‘I Cannot Overreach the Senate’ : Orienting to the Macro-Context of Legislative Debates of the Nigerian Senate

Both democracy and the legislature in Africa are emergent and require scholarly investigations to understand them. Therefore, this paper investigates the contextual configuration of Nigerian Senate debates (henceforth, NSD), paying particular attention to how legislators orient to the macro-context of this institutional discourse. The data comprise a 1.9 million-word corpus of NSD subjected to quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis. While the quantitative approach provides information on key semantic domains, concordance and collocational data, the qualitative analysis relies on a partial theory of the context models of parliamentary debates and the concepts of appropriateness and common ground. The components of the macro-context of NSD comprise context as social domain subcategorized into institutional setting, actors and goals, and context as social actions subcategorized into the global actions of legislation, representation and oversight function, respectively. The paper argues that legislators make explicit, through specific cognitive pragma-linguistic devices, their knowledge of aspects of the context of NSD they consider relevant for engaging in, and interpreting ongoing interaction, especially when something goes wrong.