Nigerians' Reactions towards COVID-19 Pandemic Health Precautions: A Pragma-Semiotic Analysis

Abstract

After the Federal Government of Nigeria declared a total lockdown and COVID-19 pandemic health precautions, many Nigerians have gone to their various Facebook walls to show their reactions. These were deployed via texts (captions) and visual (photos) means. Previous studies on COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria have adopted critical discourse analysis and stylistics approaches with little attention paid to pragmatic and multimodal reactions of the Nigerians towards COVID-19. This paper undertakes pragma-semiotic analysis of the Nigerians' reactions towards COVID-19 pandemic health precautions to examine how the texts and images portray their intentions towards COVID-19, to discover the potential meaning exhibited by the images and captions, and to analyse the pragmatic acts of the linguistic and nonlinguistic posts. Sixteen Nigerian Facebook posts were purposively selected using insights from Mey's (2001) pragmatic act and Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) multimodal discourse analysis. The posts which were classified under four semantic fields namely business innovation and profit-oriented, law abiding, poverty striking and satirical posts have various visual-pragmatic strategies such as creativity, obedience, complacency, begging and ridicule. The use of pictures and texts in Facebook to tell stories about Nigerians’ reaction towards Corona virus pandemic is a demonstration of ethical responsibility that has great implications for public peace especially in an African country like Nigeria with pandemic concerns.