Abstract
One of the sources of effectuating language is a poster. It employs a range of linguistic and visual resources to convey messages of protest, persuasion, and social commentary, making them a fascinating site for examining the intersection of multimodality and pragmatics. The purposes of this study are to examine how various pragmatic resources for activating protest and critical social commentary are realized, to investigate how linguistic and visual strategies of conveying meaning and achieving communicative goals are employed, and to analyse how a range of semiotic resources are used to construct and contest social meanings, identities, and power relations. Data (posters) for this qualitative research were gathered from different online news outlets comprising the Cable, the Punch, the Guardian, Channels and Tribune. Simple random sampling technique was deployed to select six (6) #Endbadgovernance protest posters from 1st August to 10th August, 2024, from the available data population. Afterwards, modified Leuwen's (2005) Multimodal Communicative Acts (MCA) and Mey's Pragmatic Acts (PA) were deployed for their stylo-pragmatic analysis. Findings showed that from the textual part of the PA pragmeme, inference (INF) is the most potent tool in protest poster design as it is severally used in all the data to earn it 100% representation. Image was also discovered as the most powerful tool of MCA with 100% realisation while language and typology got 83% apiece. In conclusion, language researchers can simultaneously read meaning to concepts like pictures, banners and the likes, using inputs from the analytical linguistic tools of the fields of social semiotics (Multimodal Stylistics) and Pragmatics.
Keywords: Multimodal Communicative Acts, Poster, Pragmatic Acts, Pragmeme, Protest
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2025.v01i01.010
author/Umar, M.A., Salawdeen, W.O. & Abdurraheem, H.
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(1) | December 2025
