The Dependent Clause in Ghanaian English Pidgin

Increasing use of Pidgin in Ghana has inevitably drawn attention to this variety of language – especially, since its use is believed to have a direct negative effect on people’s competent use of the English Language in school. As a result, people believe that its pervasive use by the youth in Ghana has implications for education in the country. This negative perception stems from the conviction that pidgin is linguistically deficient because a)       it is a reduced language, when compared to its superstrate language(s) b)       it is spoken by people in the lower class of society Not surprisingly, therefore, there are those voices in the educational sector who often suggest that pidgin use in school campuses should be stamped out. This strong condemnation of pidgin use has aroused our interest in this study of pidgins. We consider a pidgin as a contact language, closely related to whatever language(s) serve(s) as its superstrate(s). As a contact language, then, it deserves research interest. The overall aim in this study, accordingly, is to examine the grammar of Ghanaian English Pidgin. Specifically, we are interested in the grammar of the dependent clause in a variety of pidgin. And the data we are using is derived from recorded conversations that Osei-Tutu (2009) used in his work on Ghanaian Student Pidgin. Our assumption throughout this work is that the fact that pidgin is viewed as ‘a reduced language’ does not mean that it is linguistically deficient and unstructured. We believe that it has structure and, accordingly, can be studied, like any other contact language

The Complex Sentence in Legal English: A Study of Law Reports

Using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as its theoretical framework, this study analyses case reports of Ghana’s Supreme Court decisions which were published in the Daily Graphic of 2011 and 2012. There were 87 such cases reported in the newspaper in that period. The study is based on the assumption that legal English is a recognized specialized form of language use and that the language is specific to the special requirements of the law. Earlier studies have noted that the pursuit of precision, clarity and all-inclusiveness is an important goal  of legal language. Accordingly, in this work, we have established that these goals of precision, clarity and all-inclusiveness are achieved through the use of detailed information to avoid confusion and ambiguity in the interpretation of the law. If legal language is perceived as complex and incomprehensible, it is because there are specific linguistic steps taken to ensure that the language is precise, clear and unambiguous. One such measure is the use of grammatical structures. For instance, in order to accommodate the high volume of information within a sentence, different structural types of clauses are used in the law texts. The main question we answer in this work is: what are the linguistic structures we find at the Unit of Sentence in law reports? From the analysis, the following results have emerged. The declarative is the only sentence type used in the reports which we analyzed. In addition, it is noticed that hypotaxis is the preferred clausal relationship in this variety. As a result, the picture that emerges in this analysis is that there is the overwhelming dominance of the dependent clause type. This is an indication that a)       there are links between ideas in the sentence b)       there is the process of information integration in the legal texts c)       there is information ranking in the texts All these indicators are realized through rankshifting, a grammatical process which has facilitated the packaging and the ranking of the ideas in a single sentenc

A linguistic landscape of the central business district of Accra

Using the mixed method research approach, this study investigated the linguistic landscape of the central business district of Accra, Ghana. The study employed both the Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory (EV) and the Place Semiotics Theory to explore the types of signage displayed by shop owners in the Makola market, the languages used on these signs, the dominant language(s) on the signs and how the use of language reflects the ethnolinguistic vitality of the local languages used in Accra. The findings present a very busy linguistic landscape where shop owners use the names of their companies and the products they sell as a marketing strategy through a variety of modes including signboards, billboards, taglines, and signposts to attract customers. There was also a preponderance of English in the linguistic landscape of Accra, which establishes English as a powerful tool for inter-ethnic communication and national integration, giving an implicit impression of low vitality of indigenous languages in the space

A Reconsideration of Grammatical Categorization in English: The Clause

Various models for categorizing grammatical units exist in the literature. Particularly nebulous, however, are terminologies for conceptualizing categories at the level of the clause. For example, the term complement has been used, confusingly sometimes, as both a functional term and, on some occasions, as a structural term. In this study, a model of categorization is proposed, which keeps functional classification separate from structural classification, in order that concepts used in grammatical analysis can be clearly understood and be applied more easily in text analysis. Accordingly, the specific aim of this study is to examine some already ‘accepted’ subcategories of the dependent clause and, in the process, propose a new approach for the analysis of this clause type. This approach, it is hoped, will remove (a) semantic considerations from the analysis of these grammatical units and (b) the confusion between the notional and syntactic description of the units. In the end, this work involves a reconsideration of some traditional ways of doing grammatical categorization with the hope that it will ease identification of grammatical categories. The overall goal is to offer a more consistent and structured approach to the grammatical analysis of the clause in English