Lexico – Semantic Analysis of Viewpoint Column of The Nation and The Punch Newspapers

Abstract

Linguists have come to the understanding that the English spoken and written in Nigeria is a variation of the Standard British English (SBE) rather than its deviation. Hence, this study investigates the extent to which Nigerian Newspaper columnists employ the Lexico –Semantic features of the English spoken and written in Nigeria in their write-ups. To this effect, this study is adopting the lexico- Semantic variations of the Nigerian English as identified by Babatunde (2001) as its analytical parameters. The data for this study are drawn from The Nation newspaper and The Punch newspaper, published in the year 2016.