View article

Linguistic tagging, the labelling of people and their actions with particular socio-politically-grounded values, is an ideological denominator that plays a significant role in media framing of conflict. Despite this significance, existing studies on the Nigeria-Cameroon Bakassi Peninsula border conflict, which had concentrated on the historical, political, legal and sociolinguistic dimensions, largely neglected an exploration of the dynamics of linguistic tagging. Therefore, this study investigated the linguistic tagging of people and their actions, and the underlying social, political and economic ideologies in the Nigerian and Cameroonian newspaper reports on the Bakassi Peninsula border conflict, with a view to uncovering the interactions between the tagging and the ideologies. The theoretical framework was a synthesis of insights from van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis, Halliday’s Systemic Linguistics and the theory of lexical decomposition. Data were collected from three Nigerian newspapers (The Guardian, The Punch and The Nigerian Chronicle) and three Cameroonian newspapers (The Cameroon Tribune, The Post and Eden), published in English between August 2006 and August 2010. These newspapers were purposively selected on the basis of their wide virtual and non-virtual publicity on the conflict. Out of a total of 650 news reports, 164 (87 Nigerian and 77 Cameroonian news reports) were purposively selected and subjected to content, linguistic and descriptive statistical analyses. Five conflict-related themes, namely, terrorism, resistance, dispossession, suffering and economy, which correlated with different …