Media Communication and Language Use: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Selected News on Politics

Abstract

Contexts to the study and description of language. The reason behind this is that language cannot exist on its own and be meaningful unless we relate its study to social practices. Of course, the essence of its existence is to serve both personal and social needs because different peoples and groups in different professions and societies have different ways by which they express themselves in communication. Discourse analysis was born of this ̶ as there is a need to probe how contexts shape the use of a particular language different from the rule-governed form of it. Thus, this study examines language use in media communication. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA henceforth) with Fairclough’s three dimensional model (3-D Model) of CDA is used for the analysis of the selected news on politics. Fairclough’s three-dimensional approach to CDA sees a text as a communication medium comprising three interrelated activities viz description, interpretation and explanation. Description is the identification of the formal features of a text. Interpretation identifies the relationship between the formal features of the text and interaction by considering the experiential, relational and expressive functions of the identified linguistic features in the text. Explanation which is the last stage is concerned with the relationship between interaction and the social practices, that is, it focuses on how the societal beliefs shape the use of language in communication. The findings of this study show that news broadcasters inform people of pressing issues, attract their attention in the course of communication, and state facts and reinforce the stated information in the mind of the listeners or readers through the use of a well organised and manipulated form of language. Based on the above premise, it could be said that social conditions and episodes that people encounter at a particular time influence their use of language and it varies from one profession to another. For instance, the news broadcaster of the selected news on politics uses linguistic features such as passive sentences, processes, modalities, first and third person pronouns, adjectives, metaphors to depict his/her experiences about the world around him, to establish a kind of relationship with the audience and to explicate the episodes revolved around the 2023 pre-election period in Nigeria and its effects on all the Nigerian populace.