An Analysis of Logico-Semantic Relation (Enhancement) of Clause Combination Patterns in Robert Mugabe’s Death Report in <i>The Sun</i> Online Newspaper

Abstract

The study identified instances of enhancement used from English in The Sun online newspaper. It analyzed the identified enhanced clause combinations and discussed the implications of the patterns on the interpretation of meanings in the selected news story. The goal is to understand how news stories are written in English and portray how clauses are combined through logic-semantic relations to form coherent and meaningful sentences. The primary data source comprised selected news stories from The Sun online newspaper. The raw data were multi-clause sentences extracted from the news stories. The data were then analyzed in line with the tenets of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. In the analysis, in terms of the logical relationship of clauses in the non-simple sentences, the study found that there were more hypotactic constructions in such a way that the second clause is made to be dependent on the first clause, and these have been achieved through enhancing the meaning of the first clause. Also, the findings showed that in terms of semantic implications of the combined clauses, variation, alternation, and causal conditional were the dominant patterns of meaning found in the newspaper. In addition, concerning the clausal connecting devices found in the multi-clause sentences, it was observed that explicit clause binders (e.g., because, when, which, while, with, before, etc.) were often used in
the news stories, followed by explicit clause linkers (e.g., and, or, but). Implicit clause connectors (e.g., comma (,), semi-colon (;), colon (:)) were seldom used and mainly used as a complement to the explicit clause connectors or signals.