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A Sociolinguistic Study of Interpersonal Stance in Selected Tweets on the COVID-19 Pandemic

Mariam Titilope Gobir
Department of English and Linguistics, Kwara State University, Malete

Abstract

The global pandemic, COVID-19, has been the central theme of most discourses including the social media discourse. Nigerians, like all other nationals have expressed their opinions in diverse manners regarding this menace. It is against this backdrop that this study investigates interpersonal stance in selected tweets on the COVID-19 pandemic from a sociolinguistic perspective. Using a purposive sampling method, five tweets were selected from the twitter commentaries during lockdown period. These tweets were examined through an adaptation of the analytical tools of Hyland's (2005) Stance Theory of attitudinal evaluation. The findings from the study show that rhetorical devices such as metaphor, simile, nouns and analogy were deployed in the tweets to stir the emotions of readers, create humour, and lessen the impact of the pandemic on the people. The paper concludes that tweets are not just multimedia resources found on the social media; they have meaningful connotations, they are weapons which the oppressed use to fight their oppressors in a social setting where moral decadence has become the order of the day.