STANCE ACTS AND ENTITLEMENT IDEOLOGY IN POLITICAL DECLARATIONS IN NIGERIA: THE "EMI LO KAN" EXAMPLE

Abstract

Stance acts are linguistic phenomena through which political actors express contextually motivated entitlement ideologies to demonstrate their sense of deservedness and right to positions or offices. While various works on political speeches, addresses and manifestoes in Nigeria and other parts of the world deemphasise these acts and their underlying entitlement beliefs, others from the fields of philosophy, political science, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics have shown detailed interest in how political power, identity and ideology are constructed through language. This study, however, is aimed at identifying the typologies of stance acts and the entitlement ideologies that empower these acts in Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s popular “Emilokan” declaration” made on 2 June, 2022. The speech was transcribed, using both Jefferson’s and Yoruba notations to capture its sociocultural voices. Aspects of Du Bois (2007) Stance Triangle, complemented by Ifantidou’s (2001) model of stance and relevance, van Dijk CDA (2015) and Odebunmi’s (2016) contextual model were adopted as the framework. The study revealed two main stance acts: the evaluative stance act which evinces co-acts of self-positioning (which is speaker-generated); and alignment-seeking (which is audience co-opted). The evidential stance act is also grounded on the co-acts of direct and indirect evidential stance acts. These stance acts are linked principally to three entitlement ideologies: politico-religionist, ethnicist, and altruist entitlement ideologies. Political actors, by their tactfully expressed stance acts, are bolstered by a heavy sense of rights and deservedness to construct power, dominance, and acceptance in a bid to clinch their desired positions.