An Investigation of the Pragmatic Deviance of Metaphor in Shoneyin’s <i>The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives</i>

Abstract

The theory of implicature propounded by Grice brings to linguistic enquiry the concept that speakers often say more than is semantically coded. This phenomenon, being pervasively employed in metaphoric language, engenders a semantic cum pragmatic symbiotic approach to the interpretation of tropes – a model that embellishes the sentence meaning, arising from its semantic structure, with appropriate contextual information and/or encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, derived from pragmatics. The paper investigates how metaphors in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives are pragmatically deviant by infringing the maxims of the Cooperative Principle literally, and how readers can work out the implicature. The study shows that most metaphors in the text flout the Maxims of Quality, Manner and Relation. However, the utterance meaning derived from enriching the conventional content of the expressions with contextual details ultimately preserves the Cooperative Principle.