Department of Linguistics
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Item Conceptualising appropriation, usage and gratifications of new media technologies: The e-teen model perspective(University of Ghana, 2020-03-04) Adjin-Tettey, T.D.The study argues that teens (e-teens) have different characteristics, attitudes, motivations and needs regarding new media usage and appropriation and, thus, have to be studied in a different context than any other group. It is also contended that theories and models regarding uses, gratifications and appropriation of new media technologies are generalised and therefore cannot aptly be applied to the study of e-teens. Grounded in concepts from uses and gratifications, model of technology acceptance and technology appropriation theories, as well as e-teen literature, the study proposes a conceptual model that strives to explicitly explain how teens use and appropriate new media technologies. It is intended that the model is adopted in empirical studies that aim to study how teens use and appropriate new media technologies, as well as tested for its representativeness and durability.Item Disentangling “Fetishism”: Rethinking Keywords and Terminologies in Modern Anthropology(2020-02-19) Adjei, S.How have miseducation and Eurocentric anthropological scholarship actively deluded Africans into perceiving their religion and arts as “inferior” and “barbarous”? Tracing its etymology to the Portuguese word “fetiço”, “fetish” (a.k.a the “F-word” of anthropology) has been used to denigrate significant aspects of African religions and sacred artworks. Such misperceptions and stigmatized terms can be gleaned from Rosenthal’s (1999) descriptions of Legba (and Vodu sculptures of stately importance) which employ derogatory phrases like “fetish object”, “super fetish proportions”, “Dionysian monster god”, “aggressive imago” etc. Similarly, other inexact terms like “primitive”, “demonic”, “sorcery”, “tribal”, “pagan”, and “satanic” are yet to be fully expunged from Vodu and modern anthropological scholarship. The “intellectual” history of “fetishism” has been entangled in some heated academic debates among Western and African scholars alike. De Brosses’ (1757) “discourse” on “fetishism” was first rejected by the French Acadamie scholars due to historical fallacies and methodological flaws. Pietz’ (1982) revisionist anthropology provides a closer textual analysis of the anthropological problem surrounding the discourse of “fetishism” and its misleading relationship with Vodu spirituality. Further interrogating the “problem of fetish” in anthropology, Pietz (1985) reconsiders Rattray’s (1927) position of maintaining African term as a justified methodology for reclaiming racist colonial-era text by translating terms like “fetish” back into African languages. Meyer (2002) also advocates fresh perspectives, anthropological paradigm shifts, practical approaches and methodologies for trans-disciplinary research on religion with special emphasis on socio-linguistics and materiality as an entry point to revisionist Vodu scholarship. Drawing from years of autoethnographic fieldwork and practice-based investigation into the sacred art of the Anlo-Ewe Vodu religion, this paper redefines some misleading theories of ‘fetishism’ – particularly how such perceptions have obscured a genuine appreciation of Vodu art.Item Culture and Stylistics in Translation: The Case of the Book of Proverbs in the Mfantse Bible(2020-02-12) Obeng, P.This study investigates how the Mfantse Bible translation communicates the intended message to its users. It examines how the strategies and techniques adopted in an English-Mfantse rendition communicate to achieve naturalness and faithfulness. The book, Early Scriptures of the Gold Coast discusses the inconsistencies in the Mfantse Bible and reports that even though effort was invested into the translation by missionaries and native speakers of Mfantse, the Bible lacked some finesse. This study explores the holistic translation of the Mfantse Bible. It is a qualitative study which contributes to research on Bible Translation and translation pedagogy. Generally, poetry translation is challenging, therefore the Book of Proverbs was selected as a case study. After a careful reading of the Book of Proverbs in both the source and target languages, inventory of all grammatical expressions, figurative expressions and cultural notions were taken. These were coded and analysed and later crosschecked with users in focus group discussions to ascertain their naturalness. At the grammatical level, the study establishes that both English and Akan have particular grammatical structures that express the intended meaning of the scripture without distorting meaning. In the grammatical analysis, some errors exist but their effect on meaning is minimal because morphemes are functional and have no content or conceptual meaning. The strategy most commonly employed is equivalence, in addition to a few instances of deletion. Cultural substitution worked best for the translation of culture specific items. In the Mfantse Bible, most repetition types are lost due to vocabulary and structural changes. Also, wrong cultural substitution led to mistranslations, possibly due to difference in ecology. Some errors emerged due to the fact that the verbs used did not collocate with the appropriate nouns they agree with. In the translation of figurative expressions, cultural substitution was used but the preferred strategy was literal translation. The figurative expressions used most are synonymy and antithetic parallelism. Once more, literalism helped to maintain the expressions so that they are presented to the reader as in the source text. Finally, codemixing has been discovered as one of the strategies employed in the translation. According to most of the language consultants, the translation sounds natural to a high extent and any average speaker should be able to read correctly and understand the Bible at least on a second attempt. Theoretically, the study has advanced Baker’s Levels of Equivalence in terms of contribution and proves that the levels are independent of one another and that at every level a unique outcome can be achieved.Item Expressions of Perception and Cognition in Akan(2019-02-05) Eshun, E.This study gives a thorough description of the sensory signals of the body in Akan (Kwa, Niger Congo) within the Cognitive Linguistic Approach. The study shows how these senses capture our cognitive experiences as they relate with things in the world. The sensory signals of the body that this thesis focuses on includes seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing and touching under the broad concept of perception and cognition. The data collected for the study was based on natural discourses from 40 native speakers in Mfantse speaking communities. Data comprises of spontaneous spoken text of diverse genres and elicitation from stimuli. A significant feature observed from the cognitive perceptive verbs are that they do not only display physiological roles but also demonstrate diverse evidences of what is represented in the cognitive structure as the brain receives visual stimulus. It was noted from the study that though these two verbs differ in terms of their linguistic features; morphological, grammatical and semantic properties, they can co-occur in a sentence structure and can establish grammatical meaning. The study illustrates that hwε ‘look’ involves durative process but it depends on the event. On the other hand, hu is seen as a natural and instantaneous occurrence; a visual activity described as ‘on the spot’ or ‘inceptive’. In some situations, hu can take durative function where the visual line is directed towards activity of monitory and caring. Hwε is volitional while hu displays both volitional and non-volitional roles. These two cognitive perceptive verbs are classified under two domains, intra psychologinal and social psychological experiences. The intra psychological experiences captured visual notions connected to self-philosophies such as personal opinions/beliefs, principles and values. The visual experiences of the social psychological type involve purpose, assurance, examining, and interdependency. On gustatory (taste) expressions, it is revealed that taste distinguishes the various forms of flavours and preferences people have towards the food they eat or something they like. Apart from the physiological roles, majority of the meanings of taste expressions indicate metaphorical meanings. Findings from the study show that Akan realises five primary taste sensations in the language (sweet/pleasant, salty, sour, bitter, congealing) and a semantically derived form, tablabaa ‘devoid of taste’ (bland). From the ethno-cultural background, dέw ‘sweet’ can be descried as a type of pleasant taste that includes +/- sugary entities, and non-food related experiences and has wider usage than the other taste forms. The expression dέw, selects an animate argument [+/-human] as the percipient of the taste but the perceived objects can be either animate or inanimate [+/- human – bodily feelings]. Further, it is shown that Akan has different forms of expressing sour taste - kὰw, fém sé, yerὲyerὲw and nkekaankekaa. The choices for a specific taste display the perception people have for things. Taste, thus can be linked to the personal idiosyncratic frame of mind of the perceiver as well as their cultural background. Per the discussions on olfactory, auditory and tactile it is established verbs derive their core meanings from the word tse ‘to perceive’ show that perception verbs exhibit several senses of modalities in Akan. The study also revealed that though these senses derive their basic meanings from the basic word tse ‘to perceive’, the language also displays other ways of representing and interpreting basic and extended meanings of olfactory, auditory and tactile sensory information. This might not be the same for all cultures in the world since experiences differ in cultural milieu. Finally, in examining the senses in Akan, it came to light that the condition of synaesthesia is a feature of all the senses. In the Mfantse dialect of Akan, it is established that majority of the synaesthesia examples illustrate physiological meanings. And only few of the synaesthesia touched on metaphorical concepts. The study recommends that the idea of a sense revealing several senses be given further attention to find out whether it is a universal phenomenon among African languages.Item The development of speech and gesture in Sesotho oral narratives(2019-10-09) Agyepong, D.P.This study focuses on the development of speech and gesture in a narrative task in children between 6-10 years of age and adults in Sesotho, a member of the Bantu language family spoken in southern Africa. Previous studies show that speech and gesture develop with age. However, cross-linguistic studies demonstrate that language and cultural expectations relating to narratives also impact on speech and gesture development. A comparison of isiZulu with French show some differences that point to culture’s influence. Does multimodal narrative development in Sesotho show similar cross-linguistic differences? We analyzed 36 narratives produced by Sesotho speaking children aged 5-6 years (N=12), 9-10 years (N=10) and adults (N=10), who watched a wordless cartoon and narrated the story back to an interlocutor. Our results show similar developmental trends to those found in other studies showing speech and gesture increases and becomes more complex with age and that spoken discourse and gesture development are closely related (Colletta et al. 2015). Like isiZulu speakers, Sesotho speakers produced a higher proportion of representational or iconic gestures. This result contrasts with findings for other languages such as French where adults produce a higher proportion of pragmatic gesturesItem Disambiguating the Information Structure Model of the Lexical Functional Framework(2019-09-18) Abubakari, H.This study aims at disambiguating the Information-Structure (I-structure) model in the analysis of focus constructions within the Lexical Functional Grammar Framework. It is observed that there are mismatches between the C-structure and the I-structure projections of focus constructions. This leads to instances of ambiguities in the interpretations of mostly contrastive focus constructions as opposed to information focus constructions. The I-structure is argued to be inadequately resourced to capture the different subtypes of focus constructions in Kusaal and most other African languages. In addressing this problem, the study provides alternative suggestions by building on the proposals of King (1996), Choi (1996), Butt (2014), and Abubakari (2018). It is suggested that an additional predicate attribute referred to as discourse type (DTYPE), with a value that subcategorizes subtypes of focus and topic notions be introduced in the I-structure. The study will be carried out using empirical data from the Kusaal language.Item The Nasal in Dagbani Prosody(2019-04-24) Hudu, F.; Nindow, O.This paper presents a study on nasality in Dagbani, focusing on the unique contribution of nasals to the understanding of Dagbani prosody. While much is known about nasality from previous studies, the implication of their behaviour to the structure of Dagbani prosody has not been fully explored. Nasals provide crucial evidence for aspects of Dagbani prosody that would otherwise remain less understood, four of which are noted in this talk. First, coda nasals bear tone and segmental length, which are key in establishing the mora as the tone-bearing unit in Dagbani. Second, the phonological behaviour of nasals is required for a fuller understanding of the syllable types permitted in Dagbani. Nasals are the only coda consonants that license vowel lengthening. In an underlying CVC syllable, vowel lengthening requires the nasalisation of an oral coda consonant. Nasals also provide the only examples of ambisyllabic segments in Dagbani. Third, nasalisation is the only process meant solely to satisfy a prosodic requirement. When oral consonants are nasalised, the goal is to realise a nasal in the coda. When other phonological processes affecting consonants take place, the surface form does not have any implication on the prosody. Finally, syllable structure processes are triggered or avoided on condition that the surface form is a syllabic nasal or a nasal coda. Insertion, for instance, is triggered in many contexts to avoid a consonant cluster, unless the second of the cluster is a nasal, in which case it becomes the nucleus of the syllable. This is in spite of both syllabic consonants and codas being marked. The typological implications of these observations are discussedItem A Theory of (C)overt Object Pronouns in Kwa(2019-04-17) Korsah, S.In this talk, I argue that the distribution of null versus overt object pronouns in Gã and several other Kwa languages) can best be explained in structural terms; all overt pronouns are realised in a specifier position while null object pronouns are deleted in a complement position. Kwa languages like Akan, Baule, Ga˜, Nzema, a.o. exhibit a null object pattern whose profile does not seem to fit any of the types traditionally acknowledged in theoretical linguistics lit- erature, i.e., the possibility of omitting an object pronoun does not depend on (a) agreement marking (contra Jaeggli 1982; Rizzi 1986), (b) topicality (contra Huang 1984), or (c) the mor- phology of their pronominal system (contra Neeleman & Szendroi 2007). Thus, in Ga˜, for instance, the realisation of third person object pronouns can be summarised as in (1). CONTEXT +ANIM -ANIM a. Clause-final overt null (1) b. Argument of change of state predicates overt overt c. Before verbs overt overt d. Argument of depictive predicates overt overt From (1), it is apparent that we are confronted with a new kind of null object, i.e., one that seems to be conditioned by clausal-finality and animacy.The question thus arises: What accounts for the natural classes; what explains the uniform realisation of the inanimate object pronoun in (1-b,c,d), and all animate object pronouns, to the exclusion of the inanimate object pronoun in (1-a). At first sight, a uniform explanation of (1) appears illusive, and existing proposals in the Kwa literature, e.g., Chinebuah (1976), Saah (1992), Osam (1996), and Larson (2005), for which (1) is revived problem appear not to provide a satisfactory solution either. I claim, following Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), that we can trace the (non-)pronunciation of an object pronoun to where in the syntactic structure it is located (i.e., specifier or complement) at the point of linearisation. I will provide independently-motivated arguments to show that this analysis works for the Ga˜ data problem presented above, and that we can extend same to the analysis of objectpronouns in other ((un)related) languages, such as Ewe and Dagaare. The conclusion, thus, will be that the overt-covert object pronoun distinction that we find in Kwa languages is a reflection of a specifier-complement asymmetry in grammar.Item Beyond cardinals and ordinals: A Constructionist account of other numeral constructions in Akan(2019-03-13) Appah, C.A numeral is defined as “a word or phrase expressing a number”, where number is defined as “a mathematical abstraction” (Hurford, 2001, p. 10756). Thus, a numeral is a linguistic representation of a number. This is how we understand that the two numerals ‘fifteen hundred’ and ‘one thousand five hundred’ express the same number, “1500”. Numerals have been studied from many different perspectives across languages. However, most studies focus on cardinal numerals in attributive constructions (cf. Greenberg, 1978; Heine, 1997; Stampe, 1976; von Mengden, 2010). Others too have paid considerable attention to ordinal numerals (Stampe, 1976; Stolz & Veselinova, 2011; Stump, 2010), and, indeed, cardinal and ordinal numerals have very interesting linguistic properties. However, the set of numerical expressions in any language is more than the set used to express the cardinality of sets or the ordinality of the items in the set. Other classes of numerals like fraction, frequentatives, distributives and multiplicatives abound and have been noted to present very interesting linguistic properties (cf., inter alia, Gil, 2013).This talk is a constructionist account of non-cardinal and non-ordinal numerals in Akan. I show that the formal structure of the various classes of numerals is quite regular because they inherit their structure from already existing syntactic and morphological constructions in the language, including coordinate constructions, compounding and reduplication. In the proposed constructionist account, I make the point that the properties of the various classes of numerals can be captured in schemas which abstract over the general as well as idiosyncratic properties of the various classes. I posit constructional idioms, in which various aspects of the numerals which may be regarded as constructional properties are prespecified in the schemas and inherited by the instantiating constructions.Item “Mgwame, a king of Tundwa in Pate and his millet baskets”(2018-04-19) Amidu, A.A.Comparative and descriptive linguists, as well as anthropologist, literary scholars of the school of oral literature, and historians, have long held the view that there is an interelationship between language, food culture and the origins of a people. In this paper, centred around King Mgwame of Tundwa on Pate island, we take a journey through historical time and discover that the Waswahili or people called the Waswahili, who speak Kiswahili today, were indeed great Bantu cultivators, whose favourite staple food was the millet. We learn how a powerful king lost his kingdom and ended up selling baskets in the market place into which millet could be put to pay a millet tax. He lived in the 7th or 8th century A.D. The account about King Mgwame is revived in a Kiswahili historical and literary account in the 19th century Mombasa by no less a person than Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy, a popular poet of his time, and the father of the modern secular verse tradition called the shairi. Muyaka makes us recall also the role of millet in the dramatic escape out of prison of another legend hero and literary figure of the Waswahili, by name Fumo Liyongo or Liyongo Fumo. He lived in the 12th century A.D. or in the 15th century A.D. We also learn that the rulers and people of Mombasa also exported millet to South Yemen. We conclude from these accounts that the evidence confirms the claim by historians and linguist to the effect that the ancestors of the North-East Bantu, like the rest of the Bantu, migrated from West African latitudes until they ended up in their present homelands on the East African coast and islands.
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