Specifically, it sought to investigate on the classes, placements, and environments of adverbials of attitude and emphasis employed by the two justices, and drew their implications to teaching and learning English for Legal Purposes (ELP). This study is a humble attempt at stylistically analyzing Supreme Court decisions in Philippine English (PhE) drafted by two Filipino justices. Being a powerfully legal written discourse, Supreme Court decisions are a rich corpus in which linguistic visa -vis stylistic choices of Court justices could be examined. Keywords: ambiguity, construction, Nigerian English, linguistic variable, meaning, corpus pragmatics, news headlinesĬontemporarily, stylistics today has developed into its multiplicity – one of which is forensic stylistics. A logistic regression shows a combination of factors including animacy and structural complexity as important predictors showing the nature and where/ when we might find (non) ambiguous news headlines. Of the ambiguous proportion, 47% is lexically-motivated while 53% is structurally motivated. A total of 14 predictors is investigated on the basis of over a thousand news headlines extracted from a Nigerian national newspaper, The Punch, showing that ambiguity has a likely incidence of 22%. This study shows (1) the extent to which ambiguity is present in online Nigerian newspaper headlines (2) the linguistic nature of the ambiguity, and (3) how a total of 14 linguistic predictors clearly show where we might find ambiguous headlines, the nature of the ambiguity, and the different scenarios characterising (1) and (2). But ambiguity and meaning-making are so related that the former is, to a varying degree, almost always present in news headlines, given a number of linguistic and non-linguistic factors influencing the writer, reader, and the language at hand (Hirst, 1987, Akinlotan 2018d, Eckert 2018). The language of news headlines requires that the specific meaning being constructed is without ambiguity, and thus be clearly identifiable by the readers. Such notable features included the use of certain punctuation marks, capitalization, colours choice of lexical items, grammatical categories and structures and others such as the use of elision, acronyms, fronting, amongst others. The findings showed that certain linguistic features were highlighted for the functions they were made to perform in the headlines. The study analysed the graphological, grammatical, lexical and other notable language features to establish elements constituting the style of Vanguard Newspaper headlines. To identify and explain style features in the selected newspaper headlines, Halliday's functional stylistic theory was applied. The qualitative method enabled the author to account for the motivations for the use noted language features, while the quantitative method helped to account for the preponderance of certain language features to the exclusion of others. Both qualitative and quantitative were used for data analysis. In order to achieve the objective of the study, the stratified sampling method was used to collect 120 headlines published between January and December, 2014. The study investigated the stylistic features of Nigerian Vanguard headlines.
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