SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: English Language & Literature

CONTRIBUTORS:

Chinedu, B.O;
Ekpunobi, D.C;
Chukwu, E;

ABSTRACT:

Terrorist activities have caused severe destruction of lives and property and have continued to constitute threats to global peace and security. The phenomenon of terrorism is no doubt multifaceted. The current study investigated the type of language used by terrorists in their narratives to influence or make impact on their various audiences. The qualitative and quantitative research methods were adopted. Data for the study were extracted from the fifteen speeches, five each from Abubakar Shekau, Abubakar Al-Baghdadi and Osama Bin Laden to answer the seven questions that guided the study. Critical Discourse Analyses derived from the research works of Norman Fairclough and Searle’s Speech Acts Theory formed the basic theories for the study. Persuasive and rhetorical techniques/strategies suggested by Van Leeuwen, Atkinson and Thomas Tedford were also used for the analysis. The study found that terrorists deploy a broad range of manipulative and rhetorical devices at the phonological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, pragmatic and textual level in their political narratives. Through these linguistic strategies and rhetorical devices, they were able to persuade and impress the audiences evidenced in the large number of people, especially youths that are trooping to join terrorism.