ABSTRACT The present study aimed to explore the relationship between Ghanaian newspaper editorials and the passive voice. Using six hundred (600) editorial articles, three hundred (300) each from the Ghanaian Times and the Daily Graphic, the study sought to ascertain the register features such as field, mode, participants and how they relate to one another, the communicative purpose and passive constructions employed in the above named newspapers, thereby establishing the link between the co...
ABSTRACT This thesis sets out to investigate how Ayi Kwei Armah, as a post-colonial African writer, in Osiris Rising and KMT: In the house of life re-tells the history of Africa as a way of “writing back” to assert the African Identity as his way of responding to Hegel’s (1957) claim that Africa prior to European colonization had no civilization of note to boast of. Thus, through a study of the setting, plot and characters in the two novels, this work reveals how Armah artistically use...
ABSTRACT Studies on the social management of HIV and AIDS in Nigeria have focused on how awareness about HIV and AIDS has been created through electronic media campaigns and organised interpersonal communication. These studies have not investigated context constrained language use in the advertisements on the disease despite the wide coverage and potential effectiveness of these advertisements in the public sensitisation about HIV and AIDS. This study, therefore, investigated the pragmatic f...
ABSTRACT Nigerian plays are replete with narration of crime and punishment as prime factor in socioeconomic conflict and resolution. Critical studies of these plays have so far focused on the views of the political class with little attention paid to the views of the masses, which are critical to the thematic engagement of the playwrights. Consequently, this study focuses attention on the views of the masses in order to expound the insights of crime and punishment in Nigeria. The study adopt...
ABSTRACT Available literature has applied different theories to the language of advertisement. It has examined it through stylistic, pragmatic and speech act theories but not from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics. Therefore, this study applied John Gumperz‟s theory of interactional sociolinguistics to the language of Insurance advertising in newspapers and on billboards within the Nigerian linguistic and sociocultural context, with the aim of analysing the persuasive strat...
ABSTRACT This thesis sought to examine memory, women and war in Adichie‘s Half of a Yellow Sun and Tadjo‘s The Shadow of Imana ; Travels in the heart of Rwanda. The study is a qualitative one which is based on textual, content and critical analysis. The study also focused on the ways in which characters and the processes of characterization help us reflect on the broad themes of traumatic remembrances of war and its consequences on individual characters and the society as a whole. Adich...
ABSTRACT Existing studies on Ịzọn language have concentrated on unilingual application of traditional grammar in constructing well-formed sentences, thereby neglecting critical descriptions of the ways morphosyntactic features ensure the derivation of convergent structures. A contrastive examination of English, (a standard for universal grammar analysis) and Ịzọn languages can properly characterise these syntactically significant features. This work, therefore, investigates the morph...
ABSTRACT The Linguist List Web site is a forum where professionals exchange academic information, especially those related to conferences, calls for papers for journals and books, mailing lists and job opportunities. While all these are constructed in scholarly language, the ones with the most distinguished linguistic form, often with pragmatic meaning, whose proper interpretation has implications for linguists‟ careers, are calls for journal articles posted by publishers. Scholarly inform...
ABSTRACT The major problem investigated in this study is the difficulties senior high school two students of Islamic and Wa senior high schools encounter in the use of concord in English grammar. The purpose of the study was to identify these concord learning challenges, find out why those challenges exist and find appropriate ways to help the students. The instruments used to collect data were intervention tests. The research design included pre-intervention, intervention and post-intervent...
ABSTRACT Culture is central to Ahmed Yerima‟s dramaturgy, and his culture-based dramatic texts largely project the cultural values of the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria, namely, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo. Existing linguistic studies on Yerima‟s plays have concentrated on the use of proverbs and politeness features, ignoring an in- depth pragmatic study of their cultural contexts. This study, therefore, undertakes an investigation of culture-motivated pragmatic acts (practs) and contex...
ABSTRACT Research articles (RA) constitute the most important means of communicating research findings in the academic community. Despite the crucial role played by RAs within the academic community, numerous studies across the world have shown that RAs are difficult to read and understand. In Ghana, there has not been any earlier works to evaluate the readability of RAs. The objective of this study was to explore the level of readability of RAs produced by lecturers in the Faculty of Arts in...
ABSTRACT Linguistic tagging, the labelling of people and their actions with particular sociopolitically-grounded values, is an ideological denominator that plays a significant role in media framing of conflict. Despite this significance, existing studies on the Nigeria-Cameroon Bakassi Peninsula border conflict, which had concentrated on the historical, political, legal and sociolinguistic dimensions, largely neglected an exploration of the dynamics of linguistic tagging. Therefore, this stu...
ABSTRACT This thesis explored age and gender influence on linguistic features and politeness strategies in SMS messaging among trainee teachers in Ada College of Education using Crystal’s (2008) and House & Kasper’s (1981) analytical frameworks. The data were collected from 400 first and second-year trainee teachers via user diaries, and semi-structured face-to-face interviews. A total of 200 SMS messages were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The data revealed contractions ...
ABSTRACT The main purpose of the study was to investigate the rhythm and stress used in the educated Ghanaian English speech with focus on parliamentary discourse. Descriptive and qualitative approaches were adopted for the study. The Members of Parliament (MPs) of the 4th Republic of 2006 formed the population of the study. The number of MPs used for the study was sixty. The instrument used for the study was a recording of the parliamentary discourse. Features of the rhythm of Ghanaian Engli...
ABSTRACT This thesis examines the elements of orality and performance in modern African poetry, particularly Osundare’s selected poems. The aim is to observe how Osundare uses the elements of orality in selected poems in The Eye of the Earth and Songs of the Marketplace volumes to present the African human experience. The theoretical framework for this research is the formalistic approach. The analysis is based on ten selected poems each from Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth and Son...