MOOD ANALYSIS OF SELECTED CASES OF STUDENT DISCIPLINARY INTERROGATIONS IN NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES
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Date
2017
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University of Ilorin
Abstract
Student Investigative and Disciplinary Interrogations (SIDIs) are a global and constant social practice in higher educational institutions. In spite of their strategic roles in the maintenance of peace and order in the society, SIDIs have not been scholarly explored to understand the inherent language dynamics, structure and peculiarities in Nigeria. This study was aimed at conducting a structural analysis of the discourse of SIDIs with a view to identifying the syntactic patterns and determining how grammatical systems and structures were used to achieve different communicative purposes. The objectives of the study were to: (i) conduct a structural analysis of SIDIs to identify the various types of questions asked by interrogators; (ii) investigate the specific purposes that the identified question types served in the interrogations; (iii) examine interrogators’ preferences for the identified question types; (iv) verify whether the identified question types have inhibitive effect on interrogatees’ choices and lengths of answers; and (v) determine whether interrogatees were at any disadvantage occasioned by interrogators’ questions.
The methodology was mainly descriptive and analytical. The data were transcripts of SIDIs from three public universities in Nigeria: The University of Ilorin, the Federal University of Technology, Akure, and, Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko. Five SIDIs, each containing about 30 question-answer adjacency pairs (QAPs), were selected per university (a total of 15 cases, 450 question-answer adjacency pairs). Mood analysis, an aspect of the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) was carried out for the questions and answers. The variation of the modal elements in each QAP led to the emergence of different clausal configurations and functions. Answers to the questions were further analysed into short and long types.
The findings of the study were that:
i. four question types were asked by interrogators in the discourses. These were yes/no interrogatives, declarative questions, Wh-interrogatives and moodless constructions. Interrogatees’ answers were predominantly declarative, an indication that interrogators’ role was information elicitation through questioning while interrogatees’ role was information provision through narratives;
ii. different questions served different purposes in the discourses: yes/no interrogatives and declarative functions served propositional confirmation-refutation functions; some yes/no interrogatives served the purpose of subtle commands; Wh-interrogatives served information gap-filling purposes; while moodless constructions served discourse continuity purposes;
iii. interrogators’ highest preference was for yes/no interrogatives across cases, followed by declarative questions. These were propositional confirmation-refutation questions, and were structurally restrictive;
iv. structurally restrictive questions took more long answers than short answers, an indication that though the questions were restrictive in form, they were non-restrictive in function; and
v. interrogatees were not found to be disadvantaged by interrogators’ questions because the restrictive force of most questions had no observable effect on interrogatees’ answers in most cases.
The study concluded that the QAP is evidently the main language resource for eliciting evidence in SIDIs and that although interrogators’ questions in SIDIs were predominantly and structurally restrictive, they were functionally non-restrictive. The study thus recommended the QAP as a reliable device for information elicitation in SIDIs.
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Keywords
MOOD ANALYSIS, STUDENT DISCIPLINARY INTERROGATIONS, NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES