Analysis of thematic prominence in selected Nigerian inaugural political speeches

Abstract

The paper analyses the thematic structure of two inaugural speeches of Nigerian past leaders using Halliday and Matthiessen’s formulation of the lexicogrammatical feature of Theme located in the textual metafunction in systemic functional grammar. It specifically focuses on the speakers’ strategies of fronting certain lexical items clause-initially to construe certain meanings in favour of others. For instance, the choice of unmarked theme where the subject conflates with the theme are more prevalent in utterances where the speakers would want to take credit for positive actions and audience acknowledgement, or where they would want to assign modal responsibility to their audience for negative actions, while marked theme seem to feature more in cases that are indeterminate, illusive and less than likely to be realizable goals. These choices serve as ideological tools aimed at legitimating the hegemonies of the power elite in order to manufacture the consent of their electorate. The work concludes that the textual metafunction realized in the lexicogrammatical feature of Theme serve as a resource for speakers to manipulate meanings to suit their ideological ends and calls for critical language awareness which locates the work within the critical discourse analysis (CDA) research paradigm.

Keywords: Theme, textual metafunction, critical discourse analysis, power, ideology, critical language awareness, topical theme, marked theme, unmarked theme