Browsing by Author "ADENIYI, Sijuwade Toyin"

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    A Morphosyntactic Study of English Language Usage in Selected Official Documents and Correspondences of The Lagos State Government
    (Department of English, Faculty of Art, Obafemi Awolowo University, 2023) ADENIYI, Sijuwade Toyin
    This study identified the peculiar lexical features in the selected government documents and correspondences. It analysed the structural patterns of the selected documents and correspondences. It also examined the functional contexts of the identified lexical and grammatical features in the selected documents and correspondences, and further discussed the implications of the language usage in governmental documents and correspondences on the characterisation of Nigerian English as a recognised regional variety of English in the world. This was with a view to showing the peculiar uses of language in the domain of State Government administration. This study employed both primary and secondary sources of data. The primary source comprised 80 purposively selected correspondences and documents from the Public Service Office of Lagos State Government, Alausa as well as their websites. These correspondences comprised 25 letters, 25 memos, 20 circulars and 10 press releases recently archived between 2015 and 2021. The press releases were fewer than the other documents because they were lengthier than them. The secondary source included books, journal articles, and the Internet. The data collected were analysed using Hengeveld‘s Functional Discourse Grammar (2000) and Halliday‘s Systemic Functional Grammar (1985). The results showed that lexical items such as repetition, synonyms, antonyms and identification are foregrounded lexical features in the selected documents and correspondences. The study found that the documents and correspondences were most characterized by complex sentence structure, embedding, passivation and nominalization. It further revealed that the identified lexical items featured most prominently in circulars and press releases. Finally, the study discovered that the uses of language within the Civil Service of State Government of Lagos have implications on power structure among the officials. The study concluded that the deployment of language in government is formal, standard, polite, courteous, clear and devoid of ambiguity and misinformation.