A Systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis of Meaning Making in Nigerian Political Campaign Discourse

Systemic Functional Linguistics provides one of the most analytically comprehensive frameworks for examining meaning-making in political discourse, relating linguistic choices simultaneously to ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions in ways that illuminate the multi-dimensional nature of political communication. This dissertation applies a systemic functional linguistic analysis to Nigerian political campaign discourse, developing an original multi-metafunctional analytical framework for the Nigerian political campaign genre and using it to examine campaign texts across multiple modes and contexts. The empirical corpus encompasses manifesto documents, campaign rally transcripts, broadcast political advertisements, and social media campaign posts from the 2019 and 2023 general elections, representing all six geopolitical zones and the three principal political parties. Each metafunctional analysis is conducted in full before cross-metafunctional integration, allowing both independent assessment of each meaning dimension and analysis of metafunctional tension and alignment in specific text types. Ideational analysis reveals that economic development processes are the most systematically represented material process category across parties and election cycles, while security deterioration processes are increasingly prominent in the 2023 cycle. Interpersonal analysis documents a systematic shift toward high solidarity tenor constructions in social media campaign posts compared to formal manifesto register, a shift that SFL allows to be specified in terms of mood, modality, and appraisal resource deployment. Textual analysis reveals theme selection patterns that construct different topical priorities across party and regional campaign materials. The dissertation's theoretical contribution includes a Nigerian political campaign genre model specified in SFL terms. Keywords: systemic functional linguistics, political campaign discourse, Nigeria, meaning-making, genre analysis.