Corruption is a big issue: A corpus-assisted study of the discursive construction of corruption in Ghanaian parliamentary discourse

Kwabena Sarfo Sarfo-Kantankah
2016 Legon Journal of the Humanities  
The paper examines the discursive construction of corruption by Ghanaian parliamentarians. It uses as dataset a 1.9 million-word corpus of Hansards of debates and committee reports between 2005 and 2016. It draws on the frame theory and employs a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) approach to explore the language of parliamentarians (MPs) in order to investigate how Ghanaian parliamentarians frame corruption. The paper attempts to answer the question: how do Ghanaian parliamentarians
more » ... ruct the subject of corruption in their debates and interactions? The paper fi nds that MPs discursively construct corruption as a huge systematic social canker that hinders socio-politico-economic development of Ghana. This suggests that stronger measures and more formidable parliamentary commitment are needed to fi ght corruption. The paper has implications for parliamentarians' fi ght against corruption in Ghana.
doi:10.4314/ljh.v29i1.9 fatcat:s7dmhimtcrfujb7bcpxwgbciia