A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF LEXICAL CHOICES IN SELECT NEWSPAPER HEADLINES ON THE 2023 GOVERNORSHIP ELECTIONS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

This paper focuses on the lexical choices used by headlines from seven
newspapers in reporting the 2023 governorship election in Nigeria.
The objectives are to investigate the lexical choices that these news
headlines used in reporting the elections, identify how each news
headline reported the election and determine the similarities and
differences in the choice of lexical items used by the reporters of the
headlines. The data for the study were randomly selected from the
websites of the Nigerian Tribune, Aljazeera, Sahara Reporters, Vanguard,
Arise News, the Guardian and Punch. Guided by the assumptions of
critical discourse analysis and drawing on the framework of lexical
classification in Halliday’s (1994) systemic functional grammar, the
paper demonstrates how the headlines from these newspapers
represented the same event in vastly different ways through the
particular uses of lexicon that reflected their differing standpoints and
national interests.