Lexical bundles in political communication an analysis of selected manifestoes of two political parties in Ghana

Abstract

This study explored how lexical bundles are used in political communication using the manifestoes of two major political parties in Ghana, which are the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC). The study investigated the kinds of lexical bundles used in the manifestoes, their similarities and differences in frequency and use, their structural types employed and the communicative functions of the lexical bundles in the manifestoes. Guided by the Structural Taxonomy and Functional Taxonomy of Lexical Bundles espoused by Biber et al. (2004), this study employed a qualitative approach and relied on document analysis to gather data for the study. Two manifestoes, one from each political party, were sampled as corpus for the study. Findings from the study showed that 14 three- word lexical bundles and 11 four- word lexical bundles were found in the corpus. The study revealed that these bundles were used in large frequencies to express ability of the political parties to deliver on their political promises to their electorate. Out of 17 structural types of lexical bundles, only 4 were found in the corpus. Out of these 4 structural types, prepositional phrases were found to have the most examples in the corpus. The findings also revealed that all three functional types of lexical bundles were present in the corpus. Referential expressions were the most used functional type from the corpus, followed by discourse organizers, and stance bundles. Some examples of referential expressions that were used include ‘the next four years’, ‘the next NPP/NDC government’ and ‘in this administration’. The study concludes that the few examples of lexical bundles in both manifestoes show that text producers do not have an extensive knowledge of lexical bundles and how they are used to advance discourses. It is recommended that the writers of the manifestoes incorporate more lexical bundles into their texts to improve on the communicative features of their texts.