Coordination and Subordination in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's Inaugural Address of May 29, 2026

There are several linguistic studies on presidential inaugural speeches, including President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s. They focused on discourse, lexical, stylistic and rhetorical features. There are also studies on the syntactic devices evident in inaugural speeches, with attention not paid on the derivation of the devices. This study fills the gap by looking at processes that realise certain syntactic devices in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s inaugural speech. Using the purposive sampling technique and theoretical insights from traditional grammar, nineteen sentences were extracted from the speech for analysis. The findings reveal the use of syntactic processes of coordination and subordination to derive certain syntactic devices. Coordination was used to derive bi-clausal constructions that are compound sentences, while subordination was deployed in deriving bi-clausal constructions, which are complex sentences. There is also the combination of the two processes to actualise multi-clausal constructions – compound-complex sentences. The deployment of the syntactic processes results not only in stylistic variations but also conciseness, well-coordinated thoughts, cohesion and coherence. All these enhance the encoding and decoding of the speech. The study underlies the indispensability of the syntactic processes of coordination and subordination in any speech worthy of note. It contributes to existing literature on inaugural addresses.