CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF SELECTED PIDGIN POLITICAL CAMPAIGN SPEECHES IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Campaign speeches are one of the avenues through which politicians appeal to the minds of the majority electorate as such they tend to adopt a language that will be understood by the larger number of the people. In recent times politicians have resorted to the use of Nigerian pidgin in delivering political speeches and this is because it creates a mutual platform for acceptance. On that note, this paper explores a critically the use of discursive strategies in political campaign speeches of two political aspirants of Nigeria selected from the 2015 election campaigns and 2019 campaigns respectively. Norman Fairlough’s three- dimensional framework for discourse analysis was adopted as an analytical model. Particular attention was paid to macro and micro structures that are associated with discourse and the outcome of the analysis revealed the opening remark, the content and the closing remark are present and make up the macro structures. All the macro structures contained persuasive messages put across to audience to influence their political thoughts, beliefs and attitudes. The content of the speeches consisted of recurring positive self representation of the aspirant and negative representation of the past administration all these are purposely adopted to gain the people’s mandate. In addition, there were cases of assurance and promises to address the nation’s political; security, economic and social challenges as well as the people’s need. The first person pronouns ‘we’ and ‘I’ and their variants were used as strategies for expressing political ideologies especially the logic of inclusion and exclusion or self and group reference.