A DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE DURING THE 2010-2014 MAU FOREST RESTORATION DEBATE IN KENYA

Abstract

Climate change and global warming are challenges facing the world today. This problem is aggravated by the fast disappearance of forest cover in the world. The Mau Complex is not only Kenya’s largest water tower but also the largest closed canopy ecosystem. The forest is therefore of great importance nationally and globally. In spite of its national and global importance, there has been a proliferation of political utterances against the efforts to rehabilitate this water tower. This paper seeks to describe the linguistic features manifest in political discourse and their social implications for forest conservation in the country. This study was guided by a combination of Corpus Linguistics and Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. Downsampling procedure was used to select 10 speeches by political leaders on Mau Forest saga. This study focused on the utterances of the political leaders who were opposed to the conservation cause. These speeches were obtained from the national archives for transcription and analysis.  The CDA analysis was carried out on a sample of texts from the corpus and the data analysed using qualitative and quantitative techniques.  The T-Test and Mutual Information (MI) score were employed as measures of significance.  The t-score ranking was used to measure the certainty of the collocation while the MI-score was used to test the strength of the collocation in the corpus.  Further, the CDA analysis on linguistic features indicated that political leaders’ utterances influence the way people think about the Mau Forest conservation. The results indicated that the co-occurrence of keywords and their collocations were strong and their frequency was higher than expected. The findings showed that utterances laden with negative attitude undermined the Mau Forest conservation efforts. Further the dominant use of the pronominal “we” “me” and “my” were for identity and inclusion with regard to the Mau Forest conservation. It is recommended that conservationists should interpret the potent messages of language and its ability to influence people and society. Thus linguists should use their expertise with language to complement the efforts of natural scientists in the field of conservation. This study would be beneficial to Government and policy makers by indicating that language can help us achieve shift in attitudes and behaviour on conservation issues. The study is also of significance to Ecolinguistics because it would endeavour to reveal the interrelationship between language and forest conservation.