Logico-semantic Relations of Clause Combinations in Selected Inaugural Lectures in Southwestern Nigeria Universities

Abstract

This study investigates the use of Logico-semantic relations of clause combinations in selected inaugural lectures from three universities in Southwestern Nigeria. The data comprises six purposively selected inaugural lectures from different disciplines; Obafemi Awolowo University-(Faculties of Science and Technology), University of Ibadan-(Medical Science and Social Science), and University of Lagos-(Arts and Education). The non-simple sentences were extracted from the lectures and analysed based on Halliday's theory of Systemic Functional Grammar. The results show that the logical patterns suitable for academic discourse in the field of Technology and Education are extension and enhancement while in the Sciences, Medical Sciences, Arts and Education are extension and elaboration. The elaboration patterns in the fields of Sciences, Medical Sciences, Arts and Education are more of hypotactic elaboration than paratactic elaboration while the extension in the field of Technology and Education are more of paratactic extension than hypotactic extension. Also, the analysis of the identified semantic patterns shows that clarification, addition and conditional clauses are the dominant patterns of meaning found across the different fields of academic discourse. Clarification is used mostly in elaboration; additive is used mostly in extension, while causal conditional clause is used mostly in enhancement. In addition, the study shows that the dominant use of addition, clarification and clausal conditional has implications on the delivery of the lectures as they were deployed to organise and sequence information as well as provide the readers with the necessary circumstances for enhancing their understanding of the lectures. Discourse like inaugural Lectures generally adopt the use of explicit conjunction signals (e.g., or, but, and, if, because, etc.) as implicit signals (eg.: ; ') are seldom used to complement the explicit signals. Findings further indicate that the variability of the logico-semantic patterns found in each of the lectures had a great implication on the message of the lectures as the varied patterns are indicative of ideological variation and characteristic of each discipline. The study concludes that language, especially in the aspect of its logico-semantic relations of clause combination is sensitive to different contexts of academic disciplines and inaugural lectures are a site for identifying this sensitivity.