Voices and Verbal Jousting: An Exploration of Communication Strategies in Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel

Abstract

This paper undertakes a pragmatic analysis of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, foregrounding how speech functions as a tool of power, resistance, and identity construction in a postcolonial African context. Drawing on J. R. Searle’s Speech Act Theory and H. P. Grice’s Cooperative Principles, the study explores how the play’s central characters—Baroka, Lakunle, Sidi, and Sadiku—employ language not only to communicate but to perform actions, manipulate others, and assert or contest cultural norms. The analysis categorizes representative, directive, commissive, declarative, and expressive speech acts in the text and examines how strategic violations of conversational maxims produce implicature, irony, and miscommunication. Through close reading and theoretical application, the paper demonstrates that characters use speech to navigate the ideological tensions between tradition and modernity, orality and Western literacy, patriarchy and emerging female agency. 0 The study argues that the power of Soyinka’s drama lies not merely in its themes but in its linguistic form, where utterances carry illocutionary force and performative effect. By contextualizing speech within Yoruba communicative norms and sociocultural structures, the research moves beyond thematic critique to reveal how language mediates authority, seduction, resistance, and transformation. Ultimately, this paper contributes to African literary criticism by positioning pragmatics as a vital lens for understanding dramatic discourse, and highlights how in Soyinka’s work, language is not passive reflection but active engagement with cultural and ideological change.