Copyright (c) 2026 Issues in Language and Literary Studies
Language as a Tool of Power and Control in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood and Zaynab Alkali's The Stillborn: A Critical Discourse Analysis
This study examines how gendered power relations and resistance are discursively constructed in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood and Zaynab Alkali’s The Stillborn using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). While existing feminist scholarship on these novels has extensively explored patriarchy, motherhood, and female agency at thematic and ideological levels, limited attention has been paid to the specific linguistic mechanisms through which power and resistance are produced, normalised, and contested. This study addresses this gap by treating language as analytical data rather than illustrative support. Anchored in Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA, the study analyses selected excerpts that represent recurring interactional contexts such as marriage, authority, and social expectation. At the textual level, the analysis focuses on micro-linguistic features including declarative and imperative structures, modality, evaluative lexis, metaphor, and pronoun use. At the level of discursive practice, it examines interactional patterns, silence, and narrative framing through which male authority is legitimised and female voice is constrained or enabled. These patterns are further interpreted at the level of social practice in relation to patriarchal ideologies within Nigerian socio-cultural contexts. The findings reveal that in The Joys of Motherhood, patriarchal power is largely naturalised through unmodalised declaratives, possessive constructions, and metaphors that restrict female identity to relational and reproductive roles, while resistance is predominantly internalised and narratively contained. In contrast, The Stillborn increasingly foregrounds overt resistance through assertive declaratives, negation, and first-person pronouns that challenge male authority within dialogue. The study demonstrates that patriarchy and resistance in the novels are not merely thematic concerns but are discursively engineered through language, reinforcing the value of CDA for literary analysis.
Restoring Nigeria’s Weakening Norms and Values through Folktale-Based Counselling and Linguistic Renewal
In an era of intensifying global interconnectedness, the erosion of societal norms in modern Nigeria emerges as a systemic consequence of marginalising indigenous moral frameworks amidst the destabilising friction of globalised modernity. This normative vacuum, manifested in the rise of hyper-individualistic ideologies, declining communal ethics, and a collapse in academic discipline, demands a paradigm shift from reactive Eurocentric counselling toward a proactive model where the practitioner functions as a cultural mediator. By synthesising the psychodynamics of orality with sociocultural development theories, this position paper advocates for the revitalisation of Nigerian folktales as culturally grounded therapeutic tools within an Ethical Ontogeny framework. The study proposes the Orality to Cognition O C Protocol to operationalise the aesthetic power of oral tradition across domestic, institutional and digital spheres, facilitating a strategic migration of heritage into AI-driven platforms. This approach establishes the cognitive infrastructure essential for ethical reasoning, behavioural regulation and identity formation, effectively countering digital trends that subvert traditional authority. By treating the folktale as a dynamic speech act, the counsellor bridges ancestral heritage with modern psychosocial imperatives, offering a sustainable pathway for restoring moral consciousness and ensuring that Nigerian youth emerge as ethically grounded, communicatively proficient and culturally resilient global citizens.
Tithing and Persuasive Discourse in Nigerian Pentecostal Sermons: A Socio-Cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis
This study investigates how tithing is discursively constructed and legitimised in Nigerian Pentecostal sermons through a socio-cognitive critical discourse analytical framework. While scholarship on Nigerian Pentecostalism has examined prosperity theology, church growth, and religious economy, limited attention has been paid to the specific linguistic strategies through which financial obligation is framed, normalised, and sustained in sermon discourse. This study addresses this gap by analysing persuasive language used in sermons that explicitly focus on tithing. Data consists of purposively selected sermon excerpts publicly available on YouTube and on the official media channels of prominent Nigerian Pentecostal preachers. Only sermons where tithing constitutes a central thematic focus were included, ensuring analytical relevance. The study adopts van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to Critical Discourse Analysis to examine how discourse structures, cognitive framing, and ideological positioning interact in shaping congregational interpretation and response. Analysis reveals recurring persuasive strategies, including scriptural recontextualisation, fear appeals, testimonial legitimation, authority construction, and discursive closure. At the macro level, tithing is framed within a prosperity-centred religious ideology that links financial obedience to divine favour and spiritual legitimacy. At the meso level, rhetorical devices and directive speech acts position preachers as authoritative interpreters of divine instruction. At the micro level, lexical choices, metaphors, modality, and pronoun usage reinforce obligation, urgency, and compliance. The study demonstrates that tithing in Nigerian Pentecostal sermons is not merely a theological practice but a discursively organised system of persuasion through which belief, authority, and financial commitment are constructed and maintained. It contributes to scholarship on religious discourse, pragmatics, and African Pentecostal communication by foregrounding language as a central mechanism in the production and circulation of religious authority.
Pragmatic Analysis of Hate Speech Directed at Transgender People on Selected YouTube and TikTok Channels
Hate speech presents significant challenges to social cohesion, the protection of fundamental human rights, and democratic values, particularly in rapidly circulating digital media. While existing scholarship has examined online hate speech against various marginalised groups, comparatively limited attention has been paid to hate speech targeting transgender individuals on video-based platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. To address this gap, this study investigates 20 purposively selected video excerpts (12 from YouTube and 8 from TikTok), chosen for their relevance to discussions of transgender issues and the presence of potentially hateful discourse. The videos were transcribed and analysed using a qualitative descriptive design informed by Searle’s (1969) framework of illocutionary speech acts to examine speakers’ communicative strategies and intentions. Findings show that the videos predominantly employ assertive, expressive, and directive acts to convey negative attitudes, reinforce stereotypes, and promote discriminatory viewpoints toward transgender individuals. The analysis also identifies recurring features across both platforms, including derogatory expressions, demeaning characterisations, and exclusionary rhetoric, illustrating how hate speech is discursively constructed and normalised in user-generated content.
The Phonological Adaptation of English Christian Names by Lagos Youth
Phonological adaptation of borrowed names is well-documented in language contact studies, where foreign forms are reshaped to fit the recipient variety’s phonology (Rahim, 2006; Sicherl, 2015; Legbeti & Evbuomwan, 2024), yet youth-driven adaptation of English Christian names in urban Nigerian English remains unexplored despite nativisation patterns in minority languages and older speakers (Jowitt, 1991; Gut, 2004; Ogban, 2019). This study addresses this gap by investigating whether Lagos youths use original Standard English pronunciations or adapted forms of English Christian names and how they adapt them into Nigerian English. Employing a mixed-methods design with qualitative dominance, data were gathered from naturalistic observations in Lagos youth settings and elicited recordings of 20 participants (10 male, 10 female, aged 18–30) pronouncing 20 common Christian names, followed by perceptual phonetic analysis comparing Standard English IPA forms with realisations. Findings reveal a strong preference for adapted pronunciations, using systematic strategies: consonant substitution (e.g., Matthew./?mæ?ju?/ ? /?matiu/), vowel strengthening, diphthong simplification, and cluster reduction, with complex names adapting more than familiar ones and elicited speech showing higher adaptation than spontaneous contexts. The study concludes that Lagos youths actively nativize English Christian names into Nigerian English, demonstrating dynamic phonological domestication driven by urban youth practices and advancing scholarship in World Englishes and onomastics.
The Pragmatics of Donald Trump's Declaration of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) On ‘X’ In 2025
This study examines the pragmatics of Donald Trump’s 2025 declaration of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) on X, to investigate how the statement functions as a political speech act and what effects it generates. The research is anchored in Speech Act Theory, particularly J. L. Austin’s distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, and John R. Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts into assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarative. A qualitative research design was adopted. The population consists of Trump’s tweets on insecurity and international intervention, while two tweets were purposively selected as samples: the CPC declaration tweet and a tweet announcing an air strike in Nigeria. Data were collected directly from X and analysed using both tabular classification and descriptive interpretation to identify the dominant illocutionary forces and possible perlocutionary effects. The findings reveal that the CPC tweet is largely assertive, with one central declarative act that attempts to alter Nigeria’s international status, while the air strike tweet is mainly assertive and commissive, with a limited expressive element. The study concludes that political tweets function as powerful performative acts capable of shaping diplomatic relations, influencing public perception and constructing political realities in the digital age.
‘We didn’t arraign a minor’: Disclaimer strategies in the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s rejoinders.
Crime-fighting institutions in Nigeria are those institutions constitutionally empowered to combat crimes in their different forms and shades. Extant studies on crime-fighting institutions in Nigeria have focused more on the Nigeria Police, with particular emphasis on police-suspect interactions. However, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) saddled with the responsibility of fighting economic and financial crimes, particularly from the linguistic perspective. This study, therefore, from a linguistic lens, investigates disclaimer strategies in EFCC’s rejoinders, to demonstrate how the Commission deploys linguistic-discursive resources for institutional image repair Data comprised 20 randomly sampled selected press releases (rejoinders) issued between 2019 and 2024, as elicited from the Commission’s website, and other online news or social platforms, including the Nairaland, the Pointblank news, The Vanguard, and Sun news online. With analytical insights from Dijk’s (2004) critical discourse analysis and Mey’s (2001) pragmatic act theory, findings show that refutation and deresponsibilisation, allusion to institutional professionalism, and indirect accusation are discursive disclaimer strategies which EFCC’s rejoinders are replete with. These discursive strategies ride on counterfactuals, lexicalisation, evidentiality, positive self-representation, and negative other-representation for pragmatic effects. Inherent in these discursive resources are the practs of blaming, enjoining, condemning, praising and threatening.
Realisation of English Pure Vowels by Selected Senior Secondary School Students in Kaduna State, Nigeria
This study investigated the realisation of some pure vowels of English by selected Senior Secondary School students in the Kaduna South Local Government Area of Kaduna State, Nigeria. Three objectives guided the investigation, namely, to identify and classify the types of errors made by the selected students in the realisation of English pure vowels, to determine the frequency and distribution of such errors, and to propose effective strategies and interventions for improving the production of English pure vowels among senior secondary school students. A cross-sectional survey research design was adopted to obtain data from a sample of 80 students selected through a random sampling technique from four secondary schools: Government Day Secondary School Maraban Rido, Government Secondary School Sabon Tasha, Government Secondary School Television, and Government Secondary School Kakuri. Two instruments were developed and used for data collection: the Single Pronunciation Test and the Oral Test on Connected Speech. The instruments were validated by experts in Test and Measurement from the University of Jos, and reliability was ensured through a pilot study involving a different set of students. Transcription of data followed IPA conventions, while data were analyzed using simple percentages to determine the frequency and distribution of errors. Findings revealed that students struggled significantly with the pronunciation of less familiar English pure vowels such as /?/, /?/, /?/ and /?:/, often committing substitution and distortion errors. These errors negatively affect oral communication by reducing intelligibility and causing misunderstanding in both academic and social interactions. The study recommends, among other things, early and explicit instruction in the pronunciation of English vowel sounds, particularly those absent in local Nigerian languages.
Critical Appraisals of Aesthetic Tools in Contemporary Nollywood City Films
This study is a critical exploration of social characteristics as aesthetic tools for viewers’ fancy and attraction in Nigerian city films. Aesthetics is any creative strategy employed by culture producers to win consumers of cultural products such as films. The study is guided by Roman Jakobson’s Formalist Theory, which pays attention to the functionalities of the inner properties of creativity. Contemporary Nigerian filmmakers pay attention to city films for economic reasons driven by the need to survive the harsh Nigerian economy. The filmmakers identify the vibrant population blocs and glamourise their social traits for attraction and fantasy. Such population blocs include people of Westernised consciousness, who glamourise Occidental grandeur; the Gen Zs, who are counter-culture; the Yahoo Boys, who flaunt ill-gotten wealth; the Olosho Girls (social media baddies), who sexualise; and Street Boys and Girls, who sensationalise lexicons of self-adulation or expletives. Strategic attraction of viewers through aesthetic resources is necessary for these filmmakers to gain patronage and survive the declining Nigerian economy. However, the deployment of these social characteristics as aesthetic tools has been interpreted as the filmmakers’ promotion of negative aspects of Nigerian society. However, this social aesthetic strategy and practice may not abate anytime soon.
Against Silence: Confessional Poetry as a Form of Resistance in Postcolonial Nigeria
This paper explores Nigerian confessional poetry as a form of socio-political resistance. Drawing on postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and Michel Foucault’s conception of power, discourse and counter-memory, this paper argues that the confessional mode transforms personal pain into a political act. Nigerian confessional poems foreground experiences of familial rupture, domestic violence, body vulnerability, and psychological trauma, exposing how patriarchal authority, colonial legacies, and socio-economic precarity converge to regulate silence and obedience. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative textual analysis of selected Nigerian confessional poems, combining close reading with theoretical interpretation. Poems are examined through a postcolonial and Foucauldian analytical framework to identify recurring thematic patterns, such as trauma, memory, silence, and resistance, and to interrogate how poetic language and imagery produce counter-discourses against dominant cultural and political structures. By articulating what is culturally repressed or socially taboo, Nigerian confessional poetry disrupts dominant narratives that privilege communal harmony over individual truth. The poetic ‘I’ functions not as narcissistic self-display but as a resistant subject who reclaims agency through testimony. The act of confession becomes an ethical intervention, creating a counter-archive that resists historical erasure and challenges the normative construction of masculinity and nationhood. The paper concludes that Nigerian confessional poetry emerges as a radical practice that reclaims voice, memory, and the body, asserting the personal as an indispensable site of political resistance in contemporary Nigerian society.
An Analysis of Mood Structure in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half Of A Yellow Sun
This study investigates how mood is deployed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. The study examines the types of mood structures used in the text and explores how mood contributes to unveiling power relations, emotional state and ideological meaning with a view to accounting for the linguistic resources that reflect characters’ attitudes, social roles, and psychological states which contribute significantly to the interpersonal metafunction of language in the text. Ten (10) excerpts randomly drawn from the novel were analysed using the lens of Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) Systemic Functional Grammar framework for analysing mood. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive method. The findings reveal that Adichie deploys the use of declarative, interrogative and imperative mood, and in the text, mood is highly context-based. In domestic settings, mood choices function as instruments for shaping hierarchy, intellect, and identity negotiation among characters. In military and political contexts, mood becomes a vehicle of ideology, propaganda, and institutional authority. Overall, Adichie shapes interpersonal dynamics and projects ideological positions in the narrative. The study concludes that mood serves as a linguistic resource through which this construction of power and authority during the Biafran struggle is demonstrated in the text. This study contributes to the growing field of literary linguistics by offering a detailed, functional analysis of how mood encodes interpersonal meanings in an African literary context.
Ethical Healthcare Policies in Ladipo Akinkugbe’s Footprints and Footnotes
Footprints and Footnotes chronicles the life experiences of Ladipo Akinkugbe, an Emeritus Professor of Medicine, highlighting his dual contributions to medicine and education. This study examines the ethical and humanistic dimensions of medical practice through a literary lens, using non-fictional narratives grounded in personal experience and historical context. This research identifies the inadequate diffusion of medical resources and health policies as contributing to public unawareness of the impact of medical errors. It critiques the perception of medical caregiving as a favour rather than a duty, leading to systemic issues and medical errors affecting lives. This study advocates for a society that fosters healthy living and ethical policies as a fundamental right. Acknowledging the core principles of healthcare ethics, the research adopts Bankowski's Medical Ethics and Lejeune’s Autobiographical Pact as a theoretical framework on the literariness of the autobiography and the physician's moral responsibilities, encompassing advocacy, technical expertise, citizenship, moral agency, and policy implementation. Overall, the study highlights the intersection of literature and medicine in advocating for holistic healthcare ethics and policies that promote societal well-being.
Framing Leadership and Identity: A Critical Discourse Analysis of French and Selected African Leaders in RFI Headlines
This study examines how political leadership is linguistically constructed in French-language headlines published by RFI between September and December 2025. While existing research has identified asymmetries in global media representations of Western and African political actors, limited attention has been paid to how such differences are realised at the level of headline discourse within a single international broadcaster. The study compares how Emmanuel Macron and selected African leaders are represented within a single international broadcaster. This level of analysis remains underexplored in existing research. A corpus of forty purposively sampled headlines is analysed to identify patterns in agency attribution, transitivity, modality, and crisis-related framing. The findings show systematic differences in the linguistic construction of leadership. Macron is predominantly represented as an individualised and active agent performing deliberate actions, whereas African leaders are more frequently represented within institutional, collective, or crisis-related contexts, where agency is more distributed or backgrounded. These patterns indicate that headline-level linguistic choices contribute to differentiated representations of political authority and contextual stability, highlighting how micro-level discourse structures can reflect broader asymmetries in international news coverage.
Helon Habila’s Travellers as a Narrative of Trauma
The Study investigates Travellers using Laurie Vickroy’s multidisciplinary interpretative framework to show how readers can meditate on a variety of human responses to trauma. Previous studies about trauma have emphasised the collective description of the experiences of victims as related to a common adversity or condition. This study focuses on the individual responses of characters to the trauma of voluntary or involuntary immigration. Engaging this framework, the experiences of major characters in Habila’s Travellers are explored. The unnamed narrator in Helon Habila’s Travellers occupies a vantage point which pulls the story together in unexpected ways, bringing the lives of different immigrants into view. This study employs a qualitative/descriptive method for the research. These migrants share the common experience of trauma as they grapple with the different conditions that plague them. This backdrop allows the reader to interrogate the physical, social and mental state of the characters. These characters include: the unnamed narrator, David/Moussa, Manu, Basma, Rachida and Omar, Karim Abdulbashir, and Juma. The study concludes that emigration to the Global North constitutes a location for psychoanalytic studies based on individually diverse experiences and responses, which can include drifting, repeating patterns, pragmatizing, protecting, rebellion and self-harm.
The research problem centres on how hate speech and fake news mutually reinforce one another to erode social cohesion and democratic stability in Nigeria, while scholarly understanding of their interaction remains fragmented and poorly supported by empirical data. The study’s objective is to systematically review and synthesise existing scholarship to map dominant explanations, compare methodological approaches, and identify critical knowledge gaps. Methodologically, a qualitative systematic literature review was conducted, thematically analysing 45 peer-reviewed articles, policy documents, and institutional reports published between 2015 and 2024. The theoretical framework draws on Social Responsibility Theory, Technological Determinism, and Conflict Theory to analyse how historical ethno-religious divisions, algorithmic platform architectures, and political manipulation collectively fuel harmful content. Key findings reveal that Nigerian scholarship treats hate speech and fake news largely in isolation, lacks empirical audience-reception studies, and relies heavily on a narrow set of authors. The literature further exposes a tension between legislative deterrence and media literacy interventions, as well as weak and fragmented regulatory responses. The study concludes that an effective counter-strategy must balance precise legal sanctions with robust media literacy programmes, enforceable platform accountability, and community-driven counter-speech, all tailored to Nigeria’s socio-political context and aligned with international human rights standards.
(Wo)Manhood and Gender Ideologies in Islamic Nuptial Sermons among Yoruba Muslims in Southwestern Nigeria
Islamic nuptial sermons (khutbatu al-nikah) among Yorùbá Muslims in southwestern Nigeria represent a distinctive hybrid genre in which Qur'anic exegesis and Hadith are interwoven with indigenous proverbial wisdom. Despite the centrality of these sermons to marital socialisation, their role in constructing gender ideologies remains critically underexamined. The research examines ten wedding sermons, of which six excerpts were derived (khutbatu al-nikah), performed from 2020 to 2025, with the aid of Fairclough’s tripartite framework of Critical Discourse Analysis for analysing the construction and legitimisation of masculinities and femininities. Metaphor, modality, transitivity, and intertextuality are selected for analysis. The result shows that a discourse of negotiated patriarchy operates in which men's authority is presented as a holy amanah (trust) as opposed to dominance, while femininity is established through derivation, emotional labour, and obedience using the rhetoric of love and compassion. Although the occasional relativising of male privilege occurs, gender hierarchy persists since it is double legitimized.
Intertextuality in Judicial Reasoning of Selected High Court Judgments on Theft and Fraud Cases
This study investigates how intertextuality functions as a discursive mechanism in judicial reasoning within selected Nigerian High Court judgements on theft and fraud cases. Although previous studies have established that legal discourse is inherently intertextual, this research extends beyond the identification of citations and references to examine how intertextual practices construct judicial authority, institutional legitimacy, and ideological coherence in criminal adjudication. The study is anchored in Norman Fairclough’s theory of intertextuality within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which views judicial texts as products of interconnected legal and institutional discourses. A qualitative research design was adopted, using four purposively selected Nigerian High Court judgements obtained from the Nigerian Weekly Law Reports (2022 edition). The published and transcribed judgements were selected because they are authoritative legal documents that preserve the reasoning processes of the courts. The data were analysed through qualitative intertextual and discourse analysis. The analytical procedure involved identifying intertextual markers such as legal citations, direct quotations, paraphrases, legal maxims, reported speech, and interdiscursive references, followed by an examination of their linguistic, ideological, and institutional functions within judicial reasoning. The findings reveal that intertextuality in judicial discourse extends beyond textual referencing, as judges strategically deploy intertextual devices to justify legal interpretations, reinforce doctrinal continuity, maintain institutional authority, and reproduce dominant legal ideologies. The study contributes to legal discourse scholarship by providing a critical discourse-oriented understanding of intertextuality in Nigerian High Court judicial reasoning.
Purification, Militarism, and Youth Identity in the Obòkun Ritual Festival
Yorùbá festival scholarship has extensively documented deity?centred celebrations while neglecting ancestor?hero festivals that dramatise foundational martial narratives. The Obòkun Festival in Ìbòkun, Nigeria, commemorates a warrior?founder who combined healing and conquest, yet existing literature lacks a critical analysis of how such festivals construct youth identity through ritual performance. This study addresses this gap by examining the festival’s triadic structure of purification, militarism and youth identity, arguing that these three elements operate dialectically rather than sequentially to produce gendered subjectivities and ensure intergenerational continuity. Employing ethnographic methodology grounded in participant observation, ritual analysis, and interpretive thick description, the study applies performance theory-specifically, restored behaviour, efficacy versus entertainment, and performance environment-as its analytical framework. Findings reveal that purification establishes the sacred architecture for martial memory; militarism provides the narrative core of ancestral heroism; and hierarchical youth incorporation ensures transmission through observation, apprenticeship and performance. The significance lies in recovering an understudied festival genre, demonstrating youth identity as performative achievement rather than demographic category, and offering an ethnographic case study of indigenous festival adaptation to modern pressures.
Pragmatic Acts and Functions in Selected Divorce Proceedings in Oyo Town
In order to understand how litigants and attorneys strategically employ language to resolve marital disputes and sway court rulings, this study explores the pragmatic acts and communicative functions ingrained in divorce proceedings in Oyo Town. The study investigates how courtroom utterances function as socially situated actions shaped by institutional roles, procedural norms, and sociocultural expectations surrounding marriage and family responsibilities, drawing on Mey's Pragmatic Acts Theory (2001). Selected divorce proceeding excerpts from Oyo Town’s High court make up the data, which are qualitatively analysed to find recurrent pragmatic acts and the contextual elements that allow for their interpretation. The analysis reveals three practices, and these include questioning/responding, complaining/justifying, and accusing. Similarly, three functions are revealed, and they are: Fact-establishing, grievance articulation, and blame-attribution functions. The findings further show that the interpretation of these utterances is deeply influenced by shared cultural ideologies concerning gender roles, family duties, and moral expectations within the Yoruba socio-cultural context. By highlighting the pragmatic mechanisms through which meaning and persuasion are constructed in divorce proceedings, the study contributes to the growing body of research on courtroom discourse and expands the application of this theory to institutional legal interactions in African contexts.
Lexical Density in Age and Gender Variations of Selected Crime-Related Essays by Undergraduates in Southwestern Nigeria
This study was carried out to investigate the characteristics of age and gender in the crime-related essays of selected undergraduates in Southwestern Nigeria, with a view to determining lexical density. M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar was used as a framework and a descriptive design for the study. With a convenient sampling technique employed, three Universities in Southwestern Nigeria: University of Lagos, Akoka (federal); Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba Akoka (state); and Crawford University, Igbesa (private), were chosen to represent different types of ownership. Forty-eight students, who were spread across the three Universities (four each from 100-400 levels), were purposively selected to write an essay on any of these four themes: Drug Addiction, Kidnapping, Robbery or suicide. The themes were selected due to their prevalence in Nigeria. Twenty-four (24) females and Twenty-four (24) males with predetermined ages from 16-18 and 19-21 were chosen. The data were subjected to stylometric and descriptive analyses. Findings reveal that female writings were characterised by drug addiction, while male writings were characterised by suicide. The mental process used by males in the 16-18 age bracket revealed that suicide victims react to depression by killing themselves to escape their predicament. Females in the 16-18 age bracket depicted drug addicted victims’ illegal use of drugs, resulting in hallucinations and deteriorating health. The study revealed that Nigerian undergraduates’ crime-related essays exhibited linguistic characteristics related to the age and gender of the students in terms of lexical density. The study provides data and enriches scholarship on corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics and other related research.
The Communicative Functions and Social Significance of Code-Switching and Code-Mixing Among Multilingual Undergraduate Students of Kaduna State University
This paper investigates the communicative functions and social significance of code-switching and code-mixing among multilingual undergraduate students at Kaduna State University (KASU) within Nigeria’s complex linguistic landscape. The study employs a mixed-methods research design underpinned by Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT). Quantitative data were gathered from 400 structured questionnaires distributed via stratified random sampling across the faculties of Arts, Science, and Social Sciences. This is integrated with qualitative data from semi-structured interviews featuring 12 participants tracked via alphanumeric identifiers to ensure anonymity. Cross-tabulation analysis demonstrates that the majority of students (over 80%) code-switch or code-mix to emphasise key points, ensure clarity, and handle identity management. The study shows that Faculty of Science students rely most heavily on local codes to bridge cognitive gaps when processing abstract concepts, lower-level undergraduates use language alternation as a persuasive tool, and older, upper-level students shift codes to convey respect and navigate institutional hierarchies. The qualitative analysis reveals five core themes driving student linguistic behaviour, including emotional expression and affective clarity, identity management and cultural assertion, instructional clarity and cognitive processing, peer influence and social belonging, and cultural belonging and group solidarity. The paper highlights that while these practices encourage relational convergence and democratise peer learning, they also bring negative implications, such as the accidental social exclusion of non-Hausa speakers, the masking of deficiencies in standard global English proficiency, the reinforcement of rigid linguistic hierarchies, and increased risks of campus ethnic clustering. The study concludes that code-switching and code-mixing are complex, rule-governed communicative resources rather than signs of linguistic deficiency.
Representations of Memory as Mediator of Postcolonial Trauma in Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love
Existing studies have shown memory to be inseparable from the discourse of trauma. Memory has been treated mainly as a repository on which trauma thrives. However, its role as an interpretive and negotiating tool through which traumatic experiences within the postcolonial context are judged is often overlooked. Therefore, this paper examines how individual and collective memories are used to interpret characters’ traumatic experiences in Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, using Pederson’s theory of literary trauma as a framework. The novel is analysed through close reading. The study contributes to the argument that trauma is representable by showing ways in which memory is used to augment the narration of trauma within the postcolonial context.
Sociopragmatic Orientations of Politeness Strategies in Chatham House Interviews of Selected Nigerian 2023 Presidential Election Candidates
This article examines politeness strategies deployed by Peter Obi and Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2023 Chatham House interviews from a pragmatic perspective. Most of the extant engagements of these interviews tended towards general features of political communication, such as rhetorical strategies, framing, and issue positioning, without an in-depth examination of sociopragmatic orientations in which the political actors employ politeness strategically to achieve their communicative objectives. Geoffrey Leech’s Politeness Principle and other pragmatic concepts served as the framework. Data were purposively gathered from the Chatham House interviews of Bola Ahmed Tinubu (December 22nd, 2022) and Peter Obi (January 16th, 2023), aired on YouTube (Arise TV). Findings of the study reveal four sociopragmatically constructed politeness maxims deployed by Obi and Tinubu. These are tact, generosity, modesty, and dere-responsibilisation-oriented maxim, deployed to convince Nigerians of their abilities to deliver unifying governance and adhere to the rule of law if elected as president of Nigeria. The two presidential candidates reveal specific areas of divergence and convergence in their linguistic choices while responding to questions during the Chatham House interviews to mitigate their face and that of the audience. Sociopragmatically oriented strategies of politeness offer a great privilege to political actors’ identity. The study therefore recommends that public figures should equip themselves with politeness tactics to foreground their desired identity and project themselves as acceptable leaders in society.
Pragmatic Functions of Selected Nigerian Supreme Court Judgements on Criminal Cases
The understanding of the judges’ utterances plays a crucial role in achieving communicative goals in court judgements, including Nigerian Supreme Court judgements. Existing linguistic studies on court judgements approached them using narrative analysis, critical discourse analysis, stylistic analysis and the investigation of their grammatical features. However, scant attention has been paid to pragmatic functions of judges’ utterances in Supreme Court judgements. Therefore, this study considers the pragmatic functions of judges’ utterances in Nigerian Supreme Court judgements. John Austin’s Speech Act Theory, coupled with Srikant Sarangi’s Discourse types, serve as the theoretical framework. The data for this research are 2020 and 2021 Supreme Court judgements on criminal cases selected from Law Pavilion Electronic Law Reports. The years were purposively selected because of the significant expansion of the bench from 12 justices to 20 justices during the period, while the criminal cases were purposively selected because of their grave social implications in Nigerian society. It was discovered that the judges’ utterances are sites of layered illocutionary and discursive work. Judicial narratives do more than report events: they assert, state, disapprove and declare. It was also found that only institutional actors enabled by institutional procedures control shifts between discourse types. Thus, through the examination of the pragmatic functions of the utterances in Nigerian Supreme Court judgements, communicative goals are achieved.
Digital Semiotics and the Construction of Meaning in Technology-Mediated ESL Pedagogy
This study examines the role of digital semiotics in the construction of meaning within technology-mediated English as a Second Language (ESL) pedagogy among secondary school learners. Anchored in Social Semiotics and Multimodality Theory. Recent studies have shown that AI tools have become deeply embedded in learners’ writing processes, functioning as virtual tutors that support idea generation, language accuracy, and text production. Despite the growing use of AI technologies in language education, existing studies have largely focused on their pedagogical effectiveness, including improvements in writing performance, language proficiency, and learner engagement, with little attention being paid to the semiotic processes through which learners construct, negotiate, and interpret meaning while interacting with AI-powered tools. The study explores how artificial intelligence (AI) tools reshape meaning-making processes in classroom contexts. A qualitative classroom-based design was adopted, involving a hundred (100) purposively selected students who engaged in structured writing, grammar correction, and translation tasks using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Grammarly and Google Translate. Data were generated from learners’ engagement with these tools, including immediate responses, revised texts, and observational notes. Findings reveal that construction of meaning in AI-mediated ESL classrooms is a co-produced and multimodal process, shaped through interaction between learners and algorithmic systems. Learners demonstrated different degrees of agency, ranging from direct adoption of AI outputs to critical modification and iterative prompting. The study further shows that AI tools function as active semiotic agents, greatly influencing linguistic choices, restructuring classroom authority, and expanding the means through which meaning is negotiated. The study concludes that AI integration represents a significant transformation in ESL pedagogy and recommends the development of critical AI literacy and guided pedagogical frameworks for effective classroom implementation.
Negotiating Poetics in Translating Femi Osofisan's Once Upon Four Robbers into French: Between Systemic Acceptability and Linguistic Fidelity
This study examines the negotiations of poetics in the translation of Femi Osofisan's play Once Upon Four Robbers from English to French as Il était une fois quatre voleurs by Nicole Medjigbodo. It integrates postcolonial and polysystem postulations to view translation as an intermediate process between systemic acceptability and linguistic fidelity. Drawing on qualitative and comparative analysis of the source text and target text expressions, this study reveals the strategies employed in the translation to handle the challenges of the unique poetic expression in Osofisan's work. It underlines the importance of cultural knowledge, tone, idioms and wording while trying to translate poetic expressions from other cultures, like Africa, to better achieve the target of loyalty and faithfulness in translation. Thus, it brings a new dimension to translation studies as well as literary criticism to offer a fresh perspective regarding poetic translation within the dramatic canon of Africa. Cette étude examine les enjeux poétiques liés à la traduction de la pièce théâtrale de Femi Osofisan Once Upon Four Robbers de l’anglais vers le français sous le titre Il était une fois quatre voleurs, traduite par Nicole Medjigbodo. En employant une analyse qualitative et comparative du texte source (TS) et du texte cible (TC), la recherche met en évidence les différentes stratégies de traduction utilisées pour rendre la richesse poétique et culturelle propre à l’écriture d’Osofisan. L’étude s’appuie sur les approches de la critique postcoloniale et de la théorie du polysystème afin de considérer la traduction comme un espace de médiation entre fidélité linguistiques et acceptabilité culturelle. Elle insiste également sur l’importance des réalités culturelles, du ton, des expressions idiomatiques et du choix des mots dans la traduction des expressions poétiques africaines. En mettant en lumière les défis et les possibilités de la traduction littéraire africaine, cette recherche contribue à enrichir les études traductologiques et la critique littéraire, tout en proposant une réflexion nouvelle sur la traduction poétique dans le théâtre africain.
Speech Acts in Selected Divorce Court Proceedings in Ogbomoso, Oyo State
This study examines the types and functions of speech acts employed in divorce court proceedings, with a focus on how language serves both as a legal instrument and a social practice in the resolution of matrimonial disputes. Drawing on Austin (1962) and Searle's (1969) Speech Act Theory, and informed by contemporary scholarship in legal pragmatics, a qualitative case study design was employed. Data were obtained through direct non-participant observation and audio recording of two divorce court sessions at the State High Court, Ogbomoso, Oyo State, spanning a total recording duration of approximately four hours and thirty minutes and generating over 9,000 words. Participants comprising judges, counsel, petitioners, and respondents were observed across the selected proceedings. While prior studies on Nigerian legal discourse have mostly addressed criminal courts, the specific communicative dynamics of divorce proceedings remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by providing a systematic, multi-category speech act analysis of divorce discourse in this context. Findings reveal that locutionary acts serve primarily to establish the factual and procedural basis of cases, while illocutionary acts, including directives, assertives, commissives, expressives, and declaratives, are deployed in role-specific patterns that reflect and reinforce the institutional hierarchy of the court. The study underscores how the adversarial yet emotionally charged nature of divorce proceedings creates a distinctive communicative environment in which legal norms and power relations intersect.
Vol 13, No 1 (2026): Issues In Language And Literary Studies