Department of French
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Item Les Justes by Albert Camus or the legitimate revolt(2017-04-26) Koffi, S.; Asunka, J.The concept of revolt is manifested in the works of the French writer and philosopher, Albert Camus. Revolt as he terms it is an objection, a resistance or a demonstration against oppression, exploitation and socio-political injustices that characterises the 20th century societies. For Camus, revolt transcends the realm of physical force, strength or energy enacted by man against an oppressor. It is a conscious or a psychological effort man makes to outlive absurdity and many plights of his existence as depicted in his masterpieces: L’Etranger, Le Malentendu and La Peste. In Les Justes, Albert Camus presents revolt as a means to unravel socio-political injustice. Its organisation and manifestations seem to question the legitimacy of every act of revolt. This study based on Les Justes by Albert Camus seeks to highlight on the importance of revolt as well as what constitutes a legitimate revoltItem A Comparative Study of Emotion Lexicon in French and Ewe(2016-03-31) Chachu, S.; Amuzu, E.The grammar of sentiments has been widely studied in the French language and has even been the theme for journal articles for the 1995 edition of Langages. However, there exists very little on sentiment lexicon in Ewe. The only existing literature seem to be an article by Ameka (2002) on cultural scripting of body parts for emotions. Even then, this article only focused on jealousy and related emotions. Ameka's thesis on the Ewe language (1991) also devotes a section to predicates of emotion, linked to experiences and perception. Though ground-breaking and very instructive, they do not provide an in-depth/detailed description of the emotion lexicon in the language. This leaves a field which can be added to. This presentation, which is part of an ongoing project seeks to establish a list of emotion lexicon in Ewe similar to the list that has been established for French within the Lexical-Grammar framework for French. Secondly, it seeks to discover the differences in the local grammars of the two languages as far as expressing emotion is concerned. This project studies emotion lexicon in French and Ewe. It fulfills a double objective of firstly providing a comprehensive list of emotion lexicon in Ewe, and secondly, undertaking a semantic and syntactic comparison of constructions of emotion lexicon in the two languages. Specifically, the study looks at nominal constructions with emotion lexicon and verbal constructions with emotion lexicon to investigate how the world view is expressed through emotion lexicon and how this differs cross-linguistically. This project contributes to understanding the grammar of the ewe language which has been relatively less studied than the French language. This comparison between a western language and an African language also challenges certain assertions that have been made about emotion lexicon based solely on western languages and posits that emotion lexicon are language-specific and that there is not direct equivalence for all instances of emotion lexicon from French to Ewe.Item Living outside the law. Translation, language and the law in Sub-Saharan Africa.(2019-03-07) Kuto, E.Language can be said to interact with the law in two ways: as legal language and as language of the law. Legal language refers to legalese or the specialized sublanguage used by legal professionals such as lawyers and judges (Sarscevic, 2007). On the other hand, language of the law refers to the natural language-culture of the jurisdiction (the sum of all idiolects of a language community). Both legal language and language of the law are system-specific (Legrand, Sarcevic, 2007, De Groot and van Lair, 2006; Tiesma, 1999, Gemar, 1995). Legal language is a subset of the language of the law. While native language speakers know the language of the law (French for the French civil law and English for the English common law), they resort to the services of lawyers in order to understand legal language. This paper theorizes that in jurisdictions where the native language is both legal language and language of the law, citizens are generally more “law-conscious” and therefore more law-abiding. Conversely, in jurisdictions such as pertains in Africa where a foreign language is both the legal language and language of the law (and where majority of people do not know the foreign language), citizens are generally law-unconscious and tend to live outside the law. The former generally correlates with orderly, stable, secure, accountable and prosperous societies while the latter generally correlates with widespread lawlessness, impunity, instability, insecurity and underdevelopment. There is an incentive for translating the law into native/indigenous African languages. However, translating the law into all Ghanaian/African languages is a very expensive venture. The author looks to the EU for the balance between “universal translation” (Koskinen, 2000) and “selective translation” (Koskinen, 2000) of the law.Item Significance of Topaze by Marcel Pagnol from structuralist theory perspective(2019-10-31) Sallah, C.Topaze is an eponymous play written by Marcel Pagnol, at the beginning of the 20th century to portray conditions prevailing in the French society. At the start of the play, Topaze was a school teacher with a moderate salary. He was sacked for being too honest in his profession as a teacher when he refused to change the grade of a wealthy student. He became dishonest and corrupt and was happy to be so, when by the influence of a woman and an unscrupulous municipal official, he became a wealthy businessman. By his style of analytical approach to literature genre, liberal humanist would classify the play as an educative piece which depicts the power of money and denounces the corrupt nature of men, and, as a result, this literary work of Marcel Pagnol is a canonic material for literature study in schools. But would the structuralist, by his literary theory and analytical to literary text hold the same view/opinion as the liberal humanist?