Face-Saving Acts in Yoruba Custom: A Pragmatic Investigation of Oba Ajakaye Movie

ABSTRACT: The primacy of speaking as one of the four language skills is most pronounced in drama, being a genre of literature that is said to mirror life. In order to reach a wider audience, Nigerian local movies are being projected through online digital platforms. In spite of this tilt, many more studies still largely focus on drama written texts with less attention on on-line projected movies as an area deserving of scholarly investigation. To fill this void, this paper, which adopts a qualitative research design, seeks to investigate whether higher social status are honourifics and determinants of politeness strategies employed in Yoruba custom, using Brown and Levinson theory of politeness strategies. A purposive sampling of the online data for this study was conducted. Interlocutors deployed the four politeness strategies postulated by Brown and Levinson. Altogether, fifteen politeness strategies were used in the data analysed for this study. The politeness strategies with the frequency identified in the data are: Bald-on-recordoccurred five times, Off- record occurred five times, Negative and Positive face occurred three and two times respectively. The investigationfound out that higher social statusin Yoruba custom attract honour and deference, and that, bald –on record and off-record are the highest politeness strategies used in the data which elicit discourses of Face-Threating Acts (FTA’s). The study concluded that social higher status in Yoruba custom served as honourifics and largely accounted for the choice of politeness strategies employed by the interlocutors. Keywords: Oba Ajakaye, Honourifics, Yoruba, Oreoluwa, Arilesere.