Discourse Stratagies and Discourse Markers in 2019 Presidential Campaign Advertisements

Abstract

The use of social media to advertise presidential candidates and to get support for them has increased drastically. However, many research efforts have not been done to critically investigate the discourse strategies and the meanings that text composers try to portray with campaign advertisements. This study, therefore, attempts a critical content analysis of discourse strategies and discourse markers used to garner support in the 2019 presidential campaign advertisements. 14 texts were purposively selected from social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, twitter and other online media, like punch.ng.com, sunnews.com, to mention but a few. The chosen texts featured the two major political candidates in the 2019 presidential campaign advertisements: Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC). The study adopted Vadijk’s socio cognitive model and his principles of ideological stances for the analysis of texts in this study. The findings revealed that there was a deliberate choice of certain words by text composers to create certain desired meanings. Other notable discourse strategies used were rhetorical questions, repetition, symbolism and the use of emotional appeal. The study also found out that discourse markers were ideologically used to show contrast, consequence and time that an action took place. The study concludes that semantic stratagems were used to show polarity between the out group and the in group.