📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
Online news editorials have become a primary arena for the ideological construction of the Nigerian state in the digital age, and the linguistic strategies through which state power is evaluated, critiqued, and legitimized in this space have significant implications for public political consciousness and democratic culture. This study critically analyses the representation of the Nigerian state in editorials published by six prominent Nigerian online news platforms between 2022 and 2024. A corpus of two hundred and forty editorials, forty from each platform, was constructed and subjected to critical linguistic analysis examining ideological square constructions, evaluation language systems, transitivity patterns, and intertextual reference. Evaluation language analysis reveals a predominantly negative evaluation orientation across the corpus, with negative epistemic and ethical assessments of state institutional performance accounting for sixty-seven percent of all identified evaluation instances. Transitivity analysis reveals that state actors are consistently positioned as instigators of material processes with negative outcome valence and as implicated goals of mental processes with desiderative content, constructing a narrative of a state that acts harmfully and is desired to act better. The ideological square analysis shows limited positive in-group construction of the state, distinguishing the editorial discourse of online platforms from the state-validating tendency of legacy print media identified in earlier Nigerian media studies. The study argues that online editorial discourse constitutes an emerging counter-hegemonic discursive formation in Nigerian public communication. Keywords: state representation, online news editorials, critical linguistic analysis, Nigeria, media discourse.
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