A Comparative Analysis of Discourse Tacts in Selected Military Coup Speeches and Inaugural Addresses of Nigerian Presidents

This paper compares the discourse tacts in selected military coup speeches with the inaugural addresses of some of the democratically elected presidents in Nigeria using Adegbija’s (1995) eight discourse tacts as the theoretical framework. Findings reveal that while the political /military language as used by these two groups of the Nigerian leaders are similar in the area of using language to manipulate their audience, they differ in the area of brevity when it was observed and noticed that in military coup speeches, the announcers were more economical with words in their announcements than the Presidents in their inaugural addresses and that the tacts used as the base for analysing the texts used for this study were fully obeyed and complied with in the military coup speeches than were complied with by the inaugural addresses.