Browsing by Author "Dahunsi, T. N., & Olaleye J. I."

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    A LEXICAL STUDY OF THE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICAN WOMANHOOD IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S NOVELS
    (Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, 2018) Dahunsi, T. N., & Olaleye J. I.
    The early African writers have been accused of using negative portraitures to project African women in ways that subordinate them to their men counterpart. This study closely investigated this perception using the language of narratives as the object of analysis. It is a lexical analysis that adopts comparative frequency analysis of male and female characters and their pronominal referents; analysis of character’s identity projection patterns; and analysis of comparative masculine-feminine gender semantic prosodies. Five works of Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People, Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease, and The Anthills of the Savannah were used for the study. The result shows that male characters are more frequently projected than female characters; the narrator consistently foregrounds the identities of male characters by presenting them mostly either by direct names or a combination of names with appositional information; whereas the identities of female characters are often suppressed by presenting them with descriptions and appositional information. The comparative character identity projection pattern connotes male characters’ visibility and female characters’ facelessness across texts. Both masculine and feminine genders were also presented in ways that make them to have different semantic prosodies. While the masculine gender was projected to have positive semantic prosody, the feminine gender was projected to have negative semantic prosody across texts. The paper concludes that Chinua Achebe’s narrative style that consistently projects the masculine gender as visible, domineering, strong and brave, but the feminine gender as faceless, subservient, weak and inconsequential.
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    AN INVESTIGATION OF THE STRUCTURES OF THE ENGLISH NOMINAL GROUPS IN SELECTED FICTIONAL AND NON-FICTIONAL TEXTS
    (Department of English, University of Botswana, 2022) Dahunsi, T. N., & Olaleye J. I.
    The nominal group is an important syntactic element for sentence formation and is used across languages by speakers of all ages. Despite this, more knowledge is still needed on its comprehensive structure and the possibility of structural similarities and dissimilarities that may exist among texts of different types. One hundred randomly sampled nominal groups from 12 different text types (six fictional, six non-fictional) were analysed using the Hallidayan experiential and logico-semantic grammatical models. Twenty-eight structural patterns were identified across texts, which were categorised into deictic-headed, numerative-headed, epithet-headed, classifier-headed, and “Thing”-only structures. The deictic-headed was the most productive and most frequently used, with 13 sub-structures identified. The “Thing”- only category was the least productive and least used. There were structural patterns that cut across texts but there were also patterns that were peculiar to some text-types. The use of SFG for analysis provided more insight into the understanding of the structure of nominal groups, and it clearly showed that every lexical element in the group structure has its syntactic and semantic role. The analysis further revealed that some text-types have tendencies for more frequent use of some structural elements than others. For example, editorials showed high frequencies of epithets and classifiers, textbooks showed high frequencies of qualifiers, religious texts showed low frequencies of epithets and classifiers, while poetry showed peculiarly low frequencies of qualifiers. An understanding of the structure and text-based structural variations of nominal groups can help in the correct use, analysis, and interpretation of nominal groups in English.