Re-lexicalization and Over-lexicalization in Nigerian Political Cartoon Discourse on Facebook

Usman Muhammad Bello

Abstract

Political Cartoons provide an avenue for people across the political spectrum to present their reactions to current events in a relaxed atmosphere. While such discourses provoke laughter in the audience, critical messages lie underneath them. Such messages can be retrieved by a very careful audience. Two major ways in which serious information is presented in cartoons are re lexicalization and over-lexicalization. This paper, therefore, investigated these phenomena in Nigerian political cartoon discourse. The data for this study was purposively selected Facebook political cartoons in Nigeria. Their selection was, therefore, motivated by the political topics they treated as well as the period in which they were posted. Those cartoons were posted in the first half of 2019, the period which was important in the history of Nigeria, being a period that spanned through pre-election, election and post-election experiences of the country. A multimodal approach was taken in the study— not only the lexical items in the cartoons were important in such a kind of discourse, the images as well as their color also contributed to re-lexicalization and over-lexicalization phenomena in the context of the discourse. The study revealed that Nigerian cartoonists re-lexicalize and over-lexicalize the existing lexical items in a bid to share critical information without causing so much embarrassment to the audience or the subject of political discourse.