ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE STRATEGIES AND IDEOLOGIES IN THE INAUGURAL SPEECHES OF BARRISTER IBRAHIM SHEHU SHEMA

Abstract

Inaugural speeches are crucial to political processes because they are avenues to mobilize, seek for support, persuade the people and consolidate their loyalty throughout the administration. Political actors,therefore, use the medium to persuade, manipulate, or simply inform their audience about their administration's policies. Their speeches are carefully crafted to convey their messages which definitely have ideological intents because political speeches are not value-free or neutral in terms of ideological leanings. In this study, the authors investigate the discourse strategiesin the inaugural speeches of Barrister ShehuShema. This is done by operationalizing some tenets of Critical Discourse Analysis with the aim of uncovering covert ideologies enshrined in the inaugural speeches. Several linguistic facilities such as allusions, conversational tone, pronominal references, positive face-strategies, etc are used by the speaker to change the orientation of the people and sold his party agenda to them.All these linguistic tools, as wielded by BarristerShema, help to underscore the fact that 'ideologiestruly reside in texts' and cannot be read off. The findings revealed that the languageused in the speeches are consciously and skillfully deployed to champion his party ideologies of inclusiveness, fairness and justice, continuity, acceptance of religious diversity, and unity