(Grammatical) Modality Choices and Functions in President Muhammad Buhari’s Address on the Extension of Corona Virus Pandemic Lockdown

Kazeem K. Olaniyan, Nafiu S. Ige

Abstract

This study explores the discourse functions of grammatical modality choices in President Muhammad Buhari’s address on the extension of Coronal virus Pandemic Lockdown. The study is motivated by the dearth of work that exclusively focuses on the Nigerian presidential address on the Coronavirus (Covid-19 pandemic) pandemic most especially from the purview of modality features and functions as an aspect of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It utilised data from President Muhammadu Buhari’s address on the extension of Covid- 19 pandemic lockdown given on Monday 13th April 2020. The data was collected from the newspaper publication and analysed using insights from the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) tool of modality. Given the communicative intention of the president and the context in which the modal auxiliaries are used in the address, three categories of modal auxiliaries namely; prediction, possibility and necessity are found to characterise the data. Prediction modals “will” and “would” are used to perform the discourse functions of informing, acknowledging/appreciating, assuring and persuading/encouraging Nigerians. The possibility modal “can” is used in the functional context of acknowledging and warning. The necessity modal “must” is used in appreciating, instructing/directing, warning and pacifying/encouraging.  The study has the potency of complementing existing works on presidential addresses as a genre of political discourse in general. It equally adds to the growing literature on the Covid-19 pandemic discourse in linguistic scholarship. The study concludes that an understanding of modality choices and their discourse functions in the presidential address on the Covid-19 pandemic discourse will enhance a better understanding of the discourse.

Keywords

Covid-19 Pandemic, Lockdown, Presidential Address, Modality, SFL

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