A PRAGMATIC AND LEXICAL ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL ADVERTORIALS IN SELECTED NIGERIAN NEWSPAPERS: A CASE STUDY OF PRESIDENT GOODLUCK JONATHAN

Pragmatics and lexical choice are central to understanding how public discourse constructs, negotiates, and naturalizes political meaning. In particular, political advertorials strategically deploy language to persuade, align, and legitimize power. Despite growing scholarship on political discourse, the pragmatic and lexical patterns of Nigerian newspaper advertorials, especially those centered on individual political actors, have received limited attention. This study fills this gap by examining the pragmatic acts and lexical choices in selected Nigerian newspaper advertorials featuring President Goodluck Jonathan, with the aim of revealing how language is used to shape political perception. This study investigates the dominant speech act types and salient lexical relations that characterize these texts. This study is anchored on Bach Harnish’s model of speech act theory, which is justified by his explanatory power in uncovering illocutiomary intended meanings beyond the surface structures of the speaker and the inference of the hearers based on mutual contextual beliefs. Using a qualitative content-analytic methodology, purposively selected advertorials from the Guardian, the punch, and Nation newspapers from September, 2010 and April, 2011 are analyzed. Findings revealed a high frequency of constatives, commissives, directives, and acknowledgements, reflecting information-giving, promise-making, persuasion, and solidarity-building strategies. Lexical analysis shows the strategic use of emotively charged words, synonyms, antonyms, and polysemous expressions to project competence, empathy, and national unity. This study concludes that pragmatic acts and lexical choices jointly function as persuasive tools in political advertorials. This study recommends increased critical linguistic awareness among readers and further comparative studies across political actors and periods.