Linguistic Analysis and Discourse Studies

Existing scholarship on Maya Angelou has examined her poetry in relation to racial and gender identity, resilience, liberation, autobiography, orality, and the representation of Black womanhood, while studies of Kamau Brathwaite have largely focused on Caribbean history, African cultural memory, colonialism, diaspora, nation language, rhythm, and formal experimentation. However, the relationship between psychological experience and bodily expression in the two writers' poetry has received comparatively less sustained attention, particularly from a psychosomatic perspective. This article argues that bodily imagery, physical sensation, movement, voice, and rhythm in selected poems by Angelou and Brathwaite provide important means through which psychological conflict, traumatic experience, memory, resilience, and identity are articulated. The study is theoretically grounded in trauma and embodiment studies, drawing on concepts that connect psychological experience, corporeality, memory, and representation. Methodologically, it employs qualitative textual analysis and comparative close reading of selected poems by the two poets, examining bodily images, somatic expressions, corporeal metaphors, movement, voice, and rhythmic structures in relation to the psychological and historical experiences represented in the poems. The study expects to show that the body functions not merely as an object of poetic description but as an expressive medium that makes psychological distress and historical memory perceptible. It further anticipates that, while Angelou frequently uses bodily assertion, movement, voice, and posture to negotiate suffering and affirm individual identity, Brathwaite more strongly links corporeal experience to collective memory, ancestral history, rhythm, and cultural survival. By bringing the two poets into comparative dialogue, the study seeks to demonstrate how psychosomatic representation can illuminate different forms of embodied experience within African American and Caribbean poetic traditions.

This study examines how poverty metaphors influence representations of government intervention and policy responses. The study uses a corpus-assisted qualitative design and conceptual metaphor theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) to investigate poverty-related discourse in Daily Trust, Leadership, and Desert Herald articles published between 2020 and 2025. In order to provide a representation of the print media in northern Nigeria, stratified sampling was used to select the three newspapers. On the other hand, poverty-related reports and editorials were purposefully chosen because of their explicit focus on poverty, poverty alleviation, government interventions, social protection, and related policy responses. Antconc version 4.3.1 was used to make concordances and find lexical and metaphorical patterns that were always there. Thirty metaphorical expressions were purposefully chosen from the concordance results, and they were then coded and analysed in accordance with the conceptual metaphor domains and discourse functions that they referred to. The findings shown that poverty was conceptualised as an enemy, trap, burden or problem, line, container are the five most prevalent conceptual metaphor domains that are identified by the analysis. Poverty as an “enemy” is seen as something that attacks, hurts, or kills, encouraging governments to fight it through poverty-reduction programmes. As a “trap,” poverty is viewed as something that captures and prevents escape, leading to policies on education, employment, and social protection. As a “burden/problem,” it is seen as something that weighs down individuals and society, encouraging welfare and financial assistance. As a “line,” poverty is understood as a boundary between the poor and non-poor, supporting measurement and targeted interventions. As a “container,” it is viewed as a condition in which people are confined, encouraging policies aimed at helping people move out of poverty. The study addresses a gap in existing Nigerian poverty discourse research by connecting corpus-assisted metaphor analysis with the representation of government responsibility and policy intervention in northern Nigerian newspaper discourse.

Linguistic studies on media representation of ND conflicts have utilised pragmatic, discourse analytical, and stylistic tools in exploring the contexts of participants’ engagement in the discourse, and the ideology and stylistics of media reporting; but little is known about how media framing is employed in representing participants. The paper examines the discursive frames, linguistic forms, and ideologies that mark the Nigerian media’s representation of the major participants engaged in the conflict. The Federal Government (FGN) group (including its Joint Task Force) and the ND militia group (with its sympathisers). Forty newspaper reports on ND conflicts (20 from two national newspapers (The Guardian and THISDAY) and 20 from two ND-based newspapers (The Tide and Pioneer), published between 2003 and 2011, were purposively sampled and subjected to content analysis, with insights from van Dijk’s model of ideological representation, Goffman’s frame analysis, and aspects of functional grammar discourse. Two media frames are constructed to represent the participants in the discourse: the FGN group has good intentions for the ND region, and the ND group should cooperate with the FGN group. These frames relate to specific media ideologies employed in representing the news participants’ qualities and roles in the conflict. The qualities are framed through evaluative nominal items, while the activities are framed by attributing agency and causality to participants’ actions through the clause information structure. The findings have demonstrated how media framing of ND news participants’ qualities and activities can shape readers’ interpretation of the conflict news events.

This study investigates the use of conceptual metaphor in the second chapter of the Holy Quran, focusing on how metaphorical language conveys complex theological, moral, and spiritual concepts. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff & Johnson (1980), the research examines the systematic mapping between source and target domains, revealing how abstract ideas such as faith, guidance, divine justice, and human conduct are made comprehensible through concrete imagery. Purposive Sampling Technique proposed by Lawrence and Palinkas et al. (2015), was employed to select eight metaphors that exhibited identifiable mapping systems relevant to the aim of the study. The analysis identifies recurring metaphorical patterns, including metaphors of light, trade, and disease, and demonstrates their role in shaping readers’ cognitive understanding and emotional engagement with the text. Utilizing Yusuf Ali’s English translation of the Quran as the primary data source. The findings indicate that conceptual metaphors are not merely stylistic devices but function as fundamental mechanisms of cognition that enhance comprehension and interpretation of Quranic teachings. This research contributes to the fields of cognitive linguistics, Quranic studies, and discourse analysis by offering a systematic exploration of metaphorical structures in sacred texts, highlighting both their cognitive significance and theological implications.

Cross-linguistic research on conceptual metaphor requires comparable data, consistent annotation and clear reporting. These requirements become more difficult when the languages being compared have different lexical systems and unequal corpus resources. This article presents a corpus-assisted comparison of visual and auditory perception metaphors in English and Hausa romance fiction. The data come from four English novels containing 520,425 words and twelve Hausa novels containing 521,052 words. AntConc 3.5.7 was used to retrieve the English lemmas see and hear and the Hausa verbs gani and ji. A random sample of 500 citations was examined for each verb. Metaphorical uses were identified through the Metaphor Identification Procedure, while the resulting conceptual mappings were interpreted within Sweetser’s (1990) Mind-as-Body account and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The audit confirms 565 metaphorical tokens in the four samples: 260 for see, 52 for hear, 151 for gani and 102 for ji. Metaphor incidence was highest for see (52.0%), followed by gani (30.2%), ji (20.4%), and hear (10.4%). The clearest cross-linguistic contrast is that cognition is expressed through vision in the English corpus and through hearing in the Hausa corpus. The study also shows that equal corpus size does not ensure full comparability because the corpora differ in text distribution, author composition, sampling fractions, and lexical polysemy. In particular, Hausa ji requires contextual separation of hearing from feeling, taste and smell. The article therefore presents a transparent workflow that keeps corpus composition, lexical retrieval, metaphor identification, conceptual classification, translation. and reliability assessment as distinct stages.

Family dynamics are the unique patterns of communication between family members, which unveils how they negotiate roles and power relations, and secure emotional connections. This paper explores visual and linguistic resources in selected Taaooma’s YouTube comedy skits, to explore how humor is constructed and how Nigerian cultural practices and family dynamics are encoded in humor and satirical contents. Kress’s (2010) Multimodality serves as the theoretical framework. Data for the study comprises five selected Taaooma’s comedy skits, produced in Nigeria. The findings reveal that Taaooma employs costume and makeup, gesture, language and dialogue, setting and character, to reflect and reinforce Nigerian cultural practices and societal issues. These semiotic resources demonstrate that comedy skits are products of multiple layering of communicative modes. The study concludes that Taaooma’s comedy skits functions as social commentary that critiques everyday social tensions: parental control versus youthful resistance, religious ideals versus moral lapses, and shifting gender expectations within the Nigerian household. The research therefore positions her skits as significant multimodal texts that contribute to the understanding of sociocultural and communicative practices in Nigeria.

This study examines how selected Nigerian Pentecostal posters recontextualise everyday language and experience as religiously meaningful problems and anticipated sites of divine intervention. It applies qualitative multimodal discourse analysis to a purposive corpus of twenty posters selected for this study. Multimodal Social Semiotics provides the principal framework, while recontextualisation serves as a supporting analytical concept. Poster-by-poster analysis shows that Nigerian Pidgin, colloquial English, interrogatives, imperatives, taboo language and culturally familiar references are coordinated with portraiture, gaze, gesture, typography, colour and composition. These resources frame financial insecurity, marital anxiety, interpersonal grievance and perceived obstruction through Pentecostal problem-intervention narratives. The study conceptualises this patterned transformation as multimodal sacralisation of everyday Nigerian experience.

The expansion of Nigeria's fintech sector has increased the prominence of digital promotional images as strategic tools to communicate with consumers. Although they are at the core of the promotion of fintech products and services, the organisation of their multimodal resources for meaning-making remains underexplored. The study, therefore, investigates the compositional systems of the multimodal resources in selected Nigerian fintech promotional images. The data, which comprise ten purposively selected promotional images from Nigerian fintech companies’ digital platforms were analysed qualitatively using Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) socio-semiotic approach to multimodality. The findings indicate that visual, verbal, and spatial resources combine within compositional systems to direct the viewer's gaze, manage relationships among elements, and create coherent communicative wholes. These systems also encode ideological meanings, presenting technology as a solution and fintech services as desirable tools in users' everyday lives. The study shows that compositional systems dominate how people frame perceptions of technology, finance, and user identity today.

Nigeria’s cultural diversity and growing consumer market provide a context for examining how food packaging and labelling communicate brand and cultural meanings. This study examines the multimodal discourse of food product labels and packaging in Nigeria, focusing on food seasonings and spices. Six food products were purposively selected from the Nigerian food market. Adopting a qualitative research approach and an ex post facto research design, data were analysed using Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) Visual Grammar, with particular emphasis on the compositional metafunction, namely information value, salience, and framing. The findings show that topography, colour, images, and symbolism are combined to establish product identity, communicate product information, and create visual salience. The analysis further reveals the use of culturally recognisable food images, patterns, colours, and symbols that associate the products with Nigerian culinary practices and cultural experiences. The packaging also predominantly uses English, while French appears on some products, suggesting an orientation towards a wider West African market. The study demonstrates that food packaging functions beyond product identification to construct cultural and commercial meanings through multimodal resources. It highlights the importance of culturally and contextually relevant packaging in communicating food products in Nigeria.

Celebrity culture is an extension of popular culture that curates celebrities’ identities and lifestyles in the 21st century. The public visibility of these celebrities depend heavily on the media. Therefore, this study examines the multimodal nexus in which African celebrities are constructed, negotiated, and contested during the 2025 Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA) Cultural Day. Using a qualitative, descriptive methodology, this research analyses the purposive selection of Ten (10) gendered images that represent African cultural heritage to adequately explore the semiotic ensembles deployed by these celebrities during the 2025 AMVCA cultural day and how the media represented them. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s visual grammar is deployed to analyse the data mapped out for this study, enabling a holistic interpretation of how meaning is construed visually leaving the textual dimension. The findings reveal that semiotic tools such as fashion, colour, and accessories interlock to construct cultural identities of African celebrities. Additionally, female gender is concerned with self-assertion rather societal valuation. This research contributes to the understanding of cultural preservation within the modern media landscape.

Abuse and victimisation of persons with disabilities (PWDs) are recurring concerns in disability discourse, yet limited attention has been given to how advocacy organisations construct these experiences through coordinated verbal and visual resources. The study examines the representation of abuse and victimisation of PWDs in five purposively selected graphics posted on the official Instagram page of the Disability Rights Advocacy Centre (DRAC) in 2022. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive research design and employs Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), integrating Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (VG). The analysis examines ideational/representational, interpersonal/interactive, and textual/compositional meanings realised through dialogue, participant roles, gaze, social distance, framing, information value, salience, colour, posture, and layout. Findings reveal five related patterns of abuse: neglect and social isolation; institutional dismissal and derogatory language; sexual objectification and exploitation; social denigration and discrimination; and economic exploitation accompanied by threats to mobility. The findings further show that linguistic and visual choices not only depict abuse but also assign responsibility, construct unequal power relations, and position viewers to recognise the rights and agency of PWDs. The study demonstrates how advocacy graphics can expose and contest discourses that normalise abuse against PWDs.

This article examines four Nigerian memetic expressions, Sapa no fit catch me, No gree for anybody, You go explain taya, and Na you sabi, as cultural texts through Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model. Rather than treating them as statistically representative of Nigerian social media, the study uses qualitative, theory-led close reading to investigate how vernacular humour organises meanings of economic precarity, defiance, distrust, exhaustion, and withdrawal. The analysis distinguishes preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings while extending Hall’s model through the concept of recursive re-encoding, the process by which users interpret a circulating expression and reposition it through reposting, captioning, remixing, or contextual relocation. Findings show that the expressions are politically ambivalent: they may normalise individual endurance and self-responsibility, but they can also expose institutional failure, challenge credibility, and create affective forms of everyday resistance. The article therefore offers a culturally situated account of how decoding becomes renewed encoding in contemporary African digital culture while recognising the limits of resistance claims without direct audience data.

This study examines how emojis and stickers function as multimodal resources in the WhatsApp-mediated academic discourse of the National Association of Students of English and Literary Studies (NASELS), Federal University of Kashere, Nigeria. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001) social semiotic approach, the study adopts a qualitative descriptive design to analyse 75 purposively selected chat threads containing 243 emojis and 126 stickers. The findings show that emojis and stickers perform affective, pragmatic, interpersonal, humorous, and identity-related functions, extending and sometimes substituting for verbal messages. While emojis primarily provide emotional and pragmatic cues, stickers often convey more elaborate expressive and interactional meanings and can function as standalone communicative acts. Both resources contribute to managing interpersonal relations, signalling shared humour, modifying the force of expressions, and reinforcing group identity. The study demonstrates that meaning in student WhatsApp interaction is constructed through the coordinated use of verbal and visual modes rather than through text alone. It contributes to research on digital discourse and multimodality by showing how Nigerian university students deploy emojis and stickers as integral semiotic resources for meaning-making and social interaction in digitally mediated academic communication.

This paper investigates how categorisation functions as an ideological discursive strategy in Twitter (X) discourse surrounding the 2023 Nigerian presidential election. Categorisation, understood here as the linguistic labelling of individuals and groups according to social identities such as ethnicity, region, and religion, is analysed as a key resource through which political actors and ordinary citizens construct legitimacy and delegitimacy online. Drawing on Fairclough's socio-cultural model and van Dijk's socio-cognitive framework, the study examines ten purposively selected tweets, drawn to reflect a range of ethnic, regional, and partisan viewpoints rather than a single narrative, to show how ethnic, geopolitical, and religious identities were constructed and mobilised during online political debate. The findings show that Twitter users repeatedly used categorisation to draw ingroup-outgroup boundaries, invoke stereotypes, legitimise preferred candidates, and delegitimise opponents, using identity markers such as Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, Obidient, and the Muslim-Muslim ticket to stake out positions on legitimacy, power, fairness, and national unity. Rather than treating these claims as settled fact, the analysis treats them as perceptions and rhetorical positions being contested online, and reads them against each other to show how competing groups mobilise similar discursive strategies for different ends. The study contributes a micro-linguistic account of ideological representation to research on Nigeria's digital political sphere, and argues that understanding contemporary Nigerian political communication requires attention to the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic processes through which citizens construct and contest political meaning online.

Nigerians’ reflection on the phenomenon of death equally captures their philosophy of life, which is patently articulated in their epitaphic discourse. Therefore, this paper argues that the epitaphic formula “Here lies...” is not merely locative but a pragmatic philosophical statement of embodied finitude that calls for existential reflection. Thus, this study, using a three-part theoretical framework of Embodied Finitude, Deictic Shift Theory, and Gricean Implicature, analyses fifty (50) epitaphs with the formula “Here lies/lie the body of...” from Atan Cemetery, Yaba and Vaults & Gardens, Ikoyi in Lagos. Existentially, “here” reduces the deceased from agent to coordinate, thus expressing a philosophy of “being-after-death” as “being-at-a-location.” Hence, the formulaic expression encodes what Heidegger calls “being-there,” existence in terms of spatial presence. Pragmatically, “here” is an indexical anchor that obliges deictic alignment, implying that the reader, by reading “here,” must have the same spatial “here” as the corpse. This situation results in the implicature, “You will be here too.” While collocates such as “sleep” and “rest” project a philosophy of continuity, “here lies” resets material realism, thus creating a productive tension that allows a lasting reflection. It shows that epitaphs achieve their philosophical significance with minimal deictic resources, drawing on spatial deixis to ground metaphysical claims about death in the reader’s lived experience of finitude. In view of the above, this paper contributes to death discourse studies by showing how deixis operates simultaneously as a philosophical claim and a technology of reflection in African memorial discourse.

Punctuation is commonly regarded as an orthographic system for organising written language, but its functions extend to grammatical structuring and the direction of textual interpretation. The Punch newspaper was selected because of its established role in Nigerian public discourse, while the editorial “Police and Ige’s Murder” was chosen because it presents a sustained account of competing institutional claims and investigative controversy. This study examines punctuation as a grammatical and meaning-directing resource in The Punch newspaper editorial, “Police and Ige’s Murder,” published on May 15, 2002. Situated within a pragma-semantic perspective, the study investigates how punctuation marks contribute to the organisation of grammatical structures, the interpretation of propositions, and the pragmatic construction of meaning in a politically charged editorial discourse. The analysis focuses on six punctuation marks: full stops, commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens, and question marks in selected textual segments. The study demonstrates that punctuation interacts systematically with lexical and syntactic choices to construct emphasis, contrast, doubt, accusation, interrogation, and evaluative positioning. In particular, question marks in rhetorical questions intensify the editorial’s demand for institutional accountability, while commas and full stops regulate information flow and establish relationships among successive claims. Quotation marks distinguish reported assertions from the editorial voice, creating pragmatic distance and foregrounding contradictions in official accounts. Apostrophes and hyphens further contribute to grammatical precision and textual cohesion. The study concludes that punctuation performs not merely orthographic but also grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic functions, enabling the editorial to encode evaluative meanings and guide readers’ inferences. Consequently, punctuation constitutes an important resource for examining meaning construction, ideological positioning, and accountability discourse in Nigerian newspaper editorials.

Political discourse is inherently competitive, with politicians deploying confrontational language to negotiate power, construct identities, and shape public perception. This study examines strategic impoliteness as a persuasive resource in Nyesom Wike's political discourse, arguing that his confrontational rhetoric extends beyond mere violations of politeness norms. The data comprise five politically significant discourse events involving Wike, purposively sampled from Nigerian newspaper outlets across a bounded period of intra-party and gubernatorial conflict spanning September 2022 to August 2026, from which 22 discrete pragmkatic excerpts were purposively selected based on strategic salience and representativeness, with sampling continued until saturation. Adopting a qualitative, corpus-informed discourse-analytical approach, the study draws on Culpeper's (2011) impoliteness theory and Reyes' (2011) strategies of legitimization to identify Wike's impoliteness strategies and the persuasive work they perform before the electorate. Findings show that Wike frequently employs bald-on-record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, and sarcasm to delegitimize opponents' competence and integrity, while legitimizing his own authority through appeals to experience, projected consequences, and emotionally charged solidarity. These strategies function as both face-threatening acts and persuasive mechanisms, positioning Wike as a decisive leader against untrustworthy rivals. The study concludes that impoliteness here operates as a strategic, audience-conditioned resource, extending impoliteness theory beyond its predominantly Western contexts.

This study examines maxim flouting in naturally occurring child discourse and explores how apparent departures from conversational norms remain meaningful in interaction. Guided by Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory, it adopts a qualitative discourse-analytic approach to 13 hours of recorded interactions involving 50 children aged 5–13 in classroom, playground, and youth fellowship settings in Nsukka Metropolis. The analysis identified 58 instances of maxim flouting, classified according to Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Findings reveal developmental differences in pragmatic behaviour. Younger children mainly flouted Quantity through over-elaboration, while children in middle childhood increasingly manipulated topics through Relation flouting. Early adolescents demonstrated more sophisticated Quality flouting, particularly through irony and hyperbole. Context also shaped the pragmatic strategies employed. Rather than causing communicative breakdown, maxim flouting enabled children to convey meanings through shared assumptions and inference. The study highlights the value of combining Grice’s taxonomy with Relevance Theory to explain pragmatic development.

This study reanalyses police interrogation in Kano metropolis through a rhetoro-pragmatic forensic discourse framework that explains how pragmatic actions acquire rhetorical force in institutional investigative encounters. Although previous studies of Nigerian police interrogation have examined discourse control, resistance, argumentation and responsibility negotiation, less attention has been given to a turn-level reanalysis that connects the distribution of recurring interactional functions with their rhetorical organisation across a documentary corpus. The study therefore revisits three appendix transcripts in Sadiq’s (2011) dissertation from Sabon Gari, Fagge and Nassarawa police divisions. The analysis covers 220 eligible police and accused, suspect or offender turns and examines elicitation, accusation, directive, prompt, denial, excuse, evaluation, threat, reassurance and negotiation, with Other retained as a residual category. Quantitative findings show that elicitation is the most frequent function, followed by denial and directive, while the qualitative analysis demonstrates how these actions combine in different sequences of information seeking, responsibility attribution, resistance, coercion, explanation and consequence management. The study contributes a turn-level account of forensic interaction that integrates descriptive quantitative evidence with context-sensitive rhetoro-pragmatic interpretation. It argues that the forensic significance of interrogation lies not only in obtaining information but also in how competing accounts are rhetorically organised and converted into potentially consequential records.