THE USE OF ‘I THINK’ AND ‘I BELIEVE’ IN GHANAIAN PARLIAMENTARY DISCOURSE

The current study explores the varied uses of the modal lexical verbs think and believe in expressing modality in parliamentary debates in Ghana using Context-Dependency and Lexical Specialisation theory by Angelika Kratzer (1981, 1991) and modality under the interpersonal metafunction of Halliday‘s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study is a summative content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) that employs the qualitative research design in analysing the data. The data for the study has been collected from the Hansard online from www.parliament.gh/publications/49, the official website of Ghana’s Parliament for the period of five months, from November 2016 to March 2017. In all, 300 clauses containing the lexical verbs of interest were purposefully sampled. The paper is in response to an existing claim that the modal lexical verbs think and believe express uncertainty. Though this is true, however, the technicality of political discourse renders this assertion not generally true. The current study finds that in parliamentary discourse, although the two modal lexical verbs express uncertainty to some extent, they are mostly employed as emphasisers to express a sense of urgency and to show a higher sense of validity in propositions participants make. As emphasisers, they serve a useful tool for the audience’s persuasion. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications that border on the teaching of the lexical modals. Article visualizations