Lexical epistemic markers in Ghanaian parliamentary discourse: A corpus-based diachronic analysis (2005–2024)

Despite growing scholarly attention to parliamentary communication in established democracies, African legislative contexts remain underexplored. This study, therefore, examined lexical epistemic modality markers in Ghanaian parliamentary discourse using a corpus-based diachronic analysis (2005–2024). The corpus comprised 1,729 parliamentary Hansards (41.7 million words), processed with Python 3.x and AntConc. Analysis revealed that cognitive verbs dominated epistemic expression. Diachronic analysis found statistically significant changes across consecutive electoral periods. Standardised residual analysis showed redistribution from personalised cognitive claims toward markers framing propositions as objective assessments. The findings provide the first diachronic quantitative results for epistemic modality in Ghanaian and wider West African parliamentary discourse. The results suggest potential applications for parliamentary communication training.