Discourse Markers of Sarcasm in the Marital Conflict Discourse of Nigerian Celebrities

Abstract

Sarcasm is a communicative style with a complex interpretation. Thus, it presents a range of challenges in capturing its linguistic nuances, context dependencies and the latent meaning in marital disputes. The study examined the discourse markers of sarcasm in the marital conflict discourse of Nigerian celebrities. Since sarcasm conveys indirect meaning, this study helped language learners to infer and correctly interpret the meanings of sarcastic expressions in the context of marital conflicts. The study was guided by the following research questions: (1) What discourse features indicate sarcasm in marital conflicts of Nigerian celebrities?  (2) How do these discourse features function to express sarcasm within a marital conflict context? (3) What is the relationship between sarcasm and conflict escalation in Nigerian celebrity marital disputes? Using virtual observation, the researcher deliberately selected representative samples of texts or narratives in which sarcasm was communicated in different ways from online platforms of five (5) Nigerian celebrities who had marital crises. Such platforms include Facebook, blogs, Instagram, Twitter and so on. Moreover, newspaper headlines that feature celebrity news (direct interviews with such celebrities), such as Vanguard, Daily Post, Daily Trust, Premium Times and so on, were consulted. The collated data was given a qualitative and descriptive analysis using J.R. Searle’s Speech Act Theory.  The findings revealed that Nigerian celebrities use various discourse features, such as tone-meaning incongruity, quotation marks, footing shift, exaggerated virtue, religious irony, capitalisation for emphasis, hyperbole, vagueness, undermining clichés, false empathy/flattery,  understatement,  moralising deflection,  child framing, detached tone,  mock rhetorical questions,  audience inference,  religious register,  indirect reference,  mismatch between tone and content etc, to indicate sarcasm during marital conflicts.  It is recommended that the study be replicated in similar contexts to validate the findings.