ABSTRACT
This work is a corpus-based study of newspaper editorial language. It compares the
usage of sentence types and clause patterns in newspaper editorials from native and
nonnative English contexts. Using register theory (RT), and other theories which
relate language to contexts of use and to communicative function, this work
investigates the distribution of the two major grammatical structures across
newspaper editorials from the two sociocultural contexts. The aim is to validate the
central claim of RT that linguistic features within a given register are essentially
similarly distributed across dialects of the same language because they are functional
choices people make to fulfill communicative functions within a situational context.
To this end, editorials from Ghanaian and British newspapers were explored using
corpus methodology, which combined quantitative and qualitative principles with the
hope of ascertaining the functional motivation behind the distribution of sentence and
clause patterns in the editorial register. Our findings supported by a confirmatory
statistical measurement at Pearson’s critical value of 0.05 supports the claim that
linguistic features are similarly distributed across dialects of a given language in the
sense that the complex declarative sentences and the nominal and relative clauses,
which were the dominant sentence and clause patterns were similarly distributed
across the two sociocultural contexts. Besides, these structures were noted to relate
both to the production and comprehension circumstances and to the communicative
purpose of the newspaper editorial register, a confirmation that linguistic features are
functionally distributed in a situation of use.
FRIMPONG, G (2021). A Comparative Register Analysis Of Editorials From Ghanaian And British Newspapers. Afribary. Retrieved from https://tracking.afribary.com/works/a-comparative-register-analysis-of-editorials-from-ghanaian-and-british-newspapers
FRIMPONG, GEORGE "A Comparative Register Analysis Of Editorials From Ghanaian And British Newspapers" Afribary. Afribary, 18 Apr. 2021, https://tracking.afribary.com/works/a-comparative-register-analysis-of-editorials-from-ghanaian-and-british-newspapers. Accessed 12 Oct. 2024.
FRIMPONG, GEORGE . "A Comparative Register Analysis Of Editorials From Ghanaian And British Newspapers". Afribary, Afribary, 18 Apr. 2021. Web. 12 Oct. 2024. < https://tracking.afribary.com/works/a-comparative-register-analysis-of-editorials-from-ghanaian-and-british-newspapers >.
FRIMPONG, GEORGE . "A Comparative Register Analysis Of Editorials From Ghanaian And British Newspapers" Afribary (2021). Accessed October 12, 2024. https://tracking.afribary.com/works/a-comparative-register-analysis-of-editorials-from-ghanaian-and-british-newspapers