Grammatical pragmatics: Language, power and liberty in Ghanaian political discourse

Abstract

This study demonstrates the interconnectedness between language, power and liberty. Using two of Dr Joseph Boakye Danquah’s letters written to President Nkrumah (Ghana) and working within the frameworks of language and power and language and liberty (Obeng, present article), we demonstrate that although by being candid, Ghanaian political actors in opposition risk personal danger, such actors have strategies for seeking the protection of their liberty (positive and negative) and for challenging powerful political actors’ actions. The syntactic features used for seeking liberty include factives, antithetic constructions, collocations and voice; the discourse-pragmatic features include inferencing, political pronouns, presupposition, in-group anthroponyms, politeness and metalanguage. In conclusion, language behavior in Ghana’s political ecology is intricately coordinated with political actors’ worldview of and stance on liberty and their willingness to speak candidly instead of giving up on words.

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