Linguistics & African Languages
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Item Linguistics Theories, Nigerian Languages, and the Quest for Development(Nigerian Languges Study, 2023) Adeniyi, K.; Odoje, C.O.This work assesses the progression of African linguistics and the application of theories to the study of African languages in light of the developmental needs of the languages. It is observed that the vast majority of African languages are yet to be adequately described for human learning and generational transmission. However, as linguists continue to adopt theories driven by language computations, descriptions needed for human learning seem to become expendable, a reality amounting to doing linguistics for the machine at the expense of humans. With attention now shifting to computation-motivated approaches, further development that can make these languages suitable for science education, security, law, medical practices and other contemporary realities in Nigerian society tends to be less rigorously pursued. Apart from Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, there is minimal progress being made in terms of the development of Nigerian languages. Standard dictionaries and other materials designed to aid the deployment of the languages to meet contemporary human needs within the speech communities are rarely produced in the languages. This is despite the quantum of linguistic work being done. When this is viewed in light of the endangered status of the languages, it projects a critical situation. It is concluded that there is a need for synergy between linguistics for human use and the machine. This can only be championed by African linguists with the developmental needs of African languages as objective.Item Confluence of Interests in the Translations of Ake: the Years of Childhood and Aké: ní Ìgbà Èwe: An Appraisal of Language Retrieval and Translation(Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, 2021) Odoje, C.O.There are different motivating factors for a literary artist to venture into translation business. With the introduction of Akinwumi Isola’s Language Retrieval, a new dimension to the study of African languages translations was presented, especially as regards the classification of translators and texts. This study explores the interests behind the literary translation of Wole Soyinka’s and Akinwumi Isola’s translations of Ake with a view to establishing the features of translation and language retrieval. Findings show that even though both authors employed the same strategies, e.g. language transposition and equivalence, they diverged with respect to certain features. While translation exhibits two different cultures and languages, language retrieval exhibits the same culture but different languages.Item Ife-itumo-loju: Wiwa Ord-iperi Fun Arun Kokoro-Apa-Soja-Ara (KASA) ati Ebola(Library Press @ UF, 2021) Odoje, C. O.Ọ̀pọ̀ ọ̀nà ni àwọn onímọ̀ ti dá lábàá fún ṣíṣe àwárí tàbí ìṣèdá ọ̀rọ̀-ìpẹ̀rí nínú èdè Yorùbá, lára wọn ni ìṣàlàyé, ìhùn-prọ́-pọ̀, ìfìṣàpẹẹrẹ, ìlọ́wẹ̀, ọ̀rọ̀-àyálọ̀, ìfẹ́-ìtumọ̀-lójú àti bẹ́ẹ̀ bẹ́ẹ̀ lọ. Ìfẹ́-ìtumọ̀-lójú ni ó jẹ́ ìwádìí yìí lógún nípa wíwá prọ́-ìpẹ̀rí fún àrùn Kókóró-Àpá-Sọjà-Àrà (KASA) àti Ebola. A ṣe àgbéyẹ̀wò 1572 ọ̀rọ̀ tí Yusuff, Adétúnjí àti Odòjé (2017) jẹ́ olóòtú fìlìmù, a sì fa àwọn tí wọ́n fẹ́ ìtumọ̀ wọn lójú yọ fún iṣẹ́ ìwádìí tí a ṣe. A ṣàwárí pé oríṣìíríṣìí mẹ́ta ọ̀tọ̀ọ̀tọ̀ ni irú àwọn ọ̀rọ̀ yìí; kò sì sí ìyọnu láti ní òye ìtumọ̀ tuntun tí a wá wọ àwọn ọ̀rọ̀ náà lórí wọn. Ó tilẹ̀ mú ìtumọ̀ gbé tán bá àwọn ọ̀rọ̀ tuntun tí a lò wọ́n fún.Item Varepsilon kú mask: Integrating Yorùbá cultural greetings into machine translation(ArXiv, 2023) Akinade, I.; Alabi, J. O.; Adelani, D.; Odoje, C.; Klakow, D.This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yorùbá greetings (" kú 1), which are a big part of Yorùbá language and culture, into English. To evaluate these models, we present IkiniYorùbá, a Yorùbá-English translation dataset containing some Yorùbá greetings, and sample use cases. We analysed the performance of different multilingual NMT systems including Google Translate and NLLB and show that these models struggle to accurately translate Yorùbá greetings into English. In addition, we trained a Yorùbá-English model by finetuning an existing NMT model on the training split of IkiniYorùbá and this achieved better performance when compared to the pre-trained multilingual NMT models, although they were trained on a large volume of data.Item Womanism or Humanism: The Exploration of Pamela Smith’s Translation for Ogun Qmode(Matrix Publications Nig. Enterprises, 2024) Odoje, C.O.; Ganiyat, A.; Idris, A.Language choice in translation may be informed by many factors. Some scholars have alluded this to translator’s educational background, faithfulness to source text, their personality in the area of religious preference, condition of service and so on. The examination of the impact of gender or the sex of the translator on the language choice in the translation has not been as prominent. This paper explores the translation of Pamela Smith with the view to determining whether her gender influences her choice of words and style within the theoretical framework of natural equivalence. It was found that the language choice of the translator was full of compassion, romanticism and dynamism, which are a blend of womanism and humanism.Item Bilateral Audiometric and Acoustic Analysis of High Frequency Fricatives in Students with Speech Impairments(Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages at the University of Nigeria, 2024) Nweya, G. O.; Adiboshi, A."Some scholars assume that it is possible for people who have impaired perceptions to distort fricatives. Although this assumption has been investigated in other climes; it has attracted little or no attention in the Nigerian context. This study, therefore, investigates high frequency fricatives in students with speech impairments using bilateral audiometric and acoustic analysis with a view to determining whether speech impaired persons that cannot perceive high frequency can distort fricatives as widely assumed. The audiometry was used to test the average pure tone threshold of twelve students who gave their consents and six were purposively selected. The nature of data that was elicited contained lexical items with fricatives: Is, f, f, v, zI. It was called by the researcher for the subjects and they repeated it while their voices were recorded into Praat directly for spectrographic analysis. It was reported that speech impaired persons distorted the fricatives Is, f, f, v, zI in varying degrees. For instance, subjects A, B, and C, distorted the sound Isl as It!, in soap IS'Jup/, as top, !.Qmh..respectively. In the word sheep IflP 'I"", If I was distorted as It I and Itfl, as in: [ipu, chitem and choyon by the subjects, respectively. The findings support the claim that it is possible for people who have impaired perceptions and cannot perceive high frequencies to distort fricatives.Item The eye as source of conceptual metaphors in Igbo(Department of Igbo, African, and Asian Studies, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, 2024) Nweya, G. O.; Ejinwa, S. O."This study examines how the eye (ányá) body part in Igbo is variously conceptualized and used metaphorically to express abstract concepts. Existing works on body part metaphors in Igbo were based on the traditionalist perspectives which sees metaphor as a rhetoric or figurative device with little attention from the conceptual metaphor perspective which sees metaphor as a systematic cognitive device used in the understanding of abstract concepts through the application of concrete ones. Data for this study were collected from 20 native speakers of Igbo through oral interview and observations and subjected to semantic analysis. It was discovered that the eye (ányá) body part is a source domain or concrete concept used in mapping out or expressing abstract concepts in Igbo such as intelligence, love, hope, time/distance, greed, among others. It was further discovered that metaphor is a powerful cognitive tool that help in expressing the Igbo worldviews which comprises of their culture, belief system, core values, and morals, among others. The study therefore concluded that the Igbo language is rich in the use of metaphors in everyday conversation and in expressing and understanding the worldviews of native speakers of the language.Item "Eleven vowels of Imilike Igbo including ATR and RTR schwa "(Cambridge University Press, 2024) Akinbo, S.; Ozburn, A.; Nweya, G.; Pulleyblank, D."In this paper, we examine the acoustics of vowels in the Imilike [-m-l-ke$] dialect of Igbo (Igboid, Niger-Congo), which has not previously been done. While Standard Igbo has eight vowels, previous auditorily-based research has identified eleven vowels in Imilike. Like Standard Igbo, Imilike contrasts vowels in Advanced/Retracted Tongue Root (ATR vs. RTR). We find that there are eleven vowels, distinguished most reliably by F1, B1, energy (dB) of voiced sound below 500Hz and duration. The results of this study also suggest that RTR vowels in Imilike might involve the laryngeal constriction and movement that accompany pharyngealization. The ATR and RTR schwas have similar phonological distribution and acoustic patterns as the other ATR and RTR vowels in the language.Item The structure of Ibìbìò determiner phrase(West African Linguistic Society, 2022) Ubon, A. E.; Nweya, G. O."The Determiner Phrase (DP) is a syntactic category headed by a determiner. Its internal structure has attracted scholarly attention across languages. Although, various aspects of Ìbìbìò grammar have been examined by scholarly works, the syntax of the Determiner Phrase has not been given much attention. This study, therefore, investigates the Determiner Phrase in Ìbìbìò with a view to examining its internal constituents and hierarchical structure. Primary data for the study were elicited through interviews with the aid of the Ibadan 400-word list and syntactic checklist while secondary data were collected from existing literature. Data were analysed qualitatively based on the DP hypothesis and Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. The study identified ten determiner elements in the language. They are numbers, particularisers, as well as cardinal and ordinal numerals. Some are marked for specificity or definiteness (e.g. étó ádò) while others are marked for indefiniteness (étó kèèd). The difference between the former and the latter is definiteness and indefiniteness triggered by the determiners kèèd ‘a’ and ádò ‘the’ respectively. Other determiners identified in the language are: articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, genitives, pronouns, and bare nouns. Based on the distribution of the internal constituents of the DP, the hierarchical structure of the Ìbìbìò Determiner phrase is- DP>PartP>NumP>PossP>Num’rP>DemP>NP. The study concludes that DPs take NP complements in Ìbìbìò.Item Articulated structure of the Igbo tense phrase domain(West African Linguistic Society, 2021) Nweya, G. O."The tense phrase (TP) domain is the domain that expresses grammatical tense, aspect and mood. Existing studies concentrated on describing the morph-syntactic features of the Igbo TP categories with little attention paid to their interaction and hierarchical order. This study, therefore, investigates the morpho-syntactic features and interaction of the functors with a view to determining their hierarchical order in the clause structure. Primary and secondary data were collected and subjected to syntactic analysis. Three main functors, Tense, Aspect and Negation, overtly occur in the Igbo TP area as verbal affixes and they exhibit two opposing patterns of morpheme order: V-T-ASP-NEG and T-ASP-NEG-V. The former, where the functors follow the verb, requires obligatory movement of the VP to spec TP, while the latter requires no such movement since the functors precede the verb. The study demonstrated that these morpheme orders are derived syntactically via operation merge with surface order corresponding to the hierarchical order. This is in contrast to preceding studies which assume mirror image where the linear order is the inverse of the hierarchical order.