A pragmatic study of the Nigeria centre for disease control COVID-19 twitter text messages

Abstract

The emergence of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has opened up new horizons of research in different disciplines. Scholars in  linguistics have made valuable and tremendous impacts on the language employed for disseminating facts on covid-19. Language came  to play a very important role at the peak of the outbreak of the disease by helping the media, particularly on social media  (microblogging) platforms (such as Twitter handle, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram), to disseminate relevant information to the public. In this case, language is specifically designed by writers to ensure professionalism, choice of linguistic and textual styles that  must conform to acceptable linguistic principles as well as capture the attention of the target readers. This research studied how  language was utilized to create salient awareness in the Twitter messages of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). The main focus  was to study the speech acts of the pieces of information given on this platform from February to April 2021, which constituted the  second phase of the outbreak. One hundred (100) Twitter texts were randomly selected from the Twitter handle of NCDC. The  researchers studied and analyzed the messages based on Searle’s speech act theory. The data were analyzed using both the descriptive  qualitative method and the quantitative method. It was discovered that NCDC employed the five illocutionary acts specified by Searle. The  researchers concluded that the acts were critical for successful communication.