Textual Orientation to Cculture-Sansitive Proverbs Meanings in Selected Ahmed Yerima’s Yoruba Culture-Based Plays

Proverbs have attracted a lot of attention in linguistic scholarship. Specifically, scholars have addressed the thematic and figurative features of proverbs in the espousal of ethnic experiences of different communities from sociolinguistic, stylistic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Observation has shown that Pragmatic efforts have however ignored emphasis on the impact of textual parts, especially, common grounds in character’s interactions through shared situational knowledge (SSK) and shared cultural knowledge (SCK) of interlocutors in proverbial interpretations. With the application of Kecskes (2014) socio-cognitive principle of common grounds, this study examines purposively selected Yoruba proverbs in Ahmed Yerima's Yoruba-culture based plays Mojagbe and Ajagunmale with a view to determining their meanings relative to Yerima's pragmatic intentions. The study reveals that proverbs which mainly have linguistic roots in metaphor are interpretively aided by common ground items of shared situational knowledge (SSK) and shared cultural knowledge (SCK) in characters' utterances to pragmatically serve to warn/caution, emphasize, lament, accuse, and explain in the plays. This linguistic contribution to existing literature on Ahmed Yerima’s plays is significant for aiding the understanding of form-function nexus in context-sensitive proverbial interpretation in fictional discourse in linguistic scholarship in Nigeria.