Linguistic Features and Structures in Newspaper Headlines of the ‘The Standard’ and ‘Daily Nation’ on Banditry, Kenya, 2023 (Published)
This article aims to look into the linguistic features and structures used in The Standard and Daily Nation Newspaper Headlines on the subject, banditry and the possible implication that it has to the shaping of public perception, informing government responses and raising awareness about the challenges posed by banditry. The study adopted systemic functional linguistics framework, introduced by Michael Halliday in the 1960s. It also adopted analytical research design. Data collection involved the development of a coding sheet. A coding sheet was developed to guide the systematic categorization and analysis of linguistic features and structures present in the newspaper headlines. Content analysis was employed to examine the functions, themes and the rhetorical devices used in the headlines to portray banditry incidents. The data analysis procedure entailed a systematic analysis of the newspaper headlines, aiming to examine the ways they reflect the realities on reporting of banditry in the study regions. The findings revealed that there is a nuanced interplay of linguistic features that significantly shape the construction of public perception. The headlines employed vivid verbs, descriptive adjectives, and metaphors to convey the actions, attributes, and causes associated with banditry. Rhetorical questions, emotive language, personalization, and attributions to sources engaged readers emotionally and conveyed the stance of news sources. The recommendations from this study suggests that newspapers should use varied linguistic elements to offer readers with a more comprehensive knowledge of banditry, editors and journalists should also be creative and precise in their terminologies, use language appropriately when reporting difficult themes and the media should employ rhetorical questions and emotive language with caution. There should be a balance to ensure that emotions do not overpower accurate reporting.
Keywords: Devices, Headlines, Linguistic feature, rhetoric, structures, word choices
Rhetorical Diplomacy: A Study of Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari’s Speech To the 70th Session of the United Nations General Assembly- September, 2015 (Published)
Diplomatic texts-oral or written-are usually deemed to be of a high significance. The significance of a diplomatic texts is based on the fact that it comes from the personality of a Head of State (or government or his representative) who is a mouth piece of a country by virtue of the office he holds and his utterances are channeled to influence the official relationship of states. This genre, surprisingly, has been given relatively very little attention by scholars and linguists. This study entitled: “Rhetorical Diplomacy: A study of Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari‘s speech to the 70th Session of the United Nations General Assembly”, is an analytical study of the pragmatic strategies of the President with the aim of determining their effectives in conveying the speakers intentions to his audience. The analysis, carried out in this study, was based on the theoretical backcloth of the Speech Act theory by Austin (1962) and Searle, (1969, 1999). Specifically, the study adopted Searle (1999)’s taxonomy of speech acts which gave primacy not to the types of speech acts, but to their illocutionary points /forces. As a result of this, the utterances were analysed as diplomatic actions taken by the President, in terms of their illocutionary points/ forces and the perlocutionary effects they have on his audience. Our basic findings show that the President made use of expressive, assertive, commissive, and directive speech acts to perform various direct and indirect interactive acts which were found to be diplomatically correct in foregrounding and communicating Nigeria’s challenges and polices to the global community. The data however, revealed no instance of the use of verdictive and declarative acts by the President. The paper concluded that the study of the deployment of speech acts as a strategy in political and diplomatic speeches, contributes to a better understanding of multilateral and bilateral communication and provides insights into presidential outputs in diplomatic meetings.
Keywords: Diplomacy, Speech Acts., rhetoric
A Study on Aristotle’s Rhetoric Applied to Industrial Communication (Published)
Mastering Industrial communication is of paramount importance to all professionals who are active in current industries. I strongly believe that engineers’ job is not a single man’s show. Professionals from various fields work together for a common goal at industries. The effective process of communication is pivot to effective management. When more than two individuals work on one task, definitely they need a common understanding and is possible only with appropriate communication. But mere words spilled out of lips may not be effective in current industries as they are involved with so many complexities in functioning. ARISTOTLE’S THEORIES OF RHETORIC, can be applied to the industrial communication to improve the skill of speaking and writing of the personnel at industries. With the help of Aristotle’s three persuasive appeals of Rhetoric i.e. Logos, Ethos and Pathos the industrial communication can be made more effective and with right combination of these three appeals a speech can be intensified and made more powerful than a missile. In this paper I would like to throw some light on the effectiveness of the three appeals of Rhetoric to improve the art of using language that can leave a positive impact on the employees at Industries. Aristotle’s Rhetorical appeals are profoundly influential in making the individuals realize the facts of TRUTH at work in the areas of Motivation& Training, and Problem Analysis etc.