Participant’s Roles and Cognitive Relations in Niger Delta Conflict News Discourse

Abstract

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.

A CiteSpace-based analysis of the application of Critical Discourse Analysis in news discourse

“…Therefore, the relationship between discourse and ideology are topics of considerable importance in the application of CDA in news discourse. Ononye et al (2021) explores media representation of news actors and ideologies on Niger Delta (ND) conflict discourse, revealing that there is an interaction between participant roles and cognitive relations in the ND conflict events reported in Nigerian newspapers. Moreover, recent years witnessed that the concept of the ‘depoliticization’ had become an increasingly focus for scholars in the field of CDA applied in news discourse.…”