Marang: Journal of Language and Literature

Hiatus resolution in Ndau

2017-10-31T12:50:04+00:00

This study focuses on the strategies that are employed to resolve hiatus and the contexts where hiatus is tolerated through an analysis of the morpho-syntactic and phonological settings in which Ndau vowel sequences occur. This research establishes five strategies that Ndau utilizes to resolve hiatus; namely: glide formation, secondary articulation, elision, vowel coalescence and spreading. The findings of this study demonstrate that Ndau exclusively bans hiatus in nominals. In verbs, it is banned when V₂ is an affix vowel but is permitted when V₂ is a verb stem-initial vowel. Hiatus resolution is blocked when V₂ is verb steminitial because ALIGN (ROOTVERB, L, σ, L) outranks ONSET in the verbal domain. Hiatus is also maintained in the verbal domain between the relative marker and tense sign boundary. In the cliticization domain hiatus is tolerated when V₂ is a vowel of a host of a copulative proclitic /ndí-/ and its allomorphs because MAX-COP outranks ONSET.

Keywords: hiatus resolution, clitic, copulative, Optimality Theory, nominals, verbs, Ndau.

Negotiating meaning through the labyrinthine meanderings of periodic and cumulative English sentences

2017-10-31T12:50:08+00:00

When we acquire fluency in the mother tongue, or when we achieve it in another language, in both cases including fluency in grammatical and communicative competence, we are able to construct sentences with a rich variety of structures, which sentences we appropriately deploy for communication in a diverse range of discourse contexts. Our communicative competence is displayed partly by our ability to use language judiciously when we construct sentences that communicate our thoughts and feelings in specific contexts. This is the classical Hymes (1972) knowledge of what to say, to whom, why, when, and how. The “how” has to do partly with the structural complexity or simplicity of the sentences which we use and partly with whether we are communicating in the spoken or the written mode. It is with the latter that this paper is concerned. Long sentences are generally unsuitable when used in oral communication for taxing the listener’s memory, whereas they are serviceable in the written mode since the reader can always return to the point at which they lost their way through the syntactic labyrinth. The legacy which English syntax owes to the Classical languages includes the so-called periodic or Ciceronian sentence. In addition to this, writers sometimes resort to and exploit that resource which is immanent in all natural human languages, namely the productivity of syntactic rules that is evident in their amenability to cyclical application in the construction of the so-called cumulative or loose sentence. In this paper I focus on the strengths and weaknesses of both these sentence types by highlighting their dissimilarities, similarities, as well as the overlaps between them and, crucially, their stylistic elegance. Overall, I argue that the ability both to construct and to extract meaning from such sentences is an index of one’s fluency in English.

Keywords: periodic sentence, cumulative sentence, syndetic coordination, asyndetic coordination, dualism.

Discursive representations of social meaning in Ben Okri’s Abiku fiction

2017-10-31T12:50:10+00:00

Writers adopt different strategies of communicating social meaning. The strategies enable them to represent individual and group identities, ideologies, attitudes, biases, feelings, prejudices and social relations. In Okri’s novels on abiku, the spirit child, namely The Famished Road (1991), Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998), he adopts gossip/rumour and communal/cosmic conversational structure as strategies of communicating the social and political situations of his Nigerian society. The gossip/rumour strategies are narrative forms of supplying additional information the central narrator does not have access to, while the dialogic/conversational structure represents the African communal perspective and the intercourse between the natural and the supernatural.

Keywords: Ben Okri, discursive representation, social meaning, gossip/rumour, dialogue/conversation

Animus, “Amadiora” and Adichie: An apologia of psychic nexus

2017-10-31T12:50:13+00:00

Certain masculine traits manifest from the unconscious of female characters in contemporary Nigerian fiction as revealed in the characterization technique of Chimamanda Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck. “Animus” instinct – as opposed to “anima” – is what C. G. Jung calls this psychic trait. It is the hidden impulse that makes a woman to behave like a man. It also determines the level of introversion and extraversion displayed by the woman. But this drive is similar with the Igbo religio-mythical character called “Amadiora” who is the male-manifestation of the people’s collective will, expressed in the medium of thunder. The female characters in this text are not expressing the ideology of feminism per se but their peculiar alienating experiences have activated their psychic configuration to reveal their hidden maleness. This essay explores the types of complexity that arise when a female character projects her animus-drive to respond to the challenges of border limitations and the contradictions of hybridizing with foreign values.

Keywords: Amadiora, animus, hybridity, female, Igbo, introversion, extraversion

Patriarchy and social determinism: interrogating feminist agenda in Tanzania’s neglected poetry

2017-10-31T12:50:15+00:00

This paper examines poems written in English by Tanzanians from a feminist perspective. Specifically, the paper examines how Tanzanian poets in English handle feminist ideas. It interrogates how the poets address issues of human rights, dignity and equality from a feminist perspective in a predominantly patriarchal society. Through a feminist lens, the paper also delineates how the poets depict the reaction of women against masculinity and often female-gender insensitive traditional cultural beliefs which continue to subjugate and marginalise women. The paper contends that despite being ignored in terms of scholarship, Tanzanian poets in English have been preoccupied with the question of gender equality, which helps to define and place their contribution to literary and gender discourse in Tanzania. The paper concludes that Tanzanian poets in English have rhetorically been fostering the feminist agenda to undermine prevalent patriarchal norms and values.

Keywords: Feminists, patriarchy, Tanzanian poets in English, masculinity, identity