Browsing by Author "Uwalaka, Edith Nkechinyere"

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    A stylistic analysis of selected press conference speeches of the Nigerian Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed (2015 – 2023)
    (Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Obafemi Awolowo University., 2024) Uwalaka, Edith Nkechinyere
    This study identified the social premises of the selected press conference speeches of Lai Mohammed. It also categorised the discursive news values features in the press conference speeches. It further analysed the identified discursive news values features in the speeches in terms of their lexico-semantic and grammatical forms and related them to the Nigerian contexts of the press conferences. This was done with a view to illuminating the linguistic forms and newsworthy social, political and economic issues in the press conference speeches as well as characterising Lai Mohammed’s idiolect. The study employed both primary and secondary sources of data. The primary source comprised four purposively selected video clips of the press conference speeches of Lai Mohammed titled “EndSARS Protest: No Evidence of Killing at Lekki Tollgate”; “Lagos #EndSARS Report Riddled with Errors, Inconsistencies. Discrepancies, Speculation and Innuendoes”; “We did not Ban Twitter, only Suspended it;” and “Banditry, Kidnapping not Federal Government Offence.” These press conferences were selected because they addressed issues of national interest and international importance. The selected speeches were downloaded from YouTube. The downloaded video clips were played using mp4 media player and the verbal aspect was manually transcribed into written texts. The secondary source comprised books, journal articles and the Internet. The transcribed texts were analysed using the principles of Stylistics and Discursive News Values Analysis. The results showed that Lai Mohammed built his speeches on the social premises of insecurity, unemployment, corruption, agitation for secession, terrorism, national unity and stability with a view to calling the attention of the masses to the challenges facing the government as well as the government’s commitment to solving them. The study also revealed that Lai Mohammed used Discursive News Values Analysis features such as eliteness, personalisation, timeliness, superlativeness, unexpectedness, negativity, proximity and positivity news values to construct newsworthiness in the press conferences. The results further showed that Lai Mohammed employed lexico-semantic features such as address term, role label, noun and attitudinal epithet, hyponymy, antonymy, verbs and adverbs to construct news values. The study found that grammatical forms such as simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, compound-complex sentences and syntactic parallelism were also employed by Lai Mohammed to construct news values in order to convey detailed information and to lay emphasis. The analysis of the linguistic resources of the discourse under study took into consideration the socio-cultural and political implications of the discursive news values in relation to the context of the discourse and the larger Nigerian society. The study concluded that press conference discourse is characterised with linguistic forms as well as social, political and economic issues that are used by politicians to communicate newsworthy meanings and stances.