Testing texture in presidential inaugural address: Variation across culture

Abstract

This study adopts the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), specifically the textual metafunction, to explore cohesion in Ghanaian and American Presidential Inaugural Addresses (PIAs). The SFL theory is aided by the corpus-assisted approach to text analysis. In all, sixteen PIAs given by different presidents from the American and Ghanaian contexts constitute the corpus for the study. The findings revealed that both Ghanaian and American presidents make use of all the four grammatical cohesive devices as texture creation agents in their inaugural speeches. However, these cohesive agents were deployed at different frequencies. Unlike their Ghanaian counterparts, the American presidents chose grammatical cohesive devices that were comparatively more diverse. The findings have implications for the SFL theory and other research works on texture in political discourse in general and PIAs in particular.