Questioning and Debating in UK and Ghanaian Parliamentary Discourse Emmanuel Sarfo Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English April 2016 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2016 The University of Leeds and Emmanuel Sarfo The right of Emmanuel Sarfo to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Acknowledgments It all started with the push of a button, an e-mail, asking her to look at a proposal I had written so that she could advise me on its viability for PhD research and whether she would be willing to supervise such research. She did. Her advice and suggestions for improving the proposal were amazingly profound and I would finally get admitted to the University of Leeds on a full scholarship. She would become my supervisor and continue her remarkable support and passion to see me succeed. Every comment from her and every discussion during supervisory meetings was reflectively encouraging and reassuring. Dr Alison Johnson, I lack the most competent language to express how much gratitude I owe you. I can only say I am extremely grateful to you. I express my profound appreciation to the University of Leeds for awarding me a full Leeds International Research Scholarship (LIRS) for the programme. I also thank the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, for granting me study leave to embark on this PhD programme. I am highly thankful to Alhaji Abu D. Issaka, the editor of debates, the Parliament of Ghana, who willingly gave me the Hansard data for this study. I never saw any Ghanaian so enthusiastic about rendering services to others. I am also grateful to Prof Tony Crowley for his comments and advice after my transfer viva. They were exceedingly thoughtful and helpful. I thank David Woolls for his assistance with the use of CFL Lexical Feature Marker. I thank my colleagues, Dr David Wright, currently a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, and Dr Ashraf R. Abdullah, a lecturer at Ishik University, Iraq, who were the first to meet me on my arrival at the University of Leeds. I appreciate how you encouraged me about the prospects of being in the School of English, University of Leeds. David, thank you for also coaching me in the application of Wordsmith Tools, to which I was a total novice. Many thanks also go to all colleague PhD students, especially members of the Language at Leeds Postgraduate Seminar group. I greatly benefited from the presentations I did at such seminars through the feedback I got from members. I highly appreciate the opportunity I got to ask other colleagues ‘tough’ questions that some said helped them to reflect on their work. If we ever meet again as colleagues, I will not ask such questions, unless you ask me to. Many thanks to the full-time Graduate Diploma in Law (2015/2016) class of C21/A, The University of Law, Leeds, for your words of encouragement. You were a wonderful class. Abstract This study examines UK and Ghanaian parliamentary questions and debates. Using a corpus- assisted discourse studies approach, it investigates questions from transitivity (process types) and debates from evaluatory perspectives. We explore similarities and differences between UK and Ghanaian parliamentary questions and find that, while question forms in the two parliaments are similar, there are significant differences as well. For example, indirect yes/no interrogatives in the Ghanaian data are a major difference between the two. Also, while Ghanaian MPs mark politeness directly by linguistic/word forms, such as the use of modal past, UK MPs mark politeness indirectly. The differences appear to be largely influenced by Ghanaian language interference and cultural differences. From a transitivity standpoint, in both parliaments, mental process interrogatives are the most frequent, followed by verbal, relational and then material processes. We therefore conclude that parliamentary politics can be represented through think, tell, evaluate and do (TTED) processes. Analyses of the debates show that MPs’ concern for the needs of the people becomes a focal point in the debates. Whereas government MPs think that people’s socio-economic conditions are better, opposition MPs think they are worse. This leads us to the conclusion that evaluation in parliamentary debates could be described as a rectangle (drawing on van Dijk’s ideological square), since there is disproportionateness between MPs’ praise and/or criticism for their governments’ policies, which reflects the MPs’ ideological biases. In describing the circumstances of the people, UK MPs use more complex intensifying adverbs and adjectives than their Ghanaian counterparts, a variation which we attribute to first and second language differences. There appears to be a disparity between MPs’ show of concern for the needs of the people and the public perception that MPs care only about their personal interests. MPs construct themselves as agents of the people, and tactically hide behind it their ideological biases. Table of Contents List of Tables ................................................................................................. i List of Figures ............................................................................................... ii 1 Introduction ............................................................................................ 1 1.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Review of relevant literature ................................................................................... 2 1.2.1 Parliamentary discourse, questions and debates .............................................. 2 1.2.2 Pragmatic and rhetorical studies on parliamentary questions and debates ...... 7 1.2.3 Pragma-dialectic studies on parliamentary questions and debates ................ 11 1.2.4 Corpus-based/corpus-driven studies on parliamentary debates ..................... 13 1.2.5 Justifying the current study ............................................................................ 14 1.3 Research questions ................................................................................................ 16 1.4 Rationale for the research ...................................................................................... 16 1.5 Significance of the research .................................................................................. 18 1.6 The research setting ............................................................................................... 19 1.6.1 The UK House of Commons and the Parliament of Ghana ........................... 20 1.6.2 Comparing the two parliaments ..................................................................... 22 1.7 Synopsis of the thesis ............................................................................................ 23 2 Key concepts and theoretical framework ............................................ 26 2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 26 2.2 Institutions and institutional discourse .................................................................. 26 2.3 Discourse analysis ................................................................................................. 28 2.3.1 Discourse analysis and context of situation ................................................... 31 2.3.2 Systemic functional linguistics and transitivity ............................................. 35 2.4 The pragmatics of political discourse .................................................................... 38 2.4.1 Speech acts ..................................................................................................... 39 2.4.2 Face ................................................................................................................ 44 2.4.3 (Im)Politeness ................................................................................................ 46 2.5 Corpus approaches to discourse analysis .............................................................. 52 2.6 Chapter conclusion ................................................................................................ 55 3 Methodology ......................................................................................... 56 3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 56 3.2 The data ................................................................................................................. 56 3.2.1 Pilot study data ............................................................................................... 56 3.2.2 The thesis data: Hansard and supplementary data ......................................... 60 3.3 Ethical considerations ............................................................................................ 66 3.4 How the data were analysed .................................................................................. 66 3.4.1 The use of Wordsmith Tools .........................................................................