This grammatical analysis of the central pronouns in Nigeria's 2015 Presidential Debate aimed at determining their occurrence, semantic manifestations, typological and thematic distribution, and textual functions. Twenty-three central pronouns with a combined frequency of 2409 were identified and analysed using Quirk et al.'s (1985) framework. The result showed a 58% representation and a frequency of 94.6 in 1000 words, with the forms we, you, it, I, they, our emerging the most frequent. Personal pronouns were a hundred times more frequent than reflexive pronouns and fourteen times more recurring than possessives. The 1st person, 2nd person and 3rd person forms respectively represent approximately one-half, one-quarter, and one-third of total person contrast made; however, a dominance of plural over singular was seen and this was more pronounced with 2nd person. Whereas the ratio of masculine to feminine was 22:1, neuter gender was generally dominant. A dominance of subjective case over objective case was revealed while genitive case featured as determinatives only. Pronominal choices were governed by theme, structure of responses, and idiosyncrasy, as I was more concentrated under motivation for contesting than any other theme and under recognising and justifying the problem than specifying actions to be taken or making concluding marks. The multiple-authored texts used manifestly exposed the diversity of pronoun forms and their combinatory possibility, which was advantageous since the focus was not a given politician's idiolect but the use of an aspect of language in politics, namely the central pronouns.
There is a dearth of studies on mood and modality as a focus. This study examines the manifestation of mood and modality in texts. It identifies their pattern of occurrence, compares their frequency, and accounts for possible differences between their manifestation and reported norms. The data comprise 3 069 verbal groups. It was obtained by orthographically transcribing Christian Religious Knowledge, Geography, Physics, and Chemistry lessons recorded in schools in Lagos State, Nigeria and identifying all the verbal groups therein. The topics taught were respectively The Mission of the Church, The Drainage System, Electric Field, and Nitrogen. The scale-and-category version of the systemic grammatical model, complemented by simple percentages, served as analytical tool. Results show that mood represents 72 per cent of the data and 81 per cent of the finite verbal groups. Declarative mood, interrogative mood and imperative mood represent 55 and 62, 10 and 11, and 7.4 and 8.3 per cent respectively of the data and finite. Verbal groups marked for imperative mood occurred most frequently in segments of the Physics lesson involving strict computation. The non-polar interrogative mood dominated (73 per cent) its polar counterpart. Modality accounted for 13 per cent of the data and 14 per cent of finite. Root modality and Epistemic modality manifested at a ratio of 3:2 in favour of Root meaning. Only in Physics was Epistemic modality (63 per cent ) higher than Root meaning. Will and can exceeded the reported 4.2 and 3.5 in 1 000 word-occurrence by 67 and 46 per cent respectively. PREDICTION was the most recurring specific modal meaning. The fact that every verbal group in predicator function selects from the system of mood partly explains mood's dominance over modality in the texts analysed.
This corpus-based study examined the occurrence and distribution of complex prepositions of the preposition-noun-preposition (PNP)-construction in a non-native English variety with a view to characterising it in the grammar. The data comprised 63 PNP-constructions with 585 occurrences retrieved from the 1,010,382-word International Corpus of English-Nigeria (2015). Motivated by the dearth of works on non-native varieties and underpinned by Construction Grammar, the study revealed an occurrence rate of 579 per million words (pmw). The PNP-constructions were one-and-a-half times more frequent in written (755 pmw) than in spoken (464 pmw) English and were most frequent in the domain Governance & Law (1368 pmw) and least frequent in General Interest Texts (402 pmw). Administrative Writing was the text type with the highest frequency of PNP-construction occurrence (2151 pmw), followed by Parliamentary Debates (1686 pmw); Demonstrations figured the least (49 pmw). In terms of, in addition to, in spite of and on behalf of were the prominent forms, respectively occurring 144, 37.6, 35.6 and 30.7 times pmw. Respect was the highest manifesting semantic category (49 percent) and its respect/disregard strain was dominant in Unscripted Speeches and Administrative Writing; time posted the lowest (0.2 percent). Whereas all the 63 PNP-constructions featured in the British National Corpus (BNC), only 6.1 percent of BNC's132 low frequency forms also occurred in ICE-Nigeria. While 17 percent of BNC's 30 most frequent PNP-constructions did not manifest in ICE-Nigeria, 64 percent of those present occurred more frequently in BNC than in ICE-Nigeria, with the differential as wide as 33:2.
The description of the English verbal group has primarily focused on its formal elements, whereas natural language is form and situation. This paper exemplifies some of the textual functions of the verbal group using data from spoken instructional texts recorded in selected secondary schools in Lagos, Nigeria. Four subjects (Christian Religious Knowledge, Geography, Physics and Chemistry) and four teachers were involved in the study. The corpus size was 17 600 words and the data comprised 3 069 verbal groups. Each verbal group was carefully examined to determine its textual function(s) using situation-induced elements of natural language. Twenty-seven textual functions (e.g., describing entities) were identified. Present tense, BE, and imperative mood respectively expressed 74, 56 and 41 per cent of the functions. Although there was function overlap, this study has confirmed the fact that the formal features of the verbal group currently known grossly under-represent its textual functions in natural language.
Abstract:This study presents a holistic description of the syntactic relationship between transitivity and voice, which has not attracted overt attention. The data comprises 2,187 finite verbal group (FVBG) clauses abstracted from a 17,600-word corpus of orthographically transcribed spoken instructional texts recorded in selected secondary schools in Lagos State, Nigeria. The scale-and-category version of the systemic grammatical model aided the analysis. Fourteen features of syntactic relationship were identified in the literature and their occurrence in the data was ascertained. The pattern and frequency of occurrence of transitivity and voice were determined. Findings confirm the fourteen features and show that the same 1,180 FVBG clauses indicated both transitivity and voice. Voice was however syntactically more basic than transitivity because its unmarked active voice was 26 per cent higher than transitivity's unmarked transitive. Transitivity was 67 per cent transitive and 33 per cent intransitive while voice was 91 per cent active and 9 per cent passive. Their joint occurrence was 65 per cent active transitive, 25 per cent active intransitive, 8.1 per cent passive intransitive, and 1 per cent passive transitive. Only rarely did there occur such perfect correspondences as active transitive with passive transitive. Passive intransitive clauses with animate subjects were restricted to the text dealing with persons and personalities. The transitive verbal group clause with the rankshifted clause as complement and the non-let imperative clause were shown to be passivisable without extraposition and replacement, and against traditionally held views on transitivity and voice, respectively.
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