A Critical Stylistic Study of Peter Obi’s Campaign Speech Delivered at Chatham House

Abstract

This paper is a critical stylistic analysis of Peter Obi’s presidential campaign speech that he delivered at Chatham House in the United Kingdom on January 26, 2023. Critical stylistics provides the reader or listener with ten analytical tools to make use of in carrying out critical analysis of texts for the main purpose of identifying the meanings and ideologies inherent in such texts. The aim of this work then is to investigate some of the meanings and ideologies which Peter Obi passes on to his listeners through lexical choice as well as sentence pattern and construction using three of the ten tools put forward by Jeffries (2010) for investigating the various meanings in texts. The three tools selected are: naming and describing, prioritising and equating and contrasting. Findings reveal that though all the excerpts bring out different meanings that are relevant to the text, however, the ideology behind them that serves as the foundation for all the interpretations is that of positive self presentation and negative “Other” presentation.