VEJOH - VERITAS JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES

The study examines the employment of impoliteness strategies and verbal abuse among political personages in Nigeria in selected print and online newspaper publications. Data for the study were purposively selected from the news and politics sections of print and online newspapers which include The Punch, The Vanguard, The Premium Times, The Sun, The Daily Trust, The Pulse and The Guardian. The study engaged Culpeper’s theory of impoliteness complemented by textual element of Mey’s pragmatic acts in its analysis. Findings reveal that the political personalities employ sarcasm, imposition, associating others with negative aspects, taboo and abusive language, insults, threats, name-calling, ridicule, scorn, use of inappropriate identity marker, belittling, use of animal metaphor among other strategies in a bid to express their opinions. It is evident from the findings that contrary to the ideology that the primary objective of adopting impoliteness strategies is to attack the faces of the hearers, the study reveals that political personages in Nigeria employ impoliteness strategies not only to attack the faces of fellow politicians or other Nigerians but to emphasize their relative powers over individuals considered as being disloyal and unsupportive and to demean the personality of their opponents and their supporters.

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