Volume 23, Issue 2 (September 2023)

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.