Politics and Promises: A Multimodal Social Semiotic Interpretation of Political Party Emblems and Slogans as Discourse of Hope in a Democratic Nigeria
Working within the framework of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) and critical metaphor analysis (CMA) this study examines the emblems and slogans of the four main political parties in Nigeria: the People's Democratic Party (PDP) the All Progressives Congress (APC) the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and the Labour Party (LP) which have become instruments of campaign and propaganda. While the emblems/logos are visual (iconic) representations of party ideology, the slogans are verbal rhetorical affirmations of what the emblems represent. Based on insights from the theory of multimodality, this study is an attempt to use a social semiotic approach in the interpretation of visual communication. Multimodality understands visual as representation and communication. The Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) approach which this study adopts tries to interpret how the multiple modes in multimodal communication yield themselves to different levels of meaning realization.