scholarly journals Participant’s Roles and Cognitive Relations in Niger Delta Conflict News Discourse

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 215824402110231
Author(s):  
Chuka Fred Ononye ◽  
Olaosun Ibrahim Esan ◽  
Ahmed Yunana

Media studies on Niger Delta (ND) conflict discourse have largely utilized stylistic, pragmatic, and critical discourse analytical tools in exploring media representation of news actors and ideologies in news texts but have not accommodated such issues as participants’ roles and cognitive relations in the discourse. This paper analyses the contexts of ND conflict news reporting with a view to revealing not only the participant’s role relations involved, but also the lexico-semantic resources they are characterized by. Forty newspaper reports on ND conflicts (20 from four ND-based newspapers— The Tide, New Waves, The Pointer and Pioneer, and 20 from four national newspapers— The Punch, The Guardian, Vanguard and THISDAY), published between 2003 and 2009, were sampled and subjected to discourse analysis, with insights from van Dijk’s context models and aspects of relational semantics. Four types of role were identified, viz. interactional (embracing the participants in conflict), communicative (relating to the production roles), social (involving group membership), and instrumental (dealing with the entities utilized in actualizing specific goals). The cognitive foci of these roles are associated with participants’ goals and beliefs, and these inform the participants’ position and hence role in the conflict events. Linguistically, the interactional and social roles are marked by synonymous and converse lexical items, while the communicative and instrumental roles are indexed by homonymous and antonymous lexical features. The findings corroborate the fact that there is an interaction between participant roles and cognitive relations in the ND conflict events reported in Nigerian newspapers.

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 167
Author(s):  
Chuka Fred Ononye

Media reports on Niger Delta (Henceforth, ND) conflicts have reflected a relationship between lexico-stylistic choices and media ideologies. The existing media studies on the discourse have predominantly utilised pragmatic, stylistic and discourse analytical tools in presenting and labelling discourse participants and/or their ideologies, but neglected how media ideologies can be revealed through lexico-stylistic choices made in the reports. This paper therefore examines the lexico-stylistic choices in the reports in order to establish their link to specific ideological goals of the newspapers in relaying the conflict news. Forty reports on ND conflicts, published between 2003 and 2007, sampled from two ND-based (The Tide and Pioneer) and two national (The Punch and THISDAY, labelled) newspapers, were subjected to stylistic and critical analyses, with insights from structural (relational) semantics and aspects of stylistics discourse. Two broad lexical stylistic choices are identified, including paradigmatic (61.8%—indexed by synonymous, antonymous, hyponymous, colloquial, and register items, and coinages) and syntagmatic (38.2%—marked by collocations, metaphors, pleonasms, and lexical fields) features. The features are utilised for three ideological ends; namely, picking out and framing participants as perpetrators of the violence in the discourse, evaluating specific entities and their roles in the conflicts, and reducing the impact of the activities of the news actors. Although there are overlaps, the evaluative ideology is largely associated with the national newspaper, the impact reduction ideology with the ND-based newspapers, while the framist ideology is observed in the two sets of newspapers. With these findings the study has added the lexical stylistics angle to the existing scholarship on ND conflict news discourse. Thus, the newspaper reports on ND conflicts are motivated by their ideological goals to change the reader’s outlook on the issues relating to the conflicts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-136
Author(s):  
Risdaneva Risdaneva

This study explores and compares the portrayal of women in the news reporting of crimes of sexual violence against women between two newspapers from different cultures, the Jakarta Post and the Guardian. The Jakarta Post is an English quality newspaper published in Indonesia, and the Guardian is a quality broadsheet from Great Britain. To explore the representation of women, this study accounts the portrayal of men as well since the two entities are strongly inter-related. The analytical tool used in this study is naming analysis of social actors, which is a part of critical discourse analysis. This analysis is aimed at probing the representation through the choice of lexical items in representing the main news actors. The findings of the analysis indicate that the choices of the naming categories used by both newspapers are different. The Jakarta Post mostly functionalises both the victims and the perpetrators in terms of their legal status in the criminal cases. This suggests that the broadsheet tends to view them as part of the legal processes instead of as people. The Guardian typically classifies the victims in terms of their age and gender and refers to the perpetrators with their surnames instead of as parts of the criminal cases. The Guardian’s tendency to represent both perpetrators and victims as people instead of parts of legal processes indicates that the paper is attempting to focus the reports more on the crimes themselves rather than the participants involved in the cases.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 745-756
Author(s):  
Muhammad Marwan Ismail ◽  
Farah Nadia Harun ◽  
Wan Moharani Mohammad ◽  
Nurhasma Muhammad Saad ◽  
Sulaiman Ismail

December 2019 marked the emergence of a deadly virus known as Covid-19. Since then, we have been battling the virus, which has infected more than 250 million people and killed 4.5 million globally. The pandemic has become the headline of almost every media outlet, local and international news agency. Hence, this article aims to examine the Arabic online news discourse of the event by focusing on the verbal processes strategically utilised in reporting the pandemic in Malaysia. This study's data consists of Modern Standard Arabic online news published by Aswaq (aswaqpress.com) news portal between January and July 2021. Aswaq provides Arabic news and information on Malaysia to the Arab world. Hence, the information provided by the portal is vital in portraying Malaysia to Arab audiences, particularly in framing the way Malaysia deals with the Covid-19. The study employs corpus linguistics analytical tools using corpus software AntConc 3.5.8 (2019). Then, the quantitative result will be analysed using a qualitative approach based on the textual-oriented Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Fairclough (1992). It is shown that Aswaq has strategically utilised various verbal processes to report on the word said and articulated around the pandemic. The diversity of verbal processes usage indicates different connotations that hint at different strategic approaches in reporting the news. Hence, it may lead to uncovering the outlet stance of the event. Finally, the study will present suggestions for other related studies in the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (8) ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
N. S. Dankova ◽  
E. V. Krekhtunova

The article is devoted to the study of the media representation features of the situation of coronavirus infection spread. The material was articles published in American newspapers. It is shown that the metaphorical model "War" is widely used in media coverage of the pandemic. The relevance of the work is due to the ability of the media to influence the mass consciousness. The methodological basis of the research is formed by critical discourse analysis, which establishes the connection between language and social reality. The article provides an overview of works devoted to the study of metaphor. The theoretical foundations for the study of metaphorical modeling are given. In the course of the analysis, the linguistic means of updating the metaphorical model "War" were revealed. The authors note that this metaphorical model is represented by such frames as “War and its characteristics”, “Participants in military action”, “War zone”, “Enemy actions”, “Confronting the enemy”. It is shown that modern reality is presented in the media as martial law, the coronavirus is positioned in the media as a cruel and merciless enemy seeking to take over the world, the treatment of the disease is represented as a fight against the enemy. It is concluded that the use of the metaphorical model "War" is one of the ways to conceptualize the spread of coronavirus.


2021 ◽  
pp. 175048132098209
Author(s):  
Mark Nartey ◽  
Hans J Ladegaard

The activities of Fulani nomads in Ghana have gained considerable media attention and engendered continuing public debate. In this paper, we analyze the prejudiced portrayals of the nomads in the Ghanaian news media, and how these contribute to an exclusionist and a discriminatory discourse that puts the nomads at the margins of Ghanaian society. The study employs a critical discourse analysis framework and draws on a dataset of 160 articles, including news stories, editorials and op-ed pieces. The analysis reveals that the nomads are discursively constructed as undesirables through an othering process that centers on three discourses: a discourse of dangerousness/criminalization, a discourse of alienization, and a discourse of stigmatization. This anti-nomad/Fulani rhetoric is evident in the choice of sensational headlines, alarmist news content, organization of arguments, and use of quotations. The paper concludes with a call for more balanced and critical news reporting on the nomads, especially since issues surrounding them border on national cohesion and security.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312199951
Author(s):  
Ayça Demet Atay

Turkey’s membership process to the European Union has been a ‘long, narrow and uphill road’, as former Turkish Prime Minister, and later President, Turgut Özal once stated. This study analyses the representation of the European Union–Turkey negotiation process in the Turkish newspapers Cumhuriyet and Hürriyet from 1959 to 2019 with the aim of understanding the changing meaning of ‘Europe’ and the ‘European Union’ in Turkish news discourse. There is comprehensive literature on the representation of Turkey’s membership process in the European press. This article aims to contribute to the field by assessing the representation of the same process from a different angle. For this purpose, Cumhuriyet and Hürriyet newspapers’ front page coverage of selected 10 key dates in the European Union–Turkey relations is analysed through critical discourse analysis.


Author(s):  
Ebuka Elias Igwebuike

Abstract Nigerian media reports on herdsmen’s violence present dehumanised images of a slaughterhouse in which farmers are represented as animals being slaughtered by herders. Using a critical discourse analysis and appraisal framework, with a focus on the systems of attitude and graduation, this paper critically examines media representation of herdsmen’s violence as “butchering” in the form of carnism. Analysis reveals that carnist representation is reinforced through death-dealing socio-cognitive labelling, attitudinal lexicalisation and strands of carnism. Also, using attitude and graduation resources, a one-directional and horrific image is painted. The study concludes that the creation as well as consumption of such scary news cultivates cognitive prejudices and stereotypes.


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