Pragmatic Inference and Implicature in Yoruba Discourse: Towards a Yoruba Relevance Theory Account

Relevance Theory, proposed by Sperber and Wilson, offers a powerful cognitive-pragmatic account of how communicators generate and interpret implicit meanings through optimal relevance inference, yet its application to non-European languages with distinct contextual and cultural pragmatic norms requires substantial theoretical extension. This dissertation develops a Yoruba-specific Relevance Theory account of pragmatic inference and implicature, making an original theoretical contribution by extending and revising core Relevance Theory constructs to accommodate Yoruba cultural pragmatic conventions. The empirical research draws on a 30-hour corpus of naturalistic Yoruba conversation recorded in Ibadan and supplemented by discourse completion tasks designed to elicit implicature interpretation judgements from 80 native speakers. Systematic analysis of implicit meaning construction in Yoruba humour, ritual speech, indirect refusal, and politeness strategies provides the empirical foundation for theoretical revisions. The theoretical framework integrates Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory with post-Gricean pragmatics, ethnopragmatics, and Yoruba-specific cultural communication research. Existing Relevance Theory applications to Nigerian languages have been undertaken within English and Hausa contexts, with Yoruba as a test language for cross-cultural Relevance Theory being unexplored. This dissertation makes an original contribution by demonstrating that Relevance Theory requires cultural contextual enrichment of its cognitive environment construct to adequately account for Yoruba pragmatic inference patterns. Findings will identify three areas where standard Relevance Theory underpredicts Yoruba implicature: ancestral knowledge activation, proverb-triggered inference, and age-graded contextual assumptions. Keywords: pragmatic inference, implicature, Yoruba, Relevance Theory, cognitive pragmatics.