65 research outputs found
Resolving hiatus in (isi)Ndebele: An optimality theoretic account
No full textAbstractVowel hiatus is a dispreferred phenomenon in many languages. When vowel sequences arise through morphophonological concatenations in (isi)Ndebele, hiatus may be resolved in one of three processes: (i) one of the two vowels undergoes elision; (ii) one of the vowels (mostly the first vowel in the sequence) undergoes glide formation; and (iii) the two vowels undergo vowel coalescence – the merging of the two vowels into a neutral vowel that has the qualities of both the two initial vowels straddling a word boundary. This article examines these vowel hiatus resolution strategies in (isi)Ndebele, through the theoretical explications of Optimality Theory (OT) and CV Phonology. In (isi)Ndebele, the featural qualities of the two vowels straddling a word boundary and the morphological contexts at which the hiatal configurations occur determine what process repairs vowel hiatus. Hiatus resolution is also invariably ONSET and feature driven: driven by Preferred Syllable Structure Rules(PSSRs) and constraints
Language learning in Northern Ireland: teachers have their say
No full textLanguage Trends Northern Ireland surveys language teachers in Northern Ireland every two years. Its author, Dr Ian Collen, explains some of the findings
Language learning in Northern Ireland: teachers have their say
No full textLanguage Trends Northern Ireland surveys language teachers in Northern Ireland every two years. Its author, Dr Ian Collen, explains some of the findings
A pragma-dialectical approach in television talk show argumentation: A case study of the Namibia Broadcasting Corporation’s one-on-one discourse
No full textA dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of philosophy in English studiesThis study investigated the argumentative discourse of the Namibian Broadcast
Corporation (NBC) One-on-One talk show interviews between the host and a guest.
Although the interviews present different guests per sitting, the host is an NBC
employee assigned to the interview segment and is couched within the theoretical
explications of pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation (van Eemeren, 2017). The
pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation is fundamentally a broad spectrum of
the study of linguistics that has, through its development and growth, shifted its
interest and focus from abstractions of formal logic to a more structured interest in
pragmatics. This theory has since been more concerned with pragma-dialectics
encompassing the rules of argumentation, strategic manoeuvring, and effectiveness
through reasonableness. The discourse in argumentation varies in a range of how
influential political figures represent or defend their points of view on the issue at
hand. Specifically, the study represented a qualitative establishment of television
show discourse, and it was primarily focused on investigating the patterns of pragma dialectics in which the host of the talk show and the guest strategically manoeuvred
to resolve differences of opinion. In the same vein, the study investigated whether
the resolution of the differences of opinion was achieved and how effectiveness and
reasonableness played any role in the process of the arguers' attempt to defend their
standpoint on issues under discussion. The data was collected from archived audio
recordings transcribed into readable text files. The topics of the talk show discussions
covered were on issues pertaining to Namibia’s social, economic and political
spheres. The analysis employed the pragma-dialectical method to evaluate the data.
The findings, on one part, demonstrated that three turn-taking strategies played a
vital role in the argumentative discourse in the following ways: the arguers (especially
the host) used the turn-holding strategy in order to maintain and prolong their
window of talking. This was more prevalent in the repetitive use of "but", and "and".
The arguers also used turn-claiming as a strategy by interjection and conjunctions
such as “but!”, “really!’ and “Oh!” Turn-yielding strategy was also used but rarely.
The arguers decided to give up their turn to talk when deemed necessary and when
they seemed to have exhausted their stance in opinion. This benefitted the opponent
ii
in the argument by rendering them more time to express and defend their standpoint
at certain issues. The findings further reflected that, through the constellation of
argumentative moves displayed by the arguers, argumentative patterns were
employed through their typology of standpoints, a difference of opinions,
argumentative schemes and argumentative structure. It was also observed that the
arguers strategically manoeuvred at every stage of the discussion to maintain their
standpoint; in this regard, argumentative patterns came up as a result of strategic
manoeuvring. By trying to observe the importance of being effective and
reasonableness, the arguers still strategically manoeuvred. Although there are
numerous pragma-dialectic studies on talk shows, the study concluded that there
was a need for improvement in journalistic communication skills between One-on One talk show in terms of strategic manoeuvring and adhering to the rules that apply
in every argumentation stage. It is recommended that further studies should be
carried out directed towards communication skills in television shows, especially in
situations where non-native English speakers struggle to express their opinions and
fail effectively to defend their viewpoints due to language barriers and poor
argumentation strategie
Feature conditioned resolution of hiatus in Chichewa
No full textPlease help populate SUNScholar with the full text of SU research output. Also - should you need this item urgently, please send us the details and we will try to get hold of the full text as quick possible. E-mail to [email protected]. Thank you.Journal Articles (subsidised)Lettere En WysbegeerteAfrikatal
The Sexual Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Zimbabwean Youth Sociolects in Interpersonal Communicative Contexts
No full textPlease help populate SUNScholar with the full text of SU research output. Also - should you need this item urgently, please send us the details and we will try to get hold of the full text as quick possible. E-mail to [email protected]. Thank you.Lettere En WysbegeerteAfrikatal
Feature sensitive and context [in-]-sensitive glide formation and coalescence in hiatus resolution in isiNdebele
No full textThis paper argues for context and vowel-feature sensitive repair of hiatal configuration in isiNdebele, a Bantu language largely spoken in southern parts of Zimbabwe as well as parts of South Africa. Bantu languages by and large phonologically and/or phonetically repair vowel hiatus configurations arising from both phonological and morphophonological concatenations. The phonology of isiNdebele seems to largely favour an analysis that does not permit the surface realisation of clusters of segments of the form VV (vowel-vowel clusters). Observing such an analysis, which this paper argues to be largely ONSET motivated/triggered and the featural properties of the phonological structures of the languages under study, their reactions to such disprefered vowel clusters and their phonotactics are here examined within the framework of Optimkty Theory (OT) as enunciated by Prince and Smolensky (1991, 1993), McCarthy and Prince (1999), Archangeli (1997) and Kager (1999) as well as Distinctive Features as discussed by Chomsky and Halle (1963). Repair strategies for such configurations such as glide formation, consonantal and/or glide insertions, vowel deletion and coalescence are discussed. The analysis adopted here implicates that the resolution of these disprefered configurations arises from incompatibilities in the features of the vowels straddling a word boundary. It argues that these repair strategies are largely motivated by language internal constraint ranking systems which in Bantu languages seem to largely prefer the preservation of [-] features over [-F] features i.e. the ranking [- F']>>[+ F']
The ‘reporter voice’ and ‘objectivity’ in cross linguistic reporting of ‘controversial’ news in Zimbabwean newspapers. an appraisal approach
No full textThesis,The dissertation is a comparative analysis of the structural (generic/cognitive) and ideological properties of Zimbabwean news reports in English, Shona and Ndebele, focusing specifically on the examination of the proliferation of authorial attitudinal subjectivities in ‘controversial’ ‘hard news’ reports and the ‘objectivity’ ideal. The study, thus, compares the textuality of Zimbabwean printed news reports from the English newspapers (The Herald, Zimbabwe Independent and Newsday), the Shona newspaper (Kwayedza) and the Ndebele newspaper (Umthunywa) during the period from January 2010 to August 2012. The period represents an interesting epoch in the country’s political landscape. It is a period characterized by a power-sharing government, a political situation that has highly polarized the media and as such, media stances in relation to either of the two major parties to the unity government, the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T). Couched in the theoretical explications of Appraisal Theory, specifically the ‘reporter voice’ configuration, the study sought to investigate the proliferation of journalistic ideological subjectivities in ‘hard news’ reports – a genre of news reporting that is largely characterised by claims of ‘objectivity’ and/or ‘neutrality’ and dispassionate journalistic reporting positions. The study, also assuming the orbital structure model developed by Iedema, Feez and White (1994) and White (1997, 1998) in the analysis of ‘hard news’ report in English broadsheet reporting, furthermore sought to investigate whether the textuality and cognitive/rhetorical structure of ‘hard news’ reports in news reports from the three Zimbabwean language journalistic cultures are organised around the same structure. The corpus of news reports analysed in this study were examined for the proliferation of instances of observable authorial ideological positionings by focusing how the choices made in terms of lexical, lexicogrammatical and syntagmatic resources signal evaluative keys that betray authorial ideological subjectivities. The texts were, thus, subjected to close textual analyses in terms of generic structure and journalistic voices. The study shows that Zimbabwean news reports in English, Shona and Ndebele generally share the same structure as expressed by the orbital model, in which authorial subjective evaluations are curtailed through a variety of strategic impersonalisations – largely ‘attribution’. However, despite these similarities, significant differences were observed with regards to the textuality of news reports as well as the uses made of attributed materials
Arguments for an appraisal linguistic discourse approach to the analysis of `objectivity' in 'hard' news reports
No full textStudies focusing on the ideal of 'objectivity' in *hard' news reports are numerous, with most of them within journalistic studies and theorised from diverse theoretical insights. This article departs from journalistic to a linguistic discourse approach-presenting evidence that the linguistic discourse analytical framework of Appraisal Theory provides alternative ways of analysing 'objectivity' and ideological bias in 'hard' news reports. Couched in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) Appraisal is a model that explains the way(s) in which language construes attitude and enables writers and speakers to position themselves evaluatively with
respect the viewpoints of potential respondents and other speakers/writers (White, 2007: Thomson. White and Kitley, 2008). The paper argues that the analysis of the construction of journalistic reality can also be adequately done from a linguistic perspective, specifically from analysing how lexical choices journalists make betray their ideological positioning both in terms of the content as well as context of the news report. In discussing this, the paper comparatively analyses two news reports in two Zimbabwean newspapers on the death of Retired General Solomon Mujuru
(Un)Patriotic nuances? evaluating the nature of the ‘Reporter Voice’ in hard news reports on the renewal of ‘sanctions’ in Zimbabwe
No full textOn the eve of the heavily contested 2002 harmonised Zimbabwean Presidential and Parliamentary
elections, the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU) imposed ‘sanctions’ on
Zimbabwe. In the course of time, subsequent annual renewals of the ‘sanctions’ were effected by the same imposers. This article analyses the discourse linguistic notion of ‘objectivity’ in ‘hard’ news reports on the renewal of these USA and EU imposed ‘sanctions’ in Zimbabwean newspapers. The article compare the textuality of ‘hard’ news reports from two English language Zimbabwean daily newspapers, The Herald1 2 and NewsDay1, by analysing how language and linguistic resources are used evaluatively in manners that betray authorial attitudes and ideological stance. Specifically, the analyses focus on the way(s) in which the news reports uphold or flout the ‘objectivity’ ideal as explicated through the ‘reporter voice’3 configuration of Appraisal Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).This is done through the analysis of how the linguistic choices made by the reporter(s) at lexical, lexicogrammatical, syntactic and syntagmatic levels betray conscious subjective evaluative uses of language and in the process further some assumed ideological position/stance
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