📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
The linguistic construction of violent conflicts in news media carries ideological consequences by determining whose agency is foregrounded, whose suffering is rendered visible, and which causal explanations are legitimized. This study analyses transitivity patterns in news reports about farmer-herder conflicts published in three national Nigerian newspapers, The Guardian, Vanguard, and Daily Trust, between 2022 and 2024. A corpus of one hundred and twenty news articles, forty from each newspaper, was assembled and subjected to systemic functional linguistic transitivity analysis following Halliday's model as applied in recent critical discourse studies. Process type distribution, actor-goal assignment, and nominalization frequency were examined as key analytical dimensions. Results show significant differences in transitivity representation across the three newspapers, with Daily Trust using higher proportions of material processes that foreground herder communities as actors in violent events, while The Guardian shows a pattern of relational and mental processes that psychologize farmer responses. Nominalization of violent acts, which obscures actor agency, is significantly more frequent in all three newspapers when describing state security force actions than when describing civilian actions. The analysis reveals that the three newspapers construct systematically different ideological versions of the conflict through grammatical choices that appear neutral at the level of content but are consequential at the level of representation. Keywords: transitivity analysis, news discourse, farmer-herder conflict, Nigerian newspapers, critical discourse analysis.
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