1,720,954 research outputs found
A demographic analysis of language shift in a Yoruba suburban town, Southwestern Nigeria
No full textA significant number of Nigerian languages have not been put into maximum use either by documenting them or by parents attempting to pass them on to the younger generation. Thus, this paper delves into the struggle of the ‘minority’ languages in Nigeria against the oppressive and predative tendencies of the other neighbouring prestige languages. Specifically, it examines societal endoglossic bilingualism in Erushu, Akoko with respect to some demographic variables (sex, age, education, occupation and place of acquisition). Our findings reveal that at 0.05 level of significance, there is a significant difference in the level of subjects’ mastery of Erushu, the mother tongue with respect to age as well as their mastery of Yoruba, the regional lingua franca, with respect to education. However, other variables are not statistically significant. Language use data here reveal a case of language shift as adolescents in this community are gradually giving up the mastery of Erushu in preference for Yoruba and English. The paper further reports on the quest for linguistic and ethnic identity ravaging virtually every small ethno-linguistic group in the nation as evident in the Erushu/Yoruba data presented here. The paper recommends some strategies which Nigerians should adopt in order to preserve and popularize their languages. These are educational, political and cultural strategies. These efforts include organizing language Institutes for small language groups, re-orientating the citizens through government organs as far as language use and language attitudes are concerned and the re-vitalization of some cultural festivals and names.</jats:p
Pragmatic Acts in the Inaugural Speeches of Military Heads of Government in Nigeria
No full text<p>An Inaugural speech can be described as the first official speech delivered by an individual on the assumption of any office of public trust. The inaugural speech is an important formal presentation that allows the presenter to express certain views and ideas relating to particular situations. For the presidential inaugural speech, however, we can go a step further by saying that the inaugural speech is a public piece of discourse that is usually formally presented by the president as a political office holder and which signifies the commencement of a particular administration. For a military head of government, the inaugural speech is almost in all cases, a post-coup presentation where the speaker attempts a justification of the change in government. Abaya (2008:5) defined a coup speech as “a broadcast to the nation on military intervention on the day-to-day administration of a country”. This intervention is sometimes executed through illegitimate and violent means. Thomas and Wareing (1999) argued that when people engage in politics, they make use of a wide range of linguistic choices to build up their discourse and these usually have crucial effects on shaping an ideology that will lead the people to accept their argument more easily. We can infer from the foregoing that a coup speech, being a form of communication meant for the citizens will focus on issues that are of interest to the generality of the people. As opined by Adebiyi (2006), the inaugural speech, whether it is prepared, memorised or delivered without formal preparation or notification, is geared towards motivating, mobilising, educating, informing and in some cases entertaining the target audience. It can however be argued that Adebiyi (2006) is perhaps oblivious of a salient point. This is the fact that a presidential inaugural speech, being a form of political discourse, can equally be deployed as a tool for criticism which is the case in Ademilokun (2016) where the author examined the lexical choices of President Buhari’s inaugural speech. He concluded that the lexical choices in the speech under review were meant to praise his supporters and condemn the activities of the previous governments. This shows that the inaugural speeches are not only used for motivating and mobilising as suggested by Adebiyi, but are also used to criticise and condemn previous administrations which is always the case especially in post-coup speeches where ‘military politicians’ make every effort to condemn the activities of previous regimes in order to justify the current government. This criticism can be in form of institutional or attitudinal criticism. It is therefore apt to describe the presidential inaugural speech as a comprehensive piece of discourse that addresses various aspects of a nation’s life in one clean sweep. In the views of Akinrinola (2016), presidential inaugural speeches are crafted to achieve specific objectives. This crafting therefore takes cognizance of certain factors which in turn determine the linguistic choices of the speech encoder which eventually will make him or her achieve his or her pragmatic intent in order to successfully achieve the objectives of this discourse genre. It is therefore on this basis that this study examines the pragmatic actions performed in the inaugural speeches presented by Nigeria’s military heads of government.</p>
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
Language Use and Communication Artifacts in GSM Adverts in Nigeria
Get PDFThis is a sociolinguistic study of communication and language use in GSM adverts in Nigeria. The study was conducted to identify certain sociolinguistic strategies employed in GSM adverts in Nigeria. Our findings reveal that such strategies include: code choice, ethnography, semiotics and neologisms. The study has once again revealed that language choice especially in a multilingual community like Nigeria follows certain patterns and typology based on demographic, situational and attitudinal variants controlled by socio-cultural norms of communicative appropriateness
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
- …
