Card Journal Language and ideology of political interactions

ABSTRACT

Several issues have shaped political discourse in Nigeria since her independence.

Speeches read from scripts and other texts as well as various media forums have been

major sources of data. Political interactions, dealing with spontaneous discourse/speech

events have hardly been subject of discourse. Recently one of the platforms that

transverse the Nigerian political sphere is the National Good Governance Tour

(NGGT) of Nigeria; this study therefore, explores language use in the tour and

ideologies transmitted, and the purpose with which language use in the tour serves. The

study adopts Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), as its theoretical framework and

Hallidays’ SFL, to identify language and ideology in the political interactions. Data for

the study was sourced by downloads from the website of the federal ministry of

information, and live recordings as televised. The discourse interactions were played

over, listened to, and transcribed verbatim as uttered for the purpose of this study.

Findings indicate that the interactions sought to counter the dominant apathetic

ideology of most Nigerians with that of optimism through pungent and direct

spontaneous spoken discourse. It was established also that CDA can explore the

relationship between language and ideology of political interactions.

Key words: Political Interaction, Ideology, CDA, SFL,

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