Morpho-Graphology and Meaning-Making in Nigerian Religious Discourse: A Classroom-Based Case Study of “There is no Ch_Rch Without ‘U’”

Nkopuruk; Imikan Nseobong; Odusina; Kehinde Saheed

doi:10.56201/rjhcs.v12.no2.2026.pg71.83

📄 Download Paper

Morpho-Graphology and Meaning-Making in Nigerian Religious Discourse: A Classroom-Based Case Study of “There is no Ch_Rch Without ‘U’”

Nkopuruk, Imikan Nseobong, Odusina, Kehinde Saheed

Abstract

This qualitative study examines the morpho-graphological strategies and meaning-making processes embedded in the Nigerian Pentecostal church billboard inscription: "There Is No ch_rch Without 'u'" — photographically captured on a church billboard along a major street in Abuja, Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory. The expression is a carefully constructed linguistic artefact in which the word church is rendered as ch_rch, with the letter u deliberately excised and replaced by an underscore, while the same letter u is simultaneously foregrounded in the closing prepositional phrase "without 'u'". The resultant dual-layer pun operates on the morpho-graphological plane — exploiting the visual incompleteness of the word ch_rch to draw attention to the missing grapheme — and on the semantic-pragmatic plane, where 'u' functions simultaneously as a phonographic representation of the second-person singular pronoun 'you' and as the missing letter that structurally completes the lexical item church. Drawing on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics , Kress and van Leeuwen's Social Semiotics and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, and critical insights from graph linguistics and language pedagogy, this paper analyses how this single billboard text encodes ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings within the Nigerian Pentecostal discourse ecology. The study further explores the pedagogical implications of this kind of orthographic and morphological creativity for English language teaching, word formation awareness, and literacy instruction in Nigerian educational contexts. Findings reveal that the billboard deploys deliberate graphemic omission, orthographic foregrounding, visual-verbal synergy, and pronoun-grapheme punning as intersecting semiotic resources for community-building, evangelism, and audience participation. The paper concludes by proposing morpho- graphological creativity as a rich, locally contextualized pedagogical resource for language educators in multilingual African settings.

Keywords

morpho-graphologymeaning-makingNigerian religious discoursegraphemic omissionlanguage pedagogyPentecostalismbillboard semioticsorthographic creativityAbujalinguistic landscape

References

Adebomi, O. (2025). 'What we ordered': A multimodal framing analysis of the memetic representation of the Obidient movement in Nigeria. Language and Semiotic Studies, 11(1), 44–70. https://doi.org/10.1515/lass-2024-0060 Adebomi, O. (2025). 'The land of your fathers lieth in ruins': A multimodal critical discourse analysis of Nigeria's 2023 pre-election crises-related internet memes. Discourse & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265241252998 Afolabi, O. O., & Oderinde, P. A. (2024). Exploring the use of mass media by youths in Pentecostal churches in Nigeria. Social Science Information, 63(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/00377686241239578 Boukhris, H., & Sakale, S. (2025). Nominalization as a feature of functional morpho-syntactic complexity in EFL medical scholarly research writing. Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 7(8), 88–96. https://doi.org/10.32996/jeltal.2025.7.8.10 Chigbu, G. U., Aboh, S. C., & Ganaah, J. (2025). Religious othering in Nigeria's electoral discourse: Towards a critical religious tolerance. Discourse & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265241257628 Cohen-Mimran, R. (2025). The phonology-morphology seesaw: Morpho-lexical knowledge replaces phonological awareness as the key predictor of word reading fluency by Grade 4. Reading Research Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.70020 Crystal, D. (2003). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (5th ed.). Blackwell. Dürscheid, C. (2022). Writing systems and their use: An overview of grapholinguistics (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 369). De Gruyter Mouton. IJSSHR. (2024). From pulpit to everyday speech: The social and linguistic impact of Pentecostalism in Nigerian society. International Journal of Social Science and Human Research, 7(12), 8794–8802. https://ijsshr.in/v7i12/1.php Kaldes, G., et al. (2024). Morphological assessment features and their relations to reading: A meta-analytic structural equation modeling study. Educational Research Review, 43, 100602. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2024.100602 Makinde, P. O. (2024). Semiotic landscapes of religious signboards in Awka metropolis: A multimodal analysis. Journal of Chinese and African Studies, 5(1), 49–60. Mensah, E., & Nyong, B. (2022). Visual representations on Nigerian trucks: A semiotic study. Semiotica, 249(1), 43–78. https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2019-0126 Mensah, E., Nyong, B., Mensah, E., & Ayeni, Q. (2023a). When tricycles speak: Language practices and ideology in tricycle texts in Nigeria. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 60, 1724–1738. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219096231197779 Mensah, E., Ebong, O., Ayeni, Q., & Eze, F. (2023b). Women as public transport providers: A qualitative study of the perception of female tricycle riders in Nigeria. Journal of Population and Social Studies, 31. Njoku, R. C., & Amadife, E. N. (2025). Prophets, soothsayers, and the Nigerian political kingdom: A study of the prophetic voices in the 2023 presidential election. Journal of Religion, Culture & Democracy. https://doi.org/10.54669/001c.143727 Nkopuruk, I. N. (2019). The Device of Graphology in Joe Ushie's Poetry: Stylistic and Pedagogical Implications (Master's Dissertation). Munich, Germany: GRIN Verlag. ISBN: 978-3-668-97824-8. Available at: https://www.grin.com/document/494017 Nkopuruk, I., & Saheed, O. K. (2019, March 29). Objectifying Intuitive Response in Stylistic Analysis: A Study of Maya Angelou's 'Still I Rise'. Asian Journal of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies, 2(2), 51-56. Available at: https://journalajl2c.com/index.php/AJL2C/article/view/36 Siame, P., & Nyirenda, C. (2026). Lexico-semiotic analysis of Pentecostal social media signage in Livingstone, Zambia. Linguistic Exploration, 3(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.55121/le.v3i1.458 Uwen, G. O., Adie, H. I., Ekpenyong, B. A., Odey, J. A., Uguma, V. U., Okune, S. T., & Inyang, J. B. (2024). Beyond spoken linguistic landscape: Semiotic ideologisation of regimented practices in the Nigerian Army. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 6(5). https://journals.bilpubgroup.com/index.php/fls/article/view/7016 Musonda, M., Kangwa, K. N., & Siame, P. (2025). A socio-semantic analysis of selected Mambwe anthroponyms. Linguistic Exploration, 2(4), 109–120. https://doi.org/10.55121/le.v2i2.249 Mensah, E. (2025). Shut up! You are not God: Religious identity in commercial tricycle texts in Nigeria. Language and Semiotic Studies. https://doi.org/10.1515/lass-2024-0063

Morpho-Graphology and Meaning-Making in Nigerian Religious Discourse: A Classroom-Based Case Study of “There is no Ch_Rch Without ‘U’”

Abstract

Keywords

References

More Articles from RESEARCH JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES