
































SECTION B: STUDIES IN DISCOURSE

4

New Media Discourse Analysis: A Text Linguistic Analysis of Facebook Posts on the
Russia-Ukraine War

Chiagozie Eburuaja

Abstract

Many studies have been done on text linguistics (Umera-Okeke, 2007, Ashipu, 2012, Ezeifeka
and Osakwe, 2013), but little or no study has been channeled towards analysing social media
texts on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The study adopted the Relevance theory by
Sperber and Wilson as the theoretical framework for the study. All the Facebook posts written on
the Russian invasion of Ukraine formed the population of the study. Through simple random
sampling, four Facebook posts were chosen as data for the study. Data were collected using
screenshots on a laptop. Findings revealed that the writers of the various Facebook posts used
different cohesive devices to tie their texts together and equally achieve coherence. And these
cohesive devices helped them communicate relevant and sufficient information to their readers.
The readers, on the other hand, were convinced that the writers helped them keep abreast of the
political happenings in Ukraine by making posts that are relevant. This is evidenced in the
different positive reactions garnered by the posts on Facebook.

Keywords: text linguistics, cohesive devices, coherence, new media discourse analysis, social
media texts



Introduction

Russia and Ukraine were part two of the fifteen countries that made up the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a defunct nation or country
made up of fifteen countries that are now independent nations including Ukraine. As a result of
an unsuccessful coup in Soviet Union (USSR), the politics of interference by the west e.g.
Europe and America – brought an end to the union in 1991. Among the now independent states,
Russia is a bigger nation just like Nigeria is the giant of Africa. In the former USSR, Ukraine
was where the Nuclear power plant was sited. Upon separation, Russia had a treaty with Ukraine
over stoppage of programs in the site and taking over intelligence of the nuclear power plant. On
the other hand, Russia promised not to interfere with the government and politics of Ukraine.

Contemporarily, Ukraine stands a position of greatness in the world in the area of food
production and others. Now, the west started liaising with Ukraine, and this undermines the
regional power of Russia. Ukraine also started nursing the ambition to join North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation (NATO) led by the west (America and Europe). NATO wields enormous military
power (air, land and sea). NATO as a conglomeration of nations can defeat any country with
their combined military power. Therefore, Russia found it very uncomfortable to allow Ukraine
join NATO considering that her regional power and nuclear power plant are at stake. Allowing
Ukraine join NATO will eternally and grossly make Russia susceptible to external aggression
and threat from Europe and America, and may lead to Russia losing her enormous power.

At this stage, Russia began to interfere with Ukraine’s internal politics indirectly. First,
they annexed a part of Ukraine called Crimea seven years ago. Second, they installed a pro-
Russian government in Ukraine which the west ended and aided a democratic government for the
first time in Ukraine led by President Zelenskyy. Third, Russia started supporting rebels in
breakaway regions of Ukraine – Dornesk and Lugansk – against the government. These actions
expedited the interest of Ukraine to join NATO. It, therefore, escalated the age long quest for
Russia’s regional power over the defunct union by invading Ukraine.

On 24 February 2022, the world woke up to the news of Ukraine getting invaded by
Russia due to issues bordering on border control and political interest. Ukraine is aligning with
US and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) forces to the chagrin of Russia. In 2020,
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved Ukraine's new National Security Strategy
whose aim was membership in NATO. On 24 March 2021, Zelenskyy signed the Decree No.
117/2021 which approved the reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of
the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. The invasion of Ukraine is
understandably targeted at reclaiming the nation and the region. More so, the invasion is aimed
at deterring the West from Ukraine, and Ukraine vows never to retreat.



Ukraine’s NATO membership does not sit well with the Russian President, Vladimir
Putin. They believe the closer US gets to Russia, the easier it is to penetrate and destabilize them.
Russia feels that a possible Ukrainian accession to NATO and the generic NATO enlargement is
a massive threat to its national security. The world at large has accused Russia of political
bullying and many people took to social media to assess the situation and express their angst
against Vladimir Putin. These political analystspeople have taken to the new media because it
has the widest reach -which is global- to register their displeasure on what is going on in Ukraine.

A plethora of academic researches has been carried out on computer mediated
communication and social media, generally. Many researches have been dedicated towards
(im)politeness strategies, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, turn taking and
cyber bullying on social media. But there has not been enough researches carried out on how
new media discourse participants engage their readers/listeners text linguistically. It is pertinent
to analyse how these discourse participants employ cohesion and coherence in constructing their
texts, or the lack thereof. The need for this current research is predicated on this premise. This
academic research breaks new grounds by flashing its torchlight on new media discourse
engagements on the Russia – Ukraine war.

New Media Discourse Analysis

Communication has come a long way in its rite of passage as the primary purpose of language.
From town criers, letter writing, old media, phone calls to the rave of the moment; new media
which is also called social media. Globally, people communicate on different social media
platforms using both written and spoken discourse. This new media avails its users the
opportunity to have real-time conversations, exchange pictures, chat and even have conference
calls. The new media is interactive, social, multimodal, and circularly networked, as opposed to
the linear source-message-audience flow of traditional media. Discerning distinctions between
content produced by ordinary individuals (User Generated Content) and institutionally
commissioned content produced by professionals, is eroding (Khosravinik, 2014, p.287).
The new media has come to be reckoned as the norm in language communication in the 21st

century.

Taiwo (2021) says:

New media refer to any interactive digital media production which is distributed through
the internet or the World Wide Web. New media formats include mobile apps, video
games, weblogs, e-books, email, podcast, threaded discussions, wikis, chatrooms, instant
messaging, text messaging, social network sites, video and teleconferencing, among
others … a sub-set of new media that many contemporary people can relate with is the
social media. Social media relies on networking, collaboration and interaction. Social
media is driven primarily by web 2.0 technology, which allows sharing and collaboration
opportunities to people and help them to express themselves online. (p. 266)



Kaplan and Haelein (2010) concur:

social media is “[a groupof] internet-based applications that build on the ideological and
technologi-cal foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User
Generated Content”. In this definition, what user generated content means is
digitaldiscourse “published either on a publicly accessible website or on a
socialnetworking site accessible to a selected group of people; [showing] a certainamount
of creative effort; [. . .] created outside of professional routines andpractices. (p. 61)

The new media has many socializing processes that mimic offline social associations. It
has given global visibility to many businesses, and digital marketing has become a trend. Most of
these online socialising processes – adding/blocking friends, discourse participation, tagging
people to a discourse, trolling – are prototypes of the offline discussions/face –to- face
communication that humans engage in. This justifies the basis for which the new media is
adjudged viable for discursive practices. Discourse participation is a frontline characteristic of
the new media. … “different social media (platforms) providing the discourse data for detailed
investiga-tion offer very different affordances for participation (and impose differentconstraints),
including for identity work. However, these affordances do notnecessarily straitjacket the actions
of participants, who may also adopt andappropriate media (platforms) for their playful or critical
purposes” (Leppänen, S.,Kytola, S., Westinen, E., Peuronen, S., 2020, p.9).
Taiwo elaborates:

New media are sites for expression of social practices through discourse (discursive
practices). Discursive practices address the processes by which cultural meanings are
produced and understood. Through the new media, social realities are
linguistically/discursively constructed. Such socially constructed realities are what
critical discourse analysts focus on as they investigate any form of discourse. Beyond
these, new media interactions feature conversational forms and these forms can be
observed and described based on the existing approaches to talk in interaction. Likewise,
language use in new media discourse resembles writing. It means features of written
discourse such as thematic organisation and coherence can be investigated in them. (270)

Theoretical Framework

The theory on which the present study is based is relevance theory as proposed by Sperber and
Wilson. Relevance theory is majorly based on Grice’s cooperative principle and its four sub-
maxims; maxim of quantity (information), maxim of quality (truth), maxim of relation
(relevance), and maxim of manner (clarity). These are laid down rules that interlocutors are
believed to adhere to in discourse for effective human communication. Relevance theory
considers the understanding and interpretation of an utterance based on human psychology. It
believes that human communication is deeply rooted in relevance.

Ezeifeka (2018) elaborates:



Relevance theory is an approach to communication which takes Grice’s third maxim, be
relevant, as the central and the core to explaining how information is processed in
discourse. The theory assumes that linguistic communication is based on two important
variables: 1. ostension: speaker-oriented: speaker’s manifestation of what s/he means
through a linguistic code. The speaker must show commitment to his/her intention to
communicate something relevant. 2 inference: audience/hearer-oriented: receiver’s
interpretation of the utterance based on his/her conviction that what the speaker is saying
is relevant. (p. 204)

Relevance theorists define relevance based on two principles: cognitive principle and
communicative principle. Human beings (readers/hearers) are generally blessed with the sense of
perception and learning, and this is maximized in seeking relevance in discourse.
Speakers/writers, on the other hand, always show their commitment towards producing texts that
are optimally relevant. The all-encompassing idea in relevance theory is that a speaker encodes a
message and transfers it to a hearer who decodes the message through inference and context. The
hearer determines the relevance of the message/utterance with regards to his/her cognitive
environment – “a set of facts that a person has manifest to him/her for a fact to be manifest to an
individual means that he/she is capable, at that time, of representing it mentally and accepting its
representation as true or probably true” (Ezeifeka, 2018, p. 205). Relevance, in relevance theory,
is assessed based on two factors; cognitive/contextual effects and processing efforts.

Cognitive/contextual effects

A positive cognitive effect is ‘a worthwhile difference to the individual’s representation of the
world’ (Wilson and Sperber 2004, p. 608), such as a true belief or conclusion. According to
relevance theory, an input is relevant to an individual just in case positive cognitive effects result
from the processing of that input (Mambrol 2020). When new information is processed, it is
likely to yield one of these three types of positive cognitive effects: 1. Contextual implication
where new assumptions are formed, but conclusions are basically drawn from new and (old)
existing assumptions. 2. Modification: old/existing assumptions get modified. 3. Contradiction:
new information contradicts the old/existing information, so old information s exchanged with
the new.

Processing efforts are borne out of the effort of perception, memory and inference that
must be expended in computing cognitive effects (Mambrol 2020).

Methodology



Data for the study comprised four Facebook posts from one personal account and the Facebook
page of a newspaper organisation. Data were collected using a laptop to take screenshots of the
aforementioned Facebook posts, and analysed using Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance theory.

Data Presentation and Analysis

Excerpt 1

Analysis

Cohesion



Text Grammatical cohesion Lexical cohesion

No matter how you see it, Russia was
beaten at a very legitimate game, and
responded the only way it knew how,
force, a method that should be frowned
upon by every right thinking individual.

Additive conjunction

No matter how you see it, posterity will
never be kind to Vladimir Putin, and there
is a way this game will play out, that
posterity will be rough on him, even in the
eye of his fellow Russians.

Repetition

Many [ ]were compelled to stop by those
who were their former comrades in the
trade.

Ellipsis

Yes, theworld is still a jungle where might
is right, but from that state of survival of
the fittest, we evolve to a higher state of
morality and compassion, not regress
further to a state of Hobbes.

Adversative conjunction

What any 1right thinking person should do,
should be to make sure the American
establishment responsible for that war,
answer either to the law, or to 2history and
posterity.

1Collocation

2Reiteration (antonyms)

Coherence

The Facebook post is quite situated in its correct context, and the writer employed the right
register (genocide, war, invaded, invasion, war, law, history, posterity) for the post. On
intentionality, the writer was quite intentional in communicating a meaningful piece to his
Facebook audience. The commitment to communicate a relevant piece is palpable. The one
hundred and eleven positive reactions (like, love and laughter) on the post show that the audience
is convinced that the post is relevant. The post garnered one hundred and twenty-one comments
plus one hundred and eleven positive reactions in support of the post. These reactions and
comments in support of the post show acceptability. Facebook allows one to make a maximum
of a sixty-three thousand two hundred and six (63,206) word post, unlike Twitter. This shows



that the writer was not constrained by space, yet he failed to deliver sufficient information on the
subject matter. On the other hand, he could have been avoiding boring his readers. Informativity
was not adequately considered in the text. The Russia Ukraine war was just forty-eight hours old;
therefore the text was adequately situated in a real time occurrence. Situationality was adequately
employed in the text. The text is very relevant to the situation of occurrence: the Russia-Ukraine
war. On intertextuality, the writer’s knowledge of other texts, which are relevant to the present
text, is not in question. The writer enriched the text with his knowledge of US invasion of Iraq,
Cuban missile crisis of 1963 and Bay of Pigs attack by John F. Kennedy.

Excerpt 2

Analysis

Cohesion

Text Grammatical cohesion Lexical cohesion

Ukraine however is demanding an unconditional
surrender of troops and fighting equipment, or face

Adversative
conjunction



complete destruction.

May Vladimir Putin be thoroughly humiliated and
disgraced in this misadventure of his.

Reiteration
(synonyms)

Coherence

Troops, trapped soldiers, invasion, surrender, fighting equipment, the military, complete
destruction and deteriorating economic situation are registers of war which the writer deployed
in constructing the text in the second excerpt. The text was also situated in its right context; the
Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Though the second excerpt is a short piece of text, the writer was quite intentional in writing the
Facebook post. The commitment to communicate a relevant text to the readers is not in question
considering that the text is enriched with appropriate registers that are associated with war. The
readers also show a certain level of conviction about the relevance of the post by agreeing with
the writer in the comment section and splashing reactions that show agreement in the post. Four
Facebook users equally shared the post on their timelines. Ostension and inference are
exemplified here. The reactions, comments and shares show a rich level of acceptability. Though
the writer is not as informative as is required, he was just making an update/follow up of news
about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The war just entered its fifth month as at the time of the
post, so situationality is very well considered in the text. The text is relevant to a situation of
occurrence. There is no evidence of intertextuality in the text.



Excerpt 3

Analysis



Text Grammatical cohesion Lexical cohesion

Ukraine Releases Number of Deaths in Battle
With Russia. Ukraine has stated that not less
than 2000 civilians have lost their lives since the
invasion by Russia on Feb. 24.

Text

Reiteration
(Repetition)

The UN had previously stated that 142 civilians
had lost their lives due to the unrest.

1Since then, more than 400 fires caused by
2enemy fire have been extinguished, according to
the statement.

1Causal conjunction 2Collocation

The emergency service also said that 500 people
have been brought to safety.

Collocation

In related news, a group of youth volunteers have
responded to a recent call by Ukrainian
President, Volodymyr Zelensky, urging people
around the world to join the fight against Russia.

Additive conjunction

Coherence

The third excerpt is written in its correct context of use, and is rich in registers of war: deaths,
battle, invasion, emergency responders, state emergency service, the unrest, enemy fire, safety,
the fight and the war. The Daily Times Nigeria is the Facebook page of a print media whose
general aim is to make news/trends easily accessible to their legion of readers all over the globe.
So, whoever that manages the social media page will make sure that whatever s/he churns out
does not fall short of the aim. Therefore, the writer’s commitment to communicate a relevant
cum meaningful text to the readers is undeniable. The 261 positive reactions on the post (likes
and haha) show that the readers are convinced that the writer communicated a relevant piece to
them; hence the acceptability is not in question. The text is as informative as is required as it
gives information bordering on deaths, emergency services, number of lives lost, number of
people brought to safety, volunteers and number of volunteers. On situationality, the text is very
relevant to a situation of occurrence: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Reliance on previous texts
made by The Guardian, the UN and the second secretary are evidence of intertextuality in the
Facebook post.



Excerpt 4

Analysis

Text Grammatical cohesion Lexical cohesion

1Russia to deliver nuclear-capable missiles to
Belarus, upgrade 2fighter jets

1Reiteration
(repetition)



Russia has pledged to deliver nuclear-capable
Iskander-M missiles to its ally Belarus.

Russia’s 24 February invasion of Ukraine
included Russianarmoured columns sent in from
Belarus.

2Collocation

Iskander missiles have been deployed previously
in Kaliningrad, a small Russian Baltic territory
between NATO members, Lithuania and Poland.
They have a range of up to 500km (300 miles).

Anaphoric reference

Russian President Vladimir Putin made the
promise when he met his Belarusian ally
Alexander Lukashenko in St Petersburg on
Saturday

Anaphoric reference

1The Belarusian President also asked Russia to
make his country’s warplanes nuclear-capable,
2and the Russian leader further promised that
Belarusian Su-25 fighter jets would be upgraded.

1Anaphoric reference

2additive conjunction

Coherence

Nuclear capable missiles, fighter jets, ally, iskander – M missiles, ballistic and cruise missiles,
warplanes, military and rocket strike are registers of war employed in constructing excerpt four,
and these words situate the text in its correct context of use. The writer’s intention to construct a
relevant linguistic code to the readers is evident (ostension). Considering that the text garnered
338 likes, the readers are convinced on the relevance of the text (inference), and this shows
acceptability in conjunction with the 66 supporting comments and 31 shares. Sufficient
information -as concerns the subject matter –(delivery of nuclear-capable missiles to Belarus and
upgrading fighter jets) is given in the text. The writer is not more informative than is required.
The Russia-Ukraine war was in its fourth month when this post was made on Facebook,
therefore the text is situated in real time. It is, hence, relevant to a situation of occurrence. No
evidence of intertextuality is seen in the text.

Conclusion

The writers of the Facebook posts employed different grammatical and lexical cohesive devices -
additive conjunctions, repetition, adversative conjunction, ellipsis, collocation, reiteration, causal
conjunction, additive conjunction and anaphoric reference – in constructing the texts and making
them hang together. The posts were equally deemed coherent using DeBeaugrande and Dressler



(1981)’s yardstick for measuring coherence which they call seven standards of textuality. The
writers employed intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, but only two of the
excerpts had evidence of intertextuality. The other two Facebook posts were bereft of
intertextuality. Suffice it to say that the texts (Facebook posts) are cohesive and coherent
considering the writers’ are intentional in churning out posts that are communicatively relevant
using linguistic codes. The readers’ conviction on the relevance of the post is palpable as is
evidenced in their positive reactions to the Facebook posts.

References

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Daily Times Nigeria. (June 26)Russia to deliver nuclear capable missile to Belarus. Facebook

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