Abstract:
Public opinion columns in Nigerian newspapers often provide vital information on
sociopolitical issues. Previous studies on political media discourse focused on how public
opinions shape pre-election political debates and speeches in Nigeria. However, little
attention was paid to how linguistic choices constrain public opinions, especially on Nigerian
presidential election results. This study was, therefore, designed to investigate the
representation of public opinions on the Nigerian presidential election results in Nigerian
newspapers, with a view to determining the public opinion types, their underlying contexts
and linguistic forms.
Norman Fairclough’s Dialectical-relational model to Critical Discourse Analysis,
complemented by M. A. K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, served as the
framework. The descriptive design was adopted. Public opinions published in February and
April of the election years in 2011-2019 were purposively selected because of their robust
contents on public opinions on Nigerian presidential election results. Purposive sampling
was used to select 300 public opinions, 50 from each of the following newspapers: The
Nation (TN), The Guardian (TG), Nigerian Tribune (NT), Vanguard, Leadership and Punch.
The data were subjected to critical discourse analysis.
Three public opinion types, namely nationalistic, moralistic and diachronic, were identified.
Nationalistic revealed strong identification with one’s nation (TN, Punch and TG); moralistic
expressed positive and negative dispositions (TN), Vanguard and Leadership; while
diachronic presented the acceptance or rejection of the election results (NT, Punch and TG).
These public opinion types were found in six contexts: corruption, retention of power, social
and political reformation, violence and credible elections. Nationalistic perspectives were
situated in the contexts of social reformation. Moralistic opinions manifested in the contexts
of corruption and retention of power. Diachronic opinions were used in the context of
credible election. Public opinions and context were discoursally marked off by modalities:
grammatical (epistemic and deontic) and lexical, which were used to unveil peoples’ attitude
towards the election results. Epistemic modals were demonstrated in diachronic and
nationalistic perspectives, while deontic modals reflected in nationalistic and moralistic
perspectives. Epistemic and deontic modals were prominent in NT, Punch and TG; while
lexical modality within the bounds of diachronic, moralistic and nationalistic perspectives
were deployed in NT, Vanguard and Leadership Six processes, namely material, mental,
relational, verbal, existential and behavioural were deployed. Material process projected all
the opinions, while mental process was associated with emotional feelings towards the
election results in moralistic and nationalistic opinions. Relational process reflected
desperation in the nationalistic and moralistic perspectives. Verbal process was used to
reflect moralistic views. Existential processes were used to construct violence in diachronic
opinions, while behavioural processes revealed sentiment in moralistic and nationalistic
perspectives. Election fairness was captured in Punch, NT and TN; whereas TG, Vanguard
and Leadership featured election results as biased.
Public opinions on Nigerian presidential election results in 2011-2019, presented through
context-driven discoursal and linguistic representations in the selected Nigerian newspapers,
capture the sociopolitical realities in the Nigerian political space.
