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Introduction
Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's literary texts, like those of the older generation of African writers such as WoIe Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, etc. reflect and embody the way of life of Africans. Of course, literature is always a reflection of its enabling society; the writer lives in a society and takes his/her ideas, characters and situations from that society. He/she then imaginatively writes about the individuals who inhabit the society, as well as about events which happen in that society, using the tool of language. Literature thus becomes a vehicle through which the historical and sociopolitical conditions of its society are depicted.
The study of language use in Adichie's literary texts, especially to generate meaning has attracted increasing interest in linguistic scholarship in recent times. Studies have thus concentrated on characterization, thematisation, stylistic and pragmatic features of her prose texts, given that "the novel is the dominant genre of literature, which has been largely accorded a deserved primacy by writers in the documentation of the political and social experiences of Africans" (cf. Agho 1995: 23, Kehinde 2005:88). While pragmatic studies of her texts have examined explicit meaning in Purple Hibiscus (see Osunbade 2009), very little attention has been paid to the contextual examination of implicit meanings of her thematic foci. This study, therefore, carries out a pragmatic investigation of implicatures of political discourse in Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (henceforth PH) and Half of a Yellow Sun (henceforth HYS), to determine how language is deployed to facilitate access to her thematic concerns.
My choice of Adichie is motivated by a number of factors. Apart from being the new voice of Nigerian literature whose novels have attracted several awards, especially in the contemporary literary scene (suggesting that she has gained a measure of success that eludes many writers), mere is a close relationship between her writing and her world, her society and life (see Adebayo 1995: 64); and her works bear relevance to the espousal of political issues in the post-colonial Nigeria.
My data consists of politics-related conversations from die selected texts (i.e. PH and HYS). All the political discourses in the novels are sampled and analysed for occurrences of implicatures, using insights from Gricean Pragmatics, towards: enhancing a better understanding of the texts, shifting literature on pragmatics forward,...