A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Naming and Describing in Nigeria Budget Speeches

Abstract

The study identified and analyzed naming and describing (a linguistic feature) of budget speeches by the state governors in Nigeria and also described the themes and content of the speeches. It also discussed the implications of the underlying political ideologies, inherent in the speeches and related the themes and the stylistic tools to the Nigerian socio-economic situation. This was with a view to characterizing budget speech discourse in Nigeria and advancing the knowledge on its socio-semantic imports. The study used both primary and secondary sources of data. The primary data were obtained from selected state governors’ budget speeches in Nigeria. Budget speeches delivered in 2012 were selected because it was the year the country experienced the removal of oil subsidy without its inclusion in the budget. The data for this research consisted of twelve (12) budget speeches delivered by state governors in the country. The secondary data were obtained from books, journal articles and the internet. The data were analysed using Jeffries’ critical stylistic approach. The results showed that the producers of budget speech used wide range of linguistic features to express their stand point exemplified by naming and describing. The choice of words also extends to pragmatic concepts. The analysis of the linguistic features and the description of the themes and content of the speeches revealed that all the budget speeches used for the study were named or christened one way or the other such as budget of restoration, budget of transformation, budget of rescue, among others. It was discovered that positive naming was extensively used to bring about positive attitude towards the situations in the country. The themes and the stylistic tools were also related to the socio-economic situation of the country. The study concluded that governors utilized various semantic devices to represent political ideologies in different slogans using naming and describing in the financial statements of their states. Also, critical stylistics helped to give useful insight into the political dynamics of budget speech presentation.