Texture, Textuality and Political Discourse: A Study of Lexical Cohesion in Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan’s Inaugural Address, May, 2011

Abstract

This study, entitled, ”Texture and textuality in Political Discourse: A Study of Cohesive Devices in President Goodluck Jonathan’s Inaugural Address-May, 2011” was an analysis of the lexical cohesive devices employed by Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan in crafting his May, 2011’s Presidential Inaugural Address (PIA). Guided by the theoretical postulations of Halliday’s tripartite metafunctions of language: the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual, with closer affinity to the textual metafunction that has to do with text creation, cohesion is understood in this study, to be a textual quality, attained through the use of grammatical and lexical elements that enable readers to perceive semantic relationships within and between sentences. Specifally, the study concentrated on the various lexical cohesive devices the President used to bring his message and intentions to the forecourt of the listeners’ and readers’ attention. The basic finding was that the President made preponderant use of :lexical repetitions, synonyms and near synonyms, superordinate/ hyponyms and the various shades of oppositeness in language use, in fleshing out the details of his text and  making the text to say what it intends to say. In a more general terms, it was discovered that producers of political discourse normally have particular intentions and aims. These aims are not far from convincing, conscientizing and swaying, their target audience to their side on various issues, subjects or particular demands. To achieve these, it was discovered that they use a properly crafted, well- articulated, tightly knit coherent body of discourse rich in cohesive ties and other linguistic elements that give their texts texture.

Keywords: Cohesion, Text,  Texture, Textuality, Political Discourse