Al-Hikmah University Journal

Language is a tool of expression used by human beings in their day-to-day interactions. It is also an instrument that is employed by writers to speak truth to those who are at the helm of affairs. This paper examines the functional linguistic elements employed in Chief Olusegun Obasanjo's July 15, 2019 letter to President Muhammadu Buhari. The letter is sourced online and its examination is premised on descriptive method of analysis. For convenience of identification, the data are tagged as excerpts and numbered serially. The theoretical framework is Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics. The findings of the study are that fronting, apposition, long-winding sentences, conditional sentences and relativisation are syntactically employed. Binomials, loanwords and coinages are the lexico-semantic features; parenthesis, quotation marks and alphabetism constitute the graphological features. The paper concludes that linguistic structures are not just mere components of texts but functional resources that are used in conveying messages and entrenching meanings.