Linguistic Analysis and Discourse Studies

Pre-election activities and campaign speeches by Nigerian politicians have been well documented in media (humanistic and social scientific) studies; however, the ways citizens use online communicative platforms to express their (de)satisfaction with campaign moves have not enjoyed as much scholarly attention. The paper explores impoliteness strategies and linguistic forms deployed by the Nigerian Online Community (NOC) to interrogate the 'Balablu Bulaba' gaffe made by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (henceforth, BAT) during his 2023 presidential election campaign. This is motivated by the fact that online reactions, just like online voting, are not always considered a genuine platform for opinion; however, they cause a great shift in the NOC’s political stance. For data, 150 online trail comments on the reports of BAT’s gaffe were purposively sampled from three online media platforms (TVC News YouTube handle, Punch Online Newspaper, and Nairaland online community website), transposed to MS Word with line numbers, and subjected to pragmatic analysis, with insights from Culpeper’s impoliteness formulae and aspects of lexical semantics discourse. Four impoliteness strategies are revealed: negative impoliteness, positive impoliteness, bald on-record impoliteness, and mock politeness. All these are deployed through lexical resources with derogatory comparisons, negative associations, and laughing emojis to ridicule BAT, exaggerate his incompetence, challenge his supporters, and allude to better presidential candidates. With the noticeable predominance of negative impoliteness realised with multimodal linguistic forms, it can be inferred that the NOC may have been disappointed with BAT’s presidential candidacy and his general performance in the election campaign speeches.

This study investigates semilingualism in relation to linguistic proficiency in Yoruba-English bilinguals. The concept of semilingualism is a contentious issue in Linguistics. The general perception is that people who speak two languages vary in how much they use each language. However, some believe that some bilinguals have little competence in both languages. The study is based on the threshold hypothesis, which identifies the thresholds a bilingual undergoes in using the two languages in their repertoire. The study drew data from Yoruba-English undergraduates at Anchor University, Lagos, Nigeria. The researchers used oral interviews to collect data from 50 informants. For ease of analysis, the researchers used three of the six criteria Hansegård (1977) provided for identifying semilinguals to analyse the data. The study reveals that these bilinguals have more mastery of their L2 (English) than their L1 (Yoruba). While inadequate vocabulary is more apparent in the L1, incorrect grammatical expressions are more common in the L2.

This study examines Yoruba-English code-switching as a stylistic and pragmatic resource in contemporary Yoruba praise-and-worship music. Contemporary gospel music remains comparatively under-examined as a site of bilingual aesthetic and theological practice relative to classical Yoruba oral genres. Drawing on foregrounding theory and Myers-Scotton’s (1993) Markedness Model, the analysis classifies numbered excerpts drawn from eight purposively selected and fully transcribed songs, four by Tope Alabi and four by Adeyinka Alaseyori, according to structural form, textual position, and discourse function. The findings indicate that code-switching is concentrated at rhetorically prominent points, including refrains, testimonial passages, direct invocations, and climactic repetitions, rather than being evenly distributed throughout the lyrics. The songs display two broad compositional tendencies: English-anchored hooks set against Yoruba-dominant verses or ad-libs, and Yoruba-anchored refrains containing selective English insertions. English expressions in the Yoruba-dense song Arojinle cluster around themes of survival, mortality, divine intervention, and public testimony. The study argues that Yoruba-English code-switching in the selected corpus is a patterned stylistic practice through which gospel performers negotiate congregational participation, intimacy, indigenous theological specificity, and wider Christian intelligibility. The conclusions are corpus-specific and illustrative rather than statistically generalisable.

The Critical studies of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry have extensively examined questions of race, gender, identity, marginalisation, urban experience, and Black social life. Less attention, however, has been given to the ways in which the rhythmic organisation of her poems participates in the production of these meanings. This study examines rhythm as a formal principle in selected poems by Brooks, arguing that rhythm is not merely a sonic embellishment but an active element in the construction of poetic meaning. Drawing on literary Formalism and close textual analysis, the study investigates the effects of repetition, stress, pause, lineation, syntax, rhyme, and rhythmic variation on the movement and significance of Brooks’s poetic language. It focuses on how patterns of rhythmic regularity and deviation shape voice, emphasis, emotional tension, memory, identity, and representations of social experience. The analysis demonstrates that Brooks frequently adapts the rhythms of ordinary speech while modifying them through repetition, interruption, acceleration, and pause, thereby creating formal structures that intensify or complicate the meanings of her poems. The study concludes that attention to rhythmic form provides a more precise account of how Brooks’s poetry transforms lived experience into patterned poetic expression and demonstrates the interdependence of form and meaning in her work.

This study examines the use of humour as a persuasive strategy in selected Nigerian public health awareness posters. It specifically investigates how verbal and visual resources combine to construct humour as a persuasive strategy. The data for the study comprise sixteen purposively selected posters from the Nigerian Center for Disease Control (NCDC) official telegram handle, Rivers State University Teaching Hospital (RSUTH), University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), and Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH). These were grouped into six sub-headings and six posters were finally selected and subjected to qualitative analysis with insights from Schopenhauer’s (1844) incongruity theory of humour and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) grammar of visual design. The study reveals that humour is predominantly subtle and is realized through visual incongruity, metaphorical representation, exaggeration, and playful comparisons. These humorous resources attract attention, simplify health information, and support message retention. However, humour is not employed uniformly. It is varied according to the sensitivity of the health issue. The study concludes that humour, when integrated with effective multimodal design, constitutes an effective multimodal persuasive strategy in Nigerian health communication.

The line between free speech and hate speech has become contested in Nigerian public discourse, particularly following the National Commission for the Prohibition of Hate Speeches (Establishment, etc.) Bill 2019. This study applies Austin's (1962) and Searle's (1969) speech act theory to selected utterances drawn from a broadcast by Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), delivered on 8 November 2019, alongside related public statements on the hate speech debate. Using a qualitative descriptive design, the study analyses twelve purposively selected utterances at three levels: the locutionary act, the illocutionary act, and the perlocutionary effect. Findings reveal that utterances popularly labelled "hate speech" frequently perform illocutionary acts of warning, accusing, and informing rather than incitement in the strict legal sense, while perlocutionary effects vary with the hearer's political alignment. The study argues that the classification of an utterance as hate speech in Nigeria is shaped less by illocutionary force than by the socio-political status of the speaker, and recommends that legislative definitions of hate speech engage more directly with established frameworks in pragmatics.

Political discourse is used to convey ideology, power, and political identity through discursive strategies. Therefore, this study examined how de/legitimating strategies construct political identity and credibility in Mr Peter Obi’s 2023 campaign speeches during the Nigerian general elections. Employing van Leeuwen’s (2008) legitimation model and qualitative design and thematic/content analysis, four of his speeches and 20 excerpts were purposive sampled and analysed. The analysis shows that Mr Obi employs all of the four de/legitimating strategies of van Leeuwen (2008): authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis, with their relevant sub-strategies. While these strategies legitimate Mr Obi as an accountable, credible, and competent candidate for the presidency, they delegitimate his political opponents (PDP and APC) as corrupt, incompetent, and visionless politicians. The study concludes that these de/legitimation discursive strategies collectively boosted Obi’s political identity and credibility ahead of the 2023 general elections in Nigeria.

The widespread urge among young Nigerians to emigrate has become a popular media sensation tagged ‘the japa syndrome’, a local metaphorical coinage that implies a viral obsession with fleeing the country for greener pastures abroad. This article, via critical content analysis, qualitatively examines framing in four purposively selected Nigerian news editorials on brain drain: Leadership News, The Daily Trust, Punch, and Premium Times, applying the framing theory. The findings reveal three salient frames in the selected editorials on brain drain: the Nigerian government as a brain drain agency framing, humanising and eulogising Nigerian professionals as victims of brain drain framing and problematising brain drain framing. The frames were discursively realised through negative adjectives, metaphors, crestfallen attitudinal adverbs, nominalisation strategies, keywords and contrasts. The study shows that the editorial framing explicitly identifies misgovernance, policy failures, and poor working conditions as causal factors that engender brain drain. The editorials foreground ideological polarisation between Nigerian professionals as the ‘in-group’ objects of brain drain and the Nigerian government as the ‘out-group’ actor engendering brain drain. This manifests as sundry policy failures that result in socio-economic and political meltdown, which the editorials present as a causal force of brain drain.

This study stress-tests a developing Multimodal Rhetoro-Pragmatics framework through a purposive visual corpus drawn from the office of a cultural historian at the University of Abuja, Nigeria. The study addresses a problem in multimodal analysis: culturally and institutionally meaningful spaces are not adequately explained when objects are treated as isolated signs or when visual meaning is reduced to image composition. Twenty-one photographs were numbered for corpus control, and ten analytically complementary images were selected for detailed analysis. The study examines how cultural artefacts, academic materials, furniture, framed representations, technology, textiles, storage systems, human presence and spatial organisation operate as components of multimodal ensembles. The analysis follows a trajectory from multimodal ensemble through materiality and spatial configuration to semiotic patterning, pragmatic framing or action, rhetorical strategy and social effect. Findings indicate that the office functions simultaneously as workplace, cultural display, archive and professional identity environment. Meanings emerge relationally through proximity, hierarchy, visibility, accessibility, affordance and cross-modal association. The analysis supports a qualified validation of Multimodal Rhetoro-Pragmatics as an integrative framework rather than a replacement for established approaches such as social semiotics, visual grammar, systemic-functional multimodal discourse analysis, multimodal interaction analysis and geosemiotics. The principal theoretical refinement is the Ensemble Meaning principle, complemented by Material-Action, Spatial-Relational, Rhetorical Trajectory, Evidence Discipline and Cross-Modal Corroboration principles. The revised framework offers a bounded procedure for connecting semiotic configuration with situated action and rhetorical consequence while maintaining cultural and interpretive caution. The findings also identify boundaries requiring further testing across diverse cultural and institutional environments elsewhere.

This work infers that Chinelo Okparanta, in her book, Under the Udala Trees, uses the Biafran War, which qualifies as an instance of centre discourse considering its immanence in Nigerian literature, as a background not only to brace up marginalised homosexual love but also to historicize it. War novels are often accompanied by all kinds of sexuality, as a result of the atrocities, mayhem, and bloodbath that come with war. War narratives in African literature, particularly those written by Nigerian writers, navigate around the struggle for survival of heterosexual love in times of war, and that is Okparanta’s point of departure as she makes a case for the lesbian love that exists between two girls, Ijeoma and Amina, from different ethnic groups during the Biafran War era. This study implies that, as much as heterosexuality, as the norm, has been prominently occupying the privileged position of the centre, queer sexuality, which has been occupying the periphery for a while, keeps edging towards it through conscious efforts by some writers like Okparanta to give it focus. We intend to recontextualise ideas from American critic hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, in our analysis of the selected text.

This study applies Critical Stylistics to Festus Iyayi’s Violence and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus to examine how the linguistic choices of both authors construct and communicate ideologies of gender and power. Rather than accepting the conventional assumption that both novels simply reproduce a feminist ideology of male domination and female subjugation, the study sets out to identify the authors’ more complex visions of the female gender, to demonstrate how specific linguistic choices function as indices of intended meaning, and to illustrate how dialogue contributes thematic depth and stylistic distinctiveness to the two narratives. A descriptive, textual-analytic design was adopted, with data purposively sampled from Violence (19 chapters, 293 pages) and Purple Hibiscus (4 chapters, 140 pages). The analysis is anchored in Jeffries’s (2010) Critical Stylistics framework, drawing on four of her ten analytical tools. The findings indicate that both authors deploy linguistic choices that position women not only as victims but also, at points, as agents of power and, in some instances, oppression. The study concludes that linguistic choice is central to how each text constructs a layered social reality in which power is distributed unevenly and does not run in a single direction. Future research applying this Critical Stylistics model to Iyayi’s Heroes and The Contract, and to Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, is recommended to test whether these ideological patterns hold across the two authors’ wider bodies of work.

This paper explores the linguistic stylistic devices employed by Helon Habila in Waiting for an Angel to depict the era of military dictatorship in Nigeria. The study adopts the theory of New Historicism as its framework and Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as a grammatical model to examine the influence of language choice on meaning. New Historicism situates the novel under study in its historical moment and examines the political turmoil of Nigeria's unprecedented military era in the 1980s and late 1990s. The study uses Systemic Functional Grammar for meaning-making and to show the three meta-functions of language: ideational, interpersonal, and textual.

This study examines impoliteness strategies in the X (formerly Twitter) posts of political party supporters during the 2023 Nigerian presidential campaigns and accounts for the contextual factors underlying impoliteness. It explores how impoliteness functions in political discourse and party-related communication on social media. The study adopts Culpeper’s (1996) five impoliteness strategies to qualitatively analyse 9 purposively selected posts on X attributed to supporters of the three major political parties during the 2023 presidential election in Nigeria: All Progressives Congress (APC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Labour Party (LP). The findings indicate that impoliteness was used to discredit political opponents and support the image of the preferred parties and candidates. The posts identify contextual factors such as power struggle, political affiliation, ethnicity, and cultural sensitivity.

This study presents a pragmatic analysis of Psalm 35, an imprecatory psalm traditionally attributed to David, focusing on how language communicates meaning within its socio-religious context. The study is principally anchored in Searle’s (1969) Speech Act Theory, which provides a framework for identifying and interpreting the communicative functions of the psalmist’s utterances. Deixis, presupposition, implicature and relevance are employed as complementary pragmatic concepts to account for contextual reference, background assumptions, implied meanings and contextual interpretation. The analysis shows that Psalm 35 functions beyond lament as a strategic discourse in which the psalmist petitions God for justice, asserts personal innocence, and condemns hostile opponents. Directive speech acts predominate in appeals for divine intervention, while expressive acts convey emotional distress, indignation and trust in God. Deictic expressions establish relational distinctions among the psalmist, God and the enemies, reinforcing the opposition between the righteous sufferer and the wicked. Presuppositions concerning divine justice, righteousness and covenant faithfulness provide the assumptions underlying the petitions, while implicatures strengthen the moral and theological case against the enemies. The study further demonstrates that imprecatory expressions function primarily as rhetorical appeals for divine judgment rather than direct calls for personal revenge. Thus, Searle’s framework, complemented by pragmatic concepts, demonstrates how Psalm 35 achieves its communicative, persuasive and theological purposes.

Online political discourse following high-stakes presidential elections in deeply polarised post-colonial democracies often degenerates into hyper-partisanship and severe incivility, yet the underlying socio-cognitive and sociolinguistic mechanisms driving these aggressive digital linguistic attacks remain under-scrutinised. Addressing this gap, this study empirically investigates the pragmatic features and socio-political functions of impoliteness in online user comments responding to media reports declaring the winner of the 2019 Nigerian presidential election on Sahara Reporters. Adopting a qualitative socio-cognitive approach grounded in Jonathan Culpeper’s (2011) pragmatic impoliteness framework, a working corpus of 180 comments organised into 25 interactional frames was purposively sampled and systematically analysed through frame-based discourse modelling. Findings reveal that insults specifically personalised negative references, third-person negative references, and negative vocatives dominated the dataset. These were strategically combined with unpalatable questions, presuppositions, condescension, silencers, and indirect threats, operating primarily through both coercive and affective impoliteness, alongside entertaining impoliteness deployed for majoritarian triumphalism. Crucially, the study’s primary contribution to knowledge demonstrates that impoliteness in computer-mediated political discourse extends far beyond routine conversational friction or interpersonal incivility. Rather, it functions as a strategic vehicle for weaponised historical memory, ethno-regional identity construction, institutional delegitimisation, and the socio-cognitive pathologisation of political dissent. Ultimately, the paper illuminates how digital comment sections serve as volatile, contested socio-political arenas where majoritarian hegemonies, ethno-political affiliations, and democratic legitimacy are continuously negotiated, enforced, and resisted.

The rapid growth of social media has transformed how internet slang is created, shared, and adapted, making semantic change and cross-cultural linguistic diffusion faster than ever. This study examines how selected internet slang expressions develop new meanings and social significance as they move across generational and cultural boundaries. Drawing on Agha’s theory of enregisterment, the study uses a qualitative multiple-case design to analyse ten widely recognised slang expressions, including rizz, brain rot, no cap, slay, delulu, simp, and algospeak. Data were drawn from peer-reviewed studies, lexicographic records, media reports, and documented examples of online language use. The analysis identifies three recurring stages: initial enregisterment, circulation, and re-enregisterment or de-enregisterment. Through these processes, slang expressions acquire new meanings, identities, and functions as they move beyond their communities of origin. The findings show that social media platforms and algorithmic moderation accelerate linguistic innovation by enabling rapid diffusion and semantic reinterpretation. However, mainstream adoption can also obscure expressions' cultural origins and raise concerns about linguistic appropriation. The study concludes that internet slang reflects the interaction of language, identity, technology, and power, while digital platforms increasingly shape how meanings develop and spread.