Department: Linguistics African and European Languages
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1
Discourse Space Theory and Conceptual Metaphors in President Muhammadu Buhari's Speech
In the last few decades, researchers, especially in the humanities and social sciences have directed a renewed and undivided attention so to speak to the field of political communication and/or political discourse. This renewed effort has produced avalanche of literature in political discourse which has in turn attracted the interest of both political and discourse analysts in this direction. This paper therefore seeks to situate Discourse Space Theory and Conceptual Metaphor in the inaugural speech of Muhammadu Buhari. Using these two theoretical models, we shall be better placed to encapsulate how political actors use language in both its literal and literary senses to shape discourse and by extension reconstitute certain values among the citizenry. The data for this paper was sourced from the internet and authenticated by similar publications in The Guardian, The Punch and This Day which are by far the most widely read newspapers by the literate class across the country. In fact, it is the wide readership that the papers enjoy that informs our choice of these papers as source of our data. Relevant sections of President Muhammadu Buhari’s speech were extracted and divided into twenty-four (24) texts of unequal length through purposive sampling approach. The first twelve extracts were analysed using DST while the other twelve were analysed using CMT. At the end, it was gathered that presidential inaugurals are richer in personal and time deixis than other deictic forms because they enable political communicators establish different degrees of relationships with their audience on the one hand and also enhance their reference to different time dimensions on the other. Conceptual metaphor, more than any other figure of speech is frequently drawn to service by political actors in order to establish different shades of indirect meaning or better still, have their political ideologies represented in different forms of images. It is, therefore, concluded that pr
