Studies in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

Exploring Stance and Engagement Markers in the Discourse on Fuel Subsidy Removal in Nigeria in the Punch and Daily Trust Newspapers

2024-11-24T05:24:33+00:00

Eliminating fuel subsidies in Nigeria in 2023 has precipitated a significant transformation with far-reaching economic, social, and environmental consequences. While existing research has attempted to explore the discourse on fuel subsidy elimination from a nonlinguistic viewpoint using various theoretical insights, this study takes a different approach by examining the discourse from a linguistic perspective. Employing Hyland's (2005) stance and engagement model, the study examines the stance and engagement markers used in the discourse on fuel subsidy to interact with readers, describe how the subject has been evaluated, and determine the points of convergence and divergence in stance and engagement markers. The study's data consists of excerpts from Punch and Daily Trust newspapers. Sixteen excerpts, eight from each newspaper, were purposively sampled and analysed using a rigorous combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The findings show that both corpora employ hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mention, reader pronouns, shared knowledge, directives, and questions to interact with readers. These stance and engagement markers serve as linguistic means through which the authors of both corpora decrease the force of their propositions, express confidence in their arguments, indicate their attitude towards the issue evaluated, project themselves, and invite readers into the discourse. The subject of fuel subsidy in both corpora is presented badly using evaluative indicators with negative connotations. While both corpora employ a host of stance and engagement markers in structuring the discourse on fuel subsidy removal, it is noteworthy to mention that variation in frequency and percentage distribution of these linguistic elements exists.

Gender Variation in Cameroon French Apologies

2025-02-04T19:09:16+00:00

This study examines the influence of gender on apology realization by Cameroon French speakers. It is based on data provided by 40 University students (20 males and 20 females) in an apology-provoking situation involving friends. The examples were analyzed according to the types of direct and indirect apology strategies as well as types of external modifiers found. The results reveal differences across both groups regarding choices and realizations of direct and indirect apologies as well as types of external modifiers used. The paper is a call for more studies on gender pragmatic variation in Cameroon French.

Impoliteness in social media interactions by Cameroonian diaspora activists

2024-12-17T21:25:26+00:00

This study sets out to analyse Cameroonian diaspora activists’ impoliteness in their various interactions on Twitter and Facebook. It highlights the different conventionalized impoliteness formulae in Cameroon Social Media. Data for this study comprises 219 impolite messages collected from activists’ tweets and Facebook profiles from the 3rd of December 2017 to February 2023. The data was collected through screenshots thank to android phone. To analyse the data collected from these two main platforms (hereafter Twitter and Facebook), the researchers applied a mixed method research. Culpeper (2010) conventionalized impoliteness formulae was adopted in this research paper to analyse the data. Results from the analysis unveil insults as the mostly used impoliteness formula followed by pointed criticism, explicitly associate with a negative aspect, pointed accusation, threats, unpalatable questions/presuppositions and message enforcers respectively.

Key words: social media, Pragmatics, impoliteness, conventionalized formulae, Cameroon.

Text, Image and Colour: A Multimodal Reading of Selected Save The Children Campaign Posters

2025-01-19T11:54:41+00:00

This paper explains the multiple ways in which the Save the Children campaigns deploy visual and textual elements to disseminate powerful messages and evoke emotional responses. Drawing on Kress and Van Leeuwen's (2006) theory of visual grammar, this paper explicates the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings of the posters. To achieve this, ten save the children posters were collected from their official website and some social media handles, ensuring a mix of themes, target audiences, and time frames to capture a comprehensive range of multimodal strategies. The analysis reveals that these posters use images as sophisticated communication tools to foster emotional connections, highlight urgent needs, and promote active engagement from viewers. However, to enhance visual engagement, integrated messaging, call to action, it was recommended that the posters designers should continue to leverage high-quality and emotionally resonant images, ensure that visual and textual elements are seamlessly integrated, and call to action are more prominently featured.