MOOD, PERSONAL REFERENCE AND POWER IN CRISES NARRATIVES OF SELECTED GOVERNORS OF BENUE STATE

Abstract

This article analyses how the choices of mood, personal
reference and power, as outlined within the SystemicFunctional Linguistic theory, shape the narrative about the
crisis between farmers and herders in Benue State, North
Central Nigeria. Using the discourse analysis approach, the
selected utterances about the crisis by the Governors
(immediate past and present) are analysed to determine the
speakers’ choice of mood systems, personal references and
their effect on the contextual feature of power. It has been
determined through analyses that both speakers utilised the
declarative moods copiously in their speeches albeit with
varying semantic choices. While Governor Ortom, the ExGovernor opted for explicit criticism of then President
Buhari, the present Governor Alia has focused on factual
accounts about the impact of the crisis on the State. The
first person is the major feature of personal reference which
centralises the identity of the speakers and their roles in
determining how the narrative about the crisis is shaped.
The choices of mood and personal reference build up to the
realisation, in some instances, of unequal power through
the assertion of dominance and criticism of the Federal
Government and in other instances equal power through offer of collaboration with the Federal Government and
other actors. Furthermore, the findings verify existing
postulations that effective language use is vital to successful
governance in Nigeria’s multilingual and multicultural
context. Conclusions indicate that the narrative about the
Farmers-herders conflict in Benue State has been shaped
majorly by how State actors project their roles in their
respective utterances about the conflict.