Abstract:
Politics is one of the most fertile fields of language use in discourse studies. Discourse analysts have studied various genres of political discourse but the State of the Nation Address has received little attention especially in the Ghanaian research domain. This study employed the systemic functional linguistics frameworks of transitivity and modality to analyze the State of the Nation Address of two Ghanaian presidents (John Mahama and Akufo-Addo). Using the two presidents as a case study, the study aimed to determine the levels of agency and commitment Ghanaian presidents show through language choices. The study resorted to a qualitative content analysis where the summative and directed approaches were adopted as a research design. The data was retrieved from the official website of the Parliament of Ghana. Purposive non-probability sampling was used to sample the two State of the Nation Addresses for analysis. The modality analysis revealed that median value modal verbal operators dominated both SONAs followed high-value modal verbal operators. There was no use of low-value median operators in the data. The findings suggest that Ghanaian presidents do not often show high level of commitment through the linguistic choices they make. The transitivity analysis also revealed that certain patterns of systemic choice ascribe agency to Ghanaian presidents in the SONA while certain patterns of systemic choice allows Ghanaian presidents to escape agency. The study confirms ultimately that linguistic choices are motivated by various factors and language is a resource for making meaning. The study also has implications for Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, political discourse analysis, transitivity studies, pedagogy, professional practice and studies on the State of the Nation Address.
