The Pragmatics of Indirectness in Yoruba: A Cross-Generational Corpus Study

Indirectness as a pragmatic strategy encompasses a wide range of communicative behaviours through which speakers convey meanings that diverge from the semantic content of their utterances, often for reasons of politeness, face management, or social solidarity. This dissertation investigates the pragmatics of indirectness in Yoruba across three generational cohorts, producing an original cross-generational corpus analysis of indirect speech acts, implicature deployment, and indirect refusal strategies in naturalistic Yoruba discourse. A corpus of 50 hours of recorded naturalistic interaction was collected from participants in three generational cohorts: adolescents aged 15 to 19, adults aged 30 to 45, and elders aged 60 and above, drawn from urban Ibadan and rural Osun State communities. The corpus was annotated for indirect speech acts using a Yoruba-adapted version of the BNC-Spoken pragmatic coding scheme, and findings were interpreted through Gricean pragmatics, Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, and ethnopragmatics. Existing pragmatic research on Yoruba has focused on greetings, speech acts, and politeness in isolated discourse genres, without the cross-generational corpus methodology needed to trace synchronic variation and potential change in progress. This dissertation makes an original methodological and analytical contribution by establishing a cross-generational pragmatic corpus for Yoruba and identifying generational shifts in indirectness strategies attributable to urbanisation, educational attainment, and English contact. Findings will document declining use of elaborate indirect refusal sequences among younger urban speakers and a shift toward more direct assertion strategies. Keywords: pragmatics, indirectness, Yoruba, cross-generational corpus, politeness theory.