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Niger Delta Conflicts have taken a worrisome consistency (that has affected Nigeria's economic and political culture since the late 1990s) that has enjoyed wide media coverage. It is interesting how media reports employ an assortment of textual methods deployed through specific linguistic and discourse devices to subtly change the reader's ideological outlook on the group-induced conflicts. In this connection, the thrust of this research report is to systematically establish HOW media texts do this. Thus, whether media texts use propaganda to present their stories, or try to positively or negatively frame up specific entities in the news, or make effort to mediate between the two groups in the conflict, the emphasis of this book is to objectively put the nuances of language used through a theoretically-driven critical-stylistic model assembled for the analysis of conflict discourse, and verifiably uncover, not only the stylistic strategies used in the media texts, but also the linguistic indices through which the strategies are realised in the texts. The book becomes even more interesting as the 'national' and 'regional' media texts studied take differing ideological lenses.
About the author
Chuka Ononye (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English & Literary Studies, University of Nigeria. His teaching and research interests lie in discourse analysis, stylistics, pragmatics and critical linguistics, and these have been applied in his enormous work on language use in conflict and violence discourses in Africa.
