Abstract
This paper explores the linguistic strategies of survival in the context of political insecurity used by Wole Soyinka in The Man Died using the tools of implicature, presupposition, deixis and strategic silence. To unravel how Soyinka superimposes meanings over the literal level to commit covert political criticism, self-preservation and moral resistance, the study has analysed eight purposefully selected passages in the text under the guiding principles of the Grice's Theory of Conversational Implicature and Culpeper's Impoliteness Theory. The findings show that conversational implicatures can be used by the narrator to indirectly express disagreement and reveal political unjustness while minimising the risks of overt disagreement. In contrast to presuppositions that sensitise the reader to social and political limitations, deictic expressions immerse the reader in the geographical, temporal and social setting of political repression, keeping plausible deniability alive. The paper argues that strategic silence is a form of communication and not a way of expressing resistance, restraint and/or ethical rejection. The results also show that impoliteness strategies exist to challenge power relations and to challenge the authority. Thus, the linguistic resources utilized in this study reveal the function of language in the negotiation of power, survival and resistance in a political threat situation. The study contributes to both the study of literary pragmatics and the study of African political discourse and shows that the subtle and intricate pragmatics strategies are strategies of resilience, critique and moral engagement in times of authoritarianism.
Keywords: Authority, Covert Critique, Negotiation, Subtext, Survival
DOI: 10.36349/sojolics.2026.v02i01.039
author/Jaiyeoba, O. O., & Adesanmi, M. A.
journal/Sokoto JOLICS 2(1) | June 2026 |
