Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Department of Languages and Communication The Federal Polytechnic Ado-Ekiti.
This study presents a comparative pragmatic analysis of the Occupy Nigeria (2012) and EndSARS (2020) protests, focusing on how protesters construct meaning in public protest discourse. Although protest movements have become prominent forms of political participation in Nigeria, limited scholarly attention has been devoted to the pragmatic mechanisms through which protesters encode and communicate their intentions in protest texts. Consequently, the linguistic strategies through which meaning is negotiated, implied, and interpreted in protest discourse remain insufficiently explored. Addressing this gap, the study investigates how reference and inference function as pragmatic tools for meaning construction in protest communication. Drawing on the frameworks of Yule (1996) and Mey (2001), the research examines how identified referents in protest texts relate to contextual factors to convey meaning and reveal speakers’ communicative intentions. The study argues that protest discourse in Nigeria functions as a strategic site of meaning-making in which protesters deploy referential expressions and inferential cues to construct collective identity, articulate dissent, and implicitly negotiate power relations within the socio-political context. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, protest texts from the two movements are analysed to identify patterns of referential expressions and inferential meanings. The findings reveal that protesters frequently employ pronouns, particularly “we,” to construct collective identity and establish in-group and out-group distinctions. Demonstrative pronouns and noun phrases are also strategically used to signal physical and psychological distance, often expressing rejection or disapproval. Furthermore, inferential meanings embedded in the discourse reveal speakers’ intentions to threaten, reassure, criticise, condemn, incite, and confront authority. The study situates Nigerian protest discourse within a global context and, by so doing, contributes to the ongoing project of re-imagining language in a globalised world, demonstrating how locally grounded protest expressions circulate through transnational communicative networks and participate in broader conversations on justice, governance, and civic resistance.
Reference, inference, EndSARS, Occupy Nigeria, protest discourse, context.
