Multimodal Discourse Analysis of 2012 Governorship Election Campaign Billboards in Ondo State, Nigeria

Abstract

Billboards are widely used in the world for political purposes. The Ondo State 2012 governorship candidates employed billboards for their campaigns. It is observed that an average viewer of the campaign billboards finds it difficult to attain the exact interpretation of the semiotic devices in the pictures as intended by the producers. The objectives of this paper are: the analyses of the political discourse of the multimodal texts in the billboards and the exploration of the nature of the multimodal texts. This paper adopted the text dimension, the discursive practice dimension and the social practice dimensions of Fairclough’s (1992, 1995) three-dimensional framework. This theoretical framework was used to analyse and discuss the selected campaign billboards. The data collected for this study consisted of three governorship campaign billboards which were purposively selected. The study discovers that colours are meaning signifiers in the selected billboards and that the pictures, colours and verbal anchorages together with the various interpretations given them show the polysemic nature of signs. This paper concludes that visual resources are essential tools employed by campaign billboards’ producers. Finally, the study recommends that producers of campaign billboards should ensure simplicity and relevance of the semiotic resources used in the visuals. Keywords: Governorship elections, Campaign billboards, Multimodality, Verbal anchorages, Colours DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/95-04 Publication date: January 31 st 2021