Face Acts and Impoliteness Strategies in Olusegun Obasanjo’s ‘Before it is too late’ (Published)
Unlike the earlier linguistic studies of political discourse which focused on the genres of campaign speeches, presidential inaugural addresses, interviews, political advertisements and newspaper advertorials, this study examines the face acts and impoliteness strategies in Obasanjo’s appeal letter to former Nigerian President Jonathan; titled ‘Before it is too late” ( i.e BITL). Simple percentage statistical tool was used to analyse the face acts and impoliteness strategies in it. Besides, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) face acts, Culpeper’s (1996), impoliteness and VanDijk’s (1977) socio-cognitive theories serve as the eclectic theoretical framework for the study. The findings revealed that Obasanjo’s BITL is characterised by FTA with redress, bald-on-record politeness and FSA . The text is equally characterised by bald-on-record impoliteness, mock impoliteness, as well as negative and positive impoliteness strategies. Also, Obasanjo used dysphemisms and expletives as tools to butt Goodluck Jonathan and to impose on his audience’s face want. The author rides on participants’ shared cognitive and situational knowledge to pract threatening, condemning warning, stating, praising and sympathising. It was also revealed that FSA was used by Obasanjo to exonerate himself from the alleged Jonathan’s ‘misrule’. The paper concludes that only the understanding of cognition, discourse and context interface could be used to infer the meaning construction and comprehension as well as the author’s intention from the text of BITL.
Keywords: BITL, Cognition, Discourse, Nigerian politics, Power
Masculinity And Cultural Conflict in Chinu Achebe’s Things Fall Apart – A Study (Published)
The African people have varying behaviors, mannerisms, beliefs, thought patterns and way of interaction and all of these differences formed their culture and impacted their way of life. However, with the coming of the Europeans of Africa came cultural infiltration, pollution as well as alteration. This paper analyses Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart from the angle of masculinity and cultural clash as brought about by Westernization. The method of investigation is analytical and descriptive, using the formalist approach: that is looking at the actions, events, sentences and interactions of the characters in order to identity and discuss how males are portrayed, paying attention to issues of cultural realism, behaviors, actions and statements of the characters. The findings of the paper confirmed that African viewpoint of masculinity and cultural tends to be opposed to that of the Europeans, as the action and behaviors appropriate to a man in each society tend to differ. This led to different clashes from religious, cultural, ideological, to social beliefs. the conclusion that cultural clashes exist in the work and contributed to the final play out of the story, where the traditional belief system had to make way for Western ones; making things fall apart. The paper reveals that the male characters have both cultural and individual masculine idiosyncrasies and that the complexities of male roles confirm the pluralistic and slippery nature of masculinity.
Keywords: Africa, Discourse, Gender, Hegemony, Sexuality
A Discourse Analysis of Selected Football Texts (Published)
This study investigates the discourse analysis of football texts. The choice of football texts from the Nigerian newspaper was motivated by my personal interest in football and the popularity soccer has gained in recent years across the world. The study covers the football texts selected from Complete Sports which dominated the Nigerian sports’ news market. The largest number of sports lovers across the country source their information on sports most especially football news from the selected newspaper based on its popularity and accurate reporting of sporting activities the world over. Lead article from each of the newspaper were selected for a period of one month during 2010 world cup making a total of 30 lead articles. Ansary and Babai 2005 discourse Generic Structure Potential was applied to unmask the discourse structure of football text in newspapers and it contextual configuration. Talking about the discourse Generic Structure Potential (GSP), it is the total structural resources of text genre. This organizational sequencing are classified as obligatory, optional and recursive elements. Each of these classifications serves specific purposes or functional role in the texts.
Keywords: Discourse, Football, Generic structure, Genre, Sequencing, structural resources