VOCALISING FAITH AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN GOSPEL MARKETING TEXT: A PRAGMA-DISCURSIVE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS STICKERS IN NIGERIA
Keywords:
Gospel advertisement, Beliefs, Stickers, Identity brandingAbstract
This study examines how Christian religious stickers are used to perform a range of communicative and socio-religious functions in Nigeria. Situated within the framework of Transcendental Discourse Analysis (TDA) (Opeibi, 2018), the study views language use in religious domain as a social enterprise creatively constructed to execute socio-religious objectives. The theoretical framework utilises principles from semiotics and pragmatics [multimodal discursive approach- O’Halloran (2011)] based on the inter-mix of text and images for meaning negotiation. The data set used for analysis was extracted from a self-collected corpus (Transcendental Christian Religious Corpus-TCRC), consisting of end-users Christian religious stickers and messages elicited from public and private spaces (e.g. doors of living/bedrooms, private vehicles, Bible covers, handbags, laptops of some residents) in South West Nigeria. Using content analysis based on approaches in discourse analysis, semiotics and pragmatics, we demonstrate how the producers of the stickers apply a range of communicative strategies to convey socio-discursive meaning and pragmatic functions. The findings show increase usage and proliferation of these religious marketing strategy for identity construction, denominational branding, membership recruitment, faith-professing and confidence-building rhetoric as well as general gospel advertisement. It thus highlights the linguistic, pragmatic and socio-discursive significance of this new trend of professing and confessing beliefs and faith among modern Pentecostal Christians in Nigeria.
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http://www.234pulse.com/2015/01/christianity-is-the-largest-religion-in-nigeria-2014-statistics/
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