Frimpong, G.K.2018-06-042018-06-042015-07http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh/handle/123456789/23295Thesis (PHD)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.enEditorialsNewspapersNonnative English ContextsNative English ContextsGhanaThesis