Digital Tools and COVID-19 Awareness in Nigeria: A Speech Acts Analysis

ABSTRACT

A pragmatic investigation of the social media as a digital tool for increasing awareness against COVID-19 is presented in this Chapter. The study aims at exploring selected internet-based entertainment contents (also known as memes) as digital tools to create awareness on COVID-19 particularly from Facebook. The study adopts the Austinian Speech Act Theory-an assertion that language is used to perform actions and these actions are only identified when utterances are contextually appropriate. Both qualitative and quantitative research approaches were adopted to give adequate and in-depth descriptions of the types of speech acts identified from the memes. It is found that the memes are characterized by representatives (assertion), directives, commissives and expressives. Furthermore, there is the preponderance of representatives speech act type used in the memes (about 45.4%), implying that creators of memes made lucid statement on the need to keep to COVID-19 rules;followed by directives (18.2%), commissives (18.2%) and expressives (18.2%) each;while declaratives are missing in the memes. The study concludes that the social media as a digital tool are used by netizens to express their opinions about government and co-existence. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s).