Lexico-Semantic Analysis of Anthems of Selected Universities in Ekiti State, Nigeria

Abstract

Anthems often encode institutional values, hence, useful in constructing identities for such institutions. The university community is one of such organisations that are usually identified by their commonality in goals. One means by which universities showcase what they stand for is through the use of anthems. Several studies have explored the linguistic analysis of national anthems, with little attention paid to the analysis of language used in anthems of universities in Nigeria. This study, therefore, examines the use of language and their meanings in the anthems of selected universities in Ekiti State, Nigeria. This study adopts Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics for its emphasis on language use in relation to context. Anthems of three universities in Ekiti State, namely- Bamidele Olumilua University of Education, Science and Technology (BOUESTI), Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE) and Afe Babalola University (ABUAD) were purposively selected representing state, federal and private universities, respectively. The study reveals that rich but simple lexical items help in the basic comprehension and memorization of the lyrics in the anthem. Lexical devices such as repetition, synonymy, tactical deployment of nouns, verbs, adjectives and metaphors also foreground important ideas in the anthems.