Advanced fee fraud is a common form of online financial scam on the Internet. Previous researchers have attempted a broad study of the nature and narrative features of this scam. The current study attempts a linguistic analysis of 200 samples of advanced fee scam emails and examines specifically how modal auxiliary verbs are used to express certainty or uncertainty in the scam. For instance, modal verbs are commonly used to direct, promise, threaten and even serve politeness functions in scam emails. Deontic modal verbs such as "will" is found to be the most frequent verb in the data and is manipulatively deployed at speaker-oriented level of discourse to express commitment on the part of the speaker and impose some obligation such as ensuring the interaction proposed in the letters remain secret. Findings from the study reveal that the manipulative use of modal verbs contributes to the success of the proposed scam.

Accounting for the double object construction has proved very difficult for scholars in the generative model. This may stem from the assumption that constituent structures of phrases and sentences are built only in a binary-branching hierarchical structure. In this article, theme-goal shift is seen as a direct consequence of the case assigning verb requiring its pronominal theme within its local domain.

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This study examined an emerging trend in Internet discourse as metaphorical constructs used by individuals for communication online. The Internet meme is an evolving trend used for satirical illustrations and expression of intents in multimodal ways. While previous studies have focused on verbal metaphors signaled by Internet discourse, none of these studies have examined the relevance of memes in communicative contexts. This study drew from conceptual metaphor theory of cognitive linguistics to investigate the use of visual metaphors across Twitter which reflected consumer's feelings on Jumia and Konga's Black Friday sales. Five tweets were selected at random from LALIGENS, VOL. 6(1), S/N 13, FEBRUARY, 2017 92 Copyright © IAARR, 2007 Indexed and Listed in AJOL & EBSCOhost ynaija.com, an online news blog for youths. Our study revealed that Internet memes serve as a strong rhetoric for ideological manipulations. This study will spur further research along the shores of Internet discourse.