New Media Discourse Analysis: A Text Linguistic Analysis of Facebook Posts on the Russia-Ukraine War

Abstract

Many studies have been done on text linguistics (Umera-Okeke, 2007, Ashipu, 2012, Ezeifekaand Osakwe, 2013), but little or no study has been channeled towards analysing social mediatexts on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The study adopted the Relevance theory bySperber and Wilson as the theoretical framework for the study. All the Facebook posts written onthe Russian invasion of Ukraine formed the population of the study. Through simple randomsampling, four Facebook posts were chosen as data for the study. Data were collected usingscreenshots on a laptop. Findings revealed that the writers of the various Facebook posts useddifferent cohesive devices to tie their texts together and equally achieve coherence. And thesecohesive devices helped them communicate relevant and sufficient information to their readers.The readers, on the other hand, were convinced that the writers helped them keep abreast of thepolitical happenings in Ukraine by making posts that are relevant. This is evidenced in thedifferent positive reactions garnered by the posts on Facebook.