Discourse study of linguistic errors in <i>Vanguard</i> online readers’ comments on the alleged 2012 fuel subsidy committee bribery scandal

Abstract

The study identifies common linguistic errors among online commenters. It analyses and interprets the identified errors. It relates the interpreted  errors to the socio political context of Nigeria. This was done with a view to investigating how these discussed errors were used by online  commenters on the alleged national assembly fuel subsidy committee bribery scandal. The study employed both primary and secondary sources of  data. The primary source includes 20 purposively selected readers’ comments on news reports from the Vanguard online. The secondary source  includes books, journal articles and the Internet. Data were analysed using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar approach. The study discovers  that errors such as faulty sentence constructions, wrong use of, punctuation marks and spellings were used by commenters.