Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Selected Wedding Invitation Cards in South-Eastern Nigeria

Despite the socio-semiotic import of wedding invitation cards (WICs) in Nigeria in general and southeastern Nigeria in particular, enough scholarly attention has not been accorded its textual and visual dimensions to determine the socio-cultural-cum-ideological motivations. The above gap is the motivation for the present study. Atotal of 20 WICs each were collated from all the southeastern states of Nigeria, namely: Abia, Anambara, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo. This amounts to a sum total of 100 WICs which constitute the corpus for this study. This corpus was analysed following the insights provided in Bhatia (2004) and Kress and Leeuwen (2001). Bhatia’s (2004) genre analysis was utilised in the analysis of the linguistic features (textual components) of the WICs. The non-linguistic features (visual components) were analysed following Kress and Leeuwen’s (2001) socio- semiotic multi-modal analytic approach. Dynamics like printed forms, colors, layouts, graphics, and paper materials were analysed by means of this analytic paradigm. As for the linguistic features, attention was paid to the different moves in the WICs to identify text units expressing particular functions. The linguistic and non-linguistic features are characterized by nine different moves. Six of these moves are obligatory while three are non-obligatory elements. It was noted that the materiality options of cards and prints can carry an ideological implication that weddings have an elevated status or otherwise in the Igbo society.

Keywords: South-East Nigeria Igbo Invitation Multimodal Moves

Author

• Justus Chidi Ugwu
  Department of English and Literary Studies,
  Enugu State University of Science and Technology
  justus.ugwu@esut.edu.ngng, justicechidi27@gmail.com