This paper investigates the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) of Lati inu aka aka Biodun/Kayode (LIABK), a Nigerian secondary gatekeeping radio news programme, with the aim of indicating the stages of the genre where conversational humour typically occurs, and then it analyses humour types in the data through the neo-Gricean concept of untruthfulness and pragmatic act theory. The data for the study constitute a ten hour audio recording of Lati inu aka aka Biodun/Kayode from two radio stations in Ekiti and Ondo States, South-Western Nigeria. The GSP of LIABK is constituted by five obligatory elements: Opening (O), Advertisement (A), Pre-news Presentation (PnP), News Presentation (NP) and Closing (C). The genre-based expectations for O, PnP and C, and then NP are to provide entertainment and information to the listeners respectively. Thus, humour typically occurs in the O, PnP, and C stages of the programme, and rarely occurs in NP. Four humour types are indicated: song-as-humour, absurdity, joint fantasising and speaker-meaning-telic humour respectively. While song-as-humour resists being neatly categorised as autotelic humour, absurdity and joint fantasising are easily characterised as thus. The pragmatic act analysis reveals the incremental, sequential and co-constructed nature of the humour types. Furthermore, the pragmemes of entertainment and offering of opinion by the news presenters constitute the affordances or genre-based expectations that constrain the social activities that constitute LIABK. The study contributes to the scholarship on secondary gatekeeping in Nigeria broadcast media, conversational humour and pragmatics.

This chapter develops an elaborated Pragmatic Act Model (ePAM) and applies it to humorous interactions in students' text chats in a Nigerian university. The model draws insights from Giora's Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH), Mey's Pragmatic Act theory and incorporates current issues in pragmatic theorising such as the dialectics between a priori and co-constructed, emergent intention. The data for the study is got from three departmental chat room interactions in Federal University of Technology, Akure. Four humour types are analysed: canned jokes, punning/wordplay, question and answer jokes, and hyperbole/overstatement. Similarly, five pragmatic acts are performed in the identified humour types, namely, satirising, eliciting laughter, electioneering, teasing and overstating. In each of the humour types, the pragmatic mechanism drawn upon to comprehend the joke and to perform the pragmatic acts is indicated. Overall, the chapter argues that the effective appreciation of any humour act would require a pragmatically and culturally enriched context.

Religious texts have been examined by scholars from different theoretical standpoints. However, a close survey of the literature reveals that little attention has been paid to Christian apologetics from a linguistic perspective. Also, an examination of studies along the lines of Generic Structure Potential (henceforth GSP) shows that the genre status of Christian apologetics has not been indicated. This gap provides the motivation for this paper, which investigates the GSP of Christian apologetics. Twenty texts written by various key contemporary apologetic writers were purposively selected for the study. The following generic structure potential catalogue was generated: The paper reveals that the elements of the GSP concertedly work to advance, argue for or defend the Christian belief system. The paper also suggests that the model could be applied to other forms of apologetic instances.

This study investigates how legislators utilise proximisation strategies to construct ideological worldviews in Nigerian Senate debates about democratic consolidation and the legitimacy of the legislature. For data, samples were purposively drawn from a 1.9 million-word corpus of Nigerian Senate debates constructed for a broader research and subjected to qualitative discourse analysis. The analysis reveals that legislators’ discursive acts prompt the conceptual organisation of the discourse space such that the activities of the executive are construed to be inimical to democratic consolidation and the legitimacy of the legislature, whereas legislators construe themselves positively as resilient defenders of democracy and the legislative institution. Through proximisation strategies, legislators engage in the ideological discourse of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation relative to the executive. This paper contributes to our understanding of the tenuous and polarised relationship amongst arms of government under a presidential political system in an emerging democracy.

Chinua Achebe's memoir, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, caused quite a stir in the Nigerian polity when it was published in 2012. This chapter, therefore, examined the metaphors used by the author to construe the concepts of nation and the (Nigerian civil) war in the memoir. Theoretical insights were drawn from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Primary metaphor theory and Conceptual blending theory to analyze the metaphors identified. Two central metaphors were used by the author to construe the concept of nation, namely, the DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY and the SCAPEGOAT metaphors. Metaphors for war included WAR AS NIGHTMARE, AS A TRIANGLE GAME, and AS A SERIES OF VIOLENT CRIMES respectively. The metaphor system highlighted in this chapter indicates that bad governance, corruption and ethnic politics were critical to the failure of Nigeria's first democratic experience (1960-1966) and the resultant civil war of 1967-1970.