A MULTIMODAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF DISCOURSE OF PROTEST: An Example of the Federal Government of Nigeria and the Nigeria Labour Congress Face Off

Abstract

Varied interests are inevitable issues between the working class and the State, and this often degenerates into labour conflicts between the government and the people. The subsidy removal by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2012, triggered off anger among millions of Nigerians and protesters all over the country expressed grievances against the policy through slogans, music, speeches, cartoons, placard inscriptions, images, internet/electronic outlets like Facebook comments, radio, television, and so on. Kress’ (2004), Fundamentals of Image Analysis and Hall (2012)’s Discourse of Protest were harmonised as a framework for this work. This paper examines language and images and identifies the inter-semiotic and semantic coherence in this complementary multimodal mode.