An Experiential Metafuctional Analysis of News Report of Kidnappings in Selected Newspapers in Nigeria
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Date
2024
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Deparment of English, Faculty of Arts ,Obafemi Awolowo University,Ile Ife,Nigeria.
Abstract
The study identified and analysed the processes, participants and circumstantial roles in selected news reports of kidnapping in The Punch, The Tide and Leadership newspapers in Nigeria. It also discussed the grammatical resources deployed to express experiential meanings in the news reports and related the experiential meaning to the socio-cultural context of Nigeria. These were done with a view to understanding how grammatical resources were deployed in news reports of kidnapping to represent the world of the language users. The study employed both primary and secondary sources of data. The primary source comprised 20 purposively selected kidnapping news reports each from The Punch, The Tide and Leadership from 2018 to 2023, making a total of 60 reportage for the entire study. These newspapers were selected based on their wide coverage of kidnapping cases in different parts of the country. The news reports were closely read and analysed into clauses in order to bring out the grammatical resources used for expressing experiential meanings in them. The secondary source included books, journal articles and the Internet. The analysis of the data was guided by Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar.
The results showed that the experiential meanings in the clauses were reflected through the processes, participants and circumstantial roles across the three newspapers. The study revealed that the participants represented those carrying out actions of kidnapping and, the processes indicated different actions such as reporting, sensing or affirming the existence of kidnapping of people or students while the circumstantial roles gave detailed information about the location and time of the kidnappings in the selected newspaper reports. The study also found that grammatical resources for expressing experiential meanings were construed through the participants as expressed through the nominal groups, process types expressed through verbal groups and the circumstantial roles were expressed through the adverbial or prepositional groups. It discovered that across the three newspapers, there was preponderant manifestations of material and verbal processes while mental, relational and existential processes are not as dominant as the material and verbal processes with no instance of behavioural process in the three newspapers. The study further revealed that the preponderance of material and verbal processes indicated that kidnapping news reports centred on revealing the actions perpetrated by kidnappers to the kidnapees as well as reporting, exposing and decrying the criminal act perpetrated by the kidnappers to the victims.The study concluded that the grammatical resources were deployed to disseminate information on stakeholders as well as the circumstantial issue surrounding the acts of kidnapping.
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xii,147pg.
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Citation
Owoeye,D.O. (2024). An experiential metafuctional analysis of news report of kidnappings in selected newspapers in Nigeria. Faculty of Arts ,Obafemi Awolowo University,Ile -Ife,Nigeria.