Browsing by Author "Mamudu, Haruna"

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    A comparative study of ideational grammatical metaphor in the inaugural speech and state of the nation address of a Ghanaian president.
    (KNUST, 2019-06) Mamudu, Haruna
    This study explores the employment of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor in the Inaugural Speech (IS) and State of the Nation Address (SONA) of President John Dramani Mahama of the republic of Ghana. Using the purposive sampling method, the maiden IS and SONA of the President were used, that is, the IS of 2013 and SONA of 2013 were selected for a qualitative content analysis. The study reveals that President Mahama employed all the types of IGM in his SONA but type 4 not employed in the IS. The analysis confirms Halliday’s claim that nominalization is “the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor”. The syntactic versatility feature of nominalization enabled the President to utilize this resource to organize his messages in diverse ways to foreground and background aspects of his messages. The study reveals that IGMs lead to abstraction of processes through which actions and situations are objectified as if they were entities. The President used this resource efficiently in highlighting what has been done, what is being done and what will be done especially in the SONA. The findings also demonstrate the use of IGMs to achieve lexical economy, information density and impersonality. The pervasiveness of IGM type 12, whose realization makes the metaphorical expression longer than the congruent reveals that word economy is not always the main concern for the choice of IGMs.