Sonic Rhetoric: Metaphors and Implicature in Political Discourse in Rivers State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study critically examines sonic rhetoric in political discourse in Rivers State, Nigeria, foregrounding the pragmatic and cognitive functions of implicature and metaphor in political songs. Although Nigerian political music has been widely studied as a medium of protest, resistance, and socio-political commentary, existing scholarship has largely privileged thematic and sociological readings, with insufficient attention to the inferential, metaphorical, and discourse-analytic mechanisms through which political meanings are covertly produced and ideologically naturalised. This study addresses this lacuna by integrating Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature, Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and Critical Discourse Analysis to interrogate how political songs operate as strategic sites of ideological struggle. Employing a qualitative research design, the study purposively collected political songs and chants circulating in Rivers State between October 2023 and April 2024, a period marked by intense political contestation. Eight songs were sampled, with five selected for in-depth analysis. Data were sourced from cyberspace, transcribed, and subjected to a triangulated analytical procedure combining pragmatic inference, metaphor mapping, and discourse-ideological critique. The findings demonstrate that political songs function as highly sophisticated rhetorical artefacts that encode political positions through implicature, metaphor, and interdiscursivity. Metaphorical constructions such as POLITICAL LIBERATION AS BIBLICAL EXODUS, PAIN AS DEFEAT, and POLITICAL ALLEGIANCE AS CONTAMINATION reframe political conflict in moral, embodied, and religious terms, while implicature enables indirect accusation, strategic ambiguity, and affective mobilisation. Crucially, the study reveals the discursive fluidity of sonic texts, showing how identical songs are recontextualised to perform resistance, veneration, mockery, or humiliation across competing factions. The study concludes that political songs in Rivers State constitute dynamic discursive instruments that actively mediate power relations, legitimise authority, and reproduce ideological polarisation, underscoring the centrality of sonic discourse in contemporary Nigerian political communication.

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