Browsing by Author "Alabi, V. A."
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF PSALM 23(Department of English, University of Ilorin, Ilorin., 2018) Olaleye, J. I.; Alabi, V. A.The philosophical foundation of pragmatics posits that both the intralinguistic and extralinguistic contexts cannot be trivialised in the exploration of meaning of texts. However, existing works from the perspective of pragmatics which explore how language is used to mean in Biblical texts are scanty. The purpose of this study therefore was to employ the Speech act theory proposed by Searle (1976) as well as aspects of Lawal (1997) and Bangura’s (2007) features of context like linguistic, cosmological, socio-cultural, situational and discourse deixis to discover how the writer of Psalm 23 used those aspects of pragmatics as meaning-inducing components. The analysis revealed that the writer performed especially Informative and Assertive acts to convince the audience, thereby creating plausibility for his claims and boasting. An exploration of cosmological context also revealed that he reflected Christian doctrinal positions about certain phenomena; situational-cum-socio-cultural context indicated he alluded to personal experiences in the historical background; and through discourse deixis, he alluded to events in other portions of the Scripture. Moreso, the writer exploited features of person deixis to identify and assign roles to discourse participants; while through linguistic context, elements such as modal verbs and sentence structures were used as pragmatic devices to accentuate meaning. On the basis of these discoveries, it was concluded that meanings of Biblical utterances are not locally absolute in the immediate linguistic contexts of the utterances but are also anchored to the inexhaustible contextual sources external to the utterances. Therefore, the significance of pragmatics to this study is that it provides effective mechanisms for unveiling how language is used to mean in Biblical texts.Item Contributions of Nigerian Universities to Knowledge and Development in Linguistics and Language Studies(University of Ilorin and National Universities Commission, 2010) Alabi, V. A.; Adedimeji, M.AItem LEXICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS IN SELECTED POEMS OF REMI RAJI AND ADEMOLA DASYLVA(2017) Olaleye, J. I.; Alabi, V. A.The interest of linguists has been to understand the nature of language by exploring how linguistic resources are deployed to encode meanings in texts. However, one of the major challenges which make poetry a difficult text among literary genres is an inability to perceive the morphological devices contained in poems. This paper therefore is a stylistic analysis of how Remi Raji and Ademola Dasylva exploit their linguistic dexterity at morphological and lexical levels to invent lexical items which aptly capture their intended messages. To achieve this aim, the study attempts to: discover the morphological inventories deployed by the poets to generate new lexemes; examine how the newly generated lexemes are functionally used to contribute to the overall messages of their selected poems; and to identify the devices common to both poets and isolate those that uniquely give each poet an authorial fingerprint. The specific morphological innovations attestable in their works are done by means of lexical bisection, lexical coalescence, lexical metathesis and nonce formation. They employ the devices for meaning intensification. Also, while the devices of lexical coalescence and nonce formation are common to Raji and Dasylva, the devices of lexical bisection and lexical metathesis uniquely give them authorial fingerprints respectively. The study concludes that literary texts such as poetry, which seemingly appears impenetrable, can be easily accessible, if attention is given to the morphological inventiveness deployed by the poets.Item The Nexus between Stylistics and the Language of Poetry: An Analysis of Selected Poems(Olivertree Publishing Venture for the Nigeria Englsig Studies Associatiom, 2006) Alabi, V. A.; Adedimeji, M. A.