ABSTRACT Blogging, as a social medium, serves as a platform for individuals and organisations to produce rhetorical discourses that deserve scholarly attention. This rhetorical outlook of blogging features significantly in Middle East conflicts, as instanced in the Mideast blogs that cast their focus on the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006. Existing studies on blogging as a social practice seem to concentrate mainly on its social roles without paying much attention to its rhetorical outlook. Th...
ABSTRACT This study is an analysis of the bilingual modes or technique in the writings offour Ghanaian journalists. I ask whether the incorporation of elements of Ghanaian English usage in the writings offour renowned Ghanaianjoumalists is a slip or a stylistic device meant to achieve an effect. I contend that the bilingual situation in Ghana resulting from the contact between EngI ish and Ghanaian languages poses a linguistic problem to the Ghanaian journalist. I argue that the nativization...
ABSTRACT When mention of the narrator in fiction is made, the point that immediately comes to mind is the voice that speaks the story into the reader`s ears. But the narrator does much more than just tell the story. Narratologist such as Gerard Genette and Monika Fludernik discuss other roles that the narrator plays even as it narrates the story. The narrator articulates its ideology, commenting or expounding on events in the story and in the process raising moral concerns. The narrator may ...
ABSTRACT With the insight from critical discourse analysis (CDA), there have been many attempts at revealing the ideology and power that reside in many discourses. As a result, there has been a keen interest in the study of political discourse, particularly presidential speeches. This study is intended to contribute to those studies in political discourse, specifically presidential speeches, by using CDA and Halliday’s transitivity to explore Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings’ June 4 speeches....
ABSTRACT Conceptually situated within the Kachruvian approach to the study of non-native varieties of English, this study delves into the nature of semantic change in Ghanaian English. It examines the mechanisms of meaning creation in Ghanaian English and highlights the kinds of semantic changes that are involved in this meaning creation process. This study brings to the fore creative innovations as well as sociolinguistic realities in the lexis of Ghanaian English. From the sociolinguistic s...
ABSTRACT The study examined the effect of the Schema Reading Approach on pupils in Basic Two (lower primary) in the University Basic Schools, Legon. It also explored the effect of two language teaching approaches, The Schema Reading Theory as against the Basal Reading Approach in teaching reading comprehension. It involved experiments on two different groups, the experimental and the control groups. A preliminary investigation and test were conducted before the experiments. Pre-test and post-...
ABSTRACT The right to fair hearing as enshrined in the Universal Declaration for Human Rights is one of man’s fundamental need. However, this right may be repressed due to power embedded in the language. The strategic role of language in promoting or repressing the rights of the individual to fair hearing as actualized in Ghanaian law courts was the thrust of this study. The study investigated how the linguistic structures inherent in counsels’ elicitation strategies and defendants/witnes...
ABSTRACT Language use in academic discourse has received considerable attention from researchers over the years. These researchers have shown how language is used as a tool to communicate effectively and to enact power. The study investigated and examined the language used and its functions in thesis defence, using Conversation Analysis (CA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as analytical frameworks. The investigation and examination of the language used and its function was done using se...
ABSTRACT The study examined the types of tense used in the results and discussion sections of academic writings in M.Phil. theses in English and Health Science in the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. The mixed method approach was used for the study. The sample was drawn, using purposive and simple random sampling techniques. The total sample for the study was 20 M.Phil. theses. The quantitative approach of data analysis was used to analyse research question one and results presented in freque...
ABSTRACT Following insights from disciplinary variation studies on writer’s positioning and stance, there has been an interest in analyzing how academics engage in an academic interaction with their putative readers, by either fending off alternative views from their readers or allowing for the inclusion of their views. Using the engagement system of the appraisal theory propounded by Martin and White (2005) in analyzing 45 purposively sampled M.Phil theses submitted to the departments of L...
ABSTRACT This study explores fundamental relationships existing in the works of two great American Scholars of the 19th century: Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It argues that, “Song of Myself”, the poetry collection in Whitman’s major literary work Leaves of Grass, echoes or re-emphasizes some of Emerson’s significant ideological and philosophical beliefs. Ralph Waldo Emerson, recognized as the founder of America’s transcendentalist movement, was a key figure in America’s i...
ABSTRACT Solidarity within social groups is a prominent thematic preoccupation in contemporary African literary works. Previous studies on Adichie’s three novels: Purple Hibiscus (PH), Half of a Yellow Sun (HOAYS) and AMERiCANAH (AH), have examined textual aspects such as language, context, style, and themes with little attention on discourse strategies as they evoke social solidarity in the novels. This study, therefore, examined discourse strategies in relation to how they evoked social ...
ABSTRACT This research explores the possibility of expressing and confronting trauma in the critical site of prison through the medium of poetry. Historically rooted in Holocaust studies, trauma has been conceptualized as a psychological wound that cannot be expressed nor healed through any media, least of all, literature. In response to the call of literary theorists for a theory of narrative that incorporates healing, Masterson et al. contend that the revelatory and therapeutic power of lit...
ABSTRACT The epic is quite familiar in literary study and criticism. Its Western as well as African variants well-known among scholars and students of literature all over the world. African versions of the epic such as Mwindo, Chaka and Sundiata give us some ideas about the African epic. But is there any such thing as the pan-African epic, and do Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons, Osiris Rising and KMT: in the house of life belong to this category? The choric characterization, the strong female ...
ABSTRACT Most Nigerian hip hop artistes use a combination of English and one or more local language(s) in writing the lyrics of their songs. Over the years, this has become a common trait in the hip hop world. English is the official language in Nigeria, therefore, the base language of most Nigerian hip hop songs is English even as they introduce local expressions into the lyrics. This process can be described as code-switching in songs. It is also to be noted that pidgin is also a local lang...