Syntactic Government in Nigerian Newspaper Headlines
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18533/journal.v4i3.647Keywords:
Generative grammar, Government, Nigerian newspaper headlines, Syntactic analysis.Abstract
Several studies on Nigerian newspaper headlines have focused heavily on issues of style, language use, ideology and meaning but little has been done from a syntactic perspective. This study, therefore, examines government operates in the headlines from a generative grammar approach. The data for this study comprises newspaper headlines randomly collected from national Nigerian newspapers and are subjected to syntactic analysis with a view to describing the nature of syntactic government in Nigerian newspaper headlines. It is discovered that while all forms of government operate in the headlines, head-government and theta-government are not always visible at S-structure of the headlines. Also, lexical and Antecedent-government operate only in headlines where AI movement has taken place.
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