A Metafunction Analysis of Selected Public Service Advertisements of Ten Federal Agencies in Nigeria

Abstract

This study was set out to provide a detailed Metafunction analysis of Public Advertisements in Nigeria and to show how the metafunctions characterise the public service advertisement as a special form of advertisement. Ten different public service advertisements by various Federal Government Agencies were analysed for transitivity, mood and theme which are the major systems in experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar. The findings reveal that the choice of systems- process, mood and theme- adopted by the agencies concerned are carefully chosen to avoid misinformation and misinterpretation by the public. The writers try disguising authorial presence in order to present information accurately. We concluded that public service advertisements are characteristically coded in a way to present information as fact without personal colouration or emotional attachments which is the ideology of information giving.