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grammatical elements employed in texts are discursive means to project various aspects of social realities in the texture of such texts.

out-UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN

group in discourses. Referential strategies are often metaphorical or metonymic;

linguistic means of representing people in terms of specific characteristics which they share with other members of the group. According to Reisigl and Wodak (2009), these specific attributes of the ‘nominal referent’ is foregrounded to stand for the group. As such members of a social group may refer to each other in terms of their linguistic composition, nationality, and ethnicity, economic, religious or even sexual characteristics as a strategy to evoke solidarity among members of the group. Referential/nomination strategy, also imply the use of other linguistic devices, such as tropes and grammatical means of substitutions, with the effect of creating in-groups and out groups in the texture of discourses. The uses of ‘we’ and ‘they’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ and metaphors such as ‘the family’ or ‘ the home’ can be cited as some of the linguistic means that involve designation of the nominal that stir up the idea of social solidarity. Referential/nominal strategies may also involve the use of synecdoche in the form of a part standing for whole or a whole standing for part as in discourses. Other devices include the use of verbs and nouns to denote processes and actions that imply group cohesion.

Reisigl and Wodak (2005) are of the opinion that with predication strategies, the social-actors identified during the referential/nomination process are explicitly or implicitly labelled; deprecatorily or appreciatory. This means that there is discursive qualification of social actors, objects, phenomena, events/process and actions. Metonymy and synecdoche are identified as the two major linguistic devices by which predication strategy is realised in discourses. Metonymy replaces the name of a referent with the name of an entity which is closely associated with it (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhert, 1999). There are different types of metonymy depending on the relationship between the neighbouring conceptual fields as a predication element. For instance, metonymy may replace a person, institution or an abstract idea with a place, or may replace the use of an object with the object itself. Tropes such as metonymies obviously allow speakers ‘to conjure away’ responsible, involved or affected actors, or to keep them in the background (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 58). Synecdoche, though like metonymy, performs a more specific linguistic role of replacing the name of the referent with the name of another referent which is either semantically wider or narrower (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhert, 1999). Synecdoche is divided into generalising and particularising synecdoche’s based on the nature of replacement which a synecdoche might have done. Generalising synecdoche’s replace a semantically narrower expression

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with a semantically wider one, while particularising synecdoche replace a semantically wider term with a semantically narrower one. Apart from the specific linguistic means of metonymy and synecdoche, relationships in the discourse are also predicated on the basis of a wide range of metaphors. The metaphor which is regarded as a resource of producing distinct representation of the world (Fairclough, 2003) facilitates the transfer or projection of one experiential domain to another. With tropes such as metaphor, well understood source domains of experience are mapped into more schematic ones (Chilton, 2004). Predication strategies, which cannot neatly be separated from nomination strategies, are realised in the discourse through stereotypical, evaluative attributions of negative and positive traits in the linguistic form of implicit or explicit predicates. Some of the referential involve the use of specific forms of predication strategies; because pure referential identification, very often, involves denotative and connotative means of labelling the social actors. Predicational strategies are also realised in discourses through the application of linguistic devices such as attributes, collocation, and the use of predicative nouns. Other devices include appositions, prepositional phrases, and use of relative and conjunctive clauses, collocations, comparisons, allusions, evocations, and implicatures.

According to Reisigl and Wodak (2005), argumentation strategies consist of postulations of positive and negative attributions which are projected in the speech acts of the characters. In solidarity discourses, this strategy involves manifestation of social inclusion or exclusion, and or preferential treatment of the representative persons or group of persons are justified in the discourse. The strategies for argumentation include justification and questioning of claims of truth and normative rightness. The devices for argumentative strategy include to poi (formal or more content related) and fallacies.

Perspectivation strategies refer to the linguistic means with which social actors in discourses express their involvement in the discourse, and position their point of view in the reporting, description, narration or quotation or utterances expressing characters’

involvement or distance (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 2005). Perspectivation strategy is, therefore, regarded as the perceptual or conceptual position in terms of which verbalised situations and events are presented in discourses. Though perspectivation is being considered as a pervading phenomenon, it is rather very tricky to pin down what is actually the common core of ‘perspective’ with all its different characteristics. For instance, in spatial domain, perspective becomes obvious when the speaker describes the

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relative location of objects; the location of same object can be described in different ways depending on which vantage point the speaker takes, and how the objects are within the visual and/or communicative context and with which intrinsic spatial properties the respective objects inhabit. Consequently, in spatial descriptions, the social actors have the option to choose between limited numbers of axial systems in order to locate objects relative to each other. To demonstrate social solidarity, just like in attempts to describe objects in the spatial domain, the speaker chooses linguistic options that make the features of group cohesion obvious; like sharing of beliefs, values and other bonds that hold the social group as a cohesive unity. In discourses with solidarity traits, the readily available lexical items used to suggest solidarity are the nominal groups and pronominal such as ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our family’, ‘my country’, and other options that tend to identify the interlocutors as in-group members with shared goals. This shows that the speaker, in order to describe the cohesive nature of the social group, has to carefully select most relevant communicative statements that perspectivized a shared point of view that signals the bonds of solidarity existing among members. These communicative statements normally embody a shared point of view; the ‘we-perspective’ (Tuomela, 2007) to express the mutual knowledge, shared beliefs and sense of membership of members in a social group. Other devices for perspectivation include deictic, direct, indirect and free indirect speech, quotation marks, discourse marks, particles and metaphors which are used to explicate the point of view of the social actors in discourses.

Reisigl and Wodak (2005) state further that intensification and mitigation strategies concern with the linguistic variables found in the textual network of discourses that help to qualify and modify our understanding of propositions by intensifying or mitigating the communicative illocutionary force and the denotative status of the utterance which suggests and emphasise the attributes of members as a social group.

These strategies involve the inclusion of descriptive attributes of social actors expressing, through overt or covert articulation of opinions, emphasises to illustrate how they feel as in-group members of a particular social group. Devices for intensification and mitigation include diminutitives or augmentatives, use of modals-particles, tag questions, subjunctives, hesitatives, and vague expressions. These also include the use of hyperboles, litotes, indirect speech acts and verbs of saying, feeling and thinking in expressions. To carve solidarity in texts, these strategies are employed to explicate the preferences for ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ membership claims.

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Depending on what is being searched for in the texture of texts, the discourse strategies used might explicate various dimensions of arguments raised from the quality of the language used in the texts. Apparently, the character of the discourse strategies deployed could, on the one hand, intensify textual cohesion and the disposition of the lexico-grammatical ties, on the other hand, would amplify thematic preoccupations that anchor the concern for humanity, like solidarity, which may arise from the interactions of the social actors in the texts. The lexico-grammatical ties result either from the use of lexical items such as reiterations and collocations, or from the application of grammatical features like conjunctions, substitutions, ellipsis and reference, which might coalesce to enhance textual cohesion and at the same time amplify the social relevance of the narration. A detailed analysis of these lexical and grammatical features is made in the subsequent section.