A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE USE ON FACEBOOK: A STUDY OF PREMIUM TIMES NEWS HEADLINES

Abstract

Attaining national unity and cohesion is a function of deliberate strategic plans of different facets of human endeavour in a nation. The language front has important role to play in fostering national unity and cohesion in any country. The Nigeria and Africa situation is not an exception. The chaos and rivalry that have become an intrinsic experience for us in Nigeria and in fact, Africa is partly a function of careless and unchecked language use in the social media. This paper, therefore, explores the use and misuse of language on social media. The study examines the comments of Facebook users to online news headlines posted on Premium Times Facebook handle. A corpus of a week screenshot samples of these comments are collected out of which nine (9) were purposively selected for the analysis. These nine (9) data are grouped into five (5) texts. The selected data were analysed using Dell Hymes’ Ethnography of Speaking complemented by Theo van Leeuwen’s Identities and Subjectivity Model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The paper uses the SPEAKING acronym as the theoretical insight and discussion was based on the postulations of the CDA model adopted. The study found that the responses from readers are mostly tilting towards their individual affiliations. Also, instances of arguments and rebuttals by readers reflect a situation where the polarity tilts in bidirectional positive in-group - “us” and negative out-group – “them” among the different affiliations the users represent. The study further found that copious use of vulgar expressions pervades the comments of readers. This study therefore concludes that such use of language cannot help Nigeria and Africa in its quest for unity. The study recommends that media literacy be taught in schools in order to entrench civility in the discussions of people on social media.