PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF AMMA DARKO’S BEYOND THE HORIZON

Abstract

This paper focuses on the analysis of pragmatic features of a literary work-- Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon. Assuming that the study of discourse in literature requires a linguistic theory, it mainly draws on Austin’s (1975) theory of speech acts, which stresses the role of language in communicative social acts such as requesting, questioning, promising, etc. as well as the institutional verbal acts. The analysis is carried out on selected excerpts from the novel. The paper shows that understanding the speech act force of utterances involves the hearer in combining linguistic knowledge about grammatical marking with both background cultural knowledge and knowledge of the immediate local context.