Cross-dialectal similarity of registers: The case of the sentence across Ghanaian and British newspaper editorials

Abstract

The claim of register theory is that there is cross-dialectal similarity in linguistic choices across texts from the same register because language used in a register serves a specific communicative purpose in a given situational context. In this empirical study, the sentence was investigated across a specialized corpus of editorials from Ghanaian and British newspapers with the hope of ascertaining the similarities or otherwise in this aspect of language use across native and nonnative dialects of English. In the light of Biber and Conrad's (2009) model of register, we argue that quantitative dominance of specific sentence types and consistency in their distributional patterns across the two sociocultural contexts are indicative that those dominant sentence types are functional to the editorial register. The data reveal that in spite of a few distributional discrepancies, which reflect regional adjustments in situational and cultural contexts, sentence types are generally similarly distributed across editorials from the two sociocultural contexts, with declarative and complex sentence types being consistently dominant across the two texts.