Bibian Ugoala
I have a B A, M A (2007, 2009)and a PhD (2006) in English language from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. My research interests are in Critical Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis and Popular Culture. I currently lecture at National Open University of Nigeria. I teach Communication courses and Speech writing courses to students Online.
Supervisors: Prof. Austin Nwagbara supervised my PhD thesis
Supervisors: Prof. Austin Nwagbara supervised my PhD thesis
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Papers by Bibian Ugoala
This study investigates the semantic and textual cohesive devices in president Buhari’s directive to the Service Chiefs with respect to quashing Boko Haram menace in the country. The study aims to highlight the communicative strategies and semantic relationships that helped president Buhari to achieve cohesion in his directive to the Service Chiefs. The directive which was downloaded online was specifically given to the Service Chiefs at their decoration ceremony in August, 2015. The study adopted the content analytical method and the Language Expectancy Theory by Burgoon, Jones and Stewart (1975). Language Expectancy Theory explains how violations of lexical, syntactic and semantic expectations will either facilitate or inhibit an audience's receptivity to persuasive utterances. President Buhari’s directive to the Service Chiefs was divided into segments for ease of analysis. The analysis centred on the identification of president Buhari’s lexical choices, semantic relations and how the words were related and linked together to create cohesion in his directive to the Service Chiefs. The analysis focused on how president Buhari deployed different sense relations to engage and maintain the Service Chiefs’ interest, as well as evoke their empathy. One of the findings of this study is that there exist identifiable semantic relationships among words in president Buhari’s directive to the Service Chiefs. These semantic relations (synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, hyponym and meronym) helped president Buhari to convey his thoughts and ideas to the primary target of his speech – the Service Chiefs.
Keywords: cohesion; language; Nigeria; power; sense relations; terrorism.
Television news reports are seen as one of the most complex forms of news discourses that combine multiple semiotic elements. This paper aimed at revealing the ways through which the non-congruency of the semiotic elements of television news report such as verbal, news tickers and pictorial elements can skew the meaning of a news report. The news report which constitute the data for this study was obtained in 2011 when the Nigeria Government and labour had a long and protracted argument whether to, or not to increase the national minimum wage. The study uses a multi-modal analysis which has developed within the frame of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology. It explores the intertextual elements in the verbal and visual contents as implicit tools through which meanings can be skewed. The transcribed verbal and visual aspects of the data were divided into 6 excerpts and analyzed using Fairclough’s concept of intertextuality. Thus, the results of the present study showed that a television outfit could pass across perceived ideas and notions through building in and encoding different ideas in the verbal and nonverbal elements of a news report. In television discourse, there is an assumption that the congruency of verbal and nonverbal messages is important for accurate and persuasive communication. This paper reveals that in most cases this is not so. It is recommended that television outfits in the rendition of news, should ensure that the verbal, news tickers and pictorial elements of news report are congruent.
Keywords: news tickers, news perception, verbal, footage shots, national minimum wage
The study investigates the verbal and visual signifying elements as means by which television outfits through their news anchors and correspondents enact and express power relations in television news reportage. It explores the verbal as well as the non-verbal elements, and how they interact as semiotic systems in the creation of meaning. The content analytical research method was adopted. The focus was on the ensemble of the verbal and visuals discursive strategies which characterize the first recorded suicide bombing in Nigeria as presented by Channels Television. The report which comprised verbal and visual elements were transcribed and put in tables. The verbal elements were put in table A; the corresponding visuals were described in column B, snapshots of the visuals described in column B are presented after the columns and are labeled as plates. The verbal and visual elements were subjected to dual analytical paradigm developed within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multimodality. The study reveals the various ways through which television news anchors and correspondents subtly tuck in ideological points of view in news report. The findings show that through argumentative strategies and constantly juxtaposing identical structures verbally and visually, television outfit foregrounds a particular point of view, thus cueing the audience into reasoning along with the television outfit’s point of view. One consequence of this is that wrong ideas and messages are ventilated. In view of this, it is concluded that as much as possible television outfits should ensure close synchrony between the verbal and visual components of news reports. The study among other things recommends that television outfits should as much as possible obliterate views and ideas both in words and visuals that are likely to colour the audiences’ understanding and interpretation of the incidents reported.
Keywords: Critical discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, power relations, verbal and visual, footage shots.
The world over including Nigeria, the issue of extrajudicial killings has remained in the front burner of public discourse; concerned and affected individuals use different means and methods such as the use of the hashtag to express and register social protest regarding this. This study examines how the visual and the linguistic elements in the placards examined combine to pass across the meanings in the placards. Through the prism of Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s multimodality, the study sees the hashtag as an emerging form of discourse, an action driver rhetorical strategy and as a technique to critique social injustice. The objectives of the study are: to reveal the interplay of semiotic resources in creating meaning in the placards under study and to reveal the innovative syntactic patterning of the hashtagged messages as forms through which meaning can be expressed. The data examined in this study are seven online placards’ messages with the hashtag about the killings in Benue State of Nigeria collected over a six-month period. The study found that the placards include the greatest amount of information in the most economical way, while at the same time delivering a cogent message that is immediately and easily understood. The hashtag, though elitist, is gradually finding its way to the grassroots people. The paper recommends that innovations which are human friendly in passing across grievances should be encouraged rather than people using hostile means and tools to register protest.
This study investigates the semantic and textual cohesive devices in president Buhari’s directive to the Service Chiefs with respect to quashing Boko Haram menace in the country. The study aims to highlight the communicative strategies and semantic relationships that helped president Buhari to achieve cohesion in his directive to the Service Chiefs. The directive which was downloaded online was specifically given to the Service Chiefs at their decoration ceremony in August, 2015. The study adopted the content analytical method and the Language Expectancy Theory by Burgoon, Jones and Stewart (1975). Language Expectancy Theory explains how violations of lexical, syntactic and semantic expectations will either facilitate or inhibit an audience's receptivity to persuasive utterances. President Buhari’s directive to the Service Chiefs was divided into segments for ease of analysis. The analysis centred on the identification of president Buhari’s lexical choices, semantic relations and how the words were related and linked together to create cohesion in his directive to the Service Chiefs. The analysis focused on how president Buhari deployed different sense relations to engage and maintain the Service Chiefs’ interest, as well as evoke their empathy. One of the findings of this study is that there exist identifiable semantic relationships among words in president Buhari’s directive to the Service Chiefs. These semantic relations (synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, hyponym and meronym) helped president Buhari to convey his thoughts and ideas to the primary target of his speech – the Service Chiefs.
Keywords: cohesion; language; Nigeria; power; sense relations; terrorism.
Television news reports are seen as one of the most complex forms of news discourses that combine multiple semiotic elements. This paper aimed at revealing the ways through which the non-congruency of the semiotic elements of television news report such as verbal, news tickers and pictorial elements can skew the meaning of a news report. The news report which constitute the data for this study was obtained in 2011 when the Nigeria Government and labour had a long and protracted argument whether to, or not to increase the national minimum wage. The study uses a multi-modal analysis which has developed within the frame of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology. It explores the intertextual elements in the verbal and visual contents as implicit tools through which meanings can be skewed. The transcribed verbal and visual aspects of the data were divided into 6 excerpts and analyzed using Fairclough’s concept of intertextuality. Thus, the results of the present study showed that a television outfit could pass across perceived ideas and notions through building in and encoding different ideas in the verbal and nonverbal elements of a news report. In television discourse, there is an assumption that the congruency of verbal and nonverbal messages is important for accurate and persuasive communication. This paper reveals that in most cases this is not so. It is recommended that television outfits in the rendition of news, should ensure that the verbal, news tickers and pictorial elements of news report are congruent.
Keywords: news tickers, news perception, verbal, footage shots, national minimum wage
The study investigates the verbal and visual signifying elements as means by which television outfits through their news anchors and correspondents enact and express power relations in television news reportage. It explores the verbal as well as the non-verbal elements, and how they interact as semiotic systems in the creation of meaning. The content analytical research method was adopted. The focus was on the ensemble of the verbal and visuals discursive strategies which characterize the first recorded suicide bombing in Nigeria as presented by Channels Television. The report which comprised verbal and visual elements were transcribed and put in tables. The verbal elements were put in table A; the corresponding visuals were described in column B, snapshots of the visuals described in column B are presented after the columns and are labeled as plates. The verbal and visual elements were subjected to dual analytical paradigm developed within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multimodality. The study reveals the various ways through which television news anchors and correspondents subtly tuck in ideological points of view in news report. The findings show that through argumentative strategies and constantly juxtaposing identical structures verbally and visually, television outfit foregrounds a particular point of view, thus cueing the audience into reasoning along with the television outfit’s point of view. One consequence of this is that wrong ideas and messages are ventilated. In view of this, it is concluded that as much as possible television outfits should ensure close synchrony between the verbal and visual components of news reports. The study among other things recommends that television outfits should as much as possible obliterate views and ideas both in words and visuals that are likely to colour the audiences’ understanding and interpretation of the incidents reported.
Keywords: Critical discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, power relations, verbal and visual, footage shots.
The world over including Nigeria, the issue of extrajudicial killings has remained in the front burner of public discourse; concerned and affected individuals use different means and methods such as the use of the hashtag to express and register social protest regarding this. This study examines how the visual and the linguistic elements in the placards examined combine to pass across the meanings in the placards. Through the prism of Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s multimodality, the study sees the hashtag as an emerging form of discourse, an action driver rhetorical strategy and as a technique to critique social injustice. The objectives of the study are: to reveal the interplay of semiotic resources in creating meaning in the placards under study and to reveal the innovative syntactic patterning of the hashtagged messages as forms through which meaning can be expressed. The data examined in this study are seven online placards’ messages with the hashtag about the killings in Benue State of Nigeria collected over a six-month period. The study found that the placards include the greatest amount of information in the most economical way, while at the same time delivering a cogent message that is immediately and easily understood. The hashtag, though elitist, is gradually finding its way to the grassroots people. The paper recommends that innovations which are human friendly in passing across grievances should be encouraged rather than people using hostile means and tools to register protest.