Language is a potent weapon through which ideas, thoughts, opinions, messages and information generally are exchanged between groups of people to ensure inter-personal relationship. It is a symbol of people‟s identity and a means of identifying people‟s value system. This is particularly true of proverbs which are generally believed to be words of wisdom, usually didactic, memorisable and therefore passed down easily from one generation to another. Proverbs are context dependent and culture specific. Since proverbs cannot exist outside of the context of use, pragmatics; the study of contextual meaning, is adopted as the tool of the study. To understand the prevailing context of the selected proverbs, the socio-cultural background and orientation of a group of language users are considered. This implies that culture occupies a vintage position in the study of proverbs in order to explore their contextual meaning and didactic significance. However, cultural diversity of language users, (particularly proverb users) has yet to be given adequate consideration in researches on proverbs. Therefore, the thrust of this study is to deploy the use of a linguistic theory for the analysis of literary texts with the aim of identifying the moral significance of the selected proverbs. One hundred proverbs from four works of Ola Rotimi, are analysed using a descriptive research approach based on modified version of Lawal‟s (1997) pragmatic model. The findings reveal the need for the primary and secondary levels of meaning, the existence of direct and indirect illocutionary acts, and the significance of four context/competence variables out of the six propounded by Lawal. The findings further affirm Malinowski‟s distinction between situational context and cultural context as a basis of meaning explication in pragmatics. In conclusion, the study reveals that selected proverbs perform certain didactic functions and that the functions are revealed through a careful exploration of the prevailing context.

This chapter is concerned with the background to the study, statement of the problem, research questions, aim and objectives of the study, justification for the study, scope of the study, methodology and organisation of the study. The chapter provides a basis for a proper understanding of the thesis.

Language is an avenue through which cultures can be understood. Language and social reality are strictly tied together, hence language is said to be culturally transmitted (Heath, 2003). This implies that changes in produce change in language because peoples‟ cultural orientation, attitude, belief, disposition, worldview and social value among others are reflected in their language (including proverbs). Proverbs are products of human experiences and mostly culture specific. They (proverbs) are concise in structure, often known by heart, loaded with philosophical meaning and passed from one generation to another.

The role of proverbs in societies where discourse is laced with assorted forms of proverbs for different communicative functions cannot be over emphasized. Proverb is one of the means through which the cultural background of a group of people could be known. It reveals a people‟s historical development, worldview and attitude. Proverb is a special way by which social behaviour is controlled in order to ensure mutual intelligibility among the interlocutors. Proverbs provide hard hitting messages in a profound way rather than in a nasty or demoralizing manner. They pass very weighty messages in a mild or gentle way.