Kwabena Sarfo Sarfo-Kantankah

• Professor
• University of Cape Coast

Political candidates’ goal of appearing preferable in elections leads them to produce messages intended to make them appear better than their opponents. Using the functional theory of political campaign discourse (FTPCD) and supported by content analysis procedures, this study investigates the message types and the functions of campaign discourse o...

Research on issues of women has largely focused attention on, among others, power asymmetries and gender stereotypes, with less emphasis on positive linguistic mechanisms of women. Drawing on a critical discourse analytical approach and using Ghanaian parliamentary debates as data, this paper examines how female members of parliament (MPs) construc...

Studies on the use of adverbs and adjectives by nonnative speakers of English have largely focused on learner corpus. Using Hansards of British and Ghanaian parliamentary debates as data, this paper attempts to partly fill this gap by comparatively examining the use of adverbs and adjectives as intensifiers by British parliamentarians as first/nati...

The Ghana Journal of Linguistics is a double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly journal appearing twice a year (not including special issues), published by the Linguistics Association of Ghana. Beginning with Volume 2 (2013) it is published as an open access journal in electronic format only, at https://gjl.laghana.org and https://www.ajol.info/index.ph...

In spite of the many authoritative classifications of questions, theexamination of questions in different institutional contexts continues togenerate new and interesting insights into the nature of questions.Research shows that question forms and functions substantially differ ininstitutional contexts such as courtroom, classroom, medical andpoliti...

Using parliamentary questions as data and a corpus-assisted systemic functional approach through Wordsmith Tools, this paper, with specific reference to relational processes, explores yes/no interrogatives in order to establish how MPs encode in their questions issues of attitudes, commitments, personalities and ideas of (Prime) Ministers during Gh...

Scholars of the functional theory of campaign discourse have explored the nature of political campaign discourse, particularly presidential campaign discourse. This paper adds to the exploration and the data by analysing Ghanaian presidential debates using Benoit's functional theory. The analysis reveals that the presidential candidates acclaimed m...

Drawing on frame theory, corpus-linguistic methods and parliamentary Hansards data, the paper examines the discursive framing of children in Ghanaian parliamentary discourse. The analysis shows that children are framed within the context of child rights and protection, child labour, child marriage and child trafficking. While Ghanaian parliamentari...

Parliamentary discourse is adversarial by nature (Bull & Wells 2012; Harris 2001). It involves “systematic face-threatening acts marked by unparliamentary language and behaviour” (Ilie 2006a: 194). It is, thus, unsurprising that parliament is a norm-regulated institution. Parliament is an ideologically saturated institution, with high levels of ten...

Studying gender-based violence (GBV) in country-specific parliamentary discourses can provide legislative perspectives and global understanding of the experience of GBV and the fight against it. In Ghana, for instance, men are mostly seen as the default perpetrators of GBV, even though research shows that men also suffer from GBV. Thus, using a cor...

Containing the set of policies that political parties stand for and wish to implement if they are elected to govern a country, manifestos are a campaign tool used by political parties to persuade the citizenry to vote in a certain direction. This paper uses corpus-linguistic methods to investigate the key concepts in the manifestos of two Ghanaian...

Ever since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, several parliaments around the world have had to completely or partially close down, yet parliaments perform key roles in fashioning out laws and policies for the fight against the disease. To this end, the views of parliamentarians about the pandemic and its related issues are crucial for legislation...

Through corpus-based methods, this study examines Ghanaian parliamentary discourses around the lemmas/the lexemes/the nouns gender, men and women and topics/themes that characterise them. The analysis shows that women are discursively constructed as vulnerable and disadvantaged people who need empowerment through small-scale businesses and increase...

Employing a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach, this paper investigates apologies in a parliamentary context, using as data Hansards of the Parliament of Ghana (2005 e2018). It identifies various apologetic expressions in the data, examines the display of (in) sincerity and apology acceptance as well as socio-pragmatic factors influencing t...

Due to its supervisory responsibility over the executive and public institutions, including ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), Ghana's legislature has a mandate to check and fight corruption and make its practice a high risk, low-gain activity. The commitment, urgency and the willingness to fight corruption can be seen not only in creatin...

This paper explores the syntactic and pragmatic uses of actually as a discourse marker in Ghanaian parliamentary debates. Employing a corpus methodological approach, the paper uses a 1.9 million-word corpus of Ghanaian parliamentary data in order to examine the patterns of the use of actually by Ghanaian parliamentarians in their parliamentary deba...

Using the concepts of apologia, image repair and rhetoric, this paper examines the strategies employed by a former president of the Republic of Ghana to simultaneously maintain his reputation after losing the 2016 Ghanaian general elections and campaign for re-lection as the standard bearer of his party. The paper finds that the former president di...

This paper examines how parliamentarians design their questions and flout parliamentary rules of questioning, leading to confrontations between parliamentarians (MPs) and (Prime) Ministers. A comparative corpus-assisted discourse analysis of UK Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) and Ghanaian Minister’s Questions (GMQs) indicates that GMQs are less c...

Studies on the use of adverbs and adjectives by non-native speakers of English have largely focused on learner corpus. Using Hansards of British and Ghanaian parliamentary debates as data, this paper attempts to partly fill this gap by comparatively examining the use of adverbs and adjectives as intensifiers by British parliamentarians as first/nat...

The aim of this paper is two-fold: (1) to demonstrate the usefulness of corpus-driven methods in determining a research focus, and (2) to show that ‘people’-focussing is a key feature of UK and Ghanaian parliamentary debates. Identifying one’s research focus in discourse analysis after collecting a large amount of data can be challenging. It is rel...

The paper examines the discursive construction of corruption by Ghanaian parliamentarians. It uses as dataset a 1.9 million-word corpus of Hansards of debates and committee reports between 2005 and 2016. It draws on the frame theory and employs a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) approach to explore the languageof parliamentarians (MPs) in o...

The way women on campus turn down proposals from men is quite fascinating. The in-thing now is the use of the expression ‘‘I’m not interested’’ in turning down a man’s proposal. This, in addition to our personal interests, motivated us to research into this topic. The study tried to identify and evaluate the various strategies employed by women on...

This paper discusses the ways by which members of the Berekum Training College, Ghana refuse requests in English, and how age and socio-economic status affect those refusal forms. Employing the ethnographic research design together with the theories of face and politeness, the study reveals that there are two major ways of making refusals in Englis...