1,720,957 research outputs found
Verbal Particles in Gurene and their grammatical functions
No full text<p>A presentation at the 2020 Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics, hosted at Leiden University.</p>
Basic and extended uses of posture verbs in Gurenɛ
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the basic postural meanings and extended locative uses of three posture verbs : gã ‘be lying’, zĩ ‘be sitting’, and ze’ ‘be standing’ in Gurenɛ (Gur, Niger-Congo) spoken in and around Bolga in Northern Ghana, West Africa. The paper explores the use of these verbs from a cognitive linguistics perspective. The basic meanings of the posture verbs correlate with how the speaker conceptualizes the spatial relation of the Figure and Ground based on some image schematic abstractions of the locative scene. They include the speaker’s background knowledge of the referent scene, the spatial relationship between the two entities, and his or her conceptualisation of the posture based on his or her socio-cultural background experience. The extension of the basic meanings to describe the position of animate non-human (animals) and inanimate entities (objects) reflects how the Gurenɛ speaker conceptualises and categorises non-human entities based on some related characteristic features between their body positions and that of humans. A unique feature of the Gurenɛ phenomenon is that the posture of humans or other entities located on elevated Grounds leads the speaker to conceptualise the scene from a different perspective which blocks the use of posture verbs and calls for the use of different positional verbs, such as yagi ‘be on top, with base support’, dɔgi ‘be on top, with unstable base support, and pagi ‘be on top, of flat or flexible objects’.Cet article a pour but d’étudier le sens premier ainsi que les extensions à sens locatifs de trois verbes de posture du gurenne : gã ‘être étendu’, zĩ ‘être assis’ et ze’ ‘être debout’. Le gurenne est une langue de la branche gour de la famille des langues nigéro-congolaises. Il est parlé dans la ville de Bolga et ses alentours au nord du Ghana en Afrique de l’Ouest. L’article propose une étude des usages de ces verbes du point de vue de la linguistique cognitive. Il démontre que les sens premiers des verbes de posture sont en corrélation avec la conceptualisation par les locuteurs de la relation spatiale entre Figure et Fond basée sur des images schématiques de la scène. Celles-ci incluent la connaissance complémentaire qu’a le locuteur de la scène-référent, la relation spatiale entre les deux entités, et une conceptualisation de la posture basée sur son expérience socioculturelle. L’extension des sens premiers pour décrire la posture des êtres non-humains (animaux) et des entités inanimées (objets) reflète la conceptualisation et la catégorisation des entités non-humaines par les locuteurs du gurenne, basée sur une ressemblance de traits caractéristiques entre la position de leur corps et celle des êtres humains. L’originalité du gurenne sur ce phénomène vient du fait que la posture de tout humain et de toute autre entité localisée sur un support élevé pousse le locuteur à conceptualiser la scène d’un autre point de vue, ce qui prohibe l’usage d’un verbe de posture et oblige à utiliser un autre verbe de position tel que yagi ‘être au dessus, sur un support ayant une base’, dogi ‘être au dessus, sur un support ayant une base instable’ et pagi ‘être au dessus, sur la base d’un objet plat ou flexible’
Lessons from the field: An insight into the documentation of Gurenɛ oral genres
No full textThe paper discusses my eight months fieldwork experience of documenting endangered Gurenɛ (Mabia, Niger-Congo) oral genres which include riddles and folktales, sung folktales, songs and ritual performances between 2010 and 2012 in Bolga and Bongo in northern Ghana. It presents the documentary corpus of close to 100 hours of both audio and video recordings and discusses the strategies and challenges of documenting these genres. It is argued in this paper that though Gurenɛ with a speaker population of over 600,000 is not endangered, its oral genres such as riddles and folktales are vanishing and deserves attention to be documented. The paper draws attention of linguistic field workers and language documenters to pay attention to such languages and not to focus only on endangered or moribund languages. The documentation corpus from this project has been archived at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS, London. The lessons in this project can be used to document these genres in other Ghanaian or African languages for revitalization and preservation of these linguistic and cultural resources of language communities
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
