Speech Act Analysis of Daily Trust and The Nation Newspapers Headline Reports on “Boko Haram” Attacks

Abstract

This research studies newspaper headline reports on Boko Haram attacks in Daily Trust and The Nation, with a view to identifying the types of speech acts used in the headlines, the predominant speech act used as well as their implication to language use. Thirty six and Thirty five headlines are selected from the Daily Trust and The Nation newspapers respectively and each is assigned a corresponding speech act category. The findings reveal that out of the five speech act categories of J.R. Searle which is used as the theoretical framework of the research, only three categories are used in all the headlines in both newspapers with the assertive as the dominant speech act type and the predominant speech act type used is the same for both newspapers. Therefore, this study concludes that the headline reports of the two newspapers are not aimed at threatening, frightening or advising as wrongly perceived by readers and that the ideological
positions of the papers are not portrayed in their headlines.