Textual Orientation to Cculture-Sansitive Proverbs Meanings in Selected Ahmed Yerima’s Yoruba Culture-Based Plays (Published)
Proverbs have attracted a lot of attention in linguistic scholarship. Specifically, scholars have addressed the thematic and figurative features of proverbs in the espousal of ethnic experiences of different communities from sociolinguistic, stylistic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Observation has shown that Pragmatic efforts have however ignored emphasis on the impact of textual parts, especially, common grounds in character’s interactions through shared situational knowledge (SSK) and shared cultural knowledge (SCK) of interlocutors in proverbial interpretations. With the application of Kecskes (2014) socio-cognitive principle of common grounds, this study examines purposively selected Yoruba proverbs in Ahmed Yerima’s Yoruba-culture based plays Mojagbe and Ajagunmale with a view to determining their meanings relative to Yerima’s pragmatic intentions. The study reveals that proverbs which mainly have linguistic roots in metaphor are interpretively aided by common ground items of shared situational knowledge (SSK) and shared cultural knowledge (SCK) in characters’ utterances to pragmatically serve to warn/caution, emphasize, lament, accuse, and explain in the plays. This linguistic contribution to existing literature on Ahmed Yerima’s plays is significant for aiding the understanding of form-function nexus in context-sensitive proverbial interpretation in fictional discourse in linguistic scholarship in Nigeria.
Citation: Ade A. and Ige N. (2023) Textual Orientation to Cculture-Sansitive Proverbs Meanings in Selected Ahmed Yerima’s Yoruba Culture-Based Plays, International Journal of English Language and Linguistics Research, Vol.11, No 1, pp.26-41
Keywords: Meaning, Perspectives, Proverbial interpretations, literary pragmatic principle
Conceptual Mappings and Face Management Strategies in Obasanjo’s ‘The Way Out: A Clarion Call For Nigeria Movement’ (Published)
Political text is a discourse in which language is employed for manipulation, deception, coercion, conviction and power construction. The existing linguistic studies of Nigerian political discourse focused on the genres of cartoons, campaign speeches, adversarial political interviews, newspaper adverts, inaugural addresses, and political slogans; with the exclusion of the text of letter to the president. Hence, this paper examines the conceptual mappings and face management strategies in Obasanjo’s open letter to Nigerian President Buhari titled ‘The Way Out: Clarion Call for Nigeria Movement(i.e CCNM)’ through the eclectic theoretical framework of Gerald Steen’s (1996) Deliberate Metaphor Theory, VanDijk’s(2006) Socio-cognitive Theory and Brown and Levinson’s(1987) Face Management Theory. The findings revealed that Obasanjo’s CCNM is characterised by the deliberate mappings of a nation as a horse and lice-infested clothes; governance as a horse; a political leader as a horse rider and poor performance in government as a lice. The text is equally characterised by bald-on –record face threatening acts used to condemn Buhari’s flaws in governance and face saving acts employed to convince the Nigerian political actors and populace about the need to form a ‘coalition’ to move Nigeria forward. The paper concludes that the audience needs to construe the participants’ generic and socially-shared cognitive models to decode the author’s intention in the text.
Keywords: Meaning, cognitive mappings, facework, political text
Meaning and Semantic Roles of Words in Context (Published)
It is quite imperative to note that meaning has a significant role to play in human communication. Consequent upon this fact, semantics as a field of study has become an issue of debate. Linguists are still in oblivion with regard to consensus on single and workable definition of semantics. This controversy has led to several unending attempts to define semantics. The emphasis of this study is centred on the semantic roles of words in a given context upholding extentionalist opinion as a background or theoretical framework. The theory states that language constitutes words put together in a context to enhance communication within those who live and share the linguistic bounds. In the light of the above, the study focuses basically on the roles words in communication in a given situation. Technical terms such as agent, theme, and instrument among others are for the benefit of analytical purposes. The study restates that every lexical word has meaning, but its social application has implication on our day to day communication.
Keywords: Meaning, Semantic Roles., Semantics, Words