Facebook, an intrinsic part of 21st century social realities where cognitive-participatory activities are largely captured, is consistently explored for political deception. This chapter investigates how participants utilize language to deceive politically the Nigerian electorate on Facebook. For data, 250 Facebook posts on Nigerian politics were sampled, out of which 50 were purposefully selected for being highly rich in deceptive content in order to unpack online deception through multimodal critical discourse analysis. Four deceptive forms—equivocation of identity, exaggeration of performance, falsification of corruption cases, and concealment of offences—within two socio-political contexts—election and opposition—constituted the posts. These prompt an evocation of a messianic figure, blunt condemnation, and evocation of sympathy and retrospection to achieve the political intentions of criticism, self-presentation, silent opposition, and galvanizing public support. The chapter concludes that political propaganda taps into Facebook users to appeal to their political biases and sway their opinions.

This paper extends the frontier of research in the marketisation of higher education institution by investigating the pragmatics of promotional features and discourse strategies in the postgraduate school prospectus. The data for the study is the University of Ibadan postgraduate school prospectus (2015 edition) downloaded from the university website (http://www.postgraduateschool.ui.edu.ng). Insights were drawn from Bhatia’s genre analysis, an aspect of Hallidayian’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, for the analysis. The theory accounts for promotional features, linguistic features and discourse strategies in the discourse. Four promotional features: offer, commodification, incentives and clients were marked off by modality, epistemic and deontic linguistic features while strategies of self-promotion, implication, promotional tact and evocation to considerateness are tactfully employed to project the superiority ideology to the prospective students. The study concludes that the academia is no longer solely informative but promotionally oriented.

This paper examines how language is used to show shared beliefs between caregivers and pregnant women in antenatal classes in the Nigerian context, which hitherto suffers neglect. The data consist of tape recordings and observational notes taken during antenatal classes in selected hospitals in Lokoja, Nigeria. The study adopted a top-down analytic approach using Odebunmi’s model of contextual beliefs, supported by van Dijk’s epistemic context model, and Fetzer and Fischer’s lexical markers model. The analysis shows three categories of shared knowledge: a. state of pregnancy and postnatal care b. sexual relationships and spice lexemes c. traditional child care and superstitions. Shared knowledge of the state of pregnancy and postnatal care manifests in pregnancy misconceptions, nutrition during pregnancy and postnatal care orientations highlighted by lexical markers such as recoverable knowledge connector and joint attention builder. Shared knowledge of sexual relations and spice lexemes reflect sexual communication and native spices using metaphorization and proximal deictic lexical markers. Grandmothers’ involvement and insistence on using traditional methods and superstitions frame shared knowledge of traditional child care and superstitions through belief affirmative and self-reformulation markers. Analysis of the shared beliefs shows how caregivers represent pregnant women’s mental knowledge in interactions as well as how pregnant women interject beliefs for clarification and validity. This way, both participants demonstrate how contextual beliefs facilitate communicative processes and meaningful understanding in their interactions.

Concealment, an act of intentionally withholding information for some purposes, is considered to be often employed by caregivers to veil the terminal status of the patients. This paper therefore investigates the pragmatics of concealment in interactions between terminally-ill patients and their caregivers as it relates to psychotherapeutic process; thereby complementing existing studies which have largely captured attitudes, strategies and structures of such discourses. Seven interactions, capturing cancer, heart disease and kidney failure, were collected through tape-recording and participants’ observation at University College Hospital, Ibadan, between February and August, 2016. These were transcribed and analysed using convergence aspect of Gile’s Communication Accommodation Theory. Findings show that concealment in this discourse pragmatically configures psychotherapeutic context which bifurcates into palliative psychotherapy and cognitive-behavioural therapy. Palliative psychotherapy, through shared situational knowledge and mutual contextual belief, raises hope of recovery and dislodges fear of death. Cognitive-behavioural therapy, through shared cultural knowledge, facilitates compliance and support in the healing process. The aforementioned findings resonate that the use of concealment in therapeutic discourse psychologically changes the underlying thoughts that contribute to mental depression and modifies the problematic behaviours that result from these thoughts

Regret, a cognitive phenomenon capable of revealing a person's disposition about certain realities, is conceived as a tool to unpack Nigerian migrants' perceptions about the country. This paper examines discourse strategies of regrets' construction in the online discourses of Nigerian migrants. The data consist of eighty-eight responses of Nigerian migrants downloaded from the NAIRALAND where many Nigerians in the diaspora expressed their regrets about leaving the country. These were subjected to qualitative-descriptive analysis, using van Dijk's (2007) model of discourse strategies. The findings uncover two forms of regrets constructed in the discourse: positive and negative. The positive regrets' construction characterizes "not leaving early" regrets; positive self-appraisal and negative representation of the country. Frustration experience in the foreign countries and juxtaposition of specific circumstances in Nigeria to contemporary experiences elsewhere frame negative regrets' construction. These were constructed through discourse strategies such as presupposition, implication, lexicalization, hyperbole, illustration, metaphor and disclaimer. These Nigerians' use of language in this discourse indexes hopelessness, visionless leaders, lawlessness and economic hardship. The study concludes that while the views of Nigerian migrants may not be true, perhaps, the government may urgently look into these views and act to convince other Nigerians to prevent the exodus of prospective Nigerian migrants which could lead to brain drain.