Discourse Issues and Discursive Strategies in Selected Online Newspapers Articles on Farmer-Herders’ Conflict in Nigeria
Online journalists overtly or covertly deploy linguistic resources to project certain discourse issues based on the ideological leanings of their proprietors (or existing media frames on a news event), by means of the discursive strategies deployed. This study investigates those resources and discursive strategies. 10 online news articles were purposively selected from five Nigerian online news sources between January 2017 and December 2018. Teun van Dijk's (2004) Critical Discourse Analytical framework provided insight for analysis. It was found that discourse issues as legitimisation of hate speech, commonization of death, existential contestation, securitisation and glocalisation of an international malaise were preponderant in the corpus and were communicated using seven discursive strategies: Metaphor, Generalization, Actor description, Implication, Authority, Negative other-presentation, and Number game. The study found that whereas the discourse issues reported in the corpus were representative of real time conflict situations involving actual characters and verifiable settings (temporal and spatial),
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