ANALYSING PATTERNS OF APPOSITIONAL OCCURRENCES: A CONSIDERATION OF SELECTIONS FROM THE PUNCH AND DAILY TR

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Department of Arts

Newspapers serve as a useful tool in promoting literate communities. The success of a good article is therefore predicated on how the writer is able to manipulate the different categories within the sentence structure to captivate as well as inform their target audience. This study analyses the patterns of appositional occurrences in the language of the journalese specifically the newspaper articles. The data used for the analysis were obtained from The Punch and Daily Trust selected randomly over three months. The analysis employed the textual metafunctional approach of the Systemic Functional Linguistic theory as the framework for the study, using Meyer‟s (1992) model for analysing appositions. Meyer‟s criteria for analysing apposition have three components: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics. The findings show that the non-restrictive type of apposition which is made up of the semantic class of appellation, identification and characterization were the most frequently occurring class in the style of newspaper writings. This is because the subject matter of news reports and feature articles focuses on humans and the events around them, as a result, readers need to be provided with some form of detail and background in order to know and follow the discourse. Also, the semantic relations holding between appositions are not only those of coreference, synonymy and part/whole reference but also include speaker coreference and speaker synonymy. Equally, specific members of apposition which comprise paraphrase, reorientation and self-correction were the least occurring class in the data. This low percentage can be argued as indicative of another feature of journalistic style of avoiding repetition and superfluous information which is a universal principle of language – economy. In the light of the above findings, the study concludes that the use of appositions in the analysed newspapers is mainly for the purpose of providing the reader with much detail. In this way the writer transmits information which helps him not only to give detailed yet concise descriptions, but also in some way help the reader to follow the discourse. This study also has a pedagogical relevance as it will facilitate the teaching and learning of how appositives work in English language grammar. It could also encourage a contrastive study of appositions in English and any other Nigerian languages by linguists