Author
OJETUNDE, C. F.
Abstract
This study examined the semantic relations in President Muhammed Buhari’s 2022 Independence Day Speech with a view to determining how the meaning association could help in unraveling the speaker’s intention in any given discourse. The theoretical framework adopted for the study was Wittgenstein’s Use theory of meaning as presented by Jaroslav (2011) which states that the knowledge of how words relate with one another is premised on the way the words are used to make meaning. A purposive sampling is considered suitable for the study due to the fact that the President’s Independence Speech was solely and intentionally used as the elicitation instrument. Thus, a contextual/qualitative design was employed in analyzing the data. The text was analyzed for the effective use of lexical relations to unveil the message of the President on the Independence Day. The findings revealed that the lexical items that feature in the Speech were carefully chosen and logically woven to present the subject matter in each of the paragraphs, in order to make the Speech a unified whole and effectively communicate the message to the Nigerian citizenry and the international audience. The five major lexical relations that feature prominently in the Speech are collocation, antonymy, hypernymy, hyponymy and synonymy. These classes of sense relations are maximally employed to effect communication. It is therefore concluded that lexical/semantic relations are essential for functional use of language because they help to disambiguate the meaning intended, make the message as convincingly as possible in more captivating and clear terms as evident in 2022 President Buhari’s Independence Day Speech.
Keywords
Semantics, Analysis, Independence, Day, Speech
Introduction
A good knowledge of lexis is the basic requirement for the acquisition of communicative competence in any human language (Akande, 2003). The knowledge of words in any language requires the language user to be able to see which shade of meaning is most suitable for the context in which the word occurs and also to make various associations with other related words. Lexical semantics is concerned with what words mean, how they are represented in the speakers’ minds and how they are used in text and discourse (Carita, 2013). Cruse (2001) presents two most important fundamental issues addressed by lexical semantics, namely how to describe the meaning of words and how to account for the variability of meaning from context to context.
Content
Lexical Semantics or (Lexico-semantics) is a subfield of linguistics which is concerned with the systematic study of word meaning. It includes the study of how words structure their meanings, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of words...
Conclusion
The conclusion can be found in the main file..
References
References are available in the main file..