A Morpho-Semantic Analysis of Lexical Creativity of Political Speech of Nigeria’s Independence Anniversary 2015

Abstract

Language is used by human beings for communication. Since these human beings consists of different groups, characterized with frequent use of different linguistic behaviour and other extra linguistic norms that guide their social interaction, it is usual and normal that lexical creativity should exist in the use of language in varied situations. This research examines the lexical creativity of political speech of Nigeria’s independence anniversary of 2015 and it is approached from a morpho-semantic perspective. The data used in this work was got from President Muhammadu Buhari’s 2015 Independence Day speech using a purposive sampling method. A descriptive approach is employed in this work. The data comprises of words randomly selected from the speech and they will form the corpus of the work. It was discovered that the speaker/writer employed so many morphological processes like acronyms, coinages, compounds borrowings etc as lexical creativity in order to drive home his point(s) on a memorable day like Independence Day celebration.