CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF SELECTED PIDGIN POLITICAL CAMPAIGN SPEECHES IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Campaign speeches are one of the avenues through which politicians appeal to the minds of the majority electorate as such they tend to adopt a language that will  be  understood  by  the  larger  number  of  the  people.  In  recent  times politicians  have  resorted  to  the  use  of  Nigerian  pidgin  in  delivering  political speeches  and  this  isbecause  it  creates  a  mutual  platform  for  acceptance.  On that  note,  this  paper  explores  a  critically  the  use  of    discursive  strategies  in political  campaign    speeches  of  two  political  aspirants  of  Nigeria  selected from the 2015 election campaigns and 2019 campaigns respectively.  Norman Fairlough’s three-dimensional framework for discourse analysis was adopted as  an  analytical  model.  Particular  attention  was  paid  to  macro  and  micro structures  that  are  associated  with  discourse  and  the  outcome  of  the  analysis revealed  the  opening  remark,  the  content  and  the  closing  remark  are  present and   make   up   the   macro   structures.   All   the  macro   structures   contained persuasive   messages   put   across   to   audience   to   influence   their   political thoughts,  beliefs  and  attitudes.  Thecontent  of  the  speeches  consisted  of recurring    positive    self    representation    of    the    aspirant    and    negative representation  of  the  past  administration  all  these  are  purposely  adopted  to gain the people’s mandate.  In addition, there were cases of assurance and promises  to  address  the  nation’s  political;  security,  economic  and  social challenges as well as the people’s need.  The first person pronouns ‘we’ and ‘I’ and their variants were used as strategies for expressing political ideologies especially the logicof inclusion and exclusion or self and group reference.