Scholarly Works
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://repository.ui.edu.ng/handle/123456789/327
Browse
94 results
Search Results
Item PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSES IN SELECTED NIGERIAN CHILDREN’S SPOKEN ENGLISH IN OYO AND LAGOS STATES, NIGERIA(2021-10) ADESOYE, R. E.Phonological processes constitute a veritable means to tracing language development, especially in children. Extant studies on Nigerian children’s phonological processes have examined errors and deviations, with little attention to language as an instrument for measuring children’s linguistic development. Therefore, this study was designed to examine children’s phonological processes and the constraints ranking responsible for them, with a view to tracing their linguistic development. Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky’s Optimality Theory was used as the framework, while the descriptive design was adopted. One hundred and two participants were purposively selected. Seventy-five and twenty-five children from primary schools in Lagos and Oyo states, respectively, were selected because of their age range of four to six years, and they read a prepared text. The choice of the states was motivated by their proximal, cosmopolitan and multicultural features. Also, two children, named child A, aged one year-three months, and child B, aged four years-three months, were observed in their homes in Oyo and Lagos states, respectively, for six months for the purpose of longitudinal observation. All utterances were audio-recorded. Data were subjected to descriptive statistics, perceptual and acoustic analyses. The phonological processes identified were substitution (28.8%), vowel strengthening (23.2%), monophthongisation (15.7%), deletion (15.4%), assimilation (6.6%), gliding (4.3%) and yod coalescence (2.7%). Utterances were slow-paced, with an average of 4.8 minutes per participant, and phonemes were often singly produced. Constraints ranking favoured markedness over faithfulness constraints, such as *SCHWA >> αF, NODIPHTHONG >> MAX, *Ct#C >> *COMPLEX >> MAX and AGREE(PLACE) >> IDENT-IO. The participants’ linguistic development was noticeable in the instantiations of their processes, which were similar to the ambient variety of Nigerian English. The instances were very intelligible and significantly manifested beyond word level. They were also functional for achieving juncture prosody, cluster reduction and gemination. However, non-adult instances, like morphophonemic deletions, persisted, showing that the participants had not fully attained the adult level of phonological processes. In the longitudinal data, child A acquired voiced and labial consonants first, and codas suffered deletion more than onsets in monosyllables. By age two, child A had begun to produce polysyllables and closed syllables, and deletion changed from whole syllables to only phonemes. By age five, child B’s processes had begun to resemble adults’ and, more energy-demanding processes like epenthesis, voicing and vowel strengthening emerged. Tonalisation of English words and indigenous interference occurred in their utterances. The spectrogram showed that the outset of acquisition with child A featured weaker energy, like in unaspirated plosives; however, energy increased and stabilised as the participant got older, as indicated in the darker shades. The formant values of the participants’ vowels on the acoustic chart showed similarity to the cardinal vowel chart in terms of height and position of the tongue. Phonological processes in Nigerian children’s spoken English emerged through constraints reranking and increasingly become more like adults’ as the years pass by.Item REPRESENTATIONS OF TRAUMA IN AFRICAN MIGRANT FICTION(2021-12) AJIBOLA, O. O.African migrant fiction, which recreates characters’ experiences at home and abroad, is increasingly preoccupied with the representation of dystopian realities. Critical appraisals of the fiction have largely focused on the representation of varied mobilities – migration, exile, transnationalism and afropolitanism – without adequate attention to the depiction of migrant characters’ experiences of traumatic stress, despite its ample representation in the fiction. This study was, therefore, designed to examine the recreation of trauma and characters’ responses to traumatic stress in selected African migrant fiction with a view to establishing that traumatic experiences are not limited to characters’ natal homes. Homi Bhabha’s model of the Postcolonial Theory and Cathy Caruth’s and Judith Herman’s models of Trauma Theory, served as the framework. The interpretative design was used. Ali Farah’s Little Mother (LM), Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (HODP), Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier (LT), Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (OBSS), Alain Mabanckou’s Blue White Red (BWR), Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (HN), Fatou Diome’s The Belly of the Atlantic (TBA), and Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (WNNN) were purposively selected for their depiction of loss, trauma and suffering. The novels were subjected to critical analysis. Trauma in the novels is doubled-edged, aligning with the dominant estimation of trauma as a double wound. Traumatogenic contexts and events in the postcolony as well as in the diaspora dominate the novels. Pre-migration stressors such as unemployment, poverty and sexual assault characterise the postcolony in LT, OBSS, HODP and TBA; while displacement, deprivation and violence abound in WNNN, HN, LM and BWR, all leading to characters’ experience of Continuous Traumatic Stress. Characters’ response to pre-migration stressors in all the novels is flight. Repetitively traumatised by oppressive poverty, displacement and the inconsistencies that define life in the postcolony, the characters fled their fatherland for the West through legitimate and illegitimate routes. In the diaspora, post-migration stressors are activated by characters’ experiences of disillusionment, racism, joblessness, physical and mental assaults, unhomeliness, the trauma of a paperless existence and the perpetual fear of police brutality. Characters’ responses to post-migration stressors range from developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to committing suicide. Azel in LT and the nameless protagonist in HN experience dissolution of self and suffer from PTSD. In WNNN and LM, Tshaka Zulu, Uncle Kojo and Axad suffer from mental illnesses, while Moussa in TBA commits suicide. However, characters like Massala-Massala in BWR, Aunt Fostalina and Darling in WNNN, Faten in HODP and Efe, Ama and Joyce in OBSS largely display resilience in the face of trauma. There is recurring adoption of multiple narrative voices, symbolism and journey motif in OBSS, LM, HODP and HN, while irony and traumatic realism are employed in LT, WNNN, TBA and BWR. Migrant characters’ precarious, liminal and subaltern existence, both at home and abroad, bears witness to trauma’s mobility across space and time in African migrant fiction. This destabilises the hegemonic conception of the West as the Promised Land.Item PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSES IN SELECTED NIGERIAN CHILDREN’S SPOKEN ENGLISH IN OYO AND LAGOS STATES, NIGERIA(2021-10) ADESOYE, R. E.Phonological processes constitute a veritable means to tracing language development, especially in children. Extant studies on Nigerian children’s phonological processes have examined errors and deviations, with little attention to language as an instrument for measuring children’s linguistic development. Therefore, this study was designed to examine children’s phonological processes and the constraints ranking responsible for them, with a view to tracing their linguistic development. Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky’s Optimality Theory was used as the framework, while the descriptive design was adopted. One hundred and two participants were purposively selected. Seventy-five and twenty-five children from primary schools in Lagos and Oyo states, respectively, were selected because of their age range of four to six years, and they read a prepared text. The choice of the states was motivated by their proximal, cosmopolitan and multicultural features. Also, two children, named child A, aged one year-three months, and child B, aged four years-three months, were observed in their homes in Oyo and Lagos states, respectively, for six months for the purpose of longitudinal observation. All utterances were audio-recorded. Data were subjected to descriptive statistics, perceptual and acoustic analyses. The phonological processes identified were substitution (28.8%), vowel strengthening (23.2%), monophthongisation (15.7%), deletion (15.4%), assimilation (6.6%), gliding (4.3%) and yod coalescence (2.7%). Utterances were slow-paced, with an average of 4.8 minutes per participant, and phonemes were often singly produced. Constraints ranking favoured markedness over faithfulness constraints, such as *SCHWA >> αF, NODIPHTHONG >> MAX, *Ct#C >> *COMPLEX >> MAX and AGREE(PLACE) >> IDENT-IO. The participants’ linguistic development was noticeable in the instantiations of their processes, which were similar to the ambient variety of Nigerian English. The instances were very intelligible and significantly manifested beyond word level. They were also functional for achieving juncture prosody, cluster reduction and gemination. However, non-adult instances, like morphophonemic deletions, persisted, showing that the participants had not fully attained the adult level of phonological processes. In the longitudinal data, child A acquired voiced and labial consonants first, and codas suffered deletion more than onsets in monosyllables. By age two, child A had begun to produce polysyllables and closed syllables, and deletion changed from whole syllables to only phonemes. By age five, child B’s processes had begun to resemble adults’ and, more energy-demanding processes like epenthesis, voicing and vowel strengthening emerged. Tonalisation of English words and indigenous interference occurred in their utterances. The spectrogram showed that the outset of acquisition with child A featured weaker energy, like in unaspirated plosives; however, energy increased and stabilised as the participant got older, as indicated in the darker shades. The formant values of the participants’ vowels on the acoustic chart showed similarity to the cardinal vowel chart in terms of height and position of the tongue. Phonological processes in Nigerian children’s spoken English emerged through constraints reranking and increasingly become more like adults’ as the years pass by.Item Postproverbial irony in contemporary African cultural expressions(Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Josip Juraj Strossmayer, University of Osijek, 2024) Akinsete, C. T.Irony is one of the most common literary techniques applied to the study of world literature, right from Classical times to the present day. Having reflected on proverbial irony as a literary concept, this research argues for the need to construe and critique the phenomenon of postproverbial irony, being featured in contemporary African cultural expressions but yet to be critically engaged. This paper, therefore, attempts to examine the theoretical perception of postproverbial irony as a literary phenomenon, particularly in some African languages such as Yoruba, Shona, Luganda, Kiswahili, and Luo, with applicable tenets of transgression and subversions as postproverbial theoretical model. The aim is to justify the literary presence of postproverbials as a complex but highly advanced cultural expression in postcolonial African societies. Against the backdrop of a lopsided view of only conditioning postproverbials as sheer blasphemous verbal/speech acts, part of the objectives of this paper is to showcase the irrefutable literary strength and depth of postproverbials as a viable literary concept as well as underscore its potential as part of critical research point in contemporary African cultural space.Item From historical fiction to historiographic metafiction: Lawrence Hill’s the book of negroes as deviant Literature(2023) Akinsete, C. T.Scholars have debated the classification of the African American literature as a plain historic text, which further stimulates the controversy between history and literature. It is on this presumption that this paper critically explored Lawrence Hills’ The Book of Negroes, more as a subversive text, which is constructively predisposed to certain postmodern stylistic techniques. While amplifying obtrusive matters that still affect the black race in contemporary American society, it is observed that Hill employs Historiographic Metafiction to creatively reconceptualise the narrative of African American slave history. By implication, the fictional mode in The Book of Negroes deconstructs a fixed categorisation of historical hermeneutics of African American slave narratives, as limited to the issues of slavery, captivity, racism, oppression, and so on. While using qualitative approach as methodology, Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction served as theoretical framework, complemented by Linda Hutcheon’s conception of historiographic metafiction. As a stylistic import, this paper submits that historiographic metafiction is substantiated as a counterdiscourse against the lopsided criticism that deprecates black history and literary artistry as immaterial. With reference to its literary originality, The Book of Negroes is therefore categorised as a deviant form of black writing in contemporary times.Item Sex, crime and urbanism as motifs of violence in selected thriller fictions of Leye Adenle(2023-12) Akinsete, C. T.; Etiwe, J. D.Leye Adenle’s thriller fictions, Easy Motion Tourist and When Trouble Sleeps, complement Nigeria’s creative writing landscape with recourse to distinct issues in contemporary Nigerian society, which serve as setting in the two novels. Against the backdrop of a rising spate of creative writing in Nigeria, attention is therefore paid to these literary specimens in relation to how the issues of sex and crime underscore the motif of violence. This study therefore investigated the tropes of sex, crime and urbanism as motifs of violence in Adenle’s popular fiction. The selected texts foregrounded the writer’s sense of creativity and imaginative prowess in establish-ing the connection between creative writing and society. Having underscored the rising tempo of Nigerian Thriller fiction in relation to critical issues raised in the texts, this research further established the relationship between literature and the society. Using Aspect of Cultural Studies theory, this study through these texts revealed critical reflections of the Nigerian society in contemporary times through critical investigation of salient thematic preoccupations connected to the notions of sex, crime and urbanism as catalyst which led to streams of violence in the novels. Further findings articulate a critical exploration of inherent literary tropes in the selected thriller texts, which pontificates towards popular fiction as a thriving genre in the Nigerian literary space.Item Women’s representation and environmental sustainability in the Niger Delta: a critique of two Nigerian novels(2022) Akinsete, C. T.This article examines the discourse of environmental degradation in the Niger Delta region with a focus on the representation of women and their roles in environmental renaissance and sustainability in the Niger Delta. Women have traditionally been portrayed as victims of environmental degradation in contemporary Nigerian fiction. The objective of this article is to deconstruct the perception of female victimology by investigating the roles women in environmental sustainability, ecological regeneration and the development of African societies, especially in the Niger Delta. This article therefore attempts to foreground firm resolutions of women characters in May Ifeoma Nwoye’s Oil cemetery and Vincent Egbuson’s Love my planet in relation to human and environmental regeneration. This study employs eco-feminism, an aspect of Eco-criticism, to critique issues of women and environmental sustainability arising in the Niger Delta environment, their awareness of and responses to the ecological damage in the region.Item Scholarly publishing in Nigeria: the enduring effects of colonization(Routledge, 2019) Omobowale, A. O.; Akanle, O.; Akinsete, C.Item Wole Soyinka and Ibadan: a voyage around WS: the history(2014) Akinsete, C.Item Symbolic representations as archetypal pulse in Idris Amali’s efeega:war of ants(2016) Akinsete, C.