Media studies on Niger Delta (ND) conflict discourse have largely utilized stylistic, pragmatic, and critical discourse analytical tools in exploring media representation of news actors and ideologies in news texts but have not accommodated such issues as participants’ roles and cognitive relations in the discourse. This paper analyses the contexts of ND conflict news reporting with a view to revealing not only the participant’s role relations involved, but also the lexico-semantic resources they are characterized by. Forty newspaper reports on ND conflicts (20 from four ND-based newspapers— The Tide, New Waves, The Pointer and Pioneer, and 20 from four national newspapers— The Punch, The Guardian, Vanguard and THISDAY), published between 2003 and 2009, were sampled and subjected to discourse analysis, with insights from van Dijk’s context models and aspects of relational semantics. Four types of role were identified, viz. interactional (embracing the participants in conflict), communicative (relating to the production roles), social (involving group membership), and instrumental (dealing with the entities utilized in actualizing specific goals). The cognitive foci of these roles are associated with participants’ goals and beliefs, and these inform the participants’ position and hence role in the conflict events. Linguistically, the interactional and social roles are marked by synonymous and converse lexical items, while the communicative and instrumental roles are indexed by homonymous and antonymous lexical features. The findings corroborate the fact that there is an interaction between participant roles and cognitive relations in the ND conflict events reported in Nigerian newspapers.

The broad theoretical underpinning of this paper is that food is a vital part of the second-order signifying modes in literary texts. Its definite thesis, in relation to the age-long debates on power dichotomy between male and female gender, is that while men merely enjoy and noisily exercise social power sustained by patriarchy, which is a contrivance, women possess a great deal of authentic powers usually not overtly acknowledged. These theoretical and ideological (thesis) statements respectively are demonstrated through a semiotic reading and analysis of four foodspheres in J.P. Clark’s The Wives’ Revolt, using the critical lenses of gastro-criticism, social semiotics and textual cooperation theory. Through these analytical lenses, the paper recognises that each of the foodspheres in this play is a hypertext which transcodes or interogates the diverse gendered power relation hypotexts embodied in religious, socio-cultural and institutional semiospheres. It concludes that the power that women exercise in food preparation and administration, as signified in some of the foodspheres analysed, is a semiotic prototype of the many other unnoticed powers, through which the female homo rule the world.

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