“Who Is Our Man?”: Corpus-Assisted Understanding of Naming Strategies in Support-Motivated Conflicts Among BBNaija Housemates’ Virtual Fans

Ononye, Chuka F. and CHUKWUIKE, JUDE TOCHUKWU and Chigbu, G. Uchechukwu (2023) “Who Is Our Man?”: Corpus-Assisted Understanding of Naming Strategies in Support-Motivated Conflicts Among BBNaija Housemates’ Virtual Fans. In: Big Brother Naija and Popular Culture in Nigeria A Critique of the Country’s Cultural and Economic Diplomacy. Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd., 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore, pp. 131-152. ISBN 978-981-19-8109-8

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Abstract

Naming in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an important discur sive strategy for investigating the representation of social actors in discourse. This is different from its focus in other disciplinary back grounds where the concept is also studied, such as Anthropology (which focuses on the socio-cultural significance of names), Onomastics (classifi cation of complex taxonomies), or Pragmatics and Semantics (referential and semantic properties of names). In his socio-semantic inventory of how social actors can be represented in discourse, Van Leeuwen (2008) illustrates that text producers can endow social actors with different representational choices which identify them either as individuals or as groups (nomination and categorisation), doers of something or bearers of some qualities (functionalisation and identification), or as humans or objects (personalisation and impersonalisation) and so on. These repre sentational choices are naming strategies realised in the form of proper names, personal or possessive pronouns, or even abstract nouns and adjec tives functioning as noun phrases in text constructions. Jeffries (2007, 2010) also identifies naming and describing as parts of the tools of Critical Stylistics, a systemic framework for the ideological study of textual meta functions. According to Ononye and Osunbade (2015, p. 5), naming and describing tasks require the analyst’s knowledge of the noun phrase (NP), because the NP in English textual structure typically ‘names’ an entity. Citing Fowler (1991), they argue that naming could be ideologically laden since the NP in a sentence is not prone to dispute or questioning (unlike the predicate, which contains an argument), and its relationship of meaning could be taken for granted by the readers. Hence, naming strate gies are important to critical discourse analysis as they could ideologically function to attribute some features to, include or exclude, associate or dissociate social actors in relation to given social actions.

Item Type:	Book Section
Subjects:	A General Works > AC Collections. Series. Collected works
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts > Faculty of Law > Faculty of Management and Social Sciences
Depositing User:	mrs chioma hannah
Date Deposited:	22 Aug 2025 20:01
Last Modified:	22 Aug 2025 20:01
URI:	http://eprints.gouni.edu.ng/id/eprint/5159

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