Intertexuality in President Obasanjo’s “Before It Is Too Late”
Keywords:
intertextuality, ideology, social structure, CDAAbstract
A letter is commonplace written communication which takes different forms depending on its social context. The context includes various societal currents that are responsible for the production, consumption and interpretation of such letter. Hence, a letter is semantic unit which incorporates the writer’s perceptions of an event which may be clearly stated or obfuscated. It is upon this platform that this study interrogates the intertextual strategies exploited by former President Obasanjo to present his view to former President Jonathan in his letter of appeal. The paper uses a theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to reveal the ways in which linguistic structure and communicative devices overtly or covertly harbour ideological meaning. President Obasanjo adopts intertextual strategies to bring a memory of past events into President Jonathan’s mind. This is because recreating knowledge of the past in texts tends to give hearers or readers a fairly clear understanding of the current situation.The paper therefore concludes that it is impossible not to have intertextual reference in any expression longer than a sentence.
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