Complex Sentences in Political and Newspaper Discourse

Abstract

This thesis aims to compare the structure of complex sentences in political speeches with complex sentences in newspaper reports that focus on political events or issues. The theoretical part of the thesis draws on a range of relevant sources and begins by defining the complex sentence and subordinate clause. It then presents a taxonomy of subordinate clauses the subsequent analysis relies on, with particular attention given to the form (finite, non-finite, and verbless) and function (nominal, relative, appositive, and adverbial) of these dependent clauses. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of key features of newspaper and political discourse, focusing especially on their syntactic characteristics relevant to the analysis. In the practical part of the thesis, the key findings from the analysis of the two corpora are presented, and the structures of complex sentences compared. The analysis discusses the prevailing tendencies in the use of subordinate clauses and relates them to defining features of the two selected discourses.