Domian Transfer as a Strategy Deployed to Portray Massive Corruption in Olusegun Obasanjo’s Open Letter to President Jonathan: A Pragmatic Survey

Abstract

This essay is a pragmatic analysis of Olusegun Obasanjo.s open letter,  dated 2nd December 2013, to the sitting president, Goodluck Ebele  Jonathan. The letter titled ¡°Before It Is Too Late¡± raises pertinent  national issues bothering on massive corruption and the degenerating state of the country.s social, economic, and political make up. There have been on-going conversations in almost every facet of the country, and outside, on the content of the letter. Also there are variations of public opinion on the intent, content, and context of the epistle, many of which come from the power brokers in Nigeria. What this essay does is to examine cases of domain transfer in the text. In the process, it discovers that the writer deploys lexical items from source domains- religion, military, business world, and Cricket game, et cetera to implicitly or explicitly portray issues of corruption in the text.

Key words: open letter; domain transfer; Obasanjo; Jonathan; corruption.