1,720,956 research outputs found
A Multimodal Study of the Online Versions of Three Nigerian Dailies
Get PDFThis paper carries out a multimodal analysis of the homepages of the online versions of The Nation, The Guardian and Nigerian Tribune. Each of the newspapers is published in Nigeria, dominating the Nigerian news scene. The texts are representative of the current wave of online newspaper publishing, which is gradually edging out the print medium. Most researchers have concentrated on the print versions of newspapers with many researchers paying little attention to the online versions. This paper notes that the online versions are different in many important respects from the hard copies. The online medium incorporates many modes which interact to construe meaning. With the foregoing, the multimodal nature of texts observed in the data calls for further inquiry into the way writers and newspaper publishers have deployed various resources to communicate and interact with their audience. The data collected are sourced online and printed in hard copies to facilitate analysis. Observations are interpreted using Halliday’s model for semiotic studies. Attention is given to the ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings constructed by the newspaper publishers. The study concludes that publishers deploy a combination of verbal resources and images to construe meaning. Furthermore, newspaper publishers use the texts to achieve social functions by creating a platform for social interaction, a purpose achieved through the interactive design of the homepages. Moreover, thumbnail images are deployed to relate the stories with the social actors identified in them. With the new art of newspaper publishing through a multimodal approach, the linguist is faced with a new challenge of developing more adequate tools for studying this new text
An Evaluation of Aspects of Culture and Grammatical Metaphors in Selected Tunde Kelani’s Films
Get PDFThis paper analyses aspects of culture and grammatical metaphor in Tunde Kelani’s films. Both primary and secondary sources of data are employed for the analysis of this study. The primary source includes five purposively selected films of Tunde Kelani. The study is restricted to only five of Kelani’s films because of their richness in grammatical metaphor. Books, journals, articles and the internet form the secondary source of data. Data were analysed within the provision of Halliday’s theoretical notion of grammatical metaphor introduced in 1985 within his Systemic Functional Grammar. The results show that Tunde Kelani employs interrogative construction for statement to clear the interrogator’s doubt, to achieve diplomacy, to suggest lack of direction, to dodge subsequent question, etc. Second, the analysis of grammatical metaphor in the films reveals that Kelani utilizes statement in the directive mood for politeness purpose. Third, the study shows that statement could be used to express the directive mood. This reflects indecision from the part of the speaker. It also reflects the power relation between the interlocutors involved. In conclusion, the complexity of the information in Nigeria’s films is as a result of the different forms of grammatical metaphors used. In a nut shell, grammatical metaphor creates tension, suspense and dramatic irony in Tunde Kelani’s films, thereby making them interesting enough. Therefore, the aspects of grammatical metaphor of Nigeria’s films should be studied to get the whole thematic concerns therein. In this paper it is suggested that further studies be carried out with some attentions on stylistic analyses in order to have a holistic understanding of Tunde Kelani’s films.
Keywords: Culture, metafunctions, grammatical metaphor, results, film
A Pragmatic Study of Verbal Irony in Selected Yoruba Home Videos
Get PDFA considerable research has been devoted to verbal irony in Yoruba language in dramatic texts and other written texts but not much attention has been paid to verbal irony in Yoruba home videos. Hence this study examines verbal irony in selected Yoruba home videos using pragmatic theory. A total of ten home videos produced within the last ten years are randomly selected for analysis using the combined pragmatics theories of Cooperative Principle (CP) and “pragmeme†proposed by Grice ((1975) and Mey (2001) respectively. The paper notes that socio-cultural background of the speaker and the listener contributes to the effective use of verbal irony. It notes, furthermore, that verbal irony is deployed to serve the purpose of instilling cultural value and norms in the Yoruba people including exposure to the supernatural world. Verbal irony is deployed in market places, homestead and public places. These discoveries will prepare the way for further studies in pragmatics and the peculiar linguistic behaviour of the Yoruba people. Other situational use of verbal irony could be investigated, as well as other linguistic functions of verbal irony in Yoruba language.
Keywords: Verbal Irony, Pragmatics, Linguistic Functions, Home Vide
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
A Lexico-Semantic Analysis of Selected Press Releases of The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)
Get PDFThe Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a new separatist movement in Eastern Nigeria, has been labelled a terrorist group by the Nigerian government against its stated goals. This study aims to investigate the language used in the IPOB’s press releases to identify the specific stylistic choices that contributed to its designation as a terrorist organisation. Four speeches from three prominent leaders of IPOB were purposively selected from the online spaces for the study; two from Mazi Uchenna Asiegbu and one each from Mazi Chika Edoziem and Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, respectively. Using Halliday’s theoretical framework of the Systemic Functional Grammar through a qualitative analysis, the selected speeches were first closely read; thereafter, the prominent lexico-sematic features that characterise the speeches were identified, categorised, and discussed. Findings revealed that the press releases were replete with the deployment of three lexico-semantic features, such as collocation, lexical relations, and figurative language, which were stylistically used to convey speakers’ intentions of grieving, protesting, self-defending, and calling for international aid. It further revealed that the manner of agitation, particularly brutality, informed their choice of negative words. The study concluded that the aggressive language patterns of the IPOB writers and their propaganda became the critical rhetorical techniques through which they were being labelled. This research will help to give insight into the specific lexical items chosen by the IPOB to construct identity, resistance, ideologies, emotions, and political positions
- …
