Language Patterns, Social Motivations and Discourse Strategies

This book exposes readers to the characteristic resilience of language to changing contexts. In this book, Sika Ahadzie explores the extent to which rapid technological change has impacted the use of language in the expression of views on social and political development in Ghana. The main focus is on the opportunity created by contemporary interactive radio and the strategies employed by interactants. She employs an eclectic framework of Speech Act Theory, Gricean Pragmatics, Interactional Sociolinguistics and Conversational Analysis as the theoretical underpinnings of the discursive strategies of language use. The work captures both ingenuity in language use and the mishandling of language on radio. It reveals linguistic patterns and innovation in Ghana, advances existing approaches to discourse analysis and even challenges some conventional definitions and models of codeswitching. Even though it is a pioneering exploratory work on language use in contemporary interactive radio in Ghana, it serves as an important source of information on the relationship between the structure, function and context of language on radio for readers across the globe.