Lexico-stylistic analysis of Facebook postings on COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 has been a global menace, hence a lot of awareness is being created in order to defeat the global menace and this awareness is carried out through language. Previous studies exist on lexico-stylistic analysis and the most related one to the present study is the stylistic analysis of a selected election campaign speech of President Goodluck Jonathan.  The study looks at the use of words in utterances and their effect in the speech from the lexical, figure of speech, cohesion and context categories perspectives. This current study differs from the previous study because it is not about an election campaign speech but rather it is centred on the role of language in fighting COVID-19 by examining Facebook postings through a lexico-stylistic approach. The study is anchored on the Linguistic and Stylistic Categories by Leech and Short. The survey design was used for the study and data for the study were collected by extracting postings on COVID-19 from the Facebook and this was limited to selected Facebook posts of June and July, 2021 due to time and financial constraints. The findings of the study show that COVID-19 postings on the Facebook are majorly characterised by simple words or words without affixation. They also show that medical registers, figures of speech and collocations are featured in the Facebook postings on COVID-19.