ABSTRACT
Christian handbills
are one of the leading non-verbal means of communication in the society
today especially the church handbills and posters. Technically put,
posters are very important forms of visual communication. It presents
picture(s) with meanings lying behind it. However, there exist some
graphosyntactic errors, lexical, syntactic features and semantic
features used in Christian
handbills. The problem of grapho-syntactic errors contravene syntactic
and graphological norms of the language and are not recognized as such
by most people. The errors are gradually and unfortunately becoming
standard forms of usage for most Nigerians. Ten (10) Christian handbills
selected from ten (10) different churches were collected between
January and May, 2016. The non-randomized method was used as the
sampling technique while the research procedure employed analysis of
linguistic aspects and features such as; graphological function,
lexical, pragmatic tools, syntactic and semantic tools. Results obtained
from this study revealed that Christian handbills play significant
roles in effective communication. Hence, the findings from this study
have become an instrument for achieving background knowledge in language
of information as contained in Christian handbills.
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Communication as a means transmission of ideas, thoughts or feelings
is in two major categories-the verbal and non verbal communications. It
is the purposeful activity of information exchange between two or
more participants in order to convey or receive the
intended meanings through a shared system of signs and semiotic rules.
The most common one used for interaction in human societies is the non
verbal such as; handbills, posters and bill boards (Barnlund, 2008).
Language is a sort of code system, a carrier of information which is
capable of transmitting intended meaning whatsoever. It also reveals
man’s socio-cultural beliefs and thoughts. The importance of language is
for easy communication, expression and enlightenment. The traditional
linguists believe that language has an intended meaning and that the
recipient has only to understand that meaning by interpreting it to make
communication work. In that case, the above information given about
language means that we can deduce different meanings from the same
language used in different contexts (Burke, 1999).