Speech presentation varies from political, religious, economic, and academic to social issues. Over the years, in academia, some research works have been carried out in various fields of speech presentation. However, studies on the modality in the speeches of educational leaders in Ghana are not pronounced. Consequently, this paper is a textual analysis of the mood choices deployed in the 2015 matriculation ceremony speech of Prof W. O. Ellis, who is one of the past vice-chancellors of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana. The matriculation ceremony was for the 2015/2016 graduate students in the Institute of Distance Learning (IDL), KNUST. With prior permission, the data (Vice Chancellor’s speech) was purposively selected from the University’s portal. The research design used for this study was qualitative. Accordingly, the speech (data) was analysed using the content analysis method.  With this method, we identified the various mood structures, the conditions that necessitate a particular mood, and how the mood choices were interpreted manually. The findings showed that the mood choices used in the selected speech were declarative and imperative. Of these two mood choices, declarative was predominant (86%). However, the study revealed that interrogative mood was absent from the speech. The study recommends that, in the future, such speeches should include interrogative moods. The basis is that the interrogative moods (especially rhetorical questions) have the propensity of maintaining the interpersonal relationship between the speaker and the listener.

‘Oedipus the King’ is an ancient tragic play that tells the story of King Oedipus of Thebes, who lived about a period before the proceedings of the Trojan War. Gradually, this King came to the realization that he had accidentally slaughtered Laius, his father, and married Jocasta, his biological mother. Fate, conflict, and free will (i.e. the inexorableness of oracular prophecies) are the main themes of the text. This paper examines selected stage directions in Oedipus the King, a text written by Sophocles. A purposive sample technique was used in selecting these stage directions. In linguistics, language, and literary criticism, 'referentiality' is usually deployed to describe the connotational and denotational sense of an entity to explicate the association between language and extralinguistic object. So, content analysis design, through referentiality, was deployed in critiquing and exhuming the hidden meanings of the selected stage directions. Thus, the use of the referentiality model coupled with definiteness and indefiniteness facilitated the unearthing of familiarity, identifiability, and uniqueness from the selected extracts. The paper is structured in four thematic areas: the introduction, methods, analysis and discussion, and conclusion.

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<p><em>Language contact is a key issue in the field of sociolinguistics. One notable phenomenon in the field of language contact is Pidgin English. Historically, Pidgin began as a language marked by traditional interference used chiefly by the prosperous and privileged sections of a community, represented by the unskilled and illiterate class of the society (Quirk et al., 1985). However, nowadays, it has gained status in some communities to the extent that it has become the mother-tongue of such communities. This paper, therefore, investigates the sociolinguistics of the multiplicity of West African Pidgins of Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana against some sociolinguistic variables of gender, attitudes, code switching, borrowing, slang, and domains of language use. The paper has been structured into two main parts. The first section contains the reviews/synopses of the various papers or works that have been used for the study. The second section deals with a discussion on the prominent sociolinguistic variables found in the various papers.</em><em></em></p>

Linguistically, most Africans are multilingual entities. Extremely, the seventeen (17) West African states display this feature. Thus, in a typical L2 classroom in Africa, the learner is likely to come into contact with several languages. These languages are mostly the official languages(s), the second or third language(s), the international language, and the indigenous languages spoken by both the learners and the teachers. Sometimes, the official language(s) is/are selected indigenous languages (for example, Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa, in the case of Nigeria). In some cases, the second language is the international language used for official engagements and international discourse. In Western Africa, Ghana is one such country that uses English as both the official and international language. When learners from diverse sociocultural backgrounds are exposed to several languages in a particular classroom setting, a lot of processes emerge. One of such processes is nativisation or indigenisation or localisation of the formal classroom language. This is the process where language learners use the formal classroom language in a manner that suits their communicative needs. This paper is a review of selected empirical studies on the use of language in the multilingual classrooms of selected African countries. The cases and papers were purposively sampled from five West African states of Cameroon, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, and Nigeria. This paper argues that language contact processes such as localisation, pidginization, and creolization are not aberrant forms per se; and since they serve the informal linguistic needs of multilingual second language learners, they should be given a place in language use.