Suchergebnisse

The need to establish a stronger rapport with supporters in political contexts is never a walk in the park. This requires dedication, persuasiveness which through language and lexical devices could create an effective platform to win their trust. Since politics is essentially about struggling to regulate power, it's only through language that such might be accomplished, thereby making language a really strong political weapon. Opeibi (2009) postulates that regardless of how good a candidate's manifesto is; regardless of how superior political thoughts and ideologies of a party could also be, these can only be expressed and further translated into social actions for social change and social continuity through the facilities provided by language. This essay, however, examined the functions of language and lexical cohesive devices in the development of political manifestos. Mixed methods such as observation; an evidence-based approach and archival studies were used in the data collection.

Corruption has been one of the main challenges bedeviling the African society. Most artistic works in the form of writing and craft have dealt extensively with this canker of corruption. The poem 'Ambassadors of Poverty' is one of such works that touches on corruption in Africa. The present study seeks to examine the communicative implications underpinning the use of parallelism and semantic deviation in the poem. The study is situated within the linguistic and stylistic categories framework by Leech and Short (2007). The findings of the study identify forms of parallelism (noun phrases, prepositional phrases, simple and complex sentences) as well as forms of semantic deviation (metaphor, personification, irony, sarcasm, paradox, oxymoron and symbolism). The findings further unveil a preponderant use of varied shades of parallel structures to juxtapose the impoverished state of the ordinary African with the corrupt and luxurious lifestyle of African leaders while forms of semantic deviation are used to encode the unpatriotic attitudes of African leaders in figurative terms. The study concludes that literary works such as poems are potent instruments that are subtly used to expose and condemn the ills of society. The study has implications for research, theory and practice.