A corpus-based stylistic analysis of selected Radio Nigeria network news commentaries on nation building

Abstract

The way the media interpret societal phenomena is pivotally instrumental to the economic, political, and socio-cultural disposition of the citizenry. Radio Nigeria has employed news commentaries for decades as a veritable platform for educating its mammoth audience and shaping their views on topical national issues. The paper assesses the stylistic peculiarities of the selected Radio Nigeria network news commentaries focused on nation building with a view to exposing how the convergence between form and content has intensified the propagation of the ideologies of the writers. It argues that the application of stylistic devices to news commentaries is not an exercise in futility but an essential complement that accentuates the informative, persuasive, emotive, and aesthetic value of the discourse. The corpus of primary data comprises five commentaries extracted from Pendants of Rhythm: A Selection of Radio Nigeria Network News Commentaries using non-random purposeful sampling and analyzed using descriptive method. The analysis yields salient stylistic devices such as simple diction enhanced by lexical relations, profuse use of complex sentences with anticipatory and trailing constituents, complex noun and verb phrases, balanced constructions, figures of speech, rhetorical question, repetition and tone. These collectively engender a satisfactory actualization of the writers’ communicative goals.