Abstract
This paper explores political leaders’ utterances in regard to the Mau Forest complex in Kenya. The paper adopts an ecolinguistic approach to critical discourse analysis to shed light on how political leaders use language to encode their perceptions and feelings about environmental conservation in general and Mau Forest restoration in particular. Awareness on such language use is important because of the understanding that political leaders are part of the elite members of society who inform and direct public opinion on many critical issues in society. The political class also controls the agenda of public debate on many societal issues. Using Critical Discourse Analysis within Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) approach, this paper brought to fore how the political class uses language to (de)emphasize or conceal meanings depending on whether such meanings or beliefs are for or against the political leaders’ interests. The findings revealed that the political leaders perceived the forest conservation programme as oppression, distortion and provocation to ethnic-based violence. In addition, the politicians’ lexical choices indicate that the politicians perceived the Mau Forest restoration programme as a falsehood propagated by the political rivals.
 
 <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0874/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>
Highlights
This study investigated the lexical choices in Kenyan politicians’ utterances on the Mau Forest conservation programme so as to describe their perceptions, opinions, and attitudes towards the conservation of the Mau Forest issue
World leaders at the summit agreed to set timelines in the fight against climate change, with the hope that the deliberations would help in influencing world policy actors to set commitments in tackling climate change. It was on these grounds that our study looked at the utterances made by key political leaders during the 2010 Mau Forest conservation debate in Kenya and their implications for forest conservation
The specific words political leaders chose to use in their speeches were taken to be indicative of brutality or cruelty, oppression
Summary
People use language to express meaning, the view that it is by understanding the theory behind the assembling of words to form a grammar that meaning can be interpreted correctly. From this perspective, Halliday sees language as being made up of semantic units, the need for a functional grammar to bring out the meanings of wordings. Halliday (1992) reiterates that this kind of analysis is functional, because it involves analyzing language in use according to context. Halliday identifies three functions that language performs, namely; ideational, interpersonal and textual. The ideational metafunction deals with the encoding of reality
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
