A pragma-semiotic analysis of ‘Occupy NigeriaudGroup’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidyudremoval in Nigeria

摘要

In response to the fuel subsidy removal by the Nigerian governmentudon 1st January 2012, Occupy Nigeria Group, a protest movement,udembarked on different mass strike actions anduddemonstrations including online activism. The civil resistantudactions geared towards reversal of petrol pump price increaseuddeployed certain verbal and visual means in portraying the governmentudand its actions. Previous studies on online protest discourseudin Nigeria have adopted sociolinguistic and discourseudanalysis approaches in examining issues of identity and selfdeterminationudwith little attention paid to visual-pragmaticudstrategies in representing people and their actions. This article,udtherefore, undertakes a pragma-semiotic investigation of ‘OccupyudNigeria Group’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal inudNigeria with a view to examining verbal and visual modes of representingudpeople and their actions in the event. Seventy-twoudonline protest posts purposively sampled from the groups’ pageudare used to identify and categorize various pragma-semiotic elementsudand functions in the representations using insights fromudMey’s (2001) pragmatic act and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006)udmultimodal discourse analysis. It is observed that the verbal modeudcomplements the visual in projecting the demands and resistanceudof the group. The posts which are classified under six semanticudfields, namely divine intervention, security consciousness, innovation,udexaggeration, defamation and abusive placards have variousudvisual-pragmatic strategies such as prayer, negative labelling,udhumour, mockery, abuse, passionate and fierce appeal, includingudphoto trick. The strategies correspond to the dominant pragmaticudacts such as demonstrative, assertive, suppository, condoling andudstipulating. All these acts are presented within the Nigerian sociopoliticaludand linguistic context