This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Examines some of the varied African literary responses to politics and social justice and injusti... more Examines some of the varied African literary responses to politics and social justice and injustice under colonialism/neocolonialism.
Abstract: This study examines Nigerian children’s literature as a metaphorical construction and p... more Abstract: This study examines Nigerian children’s literature as a metaphorical construction and process for a better understanding of our world. Among the several reasons why authors write children’s literature are to entertain and to teach the children about their cultural, traditional, political and social history. Most authors, therefore, have moral reasons for embarking on the arduous task of writing for children. The entertainment and education of the child have been at the heart of children’s literature right from the eighteenth century. Thus, the education and inculcation of moral values are central to the writing and production of children’s literature. Besides, children’s literature appears to be an attempt to protect the innocence of the child from the vagaries of socio-moral decadence that pervade the adult mind and world. That, of course, was the eighteenth century romantic ideology that has found its way into contemporary literary production and expression. Working with...
Writers adopt different strategies of communicating social meaning. The strategies enable them to... more Writers adopt different strategies of communicating social meaning. The strategies enable them to represent individual and group identities, ideologies, attitudes, biases, feelings, prejudices and social relations. In Okri’s novels on abiku, the spirit child, namely The Famished Road (1991), Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998), he adopts gossip/rumour and communal/cosmic conversational structure as strategies of communicating the social and political situations of his Nigerian society. The gossip/rumour strategies are narrative forms of supplying additional information the central narrator does not have access to, while the dialogic/conversational structure represents the African communal perspective and the intercourse between the natural and the supernatural. Keywords : Ben Okri, discursive representation, social meaning, gossip/rumour, dialogue/conversation
One of the greatest threats to national development and the rights of individuals and groups in N... more One of the greatest threats to national development and the rights of individuals and groups in Nigeria and some parts of Africa is the growing increase in religious fundamentalism by major religious in the continent. The worsening economic fortunes of many African countries, poor and corrupt leadership, increase in ethnic nationalism, oppression of the minority by dominant powers and ideologies and the quest for freedom, external influences from extremist (Islamic & Christian) groups among others have been suggested as likely causes of religious fundamentalism in Africa. The postcolonial Nigerian nation has suffered calamitous losses from religious conflicts. Consequently, some of Nigeria's 21 st Century writers have tried in their works to present a situation in which groups use language to construct individual and collective identity and ideology, legitimize their actions, and justify acts of violence against others. The grammatical resource of mood and transitivity employed by the writers enables us to access and appraise individual and group experiences, and intergroup relations in social interactions. The resources of language enable us to perceive how individuals and groups relate to each other in social activities and implicitly or explicitly sustain ideologies that support the structures of oppression and violence. Therefore, working within the tenets of critical stylistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study aims at exposing the motives that underlie the expression of religious identity and ideology in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (PH henceforth), Chidubem Iweka's The Ancient Curse (TAC henceforth), and Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them (SYOT henceforth) and their implications for national stability and development. The data reveal how the sociopolitical climate in postcolonial Nigeria breeds a culture of hatred, intolerance, violence, exclusion, and curtailment of individual and group rights in the name of religion, and how these acts are expressed in diverse discoursegrammatical patterns.
Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and cultural linguistics (CL), which form the chief theoretical ... more Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and cultural linguistics (CL), which form the chief theoretical anchor for this study, express the role of language, culture and cognition in the construal and expression of human experiences. The approaches posit that the metaphorical use of language by an individual or group is shaped by their ideological orientation, knowledge of their natural and social world, and their cultural worldview. This study investigates the metaphorical use of language by the Nigerian print media in their attempts to express ideation on corruption in the Nigerian public sector. There has not been any deliberate and rigorous attempt to study the metaphorical representation of corruption in the Nigerian media discourse, hence this study aims at addressing the lacuna. Thus, this study uses insights from CMT and CL to identify, classify and analyse some of these metaphors in six Nigerian newspapers, namely; The Guardian, Punch, Daily Trust, The Nation, Vanguard and The Sun....
Previous studies on Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street (OBSS henceforth) have focused mainly... more Previous studies on Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street (OBSS henceforth) have focused mainly on the thematic concerns of the text-prostitution, sex trafficking and sex slavery, without paying considerable attention to the role of language in the projection of the phenomena. This study critically examines ideation as a linguistic tool for inferring or retrieving the social meanings encoded in the text under study. This study also explores how the resources of language can be used in establishing social and power relations in discourse encounters and how their manifestation in literary discourse represents social experiences in real life situations. Working within the tenets of M.A.K. Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study engages in the project of using insights from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and sociolinguistics to ascertain the mental and physical state of the victims of sex slavery, the attitude of their clients, and that of other powerful social actors that inhabit the creative universe of the text under consideration. The significance of this study lies in its demonstration of how the writer's linguistic choices bring about an understanding of the social experiences and ideology that underlie the text under study
Previous studies on prostitution and sex slavery in African literature have focused chiefly on th... more Previous studies on prostitution and sex slavery in African literature have focused chiefly on the thematic concerns of the novels such as the moral dimensions of the act but none of the studies has explored the role of language as a form of representation that enables the reader to infer the psychological conditions and attitudes of discourse participants either as victims of prostitution and sex slavery or as active agents in the sustenance of the act. Working within the systemic linguistic orientation and insights from the notion of phenomenalistic construal, therefore, this study explores the linguistic representation of the inner feelings and attitudes of victims of sex slavery and prostitution in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked, and Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s Sarah House. The texts under study represent sex slavery and prostitution as forms of physical and mental violence against the victims of the acts and a gross violation of their humanness.
This paper examines the text of President Goodluck Jonathan‟s declaration of his candidacy for hi... more This paper examines the text of President Goodluck Jonathan‟s declaration of his candidacy for his party‟s presidential primaries. Previous studies on presidential speeches in Nigeria have focused on stylistic and pragmatic analysis with little emphasis on the ideological perspective of the texts. None of these studies examined the speeches of a president‟s declaration of presidential ambition or candidacy for election. The study employed a qualitative approach in the analysis of the text to tease out the meaning potential of the rhetorical strategies deployed in the speech and the ideology they encode. Methods of and insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics were employed to unearth the underlying ideology and persuasive strategies used in the declaration speech. The study revealed a conscious deployment of diverse rhetorical strategies by the President to articulate an alternative ideology for the Nigerian nation. The study also showed tha...
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which forms the theoretical anchor of this study, expresses the... more Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which forms the theoretical anchor of this study, expresses the role of language and cognition in construing and communicating human experiences. CMT posits that metaphor in discourse is shaped by the ideological orientation and cultural worldview of the speaker or group. Previous studies on Igbo language and culture have used insights from linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, religious studies among others to show how the group expresses its social and cultural experiences, but none, to the best of the present researcher’s knowledge, has used the CMT approach to study the group’s construal of dreaded diseases and medical conditions in its environment. Working within the tenets of CMT therefore, this study shows how the group uses metaphors to express ideation and tenor in relation to some dreaded diseases and conditions. The study reveals that the Igbo use different conceptual metaphors such as container, journey, leaf, natural/p...
This study examines specifically, the mission statement and ideology as discursive practices of t... more This study examines specifically, the mission statement and ideology as discursive practices of the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox (MMM) Ponzi scheme. As the demand for transparency in governance, public...
This study examines Nigerian children’s literature as a metaphorical construction and process for... more This study examines Nigerian children’s literature as a metaphorical construction and process for a better understanding of our world. Among the several reasons why authors write children’s literature are to entertain and to teach the children about their cultural, traditional, political and social history. Most authors, therefore, have moral reasons for embarking on the arduous task of writing for children. The entertainment and education of the child have been at the heart of children’s literature right from the eighteenth century. Thus, the education and inculcation of moral values are central to the writing and production of children’s literature. Besides, children’s literature appears to be an attempt to protect the innocence of the child from the vagaries of socio-moral decadence that pervade the adult mind and world. That, of course, was the eighteenth century romantic ideology that has found its way into contemporary literary production and expression. Working within the fra...
Ikenna Kamalu’s book Stylistics: Theory and Practice is a contemporary handbook on modern stylist... more Ikenna Kamalu’s book Stylistics: Theory and Practice is a contemporary handbook on modern stylistics. It demonstrates how practitioners of stylistics can effectively identify language patterns and peculiarities of discourse within a given linguistic framework. It opens with a discussion on the subject of language, representation and ideation in discourse, at a multi-level dimension. The book is remarkably alert to the ways in which language in varied discourse modes imbricates the main currents, trends, literary ideals and ideological thrusts prevalent in every society and age. Drawing from the gains of applied sociolinguistics, it extends its analysis to other fields such as literature, text grammar, pedagogy, popular culture, semiotics, rhetoric, metaphor analysis, and jurisprudence. This is to demonstrate that the principles of linguistics are applicable in diverse fields of human endeavour.
This essay examines Ben Okri’s use of metaphor to frame the relationship between groups in his so... more This essay examines Ben Okri’s use of metaphor to frame the relationship between groups in his society. A careful study of the The Famished Road (TFR), Songs of Enchantment (SOE) and Infinite Riches (IR) reveals the asymmetry in the distribution of socio-political power in the system. It also reveals the uneasy juxtaposition of values and groups such as the colonizer vs the colonized; the rich vs the poor; the white vs the black; the politicians vs the inhabitants; the modern vs the ancient, etc. The texts show one group trying to impose its ideology on the other while the dominated group tries to resist or contest the ideological hegemony of the dominant group. Okri is a magical realist who avails himself of the resources of metaphor to express a content that is typically postcolonial. This presupposes that magical realism and metaphor as modes of artistic presentation are not mutually exclusive, hence the former can be expressed in the latter, or vice versa. The study reveals that...
This study adopted the tenets of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson in the an... more This study adopted the tenets of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson in the analysis of selected political speeches of Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo (OBJ henceforth), Musa Yar’Adua (UMY henceforth) and Goodluck Jonathan (GEJ henceforth). The study discovered that metaphor is a great resource in political communication and that the speakers drew from source domains that represent social, economic and political situations and conditions in Nigeria essentially as conflict and war, building, disease, journey, illness, games and sports, and as a family. The study considers ways in which metaphors facilitate the discourse on Nigerian nationhood and how the speakers exploit metaphorical expressions in communicating their ideologies to Nigerians.
Several studies have been done on the growing trends in African popular literature, particularly ... more Several studies have been done on the growing trends in African popular literature, particularly the Onitsha market literature. Most of these works have been carried out by established scholars such as Emmanuel Obiechina, Bernth Lindfors and Stephanie Newell. While Obiechina and Lindfors studied what may be called “the first generation” of African popular literature authors, Newell extended the discourse by investigating the works of largely “unknown” authors, particularly women whose works were on Christian and secular matters. This study draws from both perspectives but however differs from them because it seems to be the first critical study on Adebayo Bello, a prolific Nigerian writer whose work is yet to receive any critical attention. Based on insights from Obiechina and Newell, this study examined the major thematic and stylistic patterns of Bello‟s pamphlets. It looked at how the deployment of linguistic resources enhanced the writer‟s rhetoric on the issues he engaged in th...
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which forms the theoretical anchor of this study, expresses the... more Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which forms the theoretical anchor of this study, expresses the role of language and cognition in construing and communicating human experiences. CMT posits that metaphor in discourse is shaped by the ideological orientation and cultural worldview of the speaker or group. Previous studies on Igbo language and culture have used insights from linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, religious studies among others to show how the group expresses its social and cultural experiences, but none, to the best of the present researcher’s knowledge, has used the CMT approach to study the group’s construal of dreaded diseases and medical conditions in its environment. Working within the tenets of CMT therefore, this study shows how the group uses metaphors to express ideation and tenor in relation to some dreaded diseases and conditions. The study reveals that the Igbo use different conceptual metaphors such as container, journey, leaf, natural/p...
Studies on gender relations have received tremendous attention from scholars working in different... more Studies on gender relations have received tremendous attention from scholars working in different disciplines and from diverse theoretical orientations. This study examines how gender is being represented in visual communication using selected lager beer advertisements in Nigeria. Visual communications, especially billboards, exert a considerable amount of influence on how people perceive themselves and how roles are assigned to both genders. Based on insights from the theory of multimodality, this study is an attempt to use a social semiotic approach in the interpretation of visual communication. Multimodality perceives visual as representation and communication. Working within the tenets of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), therefore, we are able to analyse and interpret the primary texts, which invariably helped in decoding the meaning potential embedded in the images and slogans, hence this study portrays how words, images and signs in the selected lager beer billboard advert...
Previous studies on ethnic, religious and political expressions and activities in Nigeria have ex... more Previous studies on ethnic, religious and political expressions and activities in Nigeria have examined issues such as religious and political intolerance between and among groups. In particular, the activities of pro-Biafra groups such as that of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Biafra Zionist Movement (BZM), Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and Biafra Independent Movement (BIM) among others in real life and in online forums have also been studied by scholars from different ideological and theoretical standpoints. However, none of these studies examined the deliberate expression of ethnic, religious and political identities and otherness in the discourses that emanate from the arrest, detention and trial of Nnamdi Kanu, the separatist founder of IPOB, by the government of Nigeria. This study aims at unearthing the deep sense of exclusion that underlies the reactions that trail his arrest and trial in online platforms. A total of twenty...
This study examines specifically, the mission statement and ideology as discursive practices of t... more This study examines specifically, the mission statement and ideology as discursive practices of the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox (MMM) Ponzi scheme. As the demand for transparency in governance, public...
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Examines some of the varied African literary responses to politics and social justice and injusti... more Examines some of the varied African literary responses to politics and social justice and injustice under colonialism/neocolonialism.
Abstract: This study examines Nigerian children’s literature as a metaphorical construction and p... more Abstract: This study examines Nigerian children’s literature as a metaphorical construction and process for a better understanding of our world. Among the several reasons why authors write children’s literature are to entertain and to teach the children about their cultural, traditional, political and social history. Most authors, therefore, have moral reasons for embarking on the arduous task of writing for children. The entertainment and education of the child have been at the heart of children’s literature right from the eighteenth century. Thus, the education and inculcation of moral values are central to the writing and production of children’s literature. Besides, children’s literature appears to be an attempt to protect the innocence of the child from the vagaries of socio-moral decadence that pervade the adult mind and world. That, of course, was the eighteenth century romantic ideology that has found its way into contemporary literary production and expression. Working with...
Writers adopt different strategies of communicating social meaning. The strategies enable them to... more Writers adopt different strategies of communicating social meaning. The strategies enable them to represent individual and group identities, ideologies, attitudes, biases, feelings, prejudices and social relations. In Okri’s novels on abiku, the spirit child, namely The Famished Road (1991), Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998), he adopts gossip/rumour and communal/cosmic conversational structure as strategies of communicating the social and political situations of his Nigerian society. The gossip/rumour strategies are narrative forms of supplying additional information the central narrator does not have access to, while the dialogic/conversational structure represents the African communal perspective and the intercourse between the natural and the supernatural. Keywords : Ben Okri, discursive representation, social meaning, gossip/rumour, dialogue/conversation
One of the greatest threats to national development and the rights of individuals and groups in N... more One of the greatest threats to national development and the rights of individuals and groups in Nigeria and some parts of Africa is the growing increase in religious fundamentalism by major religious in the continent. The worsening economic fortunes of many African countries, poor and corrupt leadership, increase in ethnic nationalism, oppression of the minority by dominant powers and ideologies and the quest for freedom, external influences from extremist (Islamic & Christian) groups among others have been suggested as likely causes of religious fundamentalism in Africa. The postcolonial Nigerian nation has suffered calamitous losses from religious conflicts. Consequently, some of Nigeria's 21 st Century writers have tried in their works to present a situation in which groups use language to construct individual and collective identity and ideology, legitimize their actions, and justify acts of violence against others. The grammatical resource of mood and transitivity employed by the writers enables us to access and appraise individual and group experiences, and intergroup relations in social interactions. The resources of language enable us to perceive how individuals and groups relate to each other in social activities and implicitly or explicitly sustain ideologies that support the structures of oppression and violence. Therefore, working within the tenets of critical stylistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study aims at exposing the motives that underlie the expression of religious identity and ideology in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (PH henceforth), Chidubem Iweka's The Ancient Curse (TAC henceforth), and Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them (SYOT henceforth) and their implications for national stability and development. The data reveal how the sociopolitical climate in postcolonial Nigeria breeds a culture of hatred, intolerance, violence, exclusion, and curtailment of individual and group rights in the name of religion, and how these acts are expressed in diverse discoursegrammatical patterns.
Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and cultural linguistics (CL), which form the chief theoretical ... more Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and cultural linguistics (CL), which form the chief theoretical anchor for this study, express the role of language, culture and cognition in the construal and expression of human experiences. The approaches posit that the metaphorical use of language by an individual or group is shaped by their ideological orientation, knowledge of their natural and social world, and their cultural worldview. This study investigates the metaphorical use of language by the Nigerian print media in their attempts to express ideation on corruption in the Nigerian public sector. There has not been any deliberate and rigorous attempt to study the metaphorical representation of corruption in the Nigerian media discourse, hence this study aims at addressing the lacuna. Thus, this study uses insights from CMT and CL to identify, classify and analyse some of these metaphors in six Nigerian newspapers, namely; The Guardian, Punch, Daily Trust, The Nation, Vanguard and The Sun....
Previous studies on Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street (OBSS henceforth) have focused mainly... more Previous studies on Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street (OBSS henceforth) have focused mainly on the thematic concerns of the text-prostitution, sex trafficking and sex slavery, without paying considerable attention to the role of language in the projection of the phenomena. This study critically examines ideation as a linguistic tool for inferring or retrieving the social meanings encoded in the text under study. This study also explores how the resources of language can be used in establishing social and power relations in discourse encounters and how their manifestation in literary discourse represents social experiences in real life situations. Working within the tenets of M.A.K. Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study engages in the project of using insights from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and sociolinguistics to ascertain the mental and physical state of the victims of sex slavery, the attitude of their clients, and that of other powerful social actors that inhabit the creative universe of the text under consideration. The significance of this study lies in its demonstration of how the writer's linguistic choices bring about an understanding of the social experiences and ideology that underlie the text under study
Previous studies on prostitution and sex slavery in African literature have focused chiefly on th... more Previous studies on prostitution and sex slavery in African literature have focused chiefly on the thematic concerns of the novels such as the moral dimensions of the act but none of the studies has explored the role of language as a form of representation that enables the reader to infer the psychological conditions and attitudes of discourse participants either as victims of prostitution and sex slavery or as active agents in the sustenance of the act. Working within the systemic linguistic orientation and insights from the notion of phenomenalistic construal, therefore, this study explores the linguistic representation of the inner feelings and attitudes of victims of sex slavery and prostitution in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked, and Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s Sarah House. The texts under study represent sex slavery and prostitution as forms of physical and mental violence against the victims of the acts and a gross violation of their humanness.
This paper examines the text of President Goodluck Jonathan‟s declaration of his candidacy for hi... more This paper examines the text of President Goodluck Jonathan‟s declaration of his candidacy for his party‟s presidential primaries. Previous studies on presidential speeches in Nigeria have focused on stylistic and pragmatic analysis with little emphasis on the ideological perspective of the texts. None of these studies examined the speeches of a president‟s declaration of presidential ambition or candidacy for election. The study employed a qualitative approach in the analysis of the text to tease out the meaning potential of the rhetorical strategies deployed in the speech and the ideology they encode. Methods of and insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics were employed to unearth the underlying ideology and persuasive strategies used in the declaration speech. The study revealed a conscious deployment of diverse rhetorical strategies by the President to articulate an alternative ideology for the Nigerian nation. The study also showed tha...
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which forms the theoretical anchor of this study, expresses the... more Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which forms the theoretical anchor of this study, expresses the role of language and cognition in construing and communicating human experiences. CMT posits that metaphor in discourse is shaped by the ideological orientation and cultural worldview of the speaker or group. Previous studies on Igbo language and culture have used insights from linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, religious studies among others to show how the group expresses its social and cultural experiences, but none, to the best of the present researcher’s knowledge, has used the CMT approach to study the group’s construal of dreaded diseases and medical conditions in its environment. Working within the tenets of CMT therefore, this study shows how the group uses metaphors to express ideation and tenor in relation to some dreaded diseases and conditions. The study reveals that the Igbo use different conceptual metaphors such as container, journey, leaf, natural/p...
This study examines specifically, the mission statement and ideology as discursive practices of t... more This study examines specifically, the mission statement and ideology as discursive practices of the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox (MMM) Ponzi scheme. As the demand for transparency in governance, public...
This study examines Nigerian children’s literature as a metaphorical construction and process for... more This study examines Nigerian children’s literature as a metaphorical construction and process for a better understanding of our world. Among the several reasons why authors write children’s literature are to entertain and to teach the children about their cultural, traditional, political and social history. Most authors, therefore, have moral reasons for embarking on the arduous task of writing for children. The entertainment and education of the child have been at the heart of children’s literature right from the eighteenth century. Thus, the education and inculcation of moral values are central to the writing and production of children’s literature. Besides, children’s literature appears to be an attempt to protect the innocence of the child from the vagaries of socio-moral decadence that pervade the adult mind and world. That, of course, was the eighteenth century romantic ideology that has found its way into contemporary literary production and expression. Working within the fra...
Ikenna Kamalu’s book Stylistics: Theory and Practice is a contemporary handbook on modern stylist... more Ikenna Kamalu’s book Stylistics: Theory and Practice is a contemporary handbook on modern stylistics. It demonstrates how practitioners of stylistics can effectively identify language patterns and peculiarities of discourse within a given linguistic framework. It opens with a discussion on the subject of language, representation and ideation in discourse, at a multi-level dimension. The book is remarkably alert to the ways in which language in varied discourse modes imbricates the main currents, trends, literary ideals and ideological thrusts prevalent in every society and age. Drawing from the gains of applied sociolinguistics, it extends its analysis to other fields such as literature, text grammar, pedagogy, popular culture, semiotics, rhetoric, metaphor analysis, and jurisprudence. This is to demonstrate that the principles of linguistics are applicable in diverse fields of human endeavour.
This essay examines Ben Okri’s use of metaphor to frame the relationship between groups in his so... more This essay examines Ben Okri’s use of metaphor to frame the relationship between groups in his society. A careful study of the The Famished Road (TFR), Songs of Enchantment (SOE) and Infinite Riches (IR) reveals the asymmetry in the distribution of socio-political power in the system. It also reveals the uneasy juxtaposition of values and groups such as the colonizer vs the colonized; the rich vs the poor; the white vs the black; the politicians vs the inhabitants; the modern vs the ancient, etc. The texts show one group trying to impose its ideology on the other while the dominated group tries to resist or contest the ideological hegemony of the dominant group. Okri is a magical realist who avails himself of the resources of metaphor to express a content that is typically postcolonial. This presupposes that magical realism and metaphor as modes of artistic presentation are not mutually exclusive, hence the former can be expressed in the latter, or vice versa. The study reveals that...
This study adopted the tenets of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson in the an... more This study adopted the tenets of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson in the analysis of selected political speeches of Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo (OBJ henceforth), Musa Yar’Adua (UMY henceforth) and Goodluck Jonathan (GEJ henceforth). The study discovered that metaphor is a great resource in political communication and that the speakers drew from source domains that represent social, economic and political situations and conditions in Nigeria essentially as conflict and war, building, disease, journey, illness, games and sports, and as a family. The study considers ways in which metaphors facilitate the discourse on Nigerian nationhood and how the speakers exploit metaphorical expressions in communicating their ideologies to Nigerians.
Several studies have been done on the growing trends in African popular literature, particularly ... more Several studies have been done on the growing trends in African popular literature, particularly the Onitsha market literature. Most of these works have been carried out by established scholars such as Emmanuel Obiechina, Bernth Lindfors and Stephanie Newell. While Obiechina and Lindfors studied what may be called “the first generation” of African popular literature authors, Newell extended the discourse by investigating the works of largely “unknown” authors, particularly women whose works were on Christian and secular matters. This study draws from both perspectives but however differs from them because it seems to be the first critical study on Adebayo Bello, a prolific Nigerian writer whose work is yet to receive any critical attention. Based on insights from Obiechina and Newell, this study examined the major thematic and stylistic patterns of Bello‟s pamphlets. It looked at how the deployment of linguistic resources enhanced the writer‟s rhetoric on the issues he engaged in th...
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which forms the theoretical anchor of this study, expresses the... more Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which forms the theoretical anchor of this study, expresses the role of language and cognition in construing and communicating human experiences. CMT posits that metaphor in discourse is shaped by the ideological orientation and cultural worldview of the speaker or group. Previous studies on Igbo language and culture have used insights from linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, religious studies among others to show how the group expresses its social and cultural experiences, but none, to the best of the present researcher’s knowledge, has used the CMT approach to study the group’s construal of dreaded diseases and medical conditions in its environment. Working within the tenets of CMT therefore, this study shows how the group uses metaphors to express ideation and tenor in relation to some dreaded diseases and conditions. The study reveals that the Igbo use different conceptual metaphors such as container, journey, leaf, natural/p...
Studies on gender relations have received tremendous attention from scholars working in different... more Studies on gender relations have received tremendous attention from scholars working in different disciplines and from diverse theoretical orientations. This study examines how gender is being represented in visual communication using selected lager beer advertisements in Nigeria. Visual communications, especially billboards, exert a considerable amount of influence on how people perceive themselves and how roles are assigned to both genders. Based on insights from the theory of multimodality, this study is an attempt to use a social semiotic approach in the interpretation of visual communication. Multimodality perceives visual as representation and communication. Working within the tenets of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), therefore, we are able to analyse and interpret the primary texts, which invariably helped in decoding the meaning potential embedded in the images and slogans, hence this study portrays how words, images and signs in the selected lager beer billboard advert...
Previous studies on ethnic, religious and political expressions and activities in Nigeria have ex... more Previous studies on ethnic, religious and political expressions and activities in Nigeria have examined issues such as religious and political intolerance between and among groups. In particular, the activities of pro-Biafra groups such as that of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Biafra Zionist Movement (BZM), Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and Biafra Independent Movement (BIM) among others in real life and in online forums have also been studied by scholars from different ideological and theoretical standpoints. However, none of these studies examined the deliberate expression of ethnic, religious and political identities and otherness in the discourses that emanate from the arrest, detention and trial of Nnamdi Kanu, the separatist founder of IPOB, by the government of Nigeria. This study aims at unearthing the deep sense of exclusion that underlies the reactions that trail his arrest and trial in online platforms. A total of twenty...
This study examines specifically, the mission statement and ideology as discursive practices of t... more This study examines specifically, the mission statement and ideology as discursive practices of the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox (MMM) Ponzi scheme. As the demand for transparency in governance, public...
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