The Legon Journal of the Humanities
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Item War and Absurdity: Reading Manifestations of Trauma in Uwem Akpan’s “Luxurious Hearses”(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2012) Okolocha, H.O.This essay examines the circumstances of Jubril, Chief Ukongo and Colonel Usenetok, three casualties of Sharia war fleeing to safety in Uwem Akpan’s short story, “Luxurious Hearses” in her collection, Say You’re One of Them (2008). The paper particularly identifies the loss of personhood that afflicts these individuals as a result of war; that loss of self that manifests itself in absurdity. Akpan paints poignant and convincing pictures of the horrors of war, of the physical and mental dislocation of individuals in a war situation. This paper finds that for those caught up in the throes of war or conflict, life has one basic meaning – physical survival.Item Problems with Wiredu’s Empiricalism(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2012) Ajei, M.O.In his “Empiricalism: The Empirical Character of an African Philosophy”, Kwasi Wiredu sets out to reject some logical and epistemological categorial distinctions that can be deployed as instruments for misunderstanding and denigrating African modes of thought. Towards this end, he enunciates a doctrine he calls ‘empiricalism’, which he considers is conclusively characteristic of Akan philosophy. In doing so, Wiredu ascribes some ideas to Akan metaphysics that I consider disputable. This paper aims at contesting those ascriptions. I begin with Wiredu’s thesis and arguments in favour of empiricalism, and proceed to formulate and discuss what I perceive to be the major problems with the doctrine. The paper ends by offering suggestions on how the problems engendered by Wiredu’s empiricalism may be resolved, and by surveying the prospects of the doctrine for African philosophy.Item Vowel Raising in Akan Reduplication(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2012) Adomako, K.This paper examines vowel raising in reduplication in Akan, a Niger- Congo (Kwa) language, focusing on the Asante-Twi dialect. It has been generally observed in Akan that in reduplicating CV stems, the stem [+low] vowels are pre-specified with [+high] the reduplicant (RED). However, it has been claimed that raising to the mid vowel in disyllabic REDs is idiosyncratic to the Fante dialect. I show that the phenomenon is attested in Asante and that stem CV1V2, where V2 is [+low], raises to a corresponding [-high, -low] vowel in the RED, and not [+high]. I account for this within the Optimality Theory framework.Item The Concept of African Pianism(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2012) Boamah, E.African Pianism is a style of piano music which employs techniques and styles used in the performance of African instrumental traditional songs and African popular music. The percussive and melodic capabilities of the piano make it an ideal medium for expressing the rhythmic and percussive features of African music. Deploying African traditional idioms in compositions using the concept of African pianism is however only one aspect of creating an art based on the fundamental principles which are essential to its well being. The paper discusses the various techniques and styles composers employ in composing music using the concept of African Pianism.Item Yoruba Proverbs and Musicality(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2012) Olatunji, M.O.This paper attempted to establish some links between traditional Yorùbá instrumental music and instrumentation or performance with proverbs. Eleven Yorùbá proverbs that reflect either vocal or instrumental performance were collected, categorized and analysed according to their respective functionalities among members of this ethnic group. The analyses revealed that, among other things, Yorùbá proverbs could be used to emphasise the importance of collaboration of music with other performing arts, express a relationship between the musical instrument combination and the concept of family co-existence, uphold the use of musical instruments as a communicative and panegyric tool, and emphasize the universality of Yorùbá aesthetic value on speech and music.Item A Grammar of Newspaper Editorial Language: The Complex Sentence(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2012) Wiredu, J.F.This study sets out to examine what linguistic choices are made at the level of the sentence in selected English Language editorials in a particular newspaper in Ghana – the Daily Graphic. Data for the study consists of 338 selected sentences from 22 editorials of the Daily Graphic published in January 2008. We have limited ourselves to the complex sentence, and specifically, to the dependent clause as it occurs in these editorials. At the end of the analysis, we identified the following patterns: (a) only declarative sentences were used, (b) there was overwhelming reliance on complex sentences and (c) most of the complex sentences consisted of multiple rankshifted structures.Item Supernaturalism and the Philosophical Character of the Traditional African Thinker(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2012) Majeed, H.M.Owing to the prevalence of belief in spiritual beings and in the reality of some non-physical events in traditional cultures like those of Africa, the orientation of the people is typically regarded as supernaturalistic. But while some anthropologists and philosophers see belief in the supernatural as irrational, others argue in ways that seem to suggest that supernaturalism limits the rational capacity of the African thinker. This paper rejects the positions held by these scholars and, using Akan traditional wisdom, argues for the possibility of extricating rationality from the domain of cultures – making rationality a matter of conceptual, noncultural objectivity.Item ‘Back-to-Africa’, ‘Double Consciousness’ and the African Diaspora: Confronting the Myth and the Reality in Ghanaian Fiction(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2012) Adjei, M.One of the most persistent debates about Black consciousness and Pan-Africanism has been on the attitudes of diasporans to Africa and of Africans to (returning) diasporans. This article critically examines the issue of the eternal connections between the continent of Africa and people of African descent in three Ghanaian works of fiction—Kofi Awoonor’s Comes the Voyager at Last, David Oddoye’s The Return and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Osiris Rising—and comes to the conclusion that the (re)connection between continental Africa and the African Diaspora is beset and mediated by formidable geo-political, cultural and historical barriers and, therefore, still in a state of flux.Item Towards an Integrated Formal Model of Fundamental Frequency in Overall Downtrends(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2012) Reid, D.; Ahoua, F.Although there are major differences in the various conceptual models of Fo scaling, we suggest that the corresponding mathematical formulations may be compatible and that the theoretical differences need not hinder the empirical aspects and practical uses of the theories as demonstrated in speech synthesis. The method follows standard practice in Mathematical Logics: combining and “rounding off” the formalisms of the different models, then allowing for a consistent interpretation of the new unified theory. The approach is applied to two current models of decay in intonation curves. The models and then the conflicts between them are described. These latter were used to construct the integrated model. Our short term objective is to validate the application of our approach by testing and implementing empirical instrumental data obtained independently. 1.Item Comparing Demonstratives in Kwa(Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana, 2009) Amfo, N.A.A.; Norgbe, S.B.This paper is a comparative study of demonstrative forms in three Kwa languages, Akan, Ga and Ewe. It examines the syntax, morphology, semantics and pragmatics of the demonstrative systems in these languages. The existence of various categories such as demonstrative determiner, demonstrative pronoun, demonstrative adverb, demonstrative identifier and the under-described ‘particular’ demonstratives in these three languages is examined. Semantically, we observe a basic two-way deictic contrast for most of the demonstrative systems, even though there are a few variations. The most significant qualitative feature distinction observed is one of humanness. The dearth of the morphology of these forms is noted. Finally, the role of the demonstratives in the organisation of speech flow is considered. The description of the demonstrative systems of these languages could lead to an eventual re-construction of the demonstrative system in the proto-language.
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