The pragmatics of promotional features and discourse strategies in postgraduate school prospectus in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper extends the frontier of research in the marketisation of higher education institution by investigating the pragmatics of promotional features and discourse strategies in the postgraduate school prospectus. The data for the study is the University of Ibadan postgraduate school prospectus (2015 edition) downloaded from the university website (http://www.postgraduateschool.ui.edu.ng). Insights were drawn from Bhatia’s genre analysis, an aspect of Hallidayian’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, for the analysis. The theory accounts for promotional features, linguistic features and discourse strategies in the discourse. Four promotional features: offer, commodification, incentives and clients were marked off by modality, epistemic and deontic linguistic features while strategies of self-promotion, implication, promotional tact and evocation to considerateness are tactfully employed to project the superiority ideology to the prospective students. The study concludes that the academia is no longer solely informative but promotionally oriented.

Keywords

• commodification, marketisation, genre analysis, promotional features, evocation to considerateness