DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIAN HANDBILLS

ABSTRACT

Christian handbills are one of the leading non-verbal means of communication in the society today especially the church handbills and posters. Technically put, posters are very important forms of visual communication. It presents picture(s) with meanings lying behind it. However, there exist some graphosyntactic errors, lexical, syntactic features and semantic features used in Christian handbills. The problem of grapho-syntactic errors contravene syntactic and graphological norms of the language and are not recognized as such by most people. The errors are gradually and unfortunately becoming standard forms of usage for most Nigerians. Ten (10) Christian handbills selected from ten (10) different churches were collected between January and May, 2016. The non-randomized method was used as the sampling technique while the research procedure employed analysis of linguistic aspects and features such as; graphological function, lexical, pragmatic tools, syntactic and semantic tools. Results obtained from this study revealed that Christian handbills play significant roles in effective communication. Hence, the findings from this study have become an instrument for achieving background knowledge in language of information as contained in Christian handbills