Conceptualizing Speech Acts in African Literature: A Linguistic Study of Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born

This paper conceptualizes speech acts in African literature via a linguistic study of Ayi Kwei Armah’s ^[1] The beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Within the context of the paper, “conceptualization of speech acts” is essentially the functions of speech acts in extended body of discourse such as literary texts. The paper mainly hinges on Bach and Harnish’s ^[2] speech acts theory, although insights from different pragmatic theories give it direction. African literature deploys fascinating dimensions of speech acts in the communication of writers’ thematic concerns, as evident in The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The paper concludes that a speech act approach to the study of African literature reveals the total meaning produced when speech acts are intentionally selected and deployed by the intra-text participants of discourse in varied situational contexts.