ANALYSING THE PICTORIALS OF VIOLENCE IN NIGERIA: A SEMIOTICS PERSPECTIVE

Memunat Olayemi Mahmud

Abstract


Violence attributed to the various agitating groups in the country has become a common occurrence across the Nigerian states. This paper explored a cross-comparative analysis of the pictorials of activities of two northern Nigerian agitating groups (the Boko Haram sect and the Fulani herdsmen) as semiotics signs of violence within the Nigeria socio-cultural space. A corpus of 14 pictorials of online newspaper reportage of the activities of the agitating groups across the Nigerian States downloaded from the Internet served as the primary data in this study. Using Peirce’s triadic sign relations of icon, index and symbol, the study categorised the pictorials in the reportage and analysed them as semiotics sign carriage of violence showing that the communicative imports of the pictorials effectively explicate the magnitude of violence within the Nigerian socio-cultural space in their interpretations. The signs identified in the data include instrument of operation, ruins, body language, emotional display, etc., which are semiotics modals implicative of war, violence, destruction, agony, sorrow, agitation, etc., and symbolism of cruelty, ferocity, homicide and inhumanity generally. The paper concludes that pictorials are communicative signs carriage of concrete and implicative significations.

 

Article visualizations:

Hit counter


Keywords


Boko Haram, Fulani herdsmen, reportage, semiotics, terrorism

Full Text:

PDF

References


Arpan, L. M., Baker, K., Lee, Y., Jung, T., Lorusso, L., & Smith, J. (2006). News coverage of social protests and the effects of photographs and prior attitudes. Mass Communication & Society, 9(1), 1-20.

Barker, C. (2005). Cultural studies: Teori dan praktik. Yogyakarta: Jalasutra.

Barrett, A. W., & Barrington, L. W. (2005). Is a picture worth a thousand words? Newspaper photographs and voter evaluations of political candidates. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 10(4), 98-113.

Bignell, J. (1997). Media semiotics: An introduction. Manchester: Manchester press.

Bruder, K. (2007). The effects of news photographs on a reader’s retention, COM 350. Available at: https://tardis.dreamhosters.com/katherine/Writing_&_Design_files/Photographs%20and%20Information%20Retention.pdf. Retrieved: 05/06/2022

Collins (n.d.). Gun. In collinsdictionary.com. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/gun.

Crystal, D. (2008). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. (Sixth edition). United Kingdom: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444302776.

De Saussure, F. (1989). Course in general linguistics. La Salle: Open Court.

Dictionary (n.d.). Coffin. In dictionary.com. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/coffin.

Ferguson, S. D. (2001). Researching the public opinion environment: Theories and methods (Vol. 3). Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Gibson, R. & Zillmann, D. (2000). Reading between photographs: The influence of incidental pictorial information on issue perception. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 77(2), 355-366.

Hartshorne, C. & Weiss P. (Eds.) (1935). Peirce, Charles S. 1931–1966: The collected papers of Charles S. Peirce.

Hoopes, J. (Ed.). (2014). Peirce on signs: Writings on semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce. UNC Press Books.

Jewitt, C. & Oyama, R. (2001). Visual meaning: A social semiotic approach. In T.V., Leeuwen, & C. Jewitt, (Eds.), Handbook of visual analysis. London: Sage, 134–156.

Katz, J. J. (1972). Semantic theory. New York: Harper and Row.

Khan AIS, Mazhar B. 2017. Effects of Photojournalism on Reader’s Exposure and Retention. Global Media Journal. 15(28).

Mahmud, M. O. (2019). Nonverbal signs in television advertisements: A semiotics perspective. English Language Teaching Today, 14, 40-56.

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Corpse. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corpse.

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Grave. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grave.

Moriarty, S. (1994). Visual communication as a primary system. Journal of Visual Literacy 14 (2): 11-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/23796529.1994.11674493

Nelson, R. G. (2020). The Symbolism of the Gun in Relation to Completed Suicides in the United States (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute).

Peirce, C. S. (1935-1958). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Peirce, C. S. (1998). The essential Peirce (Vol. 2). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Semetsky, I. (2007). Introduction: Semiotics, education, philosophy. Studies in Philosophy and Education 26(3): 179-183. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9031-9

Wikipedia (n.d.). Cattle. In wikipedia.org. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle.

Wikipedia (n.d.). Ranged weapon. In wikipedia.org. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranged_weapon.

Wischmann, L. (1987). Dying on the front page: Kent State and the Pulitzer Prize. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 2(2), 67-74.

Yoshii, M., & Flaitz, J. (2002). Second language incidental vocabulary retention: The effect of text and picture annotation types. CALICO Journal, 33-58.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejlll.v6i1.347

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2022 Memunat Olayemi Mahmud

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The research works published in this journal are free to be accessed. They can be shared (copied and redistributed in any medium or format) and\or adapted (remixed, transformed, and built upon the material for any purpose, commercially and\or not commercially) under the following terms: attribution (appropriate credit must be given indicating original authors, research work name and publication name mentioning if changes were made) and without adding additional restrictions (without restricting others from doing anything the actual license permits). Authors retain the full copyright of their published research works and cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms are followed.

Copyright © 2017-2023. European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics Studies (ISSN 2559 - 7914 / ISSN-L 2559 - 7914). All rights reserved.

This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library. All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms. All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and standards formulated by Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) and  Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Copyrights of the published research works are retained by authors.