Language, Style, And Ideology in Selected Nigerian Banks’ Advertising Slogans: Doing Things with Words Exemplified

Abstract

Studies in Applied Linguistics have examined the use of slogans in political campaigns and social advocacies with meagre considerations for its entrepreneurship relevance. This study, therefore, investigated ‘critical stylistic canons’ in selected banks’ advertising slogans with a view to examining the discourse-bearing linguistic elements with functionally packaged ideological loads, constituting marketing strategies for staying ahead in the competitive banking business world. Lesley Jeffries’ (2010) Critical Stylistics (CS) was complemented with Fairclough’s (2021) stripe of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the framework. These were used in analysing seven advertising slogans sourced from the official facebook pages and websites of the selected first- and second-generation Nigerian banks. The data were subjected to qualitative analyses, using descriptive research design. The paper revealed that (i) the form and structures of the banks’ advertising slogans examined are noun phrases deployed with use of excessive modifiers (ii) The thematic focusing styles identified are those of naming and describing, showcasing the qualities of the banks, and enumerating and exemplifying to elliptically imaginatively make a list of the benefits of the banks. (iii) The examined slogans revealed, through the use of language, the ideological underpinnings such as power dynamics that were supposed to influence the perception of the potential customers. Banks’ advertising slogans are indexical of gamut of inherent discursive facilities as a matter of choices from various linguistic or stylistic options for socio-economic and entrepreneurship purposes. Studying further such functional sloganeering performance in other commercial sector-contexts provides unique 21^st century entrepreneurship discourse.