JOURNALS

ABSTRACT

This study examined a linguistic stylistic analysis of political commentaries on Edo 2020 gubernatorial election. The researchers selected 3 political commentaries from one online newspaper (Daily Post). From the collected data, the aim of this study was to analyse syntactic, phonological, foregrounded elements and deviant features found in the selected political commentaries based on the objectives of the study. The analysis was anchored on Leech & Short’s Checklist of Linguistic and Stylistic Categories as its theoretical framework while the method was qualitative research analysis. Descriptive survey method was however employed to analyse the collected data. Hence, the findings showed that sentences in the analysed commentaries are structurally dominated by non-simple sentences and functionally dominated by declarative sentences. Phonological devices such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance fully have rhythmic pattern. Also, there are deployments of foregrounded elements such as deviational and non-deviational foregrounding to captivate readers' attentions. Lastly, deviant features such as grammatical and lexical deviations are found in the analysed commentaries. Therefore, the manifestation of linguistic features inherent in the analysed commentaries shows that any of the writers of these commentaries use linguistic resources at their disposal to express their views.