Subordination Across Ghanaian And British Newspaper Editorials: A Register Perspective

Abstract

This is a corpus-based empirical study which argues in the light of the register theory that grammatical categories are functional and relate to their situational context of use. Using editorials from Ghanaian and British newspapers, this paper examined the usage dynamics and the functional motivations behind the use of subordinate clauses in the editorial register. Clause subordination in this study is argued to offer the opportunity for idea expansion. Limiting the focus to functional clauses, it was found that though there are enormous patterns of similarity in the distribution of the three functional clause-types across the variable sociocultural contexts studied in line with claims by register theory, some distributional inconsistencies exist in the details of the subtypes of some of the functional clause-types. The results revealed that nominal clauses are consistently preferred across newspapers from the two sociocultural contexts, followed by relative clauses; an observation that led us to conclude that the nominal clause is indispensable to the editorial register because it performs elaboratory functions necessary for editorial communication. The findings of this cross-cultural study generally enhance our understanding of the language of newspaper editorials as well as the sociocultural variations that exist in the newspaper editorial genre.