Semantic Analysis of Adverbials in Emotion Expression: A Comparative Study of Social Media Platforms in Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated the semantic role of adverbials in expressing emotions across the three major social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, in Nigeria. Drawing from 78000 annotated posts between 2022 and 2024, it integrated the appraisal theory under the systemic functional linguistic framework theory, focusing on the affect, judgement, and engagement subsystems. The study identified, categorised and analysed adverbials that modulate emotions across political, religious, social, economic, and educational contexts. Methodologically, a mixed-methods was adopted, combining computational text mining with manual discourse analysis.The findings reveal a pattern of intense emotional framing through adverbials, with Twitter exhibiting the highest density of affective and judgmental adverbials. The research contributed to sentiment analysis, forensic linguistics, and digital pragmatics.