A Comparative Register Analysis Of Editorials From Ghanaian And British Newspapers

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.