The Depiction of Animal Behavioural Patterns in Selected RUSSIAN and YORÙBÁ Proverbs and Sayings
John Olubunmi Faloju and Ayodele Solomon Oyewale
Abstract
Proverbs and sayings are vehicles of cultural wisdom and knowledge that drive a society forward. They are considered as the repository of a people’ssociocultural, economic and political wisdom that are passed from generation to generation. The meaning of proverbs cannot be understood independent of human cognition; therefore their meanings must be surveyed in a way that is easily understandable to human beings. In the context of creation and human keen observation on nature, animals have peculiar behavioural patterns respectively. In this paper, a pragmatic analysis of selected proverbs and sayings on animals especially dog, cat, mouse, fox and wolf in Russian and Yorùbá proverbs are provided. The paper further seeks to examine the comprehension of animal behaviour in proverbs and sayings with the convergences and divergences inherent in them as depicted by the two cultures. This paper employs the socio- cognitive approach to bring to light the convergences and the divergences in the depiction of animals in Russian and Yorùbá cultural milieu. Our findings show a comprehensive evident uniqueness in fauna of both cultures. The paper reveals that proverbs on animals have conceptual communicative values and basic cognition process is involved in their interpretation.
A Generic Power Relations Assessment of the Linguistic Items in the Proscription Order of Boko Haram, IPOB and Shiites in Nigeria
Bibian Ugoala
Abstract
The study examines the power potential in the legalese of the ex-parte proscription order of the Boko Haram sect, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and the Shiites in Nigeria by the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN). The argument raised in this study is that in as much as the court through its ruling in ex-parte proscription orders ensures law and order in the society, forceful linguistic items should be expunged from such documents. Three objectives guided the study: to ascertain how dominance is enacted in each text by the applicant and the court; to highlight and discuss the repeated and similar linguistic structures through which the applicant dominate the absentee respondent (AR), to find out the different dimensions of power relations encoded in the documents. To achieve these objectives, three ex-parte proscription orders were selected for the study. The documents were downloaded from the online copies of the official gazette of the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN). The study adopts a descriptive method applying Bhatia’s (2004) Genre Theory, and Fairclough’s (1992) Critical Discourse Analysis. Selected excerpts were lifted from the documents and analysed. The summary of the findings is that, the applicant in each case, to get the absentee respondents (ARs) proscribed, deployed forceful verbs such as: ‘declaring’, ‘proscribing’, ‘restraining’, syntactic repetitions: such as ‘an order’, ‘that an order’, ‘and ‘terrorism and illegal’, unconventional graphology: such as setting some phrases and clauses in upper cases, and long sentences not separated by commas, these unconventionalities qualify the documents to be classified as genres of legal proscription documents. The study concludes that ex-parte proscription documents are replete with authority-imbued intertextual linguistic items which serves as a model for further wishes from an applicant, and rulings by the court.
Memory, Metaphor and the Post-Apartheid Imagination: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Boyhood in Context.*
Osita Ezeliora,
Abstract
When J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace was released in 1999, reactions against the author’s projection of the blacks’ humanity was heated: some members of the South African Parliament could not hide their disgust over what many perceived as “a racist narrative” attuned to the continued denigration of the African personality by white intellectuals. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and his semi-autobiographical story, Boyhood, are both set severally in farmlands, placing both narratives into what South African literary scholarship would often describe as the Plaasroman tradition or stories of the farm. In these post-apartheid ‘novels’ of Coetzee, memory and metaphor cohere in fascinating narrations that blend the past and the present in a single narrative of the ‘new’ nation. Memory, conceived here in the phraseology of Richard Terdiman as “the modality of our relation to the past” becomes a fundamental agent in the construction of narratives of the past and the present. Coetzee is aware of the implications of reportorial narrative modes that lean too heavily on historical accuracy, and opts instead for a narrative form that partly leans on, and partly defies the factual in fictional representation. In these ‘novels’, the transitional South Africa emerges as reminiscences, as recollections of shared national memories. This essay attempts to explore Coetzee’s figurations of issues considered very germane in South Africa’s shared memory: the questions of land ownership and the politics of racial representation. This is done against the backdrop of the 1913 Native land Act, with a focus on Disgrace and Boyhood.
African Proverbs as Conveyors of African Philosophy
Ndubuisi Onyemelukwe and Alfred Fatuase
Abstract
African cultural imperatives highlight the indispensable place of proverbs in African philosophy; and the folkloric elements of myths, legends, folktales and folksongs also incorporate African philosophy. However, this study focuses on proverbs only, as conveyors of African philosophy. The study is so focused, because proverbs alone embody the largest proportion of African philosophy and constitute the most rhetorically appealing folkloric element. A panoramic view of African philosophy is presented in the study as the theoretical basis for its hypothetical position, namely that African proverbs convey African philosophy, substantially. Philosophy, as an academic discipline, means the continual search for truth through reasoning as well as empirical facts. From a scholarly perspective, there is no consensus on the definition of philosophy. Nevertheless, scholars generally accept its etymological definition as ‘love for wisdom’ which entails ‘love for knowledge’, a perspective which unties its encryption in proverbs to justify this study. Each of tables 1-6 in the study presents a compendium of selected radical and non-radical African proverbs sourced purposively from six African countries namely Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Cameroon, Kenya and Ethiopia with analytical interest focused only on those of them that reflect significant radical semantics. The results of the analysis prove the validity of its hypothesis namely that African proverbs convey African philosophy, but certainly not exhaustively. The analysis has established the central evaluative assertion, repeatedly made in the study, to the effect that African philosophy is God-centred. This assertion certainly explains why contemporary African philosophy is largely influenced by Christianity, God being the spiritual architect of Christianity. Another finding of the study is that polygamy as a contingent African custom has long been rendered an outmoded nuptial custom in contemporary African philosophy in outright preference for monogamy which rules out concubinage. Finally, the study reinforces the self-evident truth asserted by Chinua Achebe in 1973 to the effect that African philosophy, and by extension, African culture and the dignity of African identity, are not resultant outcomes of Africa’s colonial experience. The authenticity of this position resides in the obvious fact that most, if not all African proverbs predate the colonial period in Africa.