One of the major reasons why newspaper readers cannot effectively interpret the actual messages of writers by glancing at the headlines is because the headlines are almost often ambiguous. This makes newspaper readers to struggle in trying to give possible interpretations to the headlines which undeniably have more than one conceivable meaning. The paper investigated data collected from three Nigerian newspapers (Vanguard, Guardian and Punch) and qualitatively analysed them, identifying linguistic features which make the headlines ambiguous. The analyses revealed that newspaper headline is a type of in-house journalistic market strategy, which puts costumers on suspense with the sole aim of promoting readership and merchandise, and that interpretation of newspaper headlines should be hesitated until the entire text has been read. It is only through this that the exact operational and contextual interpretation of a headline can be precisely and accurately achieved.

The formation of polar question also called a Yes-No question, appears to be language-specific, a situation which makes Echie speakers to find it difficult to accommodate the system of the English language, vice versa. This paper, using the qualitative design and the transformation approach, investigated the structural forms of both languages. The analysis showed great structural differences in both languages: while there is a swop in the position of the subject and the auxiliary in English, there is no such in Echie. In Echie, there are two forms of polar question realization: the resumptive pronoun type and the emphatic construction type. The paper noted that, although, the structural and derivational forms parametrically differ, polar questions exist in both languages and also perform the same syntactic and functional communicative roles. Key Words: Polar, resumptive, inversion, emphatic, transformation

The paper investigated ambiguous film titles with specific reference to films in Nigeria. It observed that film titles which are meant to serve as initial appraisal and forerunners of films that light up the interest of the consumers and promote patronage are usually scripted in mind-boggling ambiguous expressions, which make them prone to multiple interpretations. Using the pragma-syntactic theoretical framework, a total of ten ambiguous film titles randomly selected across the length and breadth of Nigeria were analysed. The analysis showed the possible interpretations of each of the selected titles, their related syntactic structures and the usefulness of pragmatics in interpreting film titles. The paper finally recommended that pragmatic features and discourse primes such as inference, implicature, linguistic context among others should always be taken into account before any film title is interpreted.

The T-shirts and the slogans on them are used to achieve different discourse and communicative themes. The T-shirts help to describe people, events, positions and situations. This article written the confines of the theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis and the qualitative design, investigates five different types of T-shirts. The T-shirts and the inscriptions on them as exemplified in the themes of readiness, position and desire, happiness and celebration, and protest are used to describe the wearers, address situations and pass information to the public. The paper therefore concludes that T-shirts and the slogans scripted on them perform different types of illoucutionary actions which cause different forms perlocutionary reactions Key Words: T-shirts, slogans, themes, multimodal, cloth; communication

With the prevalence of the internet and social network platforms in this digital age, most people opt for text messages as a fast and convenient means of communication and prefer real-time online chats to face-to-face social interactions. The cyber language is replete with writing errors that are not conventionally acceptable in academic writing and which can impede comprehension in some cases. As teenage participation in this new media increases, this study investigated the impact of chat language on the written composition of senior secondary school students who are prospective candidates for O’level and or A’level examinations. Data were generated from the students’ written essay scripts and analysed using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical framework. The study adopted the quantitative and qualitative research methods in which 842 senior secondary 2 and 3 (SS2 and SS3) students of selected schools in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, are the population. The result revealed that online chat language and text-based messages mostly affect students’ writings in mechanical accuracy and expression. The study therefore recommended that the negative effects of the social media on the students’ writings should be checked in schools.