A pragma-semiotic analysis of ‘Occupy Nigeria Group’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria
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In response to the fuel subsidy removal by the Nigerian government
on 1st January 2012, Occupy Nigeria Group, a protest movement,
embarked on different mass strike actions and
demonstrations including online activism. The civil resistant
actions geared towards reversal of petrol pump price increase
deployed certain verbal and visual means in portraying the government
and its actions. Previous studies on online protest discourse
in Nigeria have adopted sociolinguistic and discourse
analysis approaches in examining issues of identity and selfdetermination
with little attention paid to visual-pragmatic
strategies in representing people and their actions. This article,
therefore, undertakes a pragma-semiotic investigation of ‘Occupy
Nigeria Group’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal in
Nigeria with a view to examining verbal and visual modes of representing
people and their actions in the event. Seventy-two
online protest posts purposively sampled from the groups’ page
are used to identify and categorize various pragma-semiotic elements
and functions in the representations using insights from
Mey’s (2001) pragmatic act and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006)
multimodal discourse analysis. It is observed that the verbal mode
complements the visual in projecting the demands and resistance
of the group. The posts which are classified under six semantic
fields, namely divine intervention, security consciousness, innovation,
exaggeration, defamation and abusive placards have various
visual-pragmatic strategies such as prayer, negative labelling,
humour, mockery, abuse, passionate and fierce appeal, including
photo trick. The strategies correspond to the dominant pragmatic
acts such as demonstrative, assertive, suppository, condoling and
stipulating. All these acts are presented within the Nigerian sociopolitical
and linguistic context
Keywords
PE English, PR English literature