Discursive Lexicalisation in Election Petition Tribunals in Nigeria

This paper examines the use of lexicalisation in election petition tribunals in Nigeria. In adversarial courtroom settings, opposing legal teams often compete for the attention of judges and the jury in order to secure favourable verdicts for their clients. Thus, how events and social actors are represented in court becomes very crucial. This linguistic tool is referred to as ‘discursive lexicalisation’. This study adopts Fairclough’s Dialectical-Relational Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and uses the corpus tool AntConc 4.3.1 for robust data analysis. The corpus comprises 20 purposively selected cross-examination episodes drawn from the witness examination phase of the 2007 Osun State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal proceedings. The findings reveal that lexical choices with experiential and expressive values were instrumental not only in representing electoral violence and irregularities during witness cross-examination, but also in presenting a counter-narrative in the proceedings. In addition, the findings also show that lexicalisation aids contextualisation by situating the present study within Nigeria’s socio-political milieu.