A Linguistic Stylistic Analysis of Political Commentaries on Ondo 2020 Gubernatorial Election on Online Newspapers

Abstract:

This study investigated linguistic stylistic analysis of political commentaries on Ondo 2020 gubernatorial election. The researcher selected 4 political commentaries from two online newspapers (Sun and Independent). The focus of this study was to analyze the collected data based on the objectives of the study that cover syntactic, phonological, foregrounded elements and deviant features found in the selected political commentaries. The analysis was anchored on Leech and Short’s Checklist of Linguistic and Stylistic Categories as its theoretical framework while the method was qualitative research analysis. Descriptive survey method was however employed to analyze the collected data. Hence, the findings showed that sentences in the analyzed comments are predominantly non-simple sentences with mixtures of declarative, imperative and interrogative sentences. Phonological devices such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance fully have rhythmic patterns. Also, foregrounded elements such as phonetic spelling, and dominant deployment of deviational and non-deviational foregrounding to captivate readers’ attentions are evidential. Lastly, deviant features such as morphological, grammatical and lexical deviations manifest in the analyzed comments. Thus, the manifestation of linguistic features inherent in the analyzed data is an attestation that the choice of words in the use of language is peculiar to an individual writer.