Data

Table 7 below shows the overall data of this thesis. The first seven coup speeches will be used in the analysis of representation and interpellation while the other two will be used in argumentation and explanation. The one for argumentation is to show how one of the coups construct his perception of a coup against their government. It is interesting to see how the perception of a coup and taking over power is seen from the perspective of one who makes two coup speeches and make one counter coup speech. The counter coup speech will be analysed in argumentation. The other speech (Lugard's) will be analyzed intertextually with Nzegwu's.

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Coup announcer Year No of words

Nzegwu 1966 872

Garba 1975 229

Dimka 1976 169

Abacha 1984 686

Dogonyaro 1985 754

Orkah 1990 1669

Abacha 1993 894

Abacha 1990, (counter coup

speech)

280

Lugard 1903,(colonial

proclamation speech)

761

Table 5: Coup speeches with years and number of words

In short, this research will be carried out on the coup speeches made in Nigeria between 1966 and 1993, a short counter coup speech and one by Lord Lugard in 1903. Essentially, there are seven speeches announced. The seven speeches successfully announced are within the public domain are those to constitute the basic data of this research plus the other two. All the speeches are in English as it is the official language of Nigeria and are obtainable in books, websites and blogs. The speeches here have all been acquired from this website http://maxsiollun.wordpress.com/great-speeches-in-nigerias-history.In particular six of the speeches are obtained from Obotetukudo (2011). The usage of this data, as I have said in the introduction, is important because it represents the overall coup speeches in Nigeria as far as military leadership is concerned. I have tried to vet the data through checking the contents against other websites and publications to ensure that they

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are textually verbatim, even in punctuation and paragraphing with the originals announced and proclaimed by the military.

The choice of the speeches i.e., the coup announcements or what Wiking (1983) calls

“initial declarations” are ideologically very important because they give the justifications and reasons for the coup amid the tension to succeed. Subsequent discussions may not capture the nuances and intricacies of the first announcements. Wiking sees these coup speeches in terms of performatives themselves as their announcements at the same time double as the take-over of power. In essence, the initial statements capture the struggle, the need to make points and the apprehension to succeed manifest in the speeches. Other statements that come after the success of power take-over may not be made with the urgency and anxiety of the first ones. Success is also very much important as failure translates to capital punishment of mutinous parties. Another speech that I consider is the Abacha counter speech against the coup attempt by Orkah. Abacha has announced two coup speeches, but his counter coup speech is of grave importance in the understanding of ideology and the use of language in the construction of realities. This other counter coup statement is put in the part of practical reasoning especially in emphasizing the aspect of floating signifiers, and emotive conjugation.

The other speech is that of Lord Lugard that is compared with that of Nzegwu. This speech was the first colonial coordinated speech made by Lord Lugard especially to the conquered people of the Sokoto Caliphate. It was made to introduce his indirect rule system. Though in between there is about sixty years gap between Lugard’s and Nzegwu’s speech, the orientation, perspective and world view of the military have not changed from their colonial progenitors.

3.4.2 Corpus linguistics

My data will be sorted for easy and more comprehensive lexical analysis using the tools of corpus linguistics. The use of corpus methods is necessary due to some criticisms against CDA. CDA has been accused of cherry picking data to suit a predetermined research expectation. Widdowson (1995) critiques CDA on the basis of its pre-textual partiality which constrains a holistic consideration of a given text. He holds that this interpretative

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partiality inevitably leaves a vast amount of text unanalyzed and unaccounted for. This

‘deficiency’ can be remedied by the adoption of corpus linguistic resources with their mechanisms for the sorting of whole scale data for analysis (Baker 2006). Also, KhsoraviNik (2008) maintains that by merging quantitative efficiency with qualitative theoretical underpinning, the accusation of arbitrariness and the usage of fragmentary data will be clearly solved. Mautner (2007) also contends that while CL sorts data quantitatively, CDA reaches out beyond to ideological context; that is CL will sort a large amount of data into analyzable patterns that will throw up interesting leads for ideological analysis.

The data will be subjected to ‘concordance’ analysis. The software to be used for this analysis is a freeware concordancer called AntConc 3.3.0 obtained from http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html. Although the corpus is not very large, it includes all the Nigerian coup speeches, and thus the total number of speeches announced.

Concordance and wordlist generation will be very important in this research and will be majorly used here. Baker (2006,71) defines a concordance as “simply a list of all occurrences of a particular search term in a corpus presented within the context that they occur; usually a few words to the left and right of the search term”. The concordance feature will particularly show collocational associations that will help in discerning a particular pattern of use (lexical and syntactic). The analysis of concordance lines can enhance the understanding and essence of certain salient features in a text. Pronouns, for example, which are very important in political discourse will be discerned along with their collocations or co-texts. Using, say, ‘we’ followed by ‘are’ one can see what relational processes come after ‘are’. Though as advised by Baker (2006), an analyst should be careful not to involve anaphoric and cataphoric references. So, concordance can enhance the statistical validity of transitivity system. In the aspect of speech acts especially performatives, concordance will realize them easily, especially where ‘hereby’ is used.

Hereby is a performative ushering adverb. I have shown this in my analysis.

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1 driven by a belief in himself, his countrymen, and love for his country, he accepted

abacha 1993.

2 in which disturbances Fellow countrymen and women and comrades at arms, I

abacha 1983.

3 Fellow countrymen and women, I, Brigadier Sani

Abacha, of

abacha 1983.

4 Fellow countrymen and women, I, Colonel Joseph garba 1975.

5 wanted people escape. Fellow countrymen and women, the change in government has

abacha 1983.

6 to see displayed in public. My dear

countrymen, no citizen should have anything to fear,

nzegwu 1966.

7 I appeal to you, fellow countrymen, particularly my colleagues in arms to refrain

dogonyaro 1985.

8 closed till further notice. Fellow countrymen, this has been a bloodless operation and

garba 1975 9 My dear countrymen, this is the end of this speech. nzegwu 1966 1

0

of the people. My dear countrymen, you will hear, and probably see a

nzegwu 1966

Table 6: Lines with ‘countrymen’ in the speeches

In Table 6, for example, the use of countrymen and sometimes with women may reveal either a sexist attitude by some or sensitivity to sexist issues by others. Abacha, for instance, may be shown to be much more politically correct as far as gender issues are concerned than the others. And also, the same lines may also reveal certain aspects of intertextuality.

As we are dealing with texts diachronically, there are cases of mutual reinforcement of terminology too. The first coup by Nzegwu uses the term countrymen and this serves as a template for others to use in terms of synthetic camaraderie with the citizens. Also if you look to the left of the search term countrymen, you will see this social levelling with the term fellow which may also be reinforced through use. More on aspects intertextuality shall be discussed in chapter 5.

Patterns of use like fellow countrymen or the variant fellow countrymen and women may lead to lexical priming. The persistent use of particular lexical items together has the

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possible effect of priming this pair in human memory, and essentially objectifying them.

Essentially, “priming leads to a speaker unintentionally reproducing some aspect of the language, and that aspect, thereby reproduced, in turn primes the hearer” (Hoey 2005,9).

This pattern of use will indicate attitudes and may have the potential to create cognitive impact on the target audience.

Collocations in my data will greatly help in viewing lexical primings as well. So, while CL provides concrete linguistic realizations which may construct certain cognitions by examining a huge chunk of data, CDA can deconstruct and investigate how such social cognition is constructed through semantic alignments of propositions and topics. Such association would reveal further both semantic prosodies and semantic preferences of a given text. Wordlist, for its part, will help in showing the basic preoccupation and theme of a given discourse by its demonstrating usage of high-frequency words.