AbstractsThis paper attempts to use Critical Discourse Analysis to unravel the complex webs of political associations and identities that go into political speeches of Nigerian presidents using one as a model. Nigeria has always been plagued by leadership problems and a lack of critical appreciation of crises of interests that abound in our political sphere. This article aims to offer a linguistic evaluation of a given political discourse in Nigeria in the mode of close engagement with the constructions and context of the discourse. It shows how personal pronouns are used by President Jonathan in his presidential declaration of interest speech to construct various identities and to transpose sentiments and sympathies in order to probably promote a political agenda. The use of Fairclough's (1989) three-tier analytical framework, i.e., description, interpretation and explanation helps to reconstruct the import and real ideological thrust of the speech. The description level shows the linguistic associations, the interpretation level, the pragmatic and intertexual, while the explanation level shows how the socio-cultural practices in the Nigerian society are drawn upon to reflect in these two in a dialectical cycle. In essence, this study, in a systematic way, shows in general how ideologies in the status quo are (or can be) sustained and reproduced by discursively supplanting the consciousness of the people. The pronouns used in the speech end up creating identities that foster the president's political interest and sustain the state of affairs while at the same time mystifying the real class and power struggle at the political center.
This paper attempts to use Transitivity and Critical Linguistics to demonstrate that news is (or can be) socially constructed and that reality in the press is more about opinions and propositions than facts. The language that is used to represent people and events is chosen from options and choices within the linguistic system that may not be value-free or coincidental. These choices can seek to represent the world in a particular ideologically-enforced manner. The analysis done in this paper using transitivity framework indicates how grammatical resources like agency deletion, negative/positive representation of actors, foregrounding/backgrounding, nominalization and so on are used by both the New York Times and Arab News to foster ideological interests and to underscore their favored worldviews. In the Operation Cast Lead war between Israel and Hamas, the Arab News reports are shown to be very critical of Israel while defending Hamas. The New York Times, on the other hand, is shown as mitigating Israeli assaults and indicting Hamas mostly for the overall negative consequences of the war.
This research paper tries to use Critical Discourse Analysis especially Van Dijk's (1988) Discourse Analytical Perspective and complementary insights from Fairclough (1988, 1995) and Van Leeuwen (2008) to analyze two news reports from a Nigerian newspaper. These reports from the Daily Sun show two distinct and parallel kinds of reportage even though they both have a particular overriding theme which is violence. This paper analyzes both the textual and contextual aspects of the reports. The result reveals that news reports are sometimes made from an a priori perspective based on frames recalled and rebuilt in fresher news and that actors and actions are constructed to suit the perspectives. In this analysis, we see how Muslims in the Jos attacks are built into frames where they can only be assailants not victims even in a case where they are grossly victimized. This paper enforces the notion of bias and subjective reportage of events in the media as espoused by CDA.
The mandate itself positions a binary (or social roles) involving a civilizer and one to be civilized. Lexical and syntactical analyses are done here to capture this paternalistic and racially superior philosophy. Lugard constructs his medium and perception of the other to a state of apparent objectivity using (assumptions of) the suzerainty of his gaze, the use of the ethnographic present tense and categorical modality. These make his views appear authoritative, objective and his mission legitimated. Using this authoritativeness, the subaltern is naturalized, infantilized, distanced, fetishisized and conveniently othered as an object to be mastered and used. The data is analyzed using critical discourse analysis to demystify and unravel the mask of objectivity and the ideological significance of the style involved in the text.
This paper focuses on aspects of Nigerian corrupt practices and how perceptions of public service and leadership responsibilities are framed linguistically, or discursively, around predatory elitist interests. It is based on two premises. The first pertains to the ways in which the national wealth is metaphorically called the national cake, and how it is viewed as an object that elicits consumption. Textual data is generated from 19 national newspapers and blogs that show 85 occurrences of the term the national cake. The surrounding contexts of the term indicate that national wealth is eatable, shareable and is spatially located. The second premise relates to how the Nigerian elite use metonymic associations to make themselves serve as the aggregate of, or shorthand to, the geographical, partisan and religious interests of the country. This stand-for relationship plays a prominent role in establishing contiguous representations which aid (conceptual) proximity to the national cake. This study uses critical metaphor analysis, corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to demystify the facts about Nigeria’s national life otherwise overlaid by ideology.
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