AN ANALYSIS OF GRAPHO-SYNTACTIC ERRORS IN THE LANGUAGE OF ADVERTISING IN NIGERIA

AN ANALYSIS OF GRAPHO-SYNTACTIC ERRORS IN THE LANGUAGE OF ADVERTISING IN NIGERIA

1.1 THE STUDY’S BACKGROUND

Technological advancements, competition globalization, the increasing importance of information, increasingly competitive environments, and changes in consumer demographic characteristics (e.g., an increase in the number of employed women, changes in family structure) have all contributed to significant changes in marketing and advertising. As a result of these developments, traditional advertising becomes less and less successful, which is aggravated by excessive promotion and advertisers’ grandiose claims. One of the elements contributing to the shortfall is the declining trustworthiness and quality of some media. As a result, advertisers will employ any and all means at their disposal to achieve previously declared goals and maximize their influence.

According to experts (Okorie & Akhidenor 2011), covert advertising is a fundamental brand communication approach used to boost a company’s image and value. Covert advertising is described as a tool for brand communication that may be used to promote and build a brand. According to Muthukumar (2013), covert advertising has long been used as a vehicle and has its own impact on buyers. It has evolved into an important component of Integrated Marketing Communications. It is a less expensive advertising medium , with the potential to have a higher influence on the target market.

Covert advertising is a sort of advertising in which a product or brand is marketed or patronized as an insert in a film, generally by a celebrity who appears in the film. Vasanthi (2013) feels that “covert advertising is viewed as a hybrid kind of advertising.” Covert advertising refers to a product or brand that is interwoven into entertainment and media. To put it another way, branding a variety of products by inserting them in films or television shows where the audience is unaware that they are being sold to.” “Advertisers employ numerous tactics to cleverly conceal such objectives,” Alrasheedi (2014) thinks. Covert communication is used by advertisers to persuade their target consumers to buy their products.” This kind of thinking prompted Aka et al. (2015) to assert that “advertising influences the behavioural pattern of customers and ensures the effectiveness of advertisement.”

Humans generate garbage in their regular activities. According to Singh, Saxena, Bharti, and Singh (2018), garbage was not a major concern when the human population was tiny and drifting, but it became serious as a result of urbanization and the growth of big conurbations. According to Singh et al. (2018), people have migrated from urban to rural areas over the years, resulting in an increase in the amount of garbage produced by a specific site, which has had a severe detrimental impact on public health and sanitation in the environment.

Waste is an unavoidable aspect of life and does not constitute a concern until it is not properly managed. trash management in Lagos State, Nigeria is critical not just for a healthy environment, but also because it falls under SDG 11 and 3 (Sustainable cities and communities, good health and wellbeing), and proper trash management would contribute in achieving this objective. The fundamental goals of waste management, according to Brunner, are to protect human well-being, the environment, and resources.

Allesch and Brunner (2012), along with Singh et al., feel that the migration rate of people from undeveloped and semi-developed areas to metropolitan centers has increased over time. of comparison to underdeveloped cities, the population growth of developed cities is extremely rapid. The unbridled expansion of industrialized areas has left many cities in need of infrastructure services such as water supply, sewage, and community solid waste management. In many metropolitan areas, nearly half of the solid waste generated goes unattended, resulting in unsanitary conditions, particularly in densely populated areas, which has a snowball effect on increasing gruesomeness, particularly due to parasitic and microbial infections in all segments of the population, while developed city dwellers and waste handlers are the least affected. Advertising is a multifaceted strategy used by designated sponsors to distribute information about specific goods, services, or ideas to a particular audience. According to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, “the activity of drawing anything (a commodity for sale, a service provided or desired) to the public’s attention, especially through written or broadcast paid announcements.”

Thus, advertising refers to the tactics and procedures used to bring certain items, services, and ideas to the attention of the general public in order to persuade them to respond in a specific way to what is promoted. Communication is required for advertising, and communication requires the use of language. Language is the major means of connecting and communicating with others. According to Sapir, language is “a totally human and non-instinctive technique of conveying ideas, emotions, and wants through a system of deliberately generated symbols.”

Language, as a result, serves as the foundation for all human activities and interactions. Advertising uses language as a form of human contact, and according to Brook, “the words of advertising must be selected with care if they are not to have ludicrous results.”

The majority of the media in Nigeria is written in English. This is not to suggest that our native languages aren’t used in media advertising; rather, English is the media’s dominating language. Despite the fact that English is not a native language in Nigeria, it is one of the country’s official languages and its lingua franca.

The English language arrived in Nigeria formally with the establishment of Lagos as a British colony in 1862, but there are indications of its presence prior to that date. Communication between English and Nigerians of diverse ethnic groups became important with the arrival of Europeans in Nigeria for political, economic, or religious conquest. According to Omolewa (in Uzoezie), Europeans had a negative opinion of the vernacular, believing it was neither widespread nor of high quality. As a result, these Europeans chose to converse with Nigerians in their native tongue.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to set foot on Nigerian soil. They made contact with different Southern Kingdoms, notably old Calabar and the Benin Empire, about the seventeenth century. British traders were the second group of Europeans to arrive in Nigeria. According to Uzoezie, the British drove away the Portuguese and replaced it as a diplomatic and economic language with English. According to Uzoezie, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and the subsequent British success in the famous race to Nikki in 1884, gave England the monopoly for slave trading along Africa’s West Coast, paving the way for the permeation of the English language along the coast and the hinterlands, as cited by Omolewa in Adetugbo. Interactions between the English language, Portuguese, and some indigenous languages resulted in the development of a type of inter-language (pidgin).

The British officially annexed Lagos as a British colony in 1862; as a result, the British desperately needed manpower to run their government affairs in Nigeria, and having chosen English as the language of government, they had to teach the indigenous people English in order to facilitate better communication, interaction, comprehension, and management. In 1882, the English language was chosen as the medium of instruction for training badly required employees.

Missionaries who came to Nigeria to spread the gospel were also required to converse in English. They emphasized the significance of the English language in religious contexts. They taught Nigerians reading, arithmetic, and writing (the 3 Rs) as part of their conversion strategy. As a result, the language’s spread has been assisted.

When the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807, many freed slaves, according to Eresimmadu and Arinze, returned to their original towns and states. These slaves had already learned some English in their areas of servitude. They went on to serve as interpreters and teachers, helping to expand the English language. Furthermore, according to Udensi and Ike-Nwafor, the work certification system, which made a credit pass in the English language a basic requirement for employment and further education, increased the demand for a strong command of the English language. As a result, English became the language of government, the media, education, and politics, as well as the world’s lingua franca.

The adoption of English as the official language, according to Udensi and Ike-Nwafor, has produced problems for many Nigerians. These difficulties revealed themselves in language usage as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and graphological errors. These errors were caused by language exchanges between English and diverse mother tongues, sometimes known as vernacular languages. These languages are completely distinct from English, with significant changes in phonemic inventories, syllabic structures, orthography, and syntax, among other things. Nigerians frequently blend local language portions into their English speech, which appears as errors.

As a result, among other things, the integration of over 250 linguistic groups into a single nation, the emergence of trade, and the expansion of the market economy necessitated the replacement of traditional advertising (the employment of town criers) with a more contemporary strategy, via English.

1.2 THE PROBLEM’S STATEMENT

The term grapho-syntactic error is foreign to the majority of Nigerians. These errors are common in the advertising sector, as well as other occupations that require speaking and writing, and most people are ignorant of them. The following are the issues that require investigation: Most people do not perceive grapho-syntactic errors as violations of the language’s syntactic and graphological norms. Unfortunately, inaccuracies are gradually but steadily becoming frequent among Nigerians.

1.3 THE STUDY’S OBJECTIVE

The primary goal of this research is to examine grapho syntactic mistakes in Nigerian advertising language. As a result, the following goals;

1. Determine whether grapho-syntactic errors imply a lack of English language knowledge.

2. To see if there is a link between the frequency of these errors and the level of education of the people who use these incorrect forms.

3. Determine whether these incorrect forms show evidence of interference from the users’ first language.

1.4 QUESTIONS FOR RESEARCH

This research is guided by the following questions:

1. Do grapho-syntactic errors imply a lack of English language mastery?

2. Is there a relationship between the frequency of these errors and the level of education of the users of these incorrect forms?

3. Do these incorrect forms reveal evidence of interference from the users’ first language?

1.5 THE STUDY’S IMPORTANCE

This study will uncover grapho-syntactic errors in advertising language. Many people are ignorant of these shortcomings, and as a result, they accept incorrect forms as “normal English forms.” This research will aid in exposing these errors and demonstrating the correct forms of the most common ones, raising public awareness of them. It will also help to illustrate the difficulties that some advertisements present in completely grasping them as a result of such errors. As a result of the study, advertisers will be pushed to alter their items before delivering them to buyers. It will also draw instructors’ attention to them, allowing them to incorporate them into classroom activities.

This research will also raise awareness among authorities from the Federal and State Ministries of Knowledge about the requirement for a specific level of education before our people can be allowed to start a “company,” because these errors are indicative of our people’s lack of formal education. It will also make customers more skeptical of some advertising slogans or idioms, as some grammatically or semantically ill-formed claims may be “intentional” and intended to deceive the reader or listener. In essence, the purpose of this research is to promote awareness of grapho-syntactic errors in advertising and encourage those involved to help eliminate them.

1.6 STUDY OBJECTIVES

This research will look at advertising tactics in Nigeria and how they employ grapho syntactic mistakes. This study will investigate grapho-syntactic errors and whether they indicate a lack of mastery of the English language. It will also investigate whether there is a relationship between the rates of occurrence of these errors and the level of education of the users of these erroneous forms, as well as whether these erroneous forms show traces of interference from the users’ first language. As a result, English and linguistics students from two different universities in Lagos State will be used for this research.

1.7 THE STUDY’S LIMITATIONS

During the course of this study, the researcher was constrained by a lack of funds to delve deeper and broaden the scope of this research.

1.8 TERM DEFINITION

1. ERROR: The state or condition of being incorrect in one’s conduct or judgment.

2. ADVERTISING: Advertising refers to the strategies and procedures used to bring certain things, services, and ideas to the notice of the general public in order to encourage them to respond in a specific way to what is marketed.