A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYTICAL STUDY OF THE MANIFESTO OF NIGERIA‟S ALL PROGRESSIVES CONGRESS (APC)

A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYTICAL STUDY OF THE MANIFESTO OF NIGERIA‟S ALL PROGRESSIVES CONGRESS (APC)

Abstract:

This study examines the linguistic structures used for propagating specific ideologies through which discourses of the APC‟s manifesto construct ideological representations of political events and situations in Nigeria under the Peoples‟ Democratic Party‟s government. The study was motivated by how the ideological differences in the text of the APC manifesto‟s representation of Nigeria are coded in its vocabulary. To this end, the study pays closer attention to the means by which the grammatical forms of the APC manifesto‟s discourse or language use code happenings or relationships in Nigeria, the people or things involved in those happenings or relationships, including their spatial or temporal circumstances, manner of occurrence, and so on. It deploys Fairclough‟s Dialectical Relational Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis to posit in its central argument that language use in the APC‟s manifesto facilitates the encoding of ideologies.Dialectical Relational Approach comes from the perspectives of Critical Linguistics which explores the social functions of language; it describes linguistic processes in social terms in order to reveal their ideological and political investments. It identifies three stages of critical linguistic analysis: description of the text, interpretation of the relationship between text and interaction and explanation of the relationship between interaction and social context. Consequent upon this conceptualization, the method of systematic textual analysis employed for this study is the interaction of these three levels of analysis. Thus, the study situates the overall analysis at one time in detailed micro linguistic analysis of text and another time in the macro analysis of discursive and wider sociopolitical practices with especial focus on textuality, cohesion, modality, metaphor, nominalization and vocabulary, passivization and transitivity. The result of the analysis reveals that the APC manifesto‟s preference for nominalizations and the passive form, the preponderance of material and mental processes, the choice of modal verbs as against adverbials and phrases for the assertion of degree of certitude and authority, the suppression of agency via passivization, deletion, among others, facilitate the encoding and sustaining of favourable ideologies. The study further establishes that in making policy statements and textually representing actions, events, state of affairs and relationships, the APC‟s manifesto makes choices between diverse lexis and different grammatical processes and participant types, and the selections made are not neutral but ideologically significant. The study contributes to the understanding of the ideological role of language in political manifesto‟s discourse in constructing representations of the social world. It concludes that language use in the APC‟s manifesto helps to instigate good versus bad frames and a polarity of favourable „self‟ presentation and derogatory „other‟ representation

A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYTICAL STUDY OF THE MANIFESTO OF NIGERIA‟S ALL PROGRESSIVES CONGRESS (APC)

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