Browsing by Author "Zubairu, Halima Yahaya"

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    STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE NIGERIAN CRIMINAL CODE ACT AND SELECTED SUPREME COURT JUDGEMENTS
    (DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS FACULTY OF ARTS NASARAWA STATE UNIVERSITY KEFFI, 2019-12-17) Zubairu, Halima Yahaya
    This work, The Stylistic Analysis of the Nigerian Criminal Code Act and the Selected Supreme Court Judgments’ examines the style and features of the Nigerian Criminal Code Act. It is a general perception that legal texts are characterised by the use of highly formulaic, stereotypical, archaic, unusual and difficult vocabulary, impersonal constructions, nominalisations, passive constructions, multiple negations, long and complex sentences, wordiness, redundancy and so on. This usually scars lay people away from even attempting to read any legal document including constitutions and acts that are supposed to be for public consumption. This is antithetical to the cliche that “there is no excuse for ignorance” which is often said in legal settings because there is no way one could be in the know of something he/she is not familiar with. This motivated the study of the Nigerian Criminal Code Act and the Selected Supreme Court Judgments to find a linguistic solution to the unfamiliarity. However, a critical examination of the Nigerian Criminal Code Act proves that not all legal texts are marred with this peculiarity. Contrary to the expectations, the Nigerian Criminal Code Act is not as complex as people think. Though the document shares some features like nominalisation, impersonal constructions, passive constructions, multiple negations, and in some cases, long and complex sentences, with other legal texts, it does not share other intricate features that usually scare people away such as the use of highly formulaic and archaic words. Similarly, foreign and unusual vocabularies are rarely found in the document. The data were primarily collected from the Nigerian Criminal Code Act and secondarily collected from the selected case reports in Nigeria. The study used the Systemic Stylistics Theory proposed by Halliday (1985) and Checklist Stylistics Theory proposed by Leech and Short (2007) to explore the style of the Nigeria Criminal Code Act. The Checklist Stylistics Theory was used to analyse graphological and lexical style of the document and the Systemic Stylistics Theory to analyse the sentential style of the document. The document like other legal documents, consists of peculiar sentence structure such as long sentences consisting of many embedded segments. However, the document has relatively simpler words with no loan words which makes the document more approachable. The study concludes that the document is not as difficult as people perceive legal documents. This study is important because it tries to break the barrier between the Nigerian Criminal Code Act and the society for which the document is meant. The study is beneficial to linguists, law students as well as other educated people. It recommends that more studies should be carried out on other Nigerian legal documents such as Nigerian Constitution, different reports of court cases in Nigeria, to familiarise people with the law of the land.