is engaged in two basic tasks: selecting appropriate words and skillfully patterning such words with others in stretches. From classical to contemporary times, pragmatic theories are essentially theoretical frameworks for the interpretation of textual meanings – meanings which reveal language use as the performance of actions. In the analysis of Sheefah Zarma’s poem (“Love”), this paper hinges on two theoretical underpinnings: Adegbija’s pragmatic theory and the Pragma-crafting Theory. The significance of this study is worthy of scholarly attention; to the best of our knowledge, most studies on the pragmatic investigation of language use in literary writings focus on prose and drama because these two genres of literature are more action-revealing in terms of the dynamics of human interaction which is the core of pragmatics. It is therefore particularly significant that this study demonstrates phenomenally that even poetry can capture fascinating action-like dimensions of language use to disabuse the minds of readers who do not see poetry as speech-acts-revealing. Interestingly, this study examines the work of a young female poet from northern Nigeria, rather than that of a celebrated writer from the same region – Zeinab Alkali. This study concludes that pragmatic theories are integrative and capture the contextual underpinnings of language use.