Implicature in Selected News Bulletin of Radio Kogi

Previous studies on implicature have addressed many areas with the exclusion of implicature in news bulletins on radio which accounts for how the media use language. This becomes the focus of this study as it examines how the media use language in news bulletins by looking at the types of implicature in the discourse, the instances of implicature, contextual frames, and their implication on the listeners. H.P Grice’s Theory of Implicature (1975) was employed in the analysis of the sampled data. A total number of 12 news bulletins with 250 news items were collected from Radio Kogi Studio in Lokoja between January – February 2021. The researcher found 34 utterances containing implicature in the news bulletin, a total number of 17 utterances were analyzed, 6 utterances under the two types of implicature, and 6 utterances flouted the cooperative principles. The implication of the instances of implicature found in this study shows that the audience would need more inference to understand or comprehend what the news is all about. If not some of them could be misleading because they are ambiguous, obscure, and sometimes, lack enough evidence.