VEJOH - VERITAS JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES

This study examines stance taking surrounding the Nigerian 2023 General Election by some presidential aspirants in their declaration speeches to become the next president of Nigeria. Existing linguistic studies on political speeches have focused on inaugural speeches by different nations’ presidents with little attention paid to declaration speeches by presidential aspirants. Data for the study were drawn from online national dailies such as Business Day, Premium Times, The Nation and Daily Post. The period covered was between January to April, 2022 before the primary election of each party. The combined qualitative and quantitative research designs. Ken Hyland’s (2005) Stance and Engagement Theory served as the theoretical framework for the study. The data were subjected to discourse analysis. The findings of the study reveal that based on the frequencies of the stance and engagement tools, self-mention has the highest with 57 representing 35.84%, while directive and personal aside have the lowest frequencies with 6 representing 3.77. For the stances, the following were observed: winning the presidential seat is a battle; winning the presidential seat is all about antecedents and experiences; the president should be someone who knows the plight of his people and becoming the next president is all about the influence of incumbency or stronger external force where the common stances taken by the selected presidential aspirants. The paper concludes that campaign declarations are full of stance taking. It also recommends that studies should be conducted on those presidential declaration speeches from other linguistic perspectives.

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