Political and Ideological Commitments: A Systemic Functional Linguistic and Critical Discourse Analysis of President Buhari’s Inaugural Speech

The combined application of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) principles in some modern studies has gone beyond the boundaries of fictional discourse / text. It has witnessed an increasing interest in real-life discourse /text such as newspapers / magazines articles, court verdicts, and presidential and/or political speeches. This new linguistic-discursive trend is substantiated by the fact that the real-life and non-fictional texts/discourses are often ideologically loaded. Therefore, analyzing such speeches would enable to scrutinize, unearth, and reveal their hidden ideologies. It is against this backdrop that this article aims at shedding the SFL projectors’ light on the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s inaugural speech, by adopting CDA theory as the backbone. The analysis focuses on mood, epistemic and deontic modality choices, as well as recoverable references through personal pronouns used throughout the political discourse under consideration. The study has demonstrated how political leaders' discourses unearth a sort of harmony with ideologies that tally and commensurate the domestic, sub-regional and international realities. Furthermore, it provides sufficient evidence that the grammar of speech is not merely a combinational tool of creating correct constructions, but a method of structuring information and transferring ideology.