Crime Talks and Tales: A Forensic Stylistic Study of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Press Releases

Abstract

Despite the institutional importance of EFCC press releases, their forensic stylistic features remain largely underexplored in scholarly research. Thus, this study investigates the linguistic and stylistic features of press releases issued by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) using a forensic stylistic approach. Press releases produced by law-enforcement agencies function not only as informational texts but also as strategic communicative instruments that construct institutional authority, frame criminality, and influence public perception. Drawing on Critical Stylistics as developed by Lesley Jeffries (2007, 2010), the study examines how lexical choices, syntactic structures, modality, and rhetorical strategies are deployed in EFCC press releases to project procedural transparency and reinforce institutional legitimacy. The research adopts a qualitative case study design, analysing purposively selected EFCC press releases published in 2026 on the agency’s official website. The analysis focuses on lexical density, evaluative language, declarative syntactic patterns, evidential markers, and ideological framing within the texts. Findings reveal that EFCC press releases employ precise legal terminology, structured narrative sequencing, and assertive modality to construct a discourse of authority and accountability. These linguistic strategies foreground evidential processes, frame suspects within legal narratives of responsibility, and position the EFCC as a credible and decisive anti-corruption institution. The study contributes to scholarship in forensic linguistics and stylistics by demonstrating how institutional language functions simultaneously as a communicative, evidential, and ideological tool in anti-corruption discourse within the Nigerian socio-legal context.

Received: 18  April  2026 / Accepted: 28 June  2026 / Published: July 2026