Rhetoric in Selected Speeches of Ọbafemi Awolọwọ and Moshood Abiọla

A number of extant studies have examined political rhetoric and propaganda. None of them, however, has explicitly examined the deployment of rhetoric by notable Nigerian political figures as representatives of different epochs in Nigeria’s political history. This paper investigates the communicative intentions and persuasive techniques employed in selected political speeches of Obafemi Awolowo and Moshood Abiola, two past political figures in Nigeria political history. It examines the deployment of political rhetoric in communicating intentions in the selected speeches with the view to examine the persuasiveness of the speeches and the influence of the speakers’ intentions on rhetorical choices. The study is driven by Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric. Findings reveal that the selected speeches are not only highly persuasive but they also employed two types of rhetoric, combat and tact. While tact is achieved through the use of ethos, pathos, logos, and structural parallelism to boost the self-image of the speakers, combat rhetoric is achieved through metaphor and linguistic elements with negative semantic connotations, direct command, and intertextual references that register the speaker’s aversion to an idea or event. Tact rhetoric is prominent mostly in pre-election speeches such as acceptance and campaign speeches while combat rhetoric is exclusive to postelection speeches which are more of protests/complaints. The paper concludes that Awolowo and Abiola’s choice of rhetorical strategies is influenced by their communicative intentions, as the duo achieved the communicative import of persuasion in their speeches through effective deployment of rhetorical tools in their bid to inform, request, educate, commend, and condemn, as the case may be. &nbsp

Linguistic Impoliteness and Interpersonal Positioning in Nigerian Online Political Forum

Interactional positioning has to do with how people express their attitudes and dispositions to others (stance) and signal how they wish to relate with other participants in the discourse (engagement). These are closely connected with the extent to which impoliteness is expressed in discourse and the resources and strategies employed. This study investigates interactional positioning and impoliteness in two Nigerian political discussion sites, Nairaland Forum and Gistmania. The findings show that bald-on-record and negative impoliteness were predominant in the discussions. The common linguistic expressions of impoliteness were name-calling, vulgarism, cursing, dismissal and sarcasm. Participants also used questions, directives and reader pronouns you and your for face attacks and heightening of the effect of impolite expressions. Self-mentions and attitude markers, especially cognitive verbs, were used to convey feelings and attitudes towards other participants within and outside the discussion. The study concludes that impoliteness thrives in political debates online because of the uninhibited context, which gives freedom to participants to deliberately inject invective language in order to set the emotional temperature in the discussion and cause disaffection among the participants and the group they represent.Interactional positioning has to do with how people express their attitudes and dispositions to others (stance) and signal how they wish to relate with other participants in the discourse (engagement). These are closely connected with the extent to which impoliteness is expressed in discourse and the resources and strategies employed. This study investigates interactional positioning and impoliteness in two Nigerian political discussion sites, Nairaland Forum and Gistmania. The findings show that bald-on-record and negative impoliteness were predominant in the discussions. The common linguistic expressions of impoliteness were name-calling, vulgarism, cursing, dismissal and sarcasm. Participants also used questions, directives and reader pronouns you and your for face attacks and heightening of the effect of impolite expressions. Self-mentions and attitude markers, especially cognitive verbs, were used to convey feelings and attitudes towards other participants within and outside the discussion. The study concludes that impoliteness thrives in political debates online because of the uninhibited context, which gives freedom to participants to deliberately inject invective language in order to set the emotional temperature in the discussion and cause disaffection among the participants and the group they represent

Leadership Debacle and Socio-Political Flux in Post Colonial Africa: A Discourse-Stylistic Analysis of Wole Soyinkas A Play of Giants and King Baabu

After many years of freedom from colonial domination, African nations are still far from socio-political and economic stability. Post colonial African nations are still battling with socio-political and economic difficulty arising from leadership ineptitude and military dictatorship. Even though democracy has gradually replaced military dictatorship in most of these nations, the success of the democratic experiments have suffered huge setback and these have negatively impacted on the lives of the average citizens. Scholarly interests in the political and economic crises in Africa have been from a wide range of fields and theoretical perspectives including language and literature. Existing works, however, have not adequately explored its representations in the rich literary resources of the continent in spite of its role in record keeping and as the conscience of the society. This is the gap which this study fills. The present study, which adopts discourse-stylistics as theoretical ground, examines leadership crisis vis--vis socio-political flux in selected plays of Wole Soyinka. The paper identifies and describes the features of style in relation to their discourse value and how these have helped in achieving the overall satirical import of the plays. Two of Soyinkas socio-political plays namely; A play of Giants and King Baabu were purposively selected for the study. Through artistic creativity and deployment of language as an ideological satirical tool, Soyinka presents the pitiable picture of the African socio-political system and the ridiculous image of the leadership in Africa. As revealed in their poor command of the English language, Soyinka mocks post colonial African leaders as uneducated, immoral, intellectually bankrupt and pathologically deficient despots. He paints a pitiable picture of the socio-political realities and leadership ineptitude in African nations through the use metaphor and symbolism

The Role of Discursive Constructions in Nigeria's ASUU-FGN Labour Conflict of 2013

The performance of Nigeria's tertiary education sector has been undermined on numerous occasions by labour conflicts. While these labour disputes are widely reported in the media, there has been only minimal scholarly examination of the discourses that predominate in the media during these conflicts. Using the critical discourse analysis (CDA) and conceptual metaphor (CM) frameworks, this study examined the discursive features of a labour conflict in 2013 between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN). Statements by ASUU and FGN officials and their supporters, as published by Nigerian print and online news sources during the dispute, were purposively sampled, along with media outlets’ editorial statements and readers’ online comments. It was found that the labour dispute was discursively and metaphorically constructed in militaristic terms, as a conflict between two enemies engaged in a kind of battle or war. It was also found that both ASUU and the FGN engaged in propagandistic discourses in line with their militaristic discursive constructions, and that the two sides propagated disparaging discourses in respect of each other’s motivations and behaviours. It was also found that certain readers reproduced elements of the prevailing discourses in their online comments on media coverage of the strike

Pragmatic Functions of Questions in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Questioning is an instructional process that is not only central to verbal interaction in the classroom but also essential to negotiation of meaning in discourse. Existing studies dealing with functions of questions have only identified few functions which questions perform in discourse probably because the scholars who worked on them have not explored varied situations and contexts which necessitate asking questions whose functions are totally different from the ones already identified in the literature. Hence, the current research investigates the pragmatic functions of questions in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. The major advantage of using this source of data is that, it, unlike previous studies which investigate data from premeditated sources, this source provides rich and varied naturally-occurring contexts for asking different questions which perform different functions. The study is driven by insight from the concept of pragmatic competence. On the whole, the research identified nine novel pragmatic functions of questions which have not been documented in the literature. These include questions to indicate annoyance, questions to foster interpersonal relationship, questions to persuade somebody to do something, questions for showing disapproval and so on. These findings implicate that in a bid to build on a learner’s competence in a particular language, such a learner should be introduced to the importance of contexts in determining the function which a particular question is meant to perform in any communicative encounter