Nnadiebube Journal of Languages and Literatures

This study investigates pragmatic framing in Nigerian political discourse through an integrated analysis of speech acts, implicature, presupposition, deixis, modality, and evaluative language. It argues that framing in political communication is not merely a rhetorical device but a structured pragmatic system through which ideological meanings are constructed, negotiated, and stabilised. Adopting a qualitative discourse-analytical approach, the study examines how elections, political actors, and states are discursively represented in Nigerian political texts. Findings reveal that elections are framed through a dual logic of contestation and decisiveness, producing competing interpretations of political struggle and democratic legitimacy. Political actors are constructed within a triadic schema of heroism, victimhood, and threat, while states are framed as both containers of socio-political identity and competitors within broader political and developmental struggles. These framing patterns are realised through the interaction of pragmatic resources, particularly modality, presupposition, deixis, and evaluative stance, which together naturalise ideological assumptions and guide audience interpretation. The study demonstrates that framing operates as a multi-layered pragmatic configuration rather than a purely lexical or metaphorical choice. It contributes to pragmatics and political discourse studies by showing how ideological meaning in Nigerian political communication emerges from systematic interaction between linguistic form and contextual inference. It further extends African political discourse scholarship by illustrating how global framing strategies are locally recontextualised within Nigeria’s socio-political realities, including electoral competition, identity politics, and zoning dynamics.

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