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This paper sets out to study pragmatic strategies of diagnostic news delivery in Nigerian hospitals, an area that has received extremely little attention in the linguistic literature. It ultimately aims to see how these strategies are similar to or are different from those used in Western hospitals, especially as studied by Maynard (1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1992, 2003, 2004). The hospitals sampled were stratified into teaching, state-government owned and private hospitals, and a random selection of five hospitals from each group was made. Data were collected through tape recordings, and personal observation of hospital interactions. The analysis of data was based on insights from Levinson's (1979) notion of activity type and Maynard's (1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1992, 2003, 2004) devices of diagnostic news delivery. The findings reveal that three strategies are used to declare diagnostic news. Two of these are the main strategies identified by Maynard, namely asserting the condition and citing the evidence, but the third, mitigating the blunt news through veils and hedges, is largely peculiar to Nigerian hospitals. The paper concludes that a study of pragmatic strategies of diagnostic news delivery contributes to a better understanding of hospital interactions, and provides insights into doctors' verbal outputs in diagnostic meetings.

The paper examines the pragmatic functions that crisis-motivated proverbs play in Ola Rotimi's The Gods is not to Blame. It picks its inspiration from the little attention hitherto paid, in the linguistic literature, to both the specific proverbs that are spurred by crisis in the play and the pragmatic roles of such proverbs. For data, only the proverbs that are necessitated by the crisis-situations in the text are sampled, and these are analysed, using the recent theory of pragmatic acts (Mey 2001). The study reveals that crisis-motivated proverbs in The Gods are not to Blame, which are of two types: social and political, are characterized by practs such as those of counselling, cautioning, challenging, veiling, persuading, prioritizing, encouraging, threatening and admitting. These are psychological acts which exploit contextual features such as reference, metaphor, inference, shared situation knowledge, shared cultural knowledge and relevance. The paper concludes that studying literary proverbs used in crisis situations, from a pragmatic perspective, both throws additional insights into the paremiological pool and promises to provide a veritably helpful tool for language teaching.