ABSTRACT
The study examined selected Nigerian legal genre-texts to establish their generic character and explain the rapport management strategies employed in the text composition process. Existing studies on Nigerian legal texts have concentrated more on power and the linguistic means of achieving same in courtroom discourse, particularly lawyer/judge and witness interactions. This study extends the discourse on Nigerian legal texts by explaining the rhetorical strategies, move-structures, power and ideology and the social impact of legal texts and the underlying rapport management considerations.
The study was a qualitative research and text based. The data consisted of six randomly selected Nigerian legal texts from two sub-genres of the legal genre, namely, court judgements comprising three Nigerian Supreme Court judgements: The Nigerian Navy & ors v. Navy Captain D.O. Labinjo, Michael Odunze, Onyeaju Odunze, Ogbuehi Odunze, Ukachi Amu, Julius Odunze and Okwuchi Amuziev. Nwolu Nwosu, Benedith Ihu, ColumbusAkpelu, Ambrose Onyeze and Cletus Ajoku ( henceforth Michael Odunze& ors v. Nwolu Nwosu), and Ikko Kashadadi v. Ingila Sarkin Noma; legislation: The 1999 Constitution (amended),EFCC Act, 2004, and Evidence Act. The analytical procedure involved a close observation of the social and institutional contexts of the texts to understand the motivations that influence the text composition techniques.
The study found that Nigerian legal texts use identifiable rhetorical strategies such as intertextuality, syntactic discontinuity and metaphor; appellate court judgements and legislations have identifiable move-structures that characterize their organizations; appellate court judgements and legislations mediate power and ideology, and finally the studied texts showed the deployment of rapport management strategies to achieve (dis) harmonious social relationship between/among interactants.
