A Contra-Systemic Study of Clausal Coordination in Daily Trust and Alaroye Newspaper Columns

Abstract

Linking clauses within short or long sentences can be very technical. This is because the semantic output of the linkage may not equate the meaning of the individual clauses when they are not linked.This paper, therefore, examined clausal coordination in Daily Trust and Alàróyé newspaper columns written in English and Yoruba respectively. The central coordinators, and, but and or in the case of Daily Trust, and tabi and ati in the case of Alàróyé , were focused upon. All the columns were written by a single individual for each of Daily Trust and Alàróyé . The data were gathered between January 2, 2015 and February 20, 2015. Instances of coordination were randomly selected across the columns. The data were analysed based on the meta-function of Systemic Functional Grammar. Findings showed that an alternative coordinator (tàbí) often has an additive role (àtí ) in Alàróye ́ , and that an adversative coordinator (but), in the case of Daily Trust, could be neutral in that the meaning, ideas or proposition in the conjoins were not themselves contrastive or adversative. Coordination of full independent clauses was rare in Alàróyé but replete in Daily Trust. In the two texts, ellipsis in conjoins created cohesion of not only lexical units but also that of meaning. However, in coordination of dependent clauses, subordinators were, sometimes, not ellipted in the two conjoins in the case of Yoruba-medium text whereas ellipsis of the subordinator in the second conjoin was often employed in the English-medium text.