A Syntactic Analysis of Selected Clausal Coordinates as Used in the Amended 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria

The language of law has been viewed by many as difficult to understand primarily because of archaism in its morpho-syntactic structure. Also, the Latin and French maxims that have characterised legalese have prevented some researchers from delving into it. Another issue of concern to some researchers has to do with the longwinded sentence structure of legalese. Therefore, this study looks at how clauses are coordinated by and, but and or in the long sentences used in the Amended 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria with the aim of analysing the coordinated clauses, stating the syntactic implications associated with clausal coordination as well as determining the possible interpretation of the sections of the constitution where they are used. The study sets out to help non-legal practitioners comprehend sections of the constitution where clauses are coordinated as part of the Plain English campaign going on across the world.

The scope of the study is limited to clausal coordination as thesis topic implies. The theoretical Framework for the study was Systemic Functional Grammar. Halliday‟s symbols for dividing texts into constituent syntactic structures were used in the course of analysing and interpreting the data collated from a copy of the constitution procured by the researcher. Twenty-six compound and compound-complex sentences were randomly picked for analyses. Analyses were done in a tabular form of six columns: column one for serial number, two for the text, three for the source of the text, four for the text‟s analysis, five and six are for the syntactic implication of coordination and the realization possible meaning. The result of the analyse revealed that clauses are intentionally coordinated in some sections of the constitution for a number of reasons, such as: the need to further clarify the provision in the first conjoin with the one in the second conjoin; the room for the realization of a combination of alternatives, amongst others.