A Generic Structure Analysis of Selected News Commentaries on Radio Nigeria

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of the Generic Structure Pattern of news commentaries. Previous studies have applied the GSP approach to a number of discourses in the mass media as well as some religious texts in order to establish their generic structures. They include business letters, newspaper editorials magazine editorials and newspaper articles. These previous researches have also focused their attentions only on the print media and religious manuals. However, none has focused on news commentaries. This paper fills this gap in knowledge by exploring news commentaries on Radio Nigeria in order to find out its generic structure as a broadcast text.Twenty news commentaries were purposively selected, five from each of the following sectors: economy, politics, education, health and sports. The Generic Structure Potential model which is an aspect of the Systemic Functional Theory associated with Halliday and Hasan (1985) was adopted as the framework for the analysis of these news commentaries. The GSP model is premised upon the fact that Contextual Configuration (CC) “permits statements about the text structures” to be made.This paper is able to identify Anchor’s Introduction (AI), Orientation (O), Spotlighting (S) and Resolution or Lesson (RL) as obligatory elements while optional elements are Commentary Lead (CL), Problem/Cause (PC) and Solution/Effect (SE).The paper submits that the GSP of news commentaries on Radio Nigeria can be viewed as [AI] ^ (CL) ^ [O] ^[S] ^ [(PC). (SE)] ^[RL].