LEXICOGRAMMATICAL CHOICES IN THE CHILD RIGHTS ACT NIGERIA

Abstract

Studies on The Child’s Rights Act in Nigeria (henceforth, (CRANig.) have approached the study mostly from the legal perspective, and the challenges with the domestication of the law in Nigeria. Linguistic studies on the Act are still unfolding. This paper fills this gap by investigating the lexicogrammatical features embedded in the Child’s Rights Act (Nigeria). It specifically examines the Transitivity systems and the selection of connectors and legal jargons encoded and their portrayal of meanings in the Act. The Hallidayan functional approach to grammatical meanings is the theoretical approach to the study. Findings from the analysis reveal that The Act contains carefully selected lexicogrammatical resources, which are structured to depict the epistemic understanding of the world of the Nigerian legal system about children and their rights. This includes knowledge, expectations, justification, events, states, and consciousness related to the treatment of children by all those who are stakeholders in their well-being.