"OUR DEMOCRACY HAS BEEN TESTED TO THE UTMOST LIMIT”. AN EXPLORATION OF THE USE OF ASSERTIVES IN GHANAIAN PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURAL ADDRESSES

Studies on presidential inaugural addresses (PIAs) in Africa have mainly focused on rhetorical elements and general pragmatic enactments in such speeches. Through such studies, it has been brought out that an assortment of speech acts are used in PIAs. Nonetheless, the deployment nature of specific speech acts like assertives largely remains unexplored. Rooted in Searle’s taxonomy on speech acts (Searle, 1969), the present study investigates the use of assertives in five presidential inaugural addresses delivered by presidents of Ghana between 1993 and 2009. This study concludes that the presidents of Ghana mainly employ assertives to contextualise the country in terms of its past, present and future circumstances: the presidents usually paint the past of Ghana as murky, the present as encouraging and the future as promising. The assertives are thus used by the presidents to inspire the confidence of the populace in their respective governments. This study has implications for the literature on African presidential speeches as well as for the speech act theory