A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of Pre-2019 General Elections Reports in Selected Nigerian Newspapers

ABSTRACT

Nigerian newspapers. This study is, however, corpus-based. Scholars have established that discourse is a kind of constructively conditioned public exercise. They believe that power relations exist at different levels of daily social interaction; revealing superiority or inferiority of interlocutors involved. News reports relating to the General Elections were electronically collated from the various newspaper platforms for a sizable language corpus. The name Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was selected and analysed purposively with the aid of Digital Humanities (DH) tool to observe the frequency of the acronym INEC and the textual context in which it occurs in five newspapers' reports about the electoral body via the authority it gives; the warning it issues, and the appeal it makes to the stakeholders. The paper finds out that the negative perceptions of many observers about the elections have actually been predicted by the various reports in the newspapers, prior to the elections. The paper concludes that reporters of news items do not account for issues concerning electoral body with the same constructive and destructive dispositions; and this gives room for subjectivity and prejudice.

KEYWORDS
Critical Discourse Analysis, corpus, INEC, Nigerian newspapers, reports 1. Introduction 1 One of the primary aims of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is to apply critical approach, position or stance on research works on writing and oral conversation. Because there are inherent ideologies in language use, it is the focus of CDA to exhume these ideologies, beliefs and perceptions as reflected in the use of language. CDA attempts to reveal and uncover the implicit ideas that are not immediately inferred while considering the discursive relations in a text. According to Van Dijk (1993), CDA typifies 'discourse investigative study that predominantly researches the manner social abuse of influence, supremacy and disparity are legislated, replicated and repelled by writing and speech in societal and governmental settings.' Scholars believe that CDA set out to expose 'the philosophical and irregular control systems that dwell in communal, governmental and traditional processes'. This shows that language elements have some kind of expressive power which can characterize and reveal any given communicative event just like how the Latin tag puts it: Stilus virum arguit (the style proclaims the man). This paper critically looks at the various reports about the 2019 General Elections in Nigeria through the lens of CDA by relying on the 'mining' power of linguistic corpora tool to bring about valid generalization of our findings.
Nigeria came into a fully democratic dispensation on the 29th day of May, 1999 and vested the authority to conduct free, fair and acceptable elections in the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This institution has since carried out about five presidential polls, heralding about three transitions from one regime to another. Preparatory to these elections, the INEC had engaged stakeholders in terms of enlightenment and moderation of campaigns, as well as giving the stakeholders proper education on the electoral guidelines. Preparations for the 2019 Nigeria general elections were not an exception. Therefore, this paper focuses on the various news reports by some Nigerian newspapers before and during the 2019 general elections.

Review of Literature
We cannot explain CDA without making allusions to aspects of literature by scholars such as Fowler et al. (1979) and Hodge and Kress (1993). Among other ideas these scholars hold is that the practice of human communication could lead to a perplexity of societal issues which methodical examination could unearth. For instance, an omitted structure in English passive sentences could be perceived as a philosophical technique for disguising or "mystifying" reference to an agent (Chilton, 2013). One of the primary ideologies of CDA is the significant reflection that the manipulation of human communication is a collective exercise which is known by societal systems and also helps in normalizing and altering that system concurrently. These scholars have established that discourse is a kind of constructively conditioned social practice. They believe that power relations exist at different levels of daily social interaction; revealing superiority or inferiority of interlocutors involved. In the words of Van Dijk (1993), 'the practice of control typically presumes cognitive administration, including the effect of knowledge and views which we intellectualize in terms of social cognition'. Therefore, CDA centres on both printed and oral systems of human communication with explicit attention to the way human communication operates, and its systems and structures that expose supremacy in a specified speech community.
In our contemporary society, one of the major channels of effective human management in terms of information dissemination is mass media. They provide access to reliable information about language for analyses and academic investigations through how human communication functions in news reports, advertisements, and editorials among others. Also, recently, the convergence of the media on the Internet gives unlimited access to the linguistic resources from the various media organisations. Though mass media have always been seen as disseminators of objective reportage, the influence of the ownership has over the years conditioned the affiliation of many media organisations to different opinions in the political sphere.
Computer-based analytical methods have contributed in no small measure, recently, to the study language. This includes the area of patterns of language use. This method has been used for a large number of researches on media, legal and political discourses. Notable in this area are Mulderring (2009), Koller and Mautner (2004), and Baker et al (2008). The combination (of CDA and computer-based analytical tools) has added many values to the research process including the possibility of having a huge language database, ensuring the accuracy of data, as well as saving time usually spent on analyses and processing of data.
Another work in this area of research is Taiwo (2007) which focuses on newspaper headlines in Nigeria. The paper submitted that connotations and denotations of human communication are obviously terminologies of representation of thoughts of the entities in a certain speech community. Also, Dahunsi (2016) investigated the reportage of some Nigerian newspapers with emphasis on political parties. He concluded that newspapers did not write proceedings and happenings of the incumbent government and its political party with the same constructive and destructive dispositions.

Methodology
There are many tabloids and newspapers in Nigeria that report both local and international activities. Five newspapers were selected using the yardstick of readership, as well as frequency of review on other media platforms. They are The Punch, The Tribune, The Nation, Daily Independence and The Guardian. All these newspapers, which are documented in Standard English on daily basis, are accessible on the Internet. Fifty (50) reports were randomly picked from each of these newspapers. This gave us a total of two hundred and fifty (250) in our corpus.

Method of Corpus Creation
A corpus of 400,000 words was built for each of the newspapers making 2,000,000 words. It also covered between June 2018 and February 2019. The reports were sourced primarily from the websites of the newspapers. These reports and news were not articles written by independent writers or freelance journalists but write-ups from the ombudsmen of these organisations. The contents of the corpus also contained unedited and unaltered news and reports. We have, however, removed pictures and other information considered to be irrelevant to this study. Consequently, issues such as the name of the writer and place of reporting were not incorporated in our study.

Data Analysis 4.1 Frequency of the acronym INEC across corpora
The first step was to examine the number of times the acronym INEC was mentioned across corpora, and in each of the newspapers within the same period of publication. This enabled us to understand the environments of the various occurrences. We also observed the occurrence of the acronym in the negative, positive and neutral environment across corpora. This enabled us to establish the thought pattern of each newspaper organisation and their ideology, prior to the 2019 general elections in Nigeria.

Concordancing of the acronym INEC across corpora
We used Antconc, Wordsmith tools and Web matrix for concordancing. Here, our major interest was in the electoral body, INEC. Therefore, we decided to investigate the way its (INEC) issues and happenings were told by these newspapers within the period under examination. The tools we used search a corpus for a certain word or phrase and gave every example of the selected word or phrase in the middle of our computer screen, with the pre-and post-modifying words of the highlighted word or phrase.
The textual context around the acronym INEC varied in the various newspapers examined, but those that had to do with either appeal by INEC or appeal to INEC were sorted as shown in Figure 1. It is a typical example of the mood of stakeholders around the period of election in Nigeria where there are appeals and cross-appeals. Examples of these are shown in Figure 1  The textual contexts that had to do with INEC exercising authority or having anything to do with higher authority were also sorted to show the concordance lines in which INEC performed or expected that role. Examples of these can be found in the excerpt depicted in Figure 2:

Results of Analysis 5.1 Analysis of Frequency of INEC
The result shows that the acronym INEC was mentioned 6,337 times with the following distribution among the five corpora: The Nation  -920  The Punch  -1,302  The Tribune  -1,280  The Daily Independence -1,315  The Guardian  -1,520 The graphic representation of these results is seen in the Figure 4:  The graphic representation of the occurrences of INEC in Table 1 is shown in the Figure 5, which reflects the three different environments already identified:

Frequencies of 'INEC' across Corpora
The Nation The Punch The Tribune The authority or reeling out warnings against defaulters rather than appeal. Second, The Punch prefers the angle of warning rather than appeal and that of authority. The Tribune presents INEC from the angle of a body giving directive and order during this period rather than warning and appeal. However, The Daily Independence prefers to present INEC in a soft manner that shows the body appealing to the electorate and other stakeholders. It sees INEC not as authority, even though it is during this period, but as a responsible major stakeholder in ensuring smooth elections. Finally, The Guardian, just like The Tribune, sees INEC issuing more directives and orders rather than appeal and warning.
Since analysts are not neutral in Critical Discourse Studies, but commit themselves in approving of the dominated and prominent people in the society, and based on the results of examination in this research, it can be reasoned that The Daily Independence's preference of showing INEC from the soft and appealing angle is a clear evidence of its bias to portray INEC as 'weak' and almost incapacitated in handling matters of election with confidence. It could also be inferred that The Nation, The Punch and The Tribune did not hide their bias for INEC during this period since they wrote to show the body as not only authoritative, but also as an institution that could aid punishment and prosecution against defaulters of electoral laws.

Conclusion
The objective of this paper was to disclose the various innate ideologies that presume selected news reports on the Nigeria's 2019 general elections in five Nigerian newspapers of The Punch, The Tribune, The Nation, Daily Independence and The Guardian. The findings of the paper showed that reporters of news items did not write activities about the electoral body in Nigeria with the same disposition, and this has established the non-neutrality of some of the newspapers in Nigeria about their reportage in terms of language use. Only The Daily Independence is seen as markedly different from the CDA point of view. Corpus analytical methods and tools were employed in the study. These methods and tools enhanced data accuracy that enabled us in the analysis of large volumes of written language. The paper, however, believes that the negative perception of many observers about the 2019 general elections in Nigeria have actually been predicted by the various reports in the newspapers, prior to the elections. The paper concludes that newspapers were bias in their reportage. The bias nature of their reportage gives room for subjectivity and prejudice on the part of readers. Future research could focus on the 2016 General Elections in Ghana.