A Lexico-Semantic Analysis of Students' Graffiti at Akwa Ibom State University, Obio Akpa Campus

Abstract

Graffiti inscribed on university walls, desks, and public spaces are linguistic artefacts that encode the social realities, frustrations, and worldviews of students. Despite growing scholarship on university graffiti in African contexts, insufficient attention has been paid to its lexico-semantic dimensions in Nigerian universities, creating a gap in knowledge about the relationship between students' vocabulary choices and the meanings they construct in informal campus discourse. This study addresses that gap by presenting a lexico-semantic analysis of five purposively selected graffiti inscriptions collected from Akwa Ibom State University (AKSU), Obio Akpa campus. Drawing on Roland Barthes' (1972) theory of denotation, connotation, and myth, and Michael Halliday's (1978) theory of social semiotics, the study analyses five purposively selected graffiti inscriptions documented from desks in lecture halls in the Faculties of Management Sciences, Social Sciences, Arts, and the walls of the university. The study adopts a qualitative approach, subjecting each inscription to a close lexico-semantic reading that examines the surface meanings of the texts and the deeper, ideological, and social meanings embedded within specific lexical choices; myth, and the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions. Findings reveal that student graffiti at AKSU operates simultaneously across multiple semantic registers, encoding experiences of academic pressure, institutional hardship, territorial identity, interpersonal betrayal, and resilient endurance. The inscriptions draw on and in some cases subvert dominant mythological narratives surrounding education, suffering, trust, and student life in Nigeria. The study concludes that graffiti at AKSU constitutes a rich and analytically significant body of informal discourse that gives voice to the emotional, social, and ideological realities of student experience in ways that formal institutional channels do not permit.