Amusan Kayode
He is a linguist and modern grammarian. He holds a B.A (Ed) in English and Literature (TASUED) and M.A in English Linguistics at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He won the Departmental prize award as the best graduating student at the Department of English, Tai Solarin University of Education, Nigeria. He has chapters published in reputable books and articles in learned journals: African Journal of Educational Research, Lasu Journal of Humanities (LASUJOH), Osundare Research Conference Journal. He has authored a number of books which "The Systemic Approach to Language Study" and "A Guide to Linguistic and Literary Stylistics" stand out. He is currently a graduate research assistant at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, United States where he was honored with the 2021 "Competitive Graduate Award". He also emerged as a co-winner in the 2021 "Schaefer Linguistics Awards" in the United States. A feat that was achieved by a write up on the linguistic strategies used in negotiating meaning in selected Covid19-related discourses in the United States. He is currently working on the acquisition challenges of prenominal adjective order among non-native learners of English.
Supervisors: Dr. Rice and Dr. Laudun
Phone: +2347034820235
Address: Lafayette, Louisiana, USA
Supervisors: Dr. Rice and Dr. Laudun
Phone: +2347034820235
Address: Lafayette, Louisiana, USA
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Every traditional culture presumptively has its own oral literature. Oral literature does not emphasize only the past events because oral forms are now modified to mirror modern age. Moreover, yearly festivals which mostly centre on oral forms are still celebrated in many African cultures. While incantation, proverbs and wise-saying were paraded as agents of illuminating and embellishing the culture and traditions of the pristine African society, satirical songs, jokes and proverbs are still used in certain communities to attack and disparage those who flout the culture of the people. Therefore, the society has much to acquire from its oral forms. Among many forms of oral literature that have emerged over the years, the present study attempted a critical survey of the use of incantation and wise-saying as forms of oral literature in the Yoruba cosmology. It also examined this through the dramatic piece of Nelson Fashina- “Gods at the Harvest”. The study explored the genre of drama. The choice of drama is not far-fetched from the fact that the Drama genre contains cultural and traditional displays, village dances, festivals and rituals. These practices are appropriate features that exemplify the African oral traditions. A qualitative research approach was adopted as the methodological model of the study. A content analysis was conducted on Nelson Fashina’s “Gods at the Harvest” as guided by a literary criticism theory: the sociological approach to literary criticism. The theory emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between literature and society; that is literature taps from society and society in turn influences literature.
Analysis in the study reflects the ideological contents of the play. The study found that Nelson Fashina employed incantation to perform different functions which include: incantation for sacrificial rites; incantation to depict caution; incantation as an appeal for child-bearing; incantation for reprisal; incantation as an aversion towards death; incantation for meta-physical visual clarity and incantation for self-reprisal. These sets of incantation are believed to have certain spiritual backups as form of instigation. Since the play has the physical settings of the Old Yoruba cosmology and the time setting depicts the pre-colonial era, this is an indication that the writer’s choice of incantation wasn’t only real but practicable. The study also identified the wise-saying in Fashina’s Gods at the Harvest to perform the following functions: collectiveness; Necessity of Time; Help and Assistance; Courage and Fear; Morals/ Didactism; Self-Enrichment; Influence; The Reward of Evil; Warning and Endurance. In conclusion, It could be stated that Fashina has presented, in a crude way, a representation of African cosmology by depicting a typical Yoruba lifestyle which is characterized by the use of wise-saying and incantation.
The religious discourse remains one of the few aspects of language domains which have been researched recently. A gross examination of the language of Christian prayers is channeled on the tenet that there are certain linguistic factors that influence the discourse communicative events that exist between Christians and God. This study investigated the pragmatic cues as it took cognizance of the role of context in the selected prayers. The present study examined the role of context in Christian prayers, in terms of ‘what mutual agreement exists between man and God’, as this is reflected in the pragmatic cues in selected prayers. To carry out this research, the study adopted a qualitative method as its methodological framework. In respect to this, five samples of Christian gospel prayers were selected from Mountain of Fire and Miracle Ministries (MFM). These samples were purposively chosen from the monthly powerful programme of the church titled “Power Must Change Hand”. Twenty distinct prayer items were collected from each of the samples with focus on the oneps which have a well reconciled context of pragmatic markers. Content analysis was conducted on each of the data as guided by two theories of meaning which serve as the theoretical models. The study adopted John Searle's Speech Acts Theory and Herbert Paul Grice’s Theory of Presupposition. Findings revealed that the MFM prayers are classified into six contexts. The contexts are: the context of warfare, supplications, restoration, prophetic proclamation, deliverance and prayer of revelation. It was also revealed that prayer with the highest number of frequency is the prayer of prophetic proclamation with 28%. This is followed by the prayer of warfare with 27%. Prayer of supplication has the total number of 20%. Prayer of restoration takes a total number of 16%. The prayer of revelation takes 08% while the prayer of deliverance takes 01%. The study analysed data using the following pragmatic cues such as presupposition, metaphors, speech acts and implicature. Speech acts of commanding, binding and requesting were achieved with the prayers. The need to bind those enemies presupposes that they are spirits of manipulation and confusion. Examples of implications pf prayers of restoration, proclamation and deliverance in the work is to dispel every negative act that are rendering the individual’s anointing powerless. The metaphors are Spirit is a Substance; Miracles are Farm Products; Grave is Animate and Spiritual Blindness is Cataract. The speech act analysis of the selected MFM prayers revealed that most of the prayer items are utilized to perform certain acts. In conclusion, it is pertinent to state that the use of language in religious prayers is distinct and unique and they are done to achieve some pragmatic effects
The study of style of literary writers has been an arduous task among prolific scholars. It has been argued that the linguistic idiolect of a writer goes a long way to determine the style of such writer. This study therefore attempted a stylistic analysis of Neologism and colocations in Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s My Cousin Sammy and Roses and Bullet. It examined the features of neologism and collocations in both texts.
This study adopted a qualitative method for analyzing its data. The data were purposively selected from the short stories of Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo with reference to stylistic the features. The texts are My Cousin Sammy and Roses and Bullet. The data were subjected to stylistic analysis.
The study found out certain stylistic features in both texts at the lexico-semantic level. Akachi Ezeigbo uses stylistic features to draw reader/listener's attention to successive words or sentences in discourses through imitating aural expressiveness. It is found that the writer coined certain words to capture definite expressions of the war and other prominent issues. Most of these coinages were formed through several word formation processes. Some of the coinages are “Biafran”, “Igbo-made”, “chop and go Council”, “ENBC”, “Supe” etc. Emergence of collocations in the texts is realized through agreement of ADJECTIVE-NOUN, and VERB-NOUN.
The study concluded that Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s style goes beyond the literary point of view but to the linguistic and the psycholinguistics. The study recommends that a comparative analysis of more than one collection of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s short stories be done.
Key words: Stylistics, stylistic features, Collocations, Neologism,
The use of threat in political discourse has been the result of a trend. The language of threat has been severally utilized by linguists in political discourse as a means of attacks and means of achieving freedom against their political opponents. Many researches have been conducted regarding the use of threat in the political discourse in Nigeria. However, little attention has been given to the constant use of threat by Asari Dokubo in his incessant speech battle with other opposition parties. It was against this background that the present study embarked upon a critical analysis of the use of threat language as a means of achieving freedom using Asari Dokubo’s selected speeches. In carrying out this study, we adopt a qualitative research design. Four speeches are selected and analyzed accordingly. The analysis is modeled after Searle’s Speech Act theory. The speeches are analyzed based on the locutionary, illocutionary and the perlocutionary acts. Findings revealed that Asari Dokubo adopts the Acts of Warning, Condemning and Threatening. This study recommends that there are some other theories of discourse such as Thematization, transitivity, Pragmeme, Ethnography of Communication, Politeness etc., which could be adopted to investigate the use of threat among politicians. It would be of great advantage if subsequent researchers could place a focus of these theories in order to replicate a worthy research as it is.
Investigating the syntactic competence of students, most especially in essay writing, has been a vital issue confronting both the teachers and the academic bodies of secondary schools. Researchers have confirmed that most essays produced by secondary school students at regular bases are full of errors at the syntactic level. In an attempt to tackle this problem, several researches have been carried out by eminent scholars; yet the study intends to add to the existing body of knowledge by examining the same issue from a different point of view. The study, therefore, investigated the syntactic errors in the written essays of selected secondary school students in English Language. The study was enrooted in identifying, classifying, analyzing and interpreting the errors of students in written essays. In carrying out the research, the study adopted a qualitative method as its framework. Explicably, the study targeted five schools with high population of students within Ijebu-Ode. Ten students from each school constituted the sample of the study. Therefore, the corpus of the study comprised fifty students across five selected secondary schools in Ijebu Ode. The content of the data were written essays on given topics. A content analysis was attempted on the data. The Systemic Functional Grammar by MAK Halliday (2004), served as the theoretical model, as clumsy expressions were represented in tree diagrams for clarification.
Analysis in the study revealed the syntactic issues that led to the grammatical errors observed in the English writing of the secondary school students. The following categories of syntactic errors were identified, namely; wrong usage of tense, concord or agreement errors, improper use of adjectives in the comparative form, unhealthy plurality (most especially uncountable nouns), double negation, irregular marking of verbs, wrong placement of pronouns etc.. The study found out that most of the errors highlighted in this study have been greatly influenced by their mother-tongue (Yoruba language). This has a retro-active or negative effect on the learning of the second language, which is English language because both languages have mostly different features than similar features. For instance, in respect to concord error, it has been identified that many students are not conscious of the discrepancies of agreements between verbs and their subjects. This is because verbs in Yoruba language do not have any form of agreement with the changing of the subject. The study recommended that curriculum planners should review the curriculum for schools to accommodate more aspects of the English usage. It also recommends that English Studies should be taught by specialists in English who are capable of doing the job effectively and that teachers should pay attention to the occurrence of those errors in order to provide relevant remedies as attempts to prevent the students from fossilizing the wrong concepts of language usage.
The dynamism in the language of journalism has become an aspect which attracts contemporary scholars. It requires specific attention because its style affords writers the opportunity to manipulate the language to suit their contextual purposes. This study therefore attempted a stylistic analysis of the language of sports in selected Nigerian Newspapers. It examined the stylistic features of selected sports columns from the pragmatic point of view. To carry out this study, a descriptive qualitative analysis was employed as the methodological framework. Twenty five (25) newspaper sentences were selected as they are directly curled from twenty five (25) newspaper articles on sports. Most of the articles were recently articles addressing the just concluded 2019 African Confederation Cup of Nations (AFCON). Jacob Mey’s Pragmatic act theory was adopted as the theoretical model that guided the analysis of the data.
In the course of the analysis, the pragmatic act features were categories into the activity part and the textual part. Under the activity part, five pragmatic acts (practs) were identified by this study as adopted by the newspaper columnists to communicate relevant information to their readers. They are the PRACT OF COMPETING, PRACT OF APPRECIATING, PRACT OF BARGAINING, PRACT OF HOPE and PRACT OF FITNESS. Out of these practs, the pract of COMPETING and HOPE are the most recurrent pract in the study. The textual part reveals the existence of the Mutual Contextual Belief (MCB) or Situational Shared Knowledge (SSK) that exists between the columnists and the readers. The study found out that the identification of this contextual knowledge shared between them helps in the interpretation of meaning. The use of METAPHOR (MPH) has been identified as one of the pragmatic cues utilized as tool of communication in sports articles. As in the case of Metaphor, the study identified the following metaphor: “SPORTS is COMPETITION” where the “PARTICIPANTS are either LOSERS or WINNERS”. The study concludes that the use of language in the newspaper discourse is context based. The effect of such pragmatic forces (practs) on readers is that readers are lured into active reading of the ensuing news story to isolate the relevant linguistic force. The reader is therefore expected as a mark of pragmatic competence to understand columns not only as propositions but as practs. The choice of an utterance is often made to capture the mood of the story and to surreptitiously sway the reader’s feelings in favour of the writer’s opinion.
Every literary writer seeks nothing but to communicate efficiently with his audience through language. Metaphor has been a driving force behind the success of every poetic idea conveyed through language. However, metaphor is not just a rhetorical device, but an issue of conceptualization in cognitive linguistics. Studies showed that although recent researches have been conducted on the use of metaphor in poetry, yet little has been done on the aspect of poetic metaphor, most especially in African poetry. It was against this backdrop that this study attempted an Analysis of poeticMetaphor of the Poetry of Gbonabam Hallowell’s ‘the Dinning Table’ and Phillips Umeh’s ‘Ambassadors of Poverty. The conceptual metaphor theory was adopted as the theoretical framework. This study found out that metaphor functions are not only as ornaments but also as the poet’s conceptualization and cognitive means. Conceptual metaphor has the rhetoric function because it offers the advantage of being at once expressive, compact and vivid. Cognitive function and aesthetic function of poetical metaphor make poetry convey the truth and the beauty.
KEYWORDS: Poetic Metaphors, Critical Appraisal, Gbonabom Hallowell, Phillip Umeh
Every traditional culture presumptively has its own oral literature. Oral literature does not emphasize only the past events because oral forms are now modified to mirror modern age. Moreover, yearly festivals which mostly centre on oral forms are still celebrated in many African cultures. While incantation, proverbs and wise-saying were paraded as agents of illuminating and embellishing the culture and traditions of the pristine African society, satirical songs, jokes and proverbs are still used in certain communities to attack and disparage those who flout the culture of the people. Therefore, the society has much to acquire from its oral forms. Among many forms of oral literature that have emerged over the years, the present study attempted a critical survey of the use of incantation and wise-saying as forms of oral literature in the Yoruba cosmology. It also examined this through the dramatic piece of Nelson Fashina- “Gods at the Harvest”. The study explored the genre of drama. The choice of drama is not far-fetched from the fact that the Drama genre contains cultural and traditional displays, village dances, festivals and rituals. These practices are appropriate features that exemplify the African oral traditions. A qualitative research approach was adopted as the methodological model of the study. A content analysis was conducted on Nelson Fashina’s “Gods at the Harvest” as guided by a literary criticism theory: the sociological approach to literary criticism. The theory emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between literature and society; that is literature taps from society and society in turn influences literature.
Analysis in the study reflects the ideological contents of the play. The study found that Nelson Fashina employed incantation to perform different functions which include: incantation for sacrificial rites; incantation to depict caution; incantation as an appeal for child-bearing; incantation for reprisal; incantation as an aversion towards death; incantation for meta-physical visual clarity and incantation for self-reprisal. These sets of incantation are believed to have certain spiritual backups as form of instigation. Since the play has the physical settings of the Old Yoruba cosmology and the time setting depicts the pre-colonial era, this is an indication that the writer’s choice of incantation wasn’t only real but practicable. The study also identified the wise-saying in Fashina’s Gods at the Harvest to perform the following functions: collectiveness; Necessity of Time; Help and Assistance; Courage and Fear; Morals/ Didactism; Self-Enrichment; Influence; The Reward of Evil; Warning and Endurance. In conclusion, It could be stated that Fashina has presented, in a crude way, a representation of African cosmology by depicting a typical Yoruba lifestyle which is characterized by the use of wise-saying and incantation.
The religious discourse remains one of the few aspects of language domains which have been researched recently. A gross examination of the language of Christian prayers is channeled on the tenet that there are certain linguistic factors that influence the discourse communicative events that exist between Christians and God. This study investigated the pragmatic cues as it took cognizance of the role of context in the selected prayers. The present study examined the role of context in Christian prayers, in terms of ‘what mutual agreement exists between man and God’, as this is reflected in the pragmatic cues in selected prayers. To carry out this research, the study adopted a qualitative method as its methodological framework. In respect to this, five samples of Christian gospel prayers were selected from Mountain of Fire and Miracle Ministries (MFM). These samples were purposively chosen from the monthly powerful programme of the church titled “Power Must Change Hand”. Twenty distinct prayer items were collected from each of the samples with focus on the oneps which have a well reconciled context of pragmatic markers. Content analysis was conducted on each of the data as guided by two theories of meaning which serve as the theoretical models. The study adopted John Searle's Speech Acts Theory and Herbert Paul Grice’s Theory of Presupposition. Findings revealed that the MFM prayers are classified into six contexts. The contexts are: the context of warfare, supplications, restoration, prophetic proclamation, deliverance and prayer of revelation. It was also revealed that prayer with the highest number of frequency is the prayer of prophetic proclamation with 28%. This is followed by the prayer of warfare with 27%. Prayer of supplication has the total number of 20%. Prayer of restoration takes a total number of 16%. The prayer of revelation takes 08% while the prayer of deliverance takes 01%. The study analysed data using the following pragmatic cues such as presupposition, metaphors, speech acts and implicature. Speech acts of commanding, binding and requesting were achieved with the prayers. The need to bind those enemies presupposes that they are spirits of manipulation and confusion. Examples of implications pf prayers of restoration, proclamation and deliverance in the work is to dispel every negative act that are rendering the individual’s anointing powerless. The metaphors are Spirit is a Substance; Miracles are Farm Products; Grave is Animate and Spiritual Blindness is Cataract. The speech act analysis of the selected MFM prayers revealed that most of the prayer items are utilized to perform certain acts. In conclusion, it is pertinent to state that the use of language in religious prayers is distinct and unique and they are done to achieve some pragmatic effects
The study of style of literary writers has been an arduous task among prolific scholars. It has been argued that the linguistic idiolect of a writer goes a long way to determine the style of such writer. This study therefore attempted a stylistic analysis of Neologism and colocations in Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s My Cousin Sammy and Roses and Bullet. It examined the features of neologism and collocations in both texts.
This study adopted a qualitative method for analyzing its data. The data were purposively selected from the short stories of Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo with reference to stylistic the features. The texts are My Cousin Sammy and Roses and Bullet. The data were subjected to stylistic analysis.
The study found out certain stylistic features in both texts at the lexico-semantic level. Akachi Ezeigbo uses stylistic features to draw reader/listener's attention to successive words or sentences in discourses through imitating aural expressiveness. It is found that the writer coined certain words to capture definite expressions of the war and other prominent issues. Most of these coinages were formed through several word formation processes. Some of the coinages are “Biafran”, “Igbo-made”, “chop and go Council”, “ENBC”, “Supe” etc. Emergence of collocations in the texts is realized through agreement of ADJECTIVE-NOUN, and VERB-NOUN.
The study concluded that Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s style goes beyond the literary point of view but to the linguistic and the psycholinguistics. The study recommends that a comparative analysis of more than one collection of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s short stories be done.
Key words: Stylistics, stylistic features, Collocations, Neologism,
The use of threat in political discourse has been the result of a trend. The language of threat has been severally utilized by linguists in political discourse as a means of attacks and means of achieving freedom against their political opponents. Many researches have been conducted regarding the use of threat in the political discourse in Nigeria. However, little attention has been given to the constant use of threat by Asari Dokubo in his incessant speech battle with other opposition parties. It was against this background that the present study embarked upon a critical analysis of the use of threat language as a means of achieving freedom using Asari Dokubo’s selected speeches. In carrying out this study, we adopt a qualitative research design. Four speeches are selected and analyzed accordingly. The analysis is modeled after Searle’s Speech Act theory. The speeches are analyzed based on the locutionary, illocutionary and the perlocutionary acts. Findings revealed that Asari Dokubo adopts the Acts of Warning, Condemning and Threatening. This study recommends that there are some other theories of discourse such as Thematization, transitivity, Pragmeme, Ethnography of Communication, Politeness etc., which could be adopted to investigate the use of threat among politicians. It would be of great advantage if subsequent researchers could place a focus of these theories in order to replicate a worthy research as it is.
Investigating the syntactic competence of students, most especially in essay writing, has been a vital issue confronting both the teachers and the academic bodies of secondary schools. Researchers have confirmed that most essays produced by secondary school students at regular bases are full of errors at the syntactic level. In an attempt to tackle this problem, several researches have been carried out by eminent scholars; yet the study intends to add to the existing body of knowledge by examining the same issue from a different point of view. The study, therefore, investigated the syntactic errors in the written essays of selected secondary school students in English Language. The study was enrooted in identifying, classifying, analyzing and interpreting the errors of students in written essays. In carrying out the research, the study adopted a qualitative method as its framework. Explicably, the study targeted five schools with high population of students within Ijebu-Ode. Ten students from each school constituted the sample of the study. Therefore, the corpus of the study comprised fifty students across five selected secondary schools in Ijebu Ode. The content of the data were written essays on given topics. A content analysis was attempted on the data. The Systemic Functional Grammar by MAK Halliday (2004), served as the theoretical model, as clumsy expressions were represented in tree diagrams for clarification.
Analysis in the study revealed the syntactic issues that led to the grammatical errors observed in the English writing of the secondary school students. The following categories of syntactic errors were identified, namely; wrong usage of tense, concord or agreement errors, improper use of adjectives in the comparative form, unhealthy plurality (most especially uncountable nouns), double negation, irregular marking of verbs, wrong placement of pronouns etc.. The study found out that most of the errors highlighted in this study have been greatly influenced by their mother-tongue (Yoruba language). This has a retro-active or negative effect on the learning of the second language, which is English language because both languages have mostly different features than similar features. For instance, in respect to concord error, it has been identified that many students are not conscious of the discrepancies of agreements between verbs and their subjects. This is because verbs in Yoruba language do not have any form of agreement with the changing of the subject. The study recommended that curriculum planners should review the curriculum for schools to accommodate more aspects of the English usage. It also recommends that English Studies should be taught by specialists in English who are capable of doing the job effectively and that teachers should pay attention to the occurrence of those errors in order to provide relevant remedies as attempts to prevent the students from fossilizing the wrong concepts of language usage.
The dynamism in the language of journalism has become an aspect which attracts contemporary scholars. It requires specific attention because its style affords writers the opportunity to manipulate the language to suit their contextual purposes. This study therefore attempted a stylistic analysis of the language of sports in selected Nigerian Newspapers. It examined the stylistic features of selected sports columns from the pragmatic point of view. To carry out this study, a descriptive qualitative analysis was employed as the methodological framework. Twenty five (25) newspaper sentences were selected as they are directly curled from twenty five (25) newspaper articles on sports. Most of the articles were recently articles addressing the just concluded 2019 African Confederation Cup of Nations (AFCON). Jacob Mey’s Pragmatic act theory was adopted as the theoretical model that guided the analysis of the data.
In the course of the analysis, the pragmatic act features were categories into the activity part and the textual part. Under the activity part, five pragmatic acts (practs) were identified by this study as adopted by the newspaper columnists to communicate relevant information to their readers. They are the PRACT OF COMPETING, PRACT OF APPRECIATING, PRACT OF BARGAINING, PRACT OF HOPE and PRACT OF FITNESS. Out of these practs, the pract of COMPETING and HOPE are the most recurrent pract in the study. The textual part reveals the existence of the Mutual Contextual Belief (MCB) or Situational Shared Knowledge (SSK) that exists between the columnists and the readers. The study found out that the identification of this contextual knowledge shared between them helps in the interpretation of meaning. The use of METAPHOR (MPH) has been identified as one of the pragmatic cues utilized as tool of communication in sports articles. As in the case of Metaphor, the study identified the following metaphor: “SPORTS is COMPETITION” where the “PARTICIPANTS are either LOSERS or WINNERS”. The study concludes that the use of language in the newspaper discourse is context based. The effect of such pragmatic forces (practs) on readers is that readers are lured into active reading of the ensuing news story to isolate the relevant linguistic force. The reader is therefore expected as a mark of pragmatic competence to understand columns not only as propositions but as practs. The choice of an utterance is often made to capture the mood of the story and to surreptitiously sway the reader’s feelings in favour of the writer’s opinion.
Every literary writer seeks nothing but to communicate efficiently with his audience through language. Metaphor has been a driving force behind the success of every poetic idea conveyed through language. However, metaphor is not just a rhetorical device, but an issue of conceptualization in cognitive linguistics. Studies showed that although recent researches have been conducted on the use of metaphor in poetry, yet little has been done on the aspect of poetic metaphor, most especially in African poetry. It was against this backdrop that this study attempted an Analysis of poeticMetaphor of the Poetry of Gbonabam Hallowell’s ‘the Dinning Table’ and Phillips Umeh’s ‘Ambassadors of Poverty. The conceptual metaphor theory was adopted as the theoretical framework. This study found out that metaphor functions are not only as ornaments but also as the poet’s conceptualization and cognitive means. Conceptual metaphor has the rhetoric function because it offers the advantage of being at once expressive, compact and vivid. Cognitive function and aesthetic function of poetical metaphor make poetry convey the truth and the beauty.
KEYWORDS: Poetic Metaphors, Critical Appraisal, Gbonabom Hallowell, Phillip Umeh
Findings reveal the order of adjectives realised by L2 learners to be ‘age-size-participle-quality-shape-color-nationality-material-head noun’ for Yoruba L2 learners of English; ‘age-participle-size-color-quality-shape-nationality-material-head noun’ for Igbo L2 learners of English; ‘size-quality-participle-color-age-shape-nationality-material-head noun’ for Nepali L2 learners of English and ‘size-quality-participle-color-age-shape-nationality-material-head noun’ for Hindi L2 learners of English. The native speakers of English came up with the order of ‘size-quality-age-shape-color-nationality-material-head noun’. The study also revealed some of the
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challenges faced in the study to be, first, that semantically close adjectives are highly difficult to acquire when combined (e.g., participle and color adjectives). Therefore, acquisition is easier when semantic categories are far from each other (e.g., quality and nationality adjectives). Secondly, adjectives that have no sense of referent in learners’ L1 are often difficult to acquire. The direct evidence of L1 transfer of preferred order was observed in some (but not overall) degrees among L2 learners’ overall ordering of adjectives. Negative transfer is often evident in the ordering patterns among Igbo L2 learners.
The study argues that the proposed orderings by researchers and linguists on adjectival patterns are not intuitively alike to descriptive outcomes of the native speakers. Thus, adjectival ordering could be considered more of a psycholinguistic phenomenon on one part and a linguistic phenomenon on the other part. The psychological approach tends to be more applicable when subjective adjectives (e.g. quality, size, shape, age, participle) are combined while the Linguistic approach seems to be more applicable when objective adjectives (e.g., color, material, nationality) are combined.
This study concludes that while curriculum planners and L2 teachers might propose models to help learners acquire adjectival order (as presented by the British Council, WAEC and Quirk et al. etc.), they should allow for flexibility in the approach. This would help learners to learn the specific rules to determine the syntax of a language and allow their psychology to participate in linguistic permutations.