7 research outputs found
VISUALITY, LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION IN COVID-19 NIGERIAN SOCIAL MEDIA IMAGES
No full textCovid-19 is one of the most disturbing infections that has rattled the world in recent history. This flu affected nearly all the countries of the world with different degrees of medical, scientific, social and scholarly attentions. The humanities are not left out from the perspective of language and communication during the pandemic. In the light of the above, this paper undertakes a multimodal semiotic analysis of Covid-19 memes in the Nigerian context with a view to showing how the visual and language complement each other in communicating aspects of Nigerian socio-political realities during the pandemic. Among the images circulated through the Whatsapp medium, ten were selected for this study and Kress and van Leeuween’s (2006) multimodal theory was adopted as our theoretical framework. The findings revealed that language and visual images effectively complement each other as viewers are made to gain easy and quick access to the messages being communicated with a visual understanding of the realities on ground.KEYWORDS: covid-19 pandemic, multimodality, language, semiotics, memes, communicatio
Graphological Devices and Meaning in Tanure Ojaide’s Poetry
No full textThis study identifies the prominent graphological features in selected poems of Tanure Ojaide. It analyzes and categorizes these prominent graphological features and relates them to the socio-political contexts of the poems. This is with a view to understanding the graphological style of language use in the poems. Our data is drawn from selected poems of Tanure Ojaide and a close analysis of each of the poems is done to elicit graphological features using functional stylistics as our linguistic framework. The result showed that at the level of punctuation, the poet deviates from the usual norm of everyday use as he disregards the use of comma and full stop where convention calls for them. He also avoids the use of capital letters when it is necessary to do so. He uses these graphological deviations as a means of rejecting and protesting the destruction of his native Niger Delta environment through oil exploration and exploitation; and as a means of expressing his concern for deviant attitude of Nigerian rulers towards the political structure and order. The study concludes that the style which reveals the use of graphological devices projects the inherent messages of the poems.
Keywords: graphology, poetry, style, Niger Delta, Tanure Ojaid
Syntactic Parallelism and Meaning Relation in Tanure Ojaide’s Poetry
No full textThis paper is an analysis of the use of syntactic parallelism as a meaning relation device in the poetry of Tanure Ojaide. Essentially, the major thrust of Ojaide’s poetry is oil exploration and exploitation and its attendant environmental problems in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Eight poems have been selected across four different collections of Ojaide’s poetry for this study. The parallel structures inherent in the poems are identified and analysed following Allen’s (1996) classification of syntactic parallelism to show how syntactic parallelism enables the poet to foreground and organize his eco-critical messages. The study also applies Halliday’s (1961) “Scale and Category†description of elements of clause structure to handle the structure of the clauses. The findings revealed that the use of syntactic parallelism is functional in written poetry as it enables the poet to foreground the parallel similarity and dissimilarity in the meaning of words and structures which occupy variable positions in the poems. The study further revealed that syntactic parallelism acts as an organising principle in enhancing form and messages in the selected poems of Tanure Ojaide.
Keywords: Syntactic Parallelism, meaning relation, oil, exploitation, exploration, poetry, Niger Delta
RANK-SHIFTING AS A LINGUISTIC DEVICE IN THE POETRY OF TANURE OJAIDE
No full textAbstract
This paper examines rank-shifting as a linguistic device in the poetry of Tanure Ojaide with the aim of showing how it helps the poet in the projection of the plight of the Niger Delta people and the socio-political problems in his country, Nigeria. The study is guided by M. A. K. Halliday’s “Scale and Category Grammar” as a theoretical framework and it adopts Adejare and Adejare’s (1996 and 2006) clause and group structural descriptive pattern in the analysis. Six poems are purposively selected from three different collections of Ojaide’s poetry based on the manifestation of rank-shifted structures and a detailed qualitative close analysis is carried out. The result shows that the use of rank-shifted groups and clauses as adjuncts provide circumstantial information. As qualifiers and elements of clause structure, they also aid the poet as a meaning making device and enable him to relate the messages of the poems to their socio-situational contexts. Shift in rank aids the poet in the realisation of the desired meanings on the heads of nominal groups as it provides information, which can be regarded as news on the head of a nominal group
Sentential Negation in English and Izon Languages
No full textThis paper is a contrastive study of Sentential Negation in English and Izon languages. Contact language situations have given rise not only to the influences of one language over the other but also to the differences between the structures of the two languages in contact and the likely learning difficulties which an L1 learner of a second language may likely encounter in learning the structure of the L2. Thus, the data for this study were sourced from competent native speakers of the Ogbe-Ijo dialect of the Izon language and a contrastive approach was adopted using the Chomskyan’s Government and Binding theory as a theoretical framework with a view to identifying the structural variations, hierarchy of difficulties and the likely learning problems an Izon learner of English as a second language may encounter at the level of Negation. It discovers that there were obvious parametric variations between the English and Izon languages at the levels of do insertion and the negative particle not among others. It then recommends that conscious efforts should be made by teachers and Izon learners / speakers of English as a second language at the level of realisation of negation in English as a second language
Wole Soyinka’s The Road as an intertext
No full textStudies on African drama have shown the influences and the intertextual relations between African drama and European (Classical and Elizabethan) plays. It is also a known fact that African drama exhibits traces of African tradition and instances of textual relations with already existing oral and written texts. However, existing studies on Wole Soyinka’s The Road have tilted towards the usual literary interpretation or as a piece of theatrical performance with little attention paid to the intertextual nature of the text. Based on the challenges of these usual approaches to the study of literature by contemporary literary and cultural theories, this study adopts intertextual theory as a framework to examine Wole Soyinka’s The Road as an intertext showing traces of textual influences from oral and written external sources. The aim is to reveal the source texts from which the playwright draws in the creation of the text and to show how these sources contribute to the overall thematic significance of the play. Findings reveal that Soyinka draws extensively from Yorùbá oral sacred texts, the Bible, and his own earlier texts and that these sources contribute to the eclectic nature of the thematic preoccupation of the play. It is hoped that this has gone a long way to mitigate the obscure claim of structural and thematic incomprehensibility with which the play is associated
A PRAGMA-STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ISOKO APHORISMS
No full textThis paper is a study of Aphorisms in Isoko language. The Isoko language is one of the understudied minority languages facing threat of extinction from Nigerian Pidgin and the English language in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Thus, in a bid to document and preserve aspects of the Isoko language, this paper undertakes a pragma-stylistic study of Isoko aphorisms. The data for the study consists of twelve (12) Isoko aphorisms collected from competent native speakers of Isoko through participant-observation method and recording and translated into English by a competent Isoko – English bilingual. They are then analysed using Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980 & 2003) Conceptual Metaphor theory as analytical tool to ascertain the conceptual mappings between the compositional meaning of an aphoristic expression (source domain) in Isoko and its actual pragma-stylistic content (target domain). The findings reveal that the correspondence between the source and target domains in Isoko aphorisms help in accounting for both pragma-stylistic and social meanings in the real world. It recommends that studies of this nature should be carried out in other areas as it has the potentials of not only preserving and developing the Isoko language but also increasing the phrasal stock of the emerging Nigerian English
