Linguistic Analysis and Discourse Studies

Concerns about public trust and electoral legitimacy are becoming increasingly prominent as Nigeria approaches the 2027 presidential election. This study examines how trust and legitimacy are discursively constructed in emerging pre-election discourse. It investigates the linguistic and discursive strategies used to construct public trust and electoral legitimacy and analyses how Appraisal resources contribute to socio-cognitive representations of presidential candidates, political institutions, electoral legitimacy and democratic participation. Adopting a qualitative descriptive design, the study draws on a corpus of 84 discourse units collected from public posts on X between January and July 2026, from which 13 extracts were purposively selected for detailed analysis. Data were analysed using van Dijk’s Socio-Cognitive Theory and Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory. Findings reveal that lexicalisation, presupposition, modality, metaphor, pronouns, ideological polarisation and blame attribution construct competing representations of electoral credibility and institutional trust, while Attitude, Engagement and Graduation negotiate and intensify evaluations of political actors and electoral processes. The study conceptualises this emerging process as anticipatory electoral legitimation and delegitimation, demonstrating that perceptions of electoral legitimacy can develop before voting occurs. The findings underscore the importance of transparent communication, institutional impartiality and credible preparations in strengthening pre-election public confidence.

Extant studies on political discourse have examined the speeches of presidents, governors, political office holders, etc. Specifically, studies on political manifestoes have concentrated on the analysis of modals, lexical verbs, transitivity, among others. However, the use of lamentation as discursive strategy to construct insecurity and economic crises has gained less scholarly attention. Therefore, this paper examines the use of lamentation as discursive construction of insecurity and economic crises in opposition manifestoes of five presidential candidates in Nigeria’s general election between 2015 and 2023 with a view to identifying the linguistic and ideological strategies deployed in the manifestoes. The study adopted qualitative research design and the data were analysed based on a fusion of M.A.K. Halliday’s ideational metafunction of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Teun A. van Dijk’s triangular model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This is to allow for thorough understanding of linguistic representation expressed in the data analysed as well as their ideological import. Findings of the study reveal that the five opposition party presidential candidates employ lamentations as discursive strategy to expose leadership weaknesses and governance failure of the ruling party, citing poor responses to security threats and economic crises in the country. Activated through transitivity structures embedded in the excerpts, lamentation is lexicalised by emotion driven expressions that evoke mental models of widespread fear, hopelessness, sorrow, joblessness, economic deprivation and social exclusion. The lexical choices ideologically de-legitimise the party in power, frame it as incompetent and naturalise the need to have a more proactive and people-oriented political alternative which each of the opposition parties claims to represent.

This study examines discursive representation of social actors and ideologies in the judgement on Nnamdi Kanu by the Federal High Court of Nigeria in 2025. The study employed qualitative research design and thematic/content analysis and Teo van Dijk’s Ideological Square (2006). Twenty (20) excerpts were purposively sampled from the primary document (the court ruling). The analysis reveals that the court judgment employs about nine (9) discursives to represent the Federal Government and their allies positively while representing Kanu and his out-group social actors negatively. These discursives embed anti-separatism, moral righteousness, legal formalism, national security, state legitimacy, and judicial authority ideologies to construct the decisions of the court as legal and just and condemn the actions of Kanu, IPOB, and their allies. This study concludes that the judgment’s representation of social actors reflects and reproduces broader power dynamics and ideological contestation in Nigeria’s legal and political landscapes and CDA scholarship.

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.

This study examines Donald Trump’s “Save America” speech delivered at Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 to discuss how his language use strategically performs certain actions aimed to influence his supporters and give credence to his claims on the outcome of 2020 presidential election result. Data for the study are twenty-one excerpts that are purposively selected from the discourse and qualitatively analysed using insights from Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Acts Theory. Analysis focuses on identifying the speech’s dominant practs, the contextual resources through which these practs are derived, their functions, and effects on the audience. Findings reveal seven practs that are employed to perform different functions. These are ‘accusing’ employed to undermine the credibility of the election result, ‘informing’ to make the audience believe in his claims, ‘justifying’ to make his claims credible, ‘directing’ to encourage them to act, ‘warning’ to inform them about future consequences of any inaction, and ‘reassuring’ to convince them that they are together in the fight. These practs are realised through shared situational knowledge (SSK), relevance (REL), reference (REF), inference (INF), metaphor (MPH), and metapragmatic joker. This study contributes to political discourse studies by making explicit the linguistic mechanisms through which political actors achieve their goals.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a shift from traditional in-person doctor-patient interactions to digital, remote consultations, where patients and doctors collaborate on treatment. Unlike the face-to-face medical consultations, online consultation is a growing area of research in medical discourse. Using Stance and Rapport Management theories, the research explores the discourse strategies and linguistic markers of affectivity and rapport in online consultative encounters in Nigeria. Out of forty-six posts collected from the "Ask the Gynecologist Antenatal Support and Care Class" Telegram account between May and June 2022, only twenty-four were purposively selected for analysis. Findings reveal that Nigerian pregnant mothers convey affectivity and rapport through greetings, auto-referentiality, attention-captivating expressions and they employ linguistic markers of attitude -the interrogative pronoun ‘what’, possessive adjective ‘my’, verbs/adverbs ‘please’, etc- to express their concern, worry and curiosity. The study concludes that Nigerian pregnant mothers’ discourse is both relational and evaluative. They do not just seek information; they also use language to negotiate care, assert personal involvement and elicit reassurance and to express concerns about their wellbeing and a desire for guidance. These highlight the importance of a communicative, empathetic approach in maternal healthcare, where addressing both medical and emotional-linguistic needs can improve patient-caregiver consultative outcomes.

The Nigerian political elites engage in bitter communicative exchanges and conflict-related banter that result in impoliteness. This study investigated interactional banter among sociopolitical actors to identify the triggers and discourse features of impoliteness. A qualitative design was used. Six online conflict-related video posts involving four sociopolitical agents were purposively selected and downloaded from YouTube, where they were posted to reach millions of viewers following the conflicts. The videos were transcribed into text, which was mined using AntConc to identify contextual cues of impoliteness. The study was anchored in Anita Fetza’s contextualisation theory and Jacob Mey’s Pragmatic Acts. Three discourse features triggered impoliteness in political banter: control, affiliation, and status moderation. Attempts to gain territorial and cross-territorial control caused impolite banter; conflicts were caused by inter-party and intra-party affiliation, while attacks on personality and name-calling, with attempts at status moderation, caused impoliteness. Six impolite attacking strategies, namely, accusing, insulting, undermining, mocking, threatening, and mocking, and three counter-impoliteness strategies, namely, debunking, substantiating, and contrasting positions, were bidirectionally used by sociopolitical actors in political banters. The study concludes that political banters in Nigeria are a sequence of attacking, defensive, and counter-attacking acts.

Religious identity remains a significant resource for political differentiation in Nigeria, where constructions of belonging can reinforce social boundaries and polarisation. This study examines how the category infidel functions as religious othering and how its contestation reconfigures identity and belonging in Nigerian political discourse. Guided mainly by van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study adopts a qualitative design and purposively selected 149 publicly available data items collected in August 2026, comprising four news reports, one social-media post, four institutional responses, 60 Nairaland comments and 80 Facebook comments. The analysis traced three interconnected processes: religious othering, discursive de-othering, and identity/belonging reconfiguration. Findings show that infidel initially constructed a religious Other that established a hierarchy of membership categories, but its meaning and referential scope were subsequently contested through recontextualisation, semantic shift, perspectivisation, evaluative transformation and reappropriation. The analysis further demonstrates that de-othering does not simply reverse othering; rather, it may weaken, redistribute or reorganise existing boundaries of difference and belonging. The study proposes the De-Othering Model (DoM) to explain how othering categories are contested and transformed, extending CDA from the construction of the Other to the negotiation of otherness and membership in a Global-South plural political context.

The study investigates the pragmatic functions of pauses in Nigerian online chat interactions, focusing on platforms such as WhatsApp and X (formerly Twitter). While digital communication has been widely studied, the role of temporal and textual pauses (e.g., delayed responses, ellipses) as meaning-making resources remains underexplored in the Nigerian context. Drawing on H. P. Grice's Cooperative Principle and J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory, the study examines how pauses contribute to implicature and modify illocutionary force in text-based interactions. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the research combines discourse-pragmatic analysis of twenty purposively selected, anonymized chat excerpts drawn from Nigerian WhatsApp groups and X threads with semi-structured interviews involving 20 Nigerian participants. The findings indicate that pauses function as salient paralinguistic cues that index cognitive processing, hesitation, politeness strategies, and relational stance. In Gricean terms, pauses often generate implicatures by signaling deviations from conversational expectations, particularly the maxims of Quantity and Manner. From an Austinian perspective, pauses modulate illocutionary force, for instance by softening directives or intensifying evaluative responses. Furthermore, the interpretation of pauses is shown to be context-sensitive, varying significantly across personal and professional communication settings, and shaped by sociocultural norms of interaction. The study contributes to digital pragmatics by highlighting the semiotic and cultural significance of pauses in mediated communication and underscores the need for context-aware interpretations of silence and delay in online discourse.

Official police communication is an important site for defining threats, legitimating security action, and positioning citizens within security governance. This study examines a Nigeria Police Force (NPF) press release dated 16 February 2025 and published online on 17 February 2025, which reports operations against kidnapping and terrorism and calls for public vigilance. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive design and document analysis. The broader source universe consisted of NPF security-related press releases published in 2025, from which the focal release was purposively sampled because it combines operational success claims, militarized crime language, and explicit appeals for citizen participation. The selected document was segmented into 17 analytically meaningful utterances; these 17 utterances constituted the analytic population and all were examined. Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis model and securitization theory (Balzacq, 2005; Buzan et al., 1998) provide the two formal frameworks. Pragmatic speech-act functions are used only as a supporting descriptive lens. The analysis shows that militarized lexical choices such as “neutralized,” “fierce gun duel,” “tactical operation,” and “dislodgement” construct police action as necessary and effective. Numerical details and recovered items provide evidential support for institutional competence, while actor representation places the police as protectors, criminal suspects as threats, and citizens as cooperative security partners. The study concludes that the press release does more than report events: it legitimates intensified policing and securitizes public vigilance as a civic responsibility within Nigeria’s internal security discourse.

This study explores how genderlect, or gender-specific language patterns, shapes the portrayal of victims and perpetrators in Nigerian online rape reports from 2019 to 2025. It also examines what conceptual metaphors reveal about the framing of sexual violence. The analysis centres on the pivotal June 2020 #WeAreTired movement, sparked by the rape and murder of Vera Uwaila Omozuwa and Barakat Bello, after which Nigerian governors declared a rape emergency. Drawing on Tannen’s (1990) difference theory and Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) metaphor theory, the research analyses seven online texts from five Nigerian outlets and a Nairaland repost for citizen-media comparison. It investigates how naming, framing, and metaphors construct gendered identities and power dynamics before and after the watershed event. Findings indicate tentative trends: male-authored texts tend to utilise predator, disaster, and war metaphors that dramatise perpetrator violence, while female-authored texts often focus on embodied, familial, and legal domains that highlight the survivor’s relational world, sometimes softening offensive terminology. These trends are cautiously interpreted as culturally influenced discursive patterns rather than innate differences in cognition between men and women. The study recommends gender-sensitive reporting guidelines and advocates replication with larger corpora.

A fault-based divorce proceeding is a legal process in which one spouse seeks dissolution of a marriage by proving the other's marital misconduct. Extant studies on Nigerian courtroom discourse have explored speech acts, transitivity, and pragmatic acts. Little attention has been paid to the lexicalisation of discursive strategies in divorce proceedings. This study therefore examines how lexical choices realise discursive strategies in fault-based divorce proceedings adjudicated at the Customary Court, Oyo. Anchored on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics and Wodak's Discourse-Historical Approach, the study adopts a qualitative design using two audio-recorded proceedings transcribed into a 15,620-word corpus and seventeen excerpts were generated in total. Findings reveal four discursive strategies: referential nomination which employs legal-institutional and labels to position litigants as procedural subjects; Intensification uses emphatic adjectives and adverbs to amplify allegations; perspectivation draws on victimhood constructions to enhance credibility and Argumentation is realised through euphemistic and metaphorical expressions that justify marital breakdown. Overall, lexicalisation functions as a strategic resource for constructing blame, credibility, and legitimacy within Nigeria's adversarial divorce process, enriching understanding of the relationship between lexical choice and discursive strategy in legal discourse.

Safety and security of attendees and the host community’s lives and properties have been identified as imperative for attending traditional festivals in some parts of Nigeria. This motivated this study to examine safety and security issues at traditional festivals in the old Eastern region of Nigeria, including Anambra, Imo, Abia, Enugu, Akwa Ibom, Ebonyi and Cross River states. The study adopted a qualitative research design and used ethnography in data collection. The study had a huge study population that was estimated at two hundred and fifty thousand (250,000). Purposive and convenience sampling techniques were used to determine a sample size of fifty (50) for the study. Data collected were analysed using SWOT and descriptive analysis. In the findings, the identified safety and security issues were categorised as potential and available safety and security threats. Also identified measures were classified into major and minor. This includes the use of community vigilante groups, appointment of festival custodians, restricted membership to masquerade cults, etc. The study further recommended that a collaborative effort between local authorities, security operatives, government agencies, festival organisers, and community leaders is essential. Also, implementing safety regulations, improving crowd management, and increasing public awareness are crucial steps in ensuring that traditional festivals in Nigeria remain safe and enjoyable cultural expressions.

Media studies on Niger Delta (Henceforth, ND) conflicts have observed a link between the way information on the conflict is presented and the impression created on the participants in the conflict discourse. This paper investigates how stylistic forms are utilised by Nigerian media for ideological mediation while conveying information on the conflict news. Forty reports published between 2003 and 2009 were purposively selected from eight Nigerian newspapers, four national (Vanguard, The Guardian, The Punch, and THISDAY), and four regional (The Tide, The Pointer, New Waves, and Pioneer) newspapers, and subjected to stylistic and critical analyses, with insights from critical stylistics and aspects of the functional approach to textual analysis. Ideological mediation is dominated by two media practices observed in the data, namely, the representation of news actors’ positions on issues in the news, and the representation of news participants’ conditions in the discourse. While the former is indexed by such stylistic choices as the use of the modality system and the concept of presupposition, the latter is marked by the use of equivalence devices, negated opposites and contrastives. These findings corroborate the relationship between the stylistic forms used in the reports and the ideological goal of the Nigerian media to mediate ND conflicts.

Educated Nigerian English functions as a prestige variety, often contrasted with Nigerian Pidgin. Although sociopragmatic research views this distinction as interactionally constructed, cross-status discourse remains underexamined. This study investigates how “educated speech” is negotiated in real time through an analysis of the Corpus of English and Nigerian Pidgin Code-switching (CENCOS). Adopting a sociopragmatic orientation, the study uses Teun A. van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of discourse and applies the ideological square as its principal analytical construct. Purposive total-population sampling identified all eight non-graduate traders and mechanics represented in CENCOS. These speakers occurred in four conversation files and produced 269 turns. The findings reveal a marked interactional asymmetry. In the car-repair exchanges, the educated speaker questions the mechanic’s competence and dismisses his work, while neither mitigating her own conduct nor acknowledging his expertise. The mechanic, by contrast, manages his position through apology and deference, including an unsuccessful shift into English to reinforce an apology. The study argues that “educated speech” is not a fixed demographic attribute but a relational status constructed through interaction. It demonstrates the value of van Dijk’s ideological square for analysing micro-interactional manifestations of status and power in Nigerian English- Pidgin discourse.

This study examines how Hausa dominance affects the vitality and maintenance of Tangale and Fulfulde in Gombe State, North-Eastern Nigeria. Although the state is linguistically diverse, Hausa increasingly serves as the main language of inter-ethnic communication, commerce, religion, and public interaction, placing minority languages under sustained pressure. Guided by the UNESCO Language Vitality and Endangerment Framework (UNESCO, 2003), the study focuses on intergenerational transmission, speaker strength, domains of use, language attitudes, and literacy support. A descriptive sociolinguistic survey, complemented by ethnographic observation, was conducted with 55 Tangale and Fulfulde speakers, alongside interviews with 20 key informants. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively, while qualitative data were analysed thematically. Findings show that Tangale and Fulfulde remain strong markers of identity and cultural expression, but Hausa dominates wider public and inter-ethnic domains. Weakened transmission, especially in urban and mixed-language households, suggests an emerging shift that calls for community-based documentation, mother-tongue education, and media support.

The present study is a corpus-assisted study of evidential stance in a specialised corpus of select Nigerian newspaper editorials: Punch, Tribune, The Guardian, This Day and Vanguard. The corpus has 1452 editorials, with 1,154,707 tokens. The data drawn was quantitatively analysed using AntConc 4.3.1 and qualitatively, following Hyland’s (2005) model of evidential stance, which categorises evidential stance into hedges and boosters. The results reveal that evidential stance has 161,432 instances, out of which hedges take 94,860 while boosters take only 66,572. The results also revealed that the linguistic categories used to express evidential stance in the editorials include: stance complement clauses controlled by adverbs, adjectives, verbs, modals and nouns. The higher usage of hedges over boosters indicate that writers of Nigerian newspaper editorials use constructions which indicate that they have added their own opinion and assumptions to the information presented. This way, they are able to protect not only themselves, but also their newspaper outfit, in the event of the eventual overthrow of their assumption. Over all, evidential stance has been used in the editorials to: reveal certainty and uncertainty of knowledge, reveal emotional commitment and viewpoint, gain acceptance from the public, and express solidarity with the public.

This study examines Zebrudaya’s “Special” English syntax as a departure from Standard British English, focusing on patterns of variation, entertainment, and communicative intelligibility. It compares the syntactic structures of the two varieties and investigates how Zebrudaya’s usage achieves meaning within its sociocultural context. The study is anchored in the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), Speech Act Context, and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). CAH facilitates the identification of similarities and differences between Zebrudaya’s “Special” English and Standard British English, while Speech Act Context explains how meaning is derived from linguistic expressions in particular communicative situations. SFG, with its conception of language as a system of choices, provides a framework for interpreting how syntactic and lexicogrammatical choices create meaning. A qualitative research design was adopted, with 100 respondents selected through stratified random sampling. The findings reveal that although Zebrudaya’s “Special” English departs substantially from Standard British English norms, its distinctive structures do not necessarily constitute linguistic deficiency. Rather, they represent creative linguistic innovation shaped by the Nigerian sociocultural environment. The study therefore situates Zebrudaya’s “Special” English within the broader discourse of World Englishes and Nigerian English development. It concludes that the variety merits recognition as a meaningful and intelligible form of communication within the Nigerian speech community and, potentially, the wider African context. Its development also contributes to ongoing debates about language identity and Nigeria’s national language question. It further demonstrates how popular media can legitimise localised English forms while promoting cultural identity, accessibility, and interpersonal communication.

This study examines the use of metaphor, hyperbole, and evaluative language in Nigerian online sports media coverage of the 2025–2026 Premier League season, with particular attention to their communicative and rhetorical functions in the construction of sporting narratives and evaluative positions. The study adopts a qualitative stylistic research design. A corpus of 100 stylistic expressions was identified from five online sports platforms: Complete Sports, Premium Times, BBC Sports, Goal.com, and Pulse Nigeria. From the corpus, 30 analytically rich excerpts comprising 10 metaphorical, 10 hyperbolic, and 10 evaluative expressions were purposively selected for detailed analysis. The data were analysed through qualitative content analysis and stylistic analysis, with Appraisal Theory providing the principal framework for interpreting evaluative meaning. The findings indicate that metaphor provides conceptual frames through which football is represented in terms of warfare, medicine, nature, machinery, recovery, and narrative development. Hyperbole intensifies the perceived magnitude, significance, or emotional force of sporting events, while evaluative language explicitly positions players, teams, performances, and outcomes along positive or negative value scales. The study shows that these stylistic resources work complementarily in Nigerian online sports journalism and help construct football as a discourse of competition, excellence, failure, resilience, achievement, and spectacle.

This study examines the metaphorical representations of sex, men, and women in herbal sex-enhancement drug advertisements in Southeast Nigeria. The study is anchored on Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (1980) and Entman’s Framing Theory (1993). A descriptive qualitative methodology was adopted. Data comprised fifteen purposively selected audio advertisements collected from parks and markets across the five Southeast Nigerian states. The advertisements were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using the combined theoretical lenses of conceptual metaphor and framing. The findings reveal a systematic use of metaphors to medicalise normal male sexual physiology and portray men as sexually deficient patients in need of intervention. Women are metaphorically constructed as trees, platforms, food, and prey, thereby erasing their agency, consent, and willing participation in sexual relationships. Furthermore, sex is framed as performance and labour, placing men under pressure to meet rigid standards of sexual endurance and reinforcing a commercialised model of hegemonic masculinity. The study concludes that herbal sex-enhancement drug advertisements employ coordinated metaphorical and framing strategies that objectify women, mechanise male sexuality, and transform intimacy into labour. These representations reinforce unhealthy patriarchal norms and exploit anxieties for commercial gain, ultimately promoting distorted understandings of gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships.