ABSTRACT The dislocation of individuals from homeland and attempts to belong in transnational spaces in contemporary times have become significant aspects of Nigerian migrant prose fiction. This prose fiction has gained prominence following the re-invention of the homeland irrespective of the migrant status of its writers. Studies of these writings have examined the novel genre and the reinvention of socio-political realities, with little attention to the short story genre and its concerns w...
Abstract Secondary gatekeeping—a practice where a news medium selects and broadcasts fragments of the contents of another, primary media—is a novel, but prevalent phenomenon especially in the Nigerian broadcast media. The practice, unlike primary gatekeeping, is yet to receive copious scholarly attention. This study, through a combination of In-depth Interviews and Documentary (Content) Analysis, explored the rationale for newspaper reviews as performed by Radio O-Y-O, Premier FM, and Sp...
ABSTRACT Proverbs describe, classify and judge a given situation with emphasis on moral/ethical recommendations. They also point to the life patterns of the society from which they are derived. Many studies have been undertaken on classification and definition of proverbs from various cultures and disciplines. Much attention has also been drawn to Ola Rotimi‘s proverbs from the point of view of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, but enough scholarly attention has not been given to the contex...
ABSTRACT Connected speech processes (CSPs) account for sound modifications and simplifications in speech, while sociophonetics emphasises correlation between speech forms and social factors. Existing studies merely identified some CSPs that characterise Nigerian English (NE); studies that measure speakers' proximity to Standard British English (SBE) connected speech, especially in relation to social variation, are scarce. This study, therefore, investigated the incidence of assimilation, eli...
Abstract Studies on quasi-judicial public hearings have focused on rhetorical, sociolinguistic and critical discourse aspects of the hearings, but have not given attention to the discourse structure and participant goals during the hearings. Thus, this study examined language use and interaction in the 2008 quasi-judicial public hearing, conducted by a hearing panel constituted by the Senate on the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) administration in Nigeria. This was done with a view to reveal...
ABSTRACT Ethno-autobiographical poetry is a culturally constituted autobiographical poetry. Due to its subjectivity, it is regarded by critics as an unreliable construction of social history. Consequently, previous researches consider ethno-autobiographical poetry as essentially self-aggrandising, neglecting its form as a unique blend of both self and culture. Therefore, this study explored the cultural constitution of selected Nigerian migrant and travel literary ethno-autobiographical poet...
ABSTRACT The study aimed to present a genre analysis of the introduction sections of sports news presentation programmes (SNPP) on selected television stations in Ghana. Specifically, the study sought to account for the schematic structure (that is the various rhetorical units, the sequence of moves, the textual space of each move identified) and some lexico-grammatical resources that are dominant in the selected rhetorical unit that was analyzed. Three television stations (GTV, Metro TV & ...
ABSTRACT Discourse devices are the linguistic tools employed to address inherent problems in conversation for health purposes. Doctor-patient verbal interactions face major problems in clinical discourse due to differences in linguistic, sociolinguistic, cultural backgrounds as well as professional and communicative styles of doctors and patients. Pragmatic and sociolinguistic studies on doctor-patient verbal interactions have observed relevant socio-psychological and contextual factors, but...
ABSTRACT African American literature has been predominantly a male-preserve in the task of narrating the experience of slavery and its relics of denigration before the advent of reactionary literature by black female writers. Studies on female-authored African American literary works have concentrated on responding to male-authored representations of the tensions of racism, internal crisis of man-woman relationships and the challenges of empowering the black female character. Little attentio...
ABSTRACT In most Nigerian cultures, sex and sexuality are covertly expressed, but Contemporary Nigerian Hip-hop Artistes (CNHHAs) use different Escapist Discourse Strategies (EDSs) to create ambiguity and divert the attention of the Censor Board from the real sexual themes while negotiating socio-cultural restrictions in their music. Studies in the humanities and social sciences have attempted to discuss on how sex and sexuality are communicated in most Nigerian cultures. However, the (EDSs)...
ABSTRACT This study of Fante Asafo song texts from the Cape Coast area of the Central Region of Ghana was undertaken with the assumption that a close look at the texts would yield a richness of language represented by a profusion of tropes. The areas covered include a general background to Asafo as a social organisation, as well as the form and content of sixty-five randomly selected songs. A conscious effort has been made to isolate key tropes which have been treated as features of discourse...
ABSTRACT Previous studies on alms begging in the fields of medicine, psychology, sociology, journalism, and discourse analysis have depicted the phenomenon as a simple activity of requesting by indigent individuals who were often viewed as linguistically deficient. These studies did not adequately account for the context-driven and implicit communicative acts performed by beggars, thus limiting the understanding of this pragmatic phenomenon in society. Therefore, this study examined alms beg...
Abstract There have been efforts at research into biblical literature, particularly from the sociohistorical and doctrinal perspectives. However, little attention has been given to the literary and stylistic analysis of the Bible. The devotion to the sacredness of the biblical text has short-circuited the needed attention to a proper literary critique of the narrative. This study therefore is a close critique that foregrounds the literariness of the Bible with particular reference to the Kin...
ABSTRACT Using students from two Libyan private schools of English as the source 0 f information, this study focused on grammatical errors committed by some Libyan students of English, which in the view of this dissertation have not received the attention that they deserve as far as grammar teaching and research are concerned. The data for this research were collected from one main source, namely, written scripts of students. The research then employed the descriptive survey design by making ...
ABSTRACT The study aimed to explore how journalists construct news bulletins on Ghanaian radio stations. Specifically, the study sought to examine the generic structures of news bulletins and how journalists draw on other sources for the writing of their texts. Four radio stations (Joy FM, Citi FM, Radio XYZ and Radio Ghana) were selected. The total number of data set comprised 20 transcribed episodes of radio news bulletins from the four radio stations. The analysis of the data set was done ...