English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

This paper examines the linguistic messages of the placards, which were visibly displayed during the fuel subsidy removal protests in Nigeria. In this regard, we rely on the central notion of ‘stratification’ deriving from Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar, which analyses language in terms of four strata – context, semantics, lexico-grammar, and phonology-graphology. The data elicited from the online edition of Nigerian newspapers is subjected to analysis following the analytical procedure of context stratum. Specifically, the linguistic messages implicit in the sampled placards provide the thrust of contextual analyses from the theoretical prism of field, tenor, and mode, which collectively constitute the ‘register’ of the texts being studied. The results of the analysis indicate an emerging pattern of civil protest in Nigeria driven by the nation’s brand of ‘Arab Spring’, or the ‘Occupy Movement,’ which interrogates a wide range of socioeconomic and political ills plaguing the Nigerian nation. Specifically, the protests transcended the narrow confines of hardships caused by the fuel subsidy removal to pertinent issues of official corruption, debilitating cost of governance, crash in public expectations of a Jonathan presidency, and recourse to people power-induced revolution. The paper concludes that the fuel subsidy removal protests provided a teachable moment, the invaluable lessons of which need not be lost on the PDP-led administration of President Goodluck Jonathan.

Placards as a Language of Civil Protest in Nigeria: A SystemicFunctional Analysis of the Fuel Subsidy Crisis