Socio-Pragmatic Insights into Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

The present study focuses on a socio-pragmatic perspective within Discourse Analysis. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Grice’s Cooperative Principles (1975), Conversational Implicatures (Levinson, 1983, 2000), and Politeness Principles (Levinson, 1978; Leech, 1983), it examines five selected excerpts from Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun to illuminate the varying strategies through which interlocutors navigate language according to shifting conversational contexts. Following a systematic corpus selection process, the quantitative analysis and interpretation of findings reveal how characters work cooperatively to achieve mutual understanding within conversations, often generating different implicatures. The findings suggest that an utterance’s conversational significance is shaped entirely by its specific context of use. Consequently, this study underscores the essential recommendation that, for effective communication, conversational participants must attentively utilize contextual cues to construct and interpret utterances’ ad hoc conversational values, thereby fostering mutual understanding and common ground.