The Central Pronouns in Nigeria’s 2015 Presidential Debate: A Grammatical Analysis

Abstract

This grammatical analysis of the central pronouns in Nigeria’s 2015 Presidential Debate aimed at determining their occurrence, semantic manifestations, typological and thematic distribution, and textual functions. Twenty-three central pronouns with a combined frequency of 2409 were identified and analysed using Quirk et al.’s (1985) framework. The result showed a 58% representation and a frequency of 94.6 in 1000 words, with the forms we, you, it, I, they, our emerging the most frequent. Personal pronouns were a hundred times more frequent than reflexive pronouns and fourteen times more recurring than possessives. The 1st person, 2nd person and 3rd person forms respectively represent approximately one-half, one-quarter, and one-third of total person contrast made; however, a dominance of plural over singular was seen and this was more pronounced with 2nd person. Whereas the ratio of masculine to feminine was 22:1, neuter gender was generally dominant. A dominance of subjective case over objective case was revealed while genitive case featured as determinatives only. Pronominal choices were governed by theme, structure of responses, and idiosyncrasy, as I was more concentrated under motivation for contesting than any other theme and under recognising and justifying the problem than specifying actions to be taken or making concluding marks. The multiple-authored texts used manifestly exposed the diversity of pronoun forms and their combinatory possibility, which was advantageous since the focus was not a given politician’s idiolect but the use of an aspect of language in politics, namely the central pronouns.