A pragmatic analysis of selected Yoruba Chistian pain-relieving burial songs
A pragmatic analysis of selected Yoruba Chistian pain-relieving burial songs

Summary/Abstract: The Yoruba culture, like many other cultures of the world, sees death as an eternal loss, hence the sadness and crying witnessed among the people whenever a soul departs to the great beyond. However, the Christian belief system, as evident in many of the Yoruba Christian burial songs, has been employed as an antidote to the pain of death among the Yoruba Christians in Nigeria. This phenomenon has not been addressed from a linguistic perspective. This study, therefore, applies a modified version of Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Acts theory to ten Yoruba Christian pain-relieving burial songs selected among Yoruba Christians in Nigeria. It concludes that Yoruba Christian pain-relieving burial songs are emotional acts that interact with such contextual factors as Shared Yoruba Cultural belief (SYCB), Shared Christian Religious belief (SCRB), Inference (INF), Relevance (REL) and Metaphor (MPH) to produce antidotes to the pain of death among Yoruba Christians in Nigeria.

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