Conversational Implicature in Igbo Oral Narratives: A Pragmatic Study

This study analyses conversational implicature in Igbo oral narratives collected from storytelling sessions in Nnewi and Awka, Anambra State, South East Nigeria. Oral narrative traditions in Igbo communities constitute a significant repository of cultural knowledge, moral instruction, and social regulation, yet their pragmatic dimensions have been underexplored using Gricean frameworks. The research is informed by Grice's Cooperative Principle and the four conversational maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner. Data were collected through ethnographic recording of eight storytelling sessions involving a total of thirty-five adult community members. The narratives were transcribed and analysed for instances where maxims are flouted, violated, or suspended to generate implicit meanings. Findings indicate that the maxim of relation is most commonly flouted in Igbo narratives through the use of digressions that encode culturally specific moral prescriptions accessible only to culturally competent listeners. The study also identifies the role of tonal and paralinguistic cues in signalling implicature within oral performance contexts, a dimension often absent in written pragmatic studies. These findings contribute to the pragmatic analysis of African oral literature and underscore the importance of cultural competence in the interpretation of Igbo narrative implicature. The study recommends further documentation of Igbo oral texts as resources for linguistic and cultural education. Keywords: conversational implicature, Igbo oral narratives, pragmatics, Grice, Anambra State.