Taxis and Logico-Semantic Relations in Selected News Articles On Insecurity in Nigeria

Abstract

The media increasingly creates and reports peoples’ experiences of insecurity in divers news reports on insecurity in Nigeria. Previous studies on media discourse and insecurity in Nigeria have focused largely on discourse construction and representations without full attention to clausal structures and logical sequence of information in the selected media reports. This study, therefore examines the clause complexes as the meaning domain and clause connectors as cohesive devices in selected news articles on insecurity in Nigeria with a view to establishing the inter-clausal structures and logical sequence of ideas in the reportage. The clause complex of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) which sees clause as the meaning domain in a text, served as framework in the study. The main focus was on three categories: banditry, farmer/herders crisis and ethnic rivalry. Twenty-one news articles were purposively selected for their relevance to the study. The findings revealed the hypotactict constructions dominate the selected news articles. The dependent clauses were employed to amplify the meaning in the dominant clauses, and to give circumstantial information about the process rather than the participants. Also, status of clause was used to establish level of importance ascribed to the unit of information it depicted. Activities of the bandits, kidnappers and killers were often written in main clauses which gave credence to the act of insecurity in the country, while efforts of the government often came in subordinate clauses, apart from those that talked about the process. The paper concludes that news articles displays hypotactic structures than paratactic because it allows writers to describe and give circumstantial information.