Syntax, Technology and Politics: Analyzing Political Facebook Posts
Esther Serwaah Afreh 
, Obed Atta-Asamoah & Ebenezer Asare
Issue: Vol.5 No.7 Issue Article 8 pp.1146-1162
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2024578| Published online 2nd July, 2024
© 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
This study used Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory to analyze syntactic complexity in digital communication. Thirty Facebook posts made between August and December 2023 by John Dramani Mahama, a Ghanaian former president, were analyzed in this study. A textual analysis was conducted on the data. The findings affirmed that grammatical categories are functional. There was a deliberate linguistic strategy marked by a prevalence of declarative sentences and a notable dominance of complex structures in this genre of digital writing. The strategic use of non-finite clauses contributes to the complexity of the discourse. The genre of writing is also characterized by information ranking and integration. The linguistic choices align with the formal expectations of political and digital communication – precision, depth, and engagement. These observations challenge and enrich existing theories of political discourse and communication strategies in the digital era.
Keywords: Syntactic Complexity, Digital Communication, Facebook, Sentence Types, SFL
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Esther Serwaah Afreh is a Senior Lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. She holds a PhD in Linguistics. Her research has concentrated on syntax and conceptual organisation in language.
Obed Atta-Asamoah holds an M.Phil. in English. He is also a Language Tutor at the College of Distance Education, University of Cape Coast (Hwidiem Learning Center). His research has focused on the [systemic] functional use of language in political discourse.
Ebenezer Asare has an M.Phil. in English from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. He is interested in genre studies and political discourse.
Afreh, Esther Serwaah, Obed Atta-Asamoah & Ebenezer Asare. “Syntax, Technology and Politics: Analyzing Political Facebook Posts,” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 5, no.7 (2024): 1146-1162. https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2024578
© 2024 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Journals. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
