A GRAMMAR OF NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL LANGUAGE: THE COMPLEX SENTENCE

This study sets out to examine what linguistic choices are made at the level of the sentence in selected English Language editorials in a particular newspaper in Ghana – the Daily Graphic. Data for the study consists of 338 selected sentences from 22 editorials of the Daily Graphic published in January 2008. We have limited ourselves to the complex sentence, and specifically, to the dependent clause as it occurs in these editorials. At the end of the analysis, we identified the following patterns: (a) only declarative sentences were used, (b) there was overwhelming reliance on complex sentences and (c) most of the complex sentences consisted of multiple rankshifted structures. 1