CONTEXT, IDEOLOGY AND NEGOTIATION STRATEGIES IN POLITICAL INTERVIEWS IN NIGERIAN PRINT MEDIA

Abstract

Print media political interviews (PMPIs) are designed to seek information and opinion from political leaders on political issues. Previous studies on PMPIs in Nigeria have focused on general stylistic, rhetorical and pragmatic features, but have not significantly explored the combined contribution of pragmatic and ideological resources to the negotiation of meaning. The discursive contexts, linguistic features, pragmatic strategies and ideological constructs in PMPIs in Nigeria were examined to establish their joint roles in the negotiation of interactional goals. Aspects of Contextual theories, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, and van Dijk’s Socio-cognitive model were adopted. Four Nigerian national dailies: The Punch, The Sun, ThisDay and Vanguard were purposively selected for their wide readership and coverage of political interviews between 2014 and 2016, a year before and after the 2015 general elections, which marked a change in government at the federal level. One hundred PMPIs on elections and governance were purposively selected for their robust political discourse. Data were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Two discursive contexts dominated the political interviews: Context of Election (CE) and Context of Governance (CG). These contexts manifested nine discourse issues, five of which were connected to CE: Political Campaigns (PC), Leadership Ambition (LA), Election Preparations (EP), Election Ethics (EE), and Election Tribunals (ET). The other four: leadership, performance, corruption and the rule of law were linked to CG. Four transitivity processes were found. In CE, material process marked by obligatory actor; goal, with an optional circumstance showed concrete actions of competition, adjudication, declaration, consultation and fraud; and construction and inspection in CG. Mental process characterised by obligatory senser and phenomenon was used to encode mental pictures of knowledge, contemplation, sight, hearing and conviction in CE and CG. Existential process was deployed to state the existence of fraud in CE and CG, and infrastructural development and good governance in CG. Verbal process was used to state the denial and assertion of propositions in the two contexts. Seven ideological positions typified the PMPIs: nationalist and supremacist (CE); defeatist and oppositionist (CG); sectionalist, positivist and constitutionalist in CE and CG. Five pragmatic strategies used to negotiate seven interactional goals, characterised the PMPIs. The persuasive strategy, which deployed appeal to emotions, reason and personality was affiliatively used to negotiate election victory and seek higher responsibility. Evaluative and defensive strategies were affiliatively and disaffiliatively employed to negotiate ability to control and direct the affairs of Nigerian citizens through objective and subjective judgments. Direct and indirect inquisitorial strategies disaffiliatively probed election litigations, equality before the law, and all other goals. Offensive strategy was exploited to negotiate election fraud, ability to control and direct the affairs of the Nigerian citizens and abuse of power through blunt and veiled offensives. Meaning in the political interviews was co-constituted in interaction through adjacency pair, recipient interpreting and speaker interpreting. Pragmatic strategies and ideological postures were affiliatively and disaffiliatively deployed to enhance the negotiation of goals in the context of election and governance in political interviews in Nigerian print media. Keywords: Nigerian political discourse, Nigerian print media, Pragmatic strategies in politics