Legitimisation of Language in 2022 ASUU vs FGN Impasse

Abstract

Every functional society consists of active shareholders (the leaders and the lead) whose activities are complimentary and must be constantly synergistic. In the event that the required cohesion is to be disturbed, the spectrum inviting such typically owes the other segments of society some form of explanation for such an action. Consequently, this study sets to investigate the linguistic resources deployed for legitimisation in ASUU’s press release of March,2020. To achieve this, Paul Cap’s (2005,2006) Spatial, Temporal and Axiological (STA) model of legitimisation was deployed to analyse for proximisation in the corpus. It was found that the linguistic resources used in the speech represented predominant instances of Spatial, Temporal and Axiological dimensions; ASUU deployed linguistic features for positive proximisation to justify their claims for an extended (indefinite) strike action and negative proximisation when expressing their existential realities, with the Nigerian federal government, in the education sector. The study concludes that judging from the gory realities in the education sector (which ASUU is seen to strongly advocate against), ASUU’s insistence on the federal and state governments to adequately fund the sector is deserving of the needed attention. To this end, it is hoped that the education sector will receive a big boost, if ASUU’s educational gatekeeper role is taken seriously by the concerned relevant stakeholders (government or school proprietors).