Naming Strategies and Lexical Choices in Selected Newspaper Reports on Niger Delta Conflicts in Nigeria

The paper investigates the lexical choices in the newspaper reports on Niger Delta conflicts (NDCs) to establish their link to specific stylistic strategies used by the reporters in naming the entities in the discourse. Media studies on ND discourse have focused on the linguistic and contextual elements, neglecting the stylistic strategies that constrain linguistic choices in texts, thereby preventing a full understanding of how news texts are used to influence the readers’ perspectives of the conflicts. Forty reports on NDCs published between 2003 and 2007 were sampled from four ND-based newspapers (The Tide, New Waves, The Pointer and Pioneer) and subjected to stylistic analysis, with insights from Jeffries’ critical stylistics model and Osundare’s concepts of style and aspects of stylistics discourse. Two entities (the news actors and their activities) are named in the discourse through two naming strategies; namely, labelling and nominalising. Labelling is characterised by two lexical choices: emotive metaphors and qualifying adjectives used in evaluating the entities named. Nominalising is marked by two lexical patterns: plain and converted nominal forms employed to reduce the impact of the news actors’ activities. Thus, naming strategies in ND-based reports on NDCs, deployed through specific lexical choices and patterns, are motivated by reporters’ covert goal to influence the readers’ views of the conflicts.