English : Ghanaian Voices on Topics in English Language and Literature
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Editors : A. N. Mensah, Jemima A. Anderson, Prince K. Adika
Publisher : Ayebia Clarke Publishing
Date of Publication : 2013
Place of Publication : Oxford
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Item Issues in Defining Ghanaian Language-English Bilingualism : A Sociolinguistic Perspective(2013-12-09) Ansah, G.In this paper, I re-examine Sey’s (1973) categorisation of Ghanaian language-English bilingualism in Ghana in the light of issues of definition and terminology of bilingualism in the literature. The paper situates Ghanaian language-English bilingualism in the broad sociolinguistic (multilingual) milieu in Ghana and argues that the sociolinguistic situation, including language policy in Ghana, creates different kinds of Ghanaian Language-English bilingualism that are not adequately accounted for by definitions and categorisation terminology of bilingualism literature. Specifically, the paper argues that Sey’s (1973) categorisation of Ghanaian Language-English bilingualism, which is informed by competence-based approaches to defining bilingualism, is inadequate in addressing the complex patterns of bilingualism that exist in highly multilingual communities such as Ghana. Finally, the paper concludes that in highly multilingual communities the adoption of sociolinguistic approaches to defining bilingualism and categorising different kinds of bilinguals. This is because such approaches are better able to address and account for the complex nature of bilingualism patterns in highly multilingual communities.Item Polite Requests in Non-Native Varieties of English: The Case of Ghanaian English(2013-12-09) Anderson, J.A.Although several studies have been carried out on the theory of politeness, the definition of this notion varies among linguists and according to languages and cultures: what is polite and sociallyappropriate in one context or culture may be considered impolite or excessively polite in another. Further, rules of politeness may be transferred from a first language to a second language by learners who maintain hybridized usage due to these transfers. In this paper we demonstrate the maintenance of some of these transfers in politeness strategies in Ghanaian English. This variety is influenced by the cultural norms of politeness of some Ghanaian languages whose speakers fuse native speaker conventions with English politeness conventions. We discuss herein some hybridized forms that result from cultural transfers from one Ghanaian language, Akan.Item The Nominal Group in Ghanaian Student Pidgin: Some Preliminary Observations(2013-12-09) Wiredu, J.F.Item Student Pidgin – A Ghanaian Pidgin-Sound-Alike Youth Language(2013-12-09) Dako, K.Student Pidgin is a Ghanaian Pidgin-sound-alike Youth Language that so far as we can ascertain was started in the high-prestige boys’ secondary schools in Cape Coast in the late 1960s – early 1970s. It is today the unmarked code of communication among secondary and tertiary male students and is gradually being adopted by female students in the same institutions. Whereas Student Pidgin (SP) is grammatically close to Ghanaian Pidgin English (GhaPE) and can be classified as a WAP (West African Pidgin), it is sociolinguistically not a pidgin. This chapter investigates the structural, lexical and idiomatic peculiarities of SP, the identity assumed by its speakers, and it examines how it fits into the pattern of other urban youth languages in Africa.Item Prescriptivism and the Second Language Learner of English(2013-12-09) Dadzie, A.B.K.The teaching and learning of English in Ghana, and other Anglophone countries of West Africa, has been plagued with the use of unacceptable structures in the writing and pronunciation of English sentences, resulting in the chorus of ‘falling’ and ‘fallen’ standard of the language. One major reason for this is the insistence on the identification of rules of behaviour rather than of performance, one that insists on knowledge of dos and donts of learning of any kind thrived from well over fifty years ago. What all this led to is prescriptivism as a theory of teaching and learning English. This paper examines the notion of prescriptivism and points out its deficiencies and proposes the cultivation of a self-correcting mechanism; one which helps the learner to select appropriate choices given particular contexts. This is perhaps less tied to knowledge of the rules of behaviour per se and obviates situations in which learners can repeat all the rules, however complicated, but fail to apply them in the very next sentence they make.Item Significance of the Minority: A Thematic Study of Armah’s Minor Characters in Why Are We So Blest(2013-12-09) Sackey, A.A.Minor characters in Ayi Kwei Armah play crucial roles in his aesthetic universe, an artistic strategy unfortunately often missed in our enthusiasm to get to the heart of the matter. In this brief paper I intend to demonstrate with illustrative support from one of his early novels the thematic relevance of his minor characters in a proper appreciation of Armah’s vision. The book I have chosen is Why Are We So Blest.Item Cutting a Long Story Short: A Semiotic and Postmodern Reading of Veronique Tadjo’sas the Crow Flies(2013-12-09) Adjei, M.As the Crow Flies,written by Ivorian female writer VéronqueTadjo, deals with several stories in everyday life. Tadjo is a writer, artist, academic and author of books for young people. In As the crow flies, she ushers us into a wonderful world full of images, rhythm, colours, feelings, people, musicality, reflections about life in order to open the reader's mind and eyes. The work provokes pertinent questions in our daily lives through characters who are both nameless and faceless. This stylistic choice allows the reader to identify himself with these nondescript characters. The text is revolutionary in its construction and shuffles between the Short Story, Novella and Novel. Over all, it is a stylistic choice driven by postmodernism in its bold attempt to subvert existing conventional novelistic forms and makes meaning only when it is consciously located within such a framework. I, therefore, posit that, to critically engage with the text by way of content and form, one needs to approach it from semiotic and postmodernist perspectives.Item The Highlife and the Ghanaian Novel(2013-12-09) Mensah, A.N.This paper examines the different ways in which three Ghanaian novelists adopt the lyrics of the highlife, the popular West African musical form, into their novels. Ama Ata Aidoo in Changes makes a fleeting allusion to the words of a highlife song, but provides in that brief moment an ironic comment on the irrepressible optimism that is so prevalent among Ghanaians. Cameron Duodu in The Gab Boys shows a more sustained adoption of the highlife in which he not only expresses his own love of the music, but more significantly uses it as a prop for his realism, for his vivid depiction of time and place. Finally, AyiKweiArmah’s first twonovels employ the lyrics of the highlife and a focus on its rhythm as a device for thematicreinforcement and as a means of probing the Ghanaian character.Item Ethnic or Post-Ethnic Community for Africa? A Critique of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Critique of the Nation in the Suns of Independence(2013-12-09) Korang, K.L.This essay proffers an assessment of the late AhmadouKourouma’s The Suns of Independence. It takes BiodunJeyifo’s observation in the epigraph above as a salient point of departure. The encounter of the different African peoples with one another that Jeyifo refers to has occurred within the continent’s recent domination by European colonial imperialism and has a postcolonial salience which flows from the same circumstances. Whatever their differences—ethnocultural and other—Africans encountered one other colonially as commonly subordinate relative to the dominant Europeans. How, then, were they to reencounter one another in circumstances where they would no longer be subordinate? This demand will produce the imaginings and practices in which Africans would foresee themselves newly encountering one another as a free people—and if so ideally as one people. In its resolution as a postcolonial question, Africa’s future encounter with itself would be in a mode where its different peoples live in community imagined in a nationalist form. Out of the many one: the post-ethnic nation is ratified as a vision of African postcolonial community.Item Transnational Impulses in Some Recent Ghanaian Works of Prose(2013-12-09) Adika, P.K.This paper reviews two contemporary Ghanaian prose works in the light of emerging scholarly discourses about transnational cultural traffic especially as they relate to Africa and its Diasporas. The paper argues that while most classifications and studies of Ghanaian prose literature—and indeed other genres— have been framed by narrowly conceived nationalist viewpoints inherited from the mandates of European colonialism, contemporary Ghanaian novels actually embrace a wider conception of nation that invokes spaces and bodies in both Ghanaian/African homeland and the Diaspora. The paper uses AyiKweiArmah’s Osiris Rising and Kofi Awoonor’s Comes the Voyager at Last to demonstrate how this broader conception of (trans)-national space and notions of belonging in Ghanaian prose works refocuses our attentions on literary imaginaries that paradoxically transgress the borders of Ghana in order to deepen our understandings of the fuller reaches of Ghanaianness.Item “The More Storytellers, The Better”: Diversity, Ghanaian Literature and Mabel Dove-Danquah’s Fiction(2013-12-09) Yitah, H.I explore Mabel Dove Danquah’s contribution to the literary arts in Ghana during the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Literature of this “nationalist” period is important because it portrays almost all the ideas and ideology of modern African thought and many of the themes, modes and techniques found in African literature today. Moreover, the nationalist writers, through their preoccupation with nationhood, race consciousness, African cultural integrity and the evils of colonialism, announced Ghana’s intellectual independence decades before the end of colonial rule. Mabel Dove-Danquah stands out among this group as a writer whose fiction not only challenged colonial and racial legacies, as was the practice of her time, but also called into question male value systems that denied female personhood and envisioned a new woman who could challenge them. I attempt a gendered comparative analysis of Dove-Danquah’s works among her contemporaries, focusing on her transgressive portraits of female subjectivity, which range from an incipient stage to a very radical stage, and the ways in which these contribute to her distinct literary style.Item The Back Without Which There Is No Front(2013-12-09) Anyidoho, K.Using as its basic point of reference the principle of continuity so fundamental to Ewe conception of development and of life itself, the author of this paper draws on personal experience and testimony to establish an organic relationship between Ewe oral tradition and poetry written in English by himself and others. The article examines certain contradictions surrounding the use of colonial heritage language and culture as the basis of creativity and general education in Africa. It also demonstrates the challenges of creative work in colonial heritage languages as well as special benefits of original work in African languages that draws on models from the oral tradition. However, given the reality of the primary orality of African cultural practice, the paper also acknowledges the need for using modern technology for transmitting African literature, especially poetry, through recordings of the spoken voice.Item Truth as Experience(2013-12-09) Senanu, K.E.In agreeing to have my article ‘Truth as Experience’ re-published among the collection written by current members of the Department of English, I am keenly aware of how out-of-date a piece written in the 1970s would be in the context of English studies in the early 21st century. For ‘Truth as Experience’ was written in implicit response to ‘Truth as Opinion’ (published in UNIVERSITAS Vol. I Number 3 (New Series) March 1972) by my colleague in the Department of Philosophy, Johnson Wiredu, now Professor KwasiWiredu of the University of Tampa, Florida, U.S.A. I will not attempt to summarize Johnson’s argument here except to say that for him, at that point in time, “to be true is to be opined; which is to say, for anything whatever to be is to be apprehended.” By “opinion”, of course, he meant “considered opinion”. ‘Truth as Experience’ then was an indirect attempt at a rebuttal of the subjectivist theory of reality which undergirded Johnson’s carefully argued point of view. An overt rebuttal of that point of view would have been the presentation of an objectivist theory of reality as that which exists independently of apprehension. But, of course, the argument of my piece acknowledges apprehension– the experience of personal subjects (both writer and reader)– as crucial to any apology or rationale for English studies. In fact, I did consider the title: ‘Truth as Experienced’ but rejected it for obvious reasons. For what, I hope, I succeeded in doing was to argue that successful imaginative creations of the writer, although personal, are not subjective. Their objective truth consists both in their adequate and coherent grasp of a reality that is independent of the writer and reader, but brought to awareness by the creative writer’s successful use of the medium of language. That grasp– call it apprehension– is done in a language that is metaphorical, minted afresh, and yet embedded in historical usage. Put that way, my argument is in danger of landing in the lap of the late 20th century and early 21st century post-modernists: the progeny of Jacques Derrida who claim that language is the human resource for constructing reality. For them also, there is no objective reality, natural or social. It is all the creation/ construction of language and amounts to games played by writers. A scientist friend of mine remarked the other day with surprise that one of my past students who holds the trade union card of a professor, is of the view that writers and teachers of literature make no truth claim for what they write or profess. I told my friend that was a cynical position I do not share. ‘Truth as Experience’ tacitly accepts a correspondence theory of truth, although it concentrates on the complementary truth requirements of consistency and coherence. The two words are used in my piece and need careful pondering. But what is the correspondence theory of truth that I assume in ‘Truth as Experience’? The correspondence view of truth holds that any statement is true if and only if it corresponds to or agrees with factual reality. Sentences about facts express propositions. For example (from George Herbert’s poem Vertue) ‘Sweet rose Thy root is ever in its grave’ is a proposition which describes a state of affairs which agrees with objective reality. Propositions make truth claims; they stake out a chunk of reality linguistically. The correspondence theory of truth asserts that linguistic statements which correspond to the facts out there are not simply the subjective effusions of the speaker but refer to objective reality. The genuine creative writer is the one whose use of language enables us to experience true reality. I believe with this brief introduction, it is time to dip into ‘Truth as Experience’, 1973.