Card Journal Language and ideology of political interactions

ABSTRACT ABSTRACT Several issues have shaped political discourse in Nigeria since her independence. Speeches read from scripts and other texts as well as various media forums have been major sources of data. Political interactions, dealing with spontaneous discourse/speech events have hardly been subject of discourse. Recently one of the platforms that transverse the Nigerian political sphere is the National Good Governance Tour (NGGT) of Nigeria; this study therefore, explores language use in the tour and ideologies transmitted, and the purpose with which language use in the tour serves. The study adopts Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), as its theoretical framework and Hallidays’ SFL, to identify language and ideology in the political interactions. Data for the study was sourced by downloads from the website of the federal ministry of information, and live recordings as televised. The discourse interactions were played over, listened to, and transcribed verbatim as uttered for the purpose of this study. Findings indicate that the interactions sought to counter the dominant apathetic ideology of most Nigerians with that of optimism through pungent and direct spontaneous spoken discourse. It was established also that CDA can explore the relationship between language and ideology of political interactions. Key words: Political Interaction, Ideology, CDA, SFL,