A Simple Data Driven Yoruba Language Dictionary

The language of a people is an integral part of their lives, because it is synonymous with their identity, culture and environment. Traditionally, the language people speak tells others about their identity but in a country like Nigeria where a lingua franca, English has been adopted, the identity of the people is being suppressed such that the first language of some Nigerians is English instead of their mother tongue and in some extreme cases the indigenous language has been lost. The use of a lingua franca, globalization and civilization should not bring about the death of our indigenous languages, instead, amid all these, Information Technology as the bedrock of our time can be harnessed to propagate our indigenous languages. This work focused on the development of an electronic Yoruba language dictionary that is data driven. The tools and techniques used in this work produced results. Keywords: Yoruba, dictionary, database, language translation, machine learnin

APPRAISAL DEVICES ON THE “X FACTOR INDONESIA” COMMENTARIES

One of the unique phenomena in the linguistics field is the ability to apply Appraisal theory to the commentaries within modern shows such as X Factor Indonesia. This employs qualitative and quantitative research approaches to explore X Factor judges’ commentaries as a phenomenon. This article further investigates the existence of ‘appraisal theory’ on X-Factor judges’ commentaries.Appraisal theory invokes “attitude”, “graduation”, and “engagement”, which concerns the evaluation of commentaries (Martin & White, 2005). By analysing the findings from these commentaries, differences in how the judges operate the appraisal devices can be monitored through percentage acuity according to the following eight elements: affect-attitude (12, 71 %), judgement-attitude (44, 91%), appreciation-attitude (42, 37%), force-graduation (91, 67%), focus-graduation (8, 33%), mono-gloss engagement (0%), Dialogic contraction-engagement (62, 68%) and Dialogic expansion-engagement (40, 29 %)

Dynamics of Religion

RGVV(History of Religion: Essays and Preliminary Studies) brings together the mutually constitutive aspects of the study of religion(s)—contextualized data, theory, and disciplinary positioning—and engages them from a critical historical perspective. The series publishes monographs and thematically focused edited volumes on specific topics and cases as well as comparative work across historical periods from the ancient world to the modern era

Maniat Laments as Narratives: Forms and Norms of Entextualization

This thesis studies Maniat laments as narratives in folkloristic contexts. It focuses on a manuscript collection of Maniat laments which was compiled around 1930-35 by Ioannis Strilakos (a philologist from Gerolimenas, 1911-1949); it also draws on data from ethnographic fieldwork and published collections. Texts from the collection that refer to killings or abductions (sensational laments) have been compiled in a digital corpus following the latest standards in textual encoding in order to facilitate textual analyses. The study proposes an eclectic language-focused approach to verbal art following recent trends in the study of oral poetics (Bauman and Briggs 1990) and narrative analysis (Labov 1997, Ochs and Capps 2001) brought together by critical perspectives on discourse and culture in sociolinguistics (Blommaert 2005). First of all, the analysis identifies an ethnopoetic-narrative patterning and its variations in relation to prototypical structures of oral experience narratives. The identified prototypical structures are viewed along a set of narrativity dimensions which define their conventionalisation and entextualisabilityt on a continuum that encompasses laments performed in both ritual and non-ritual contexts. Secondly, this study explores the way norms of language have been deployed in practices of recording, selecting, editing, transcribing and publishing laments either emphasising their 'canonical' textual shape or adding new meanings through orthopraxies. The latter are illustrated in the hybrid register in which the texts in the manuscript collection have been recorded, pointing to synergies between orality and literacy norms and revealing the complexity of the natural histories of verbal art

African linguistics on the prairie

African Linguistics on the Prairie features select revised peer-reviewed papers from the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at the University of Kansas. The articles in this volume reflect the enormous diversity of African languages, as they focus on languages from all of the major African language phyla. The articles here also reflect the many different research perspectives that frame the work of linguists in the Association for Contemporary African Linguistics. The diversity of views presented in this volume are thus indicative of the vitality of current African linguistics research. The work presented in this volume represents both descriptive and theoretical methodologies and covers fields ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphology, typology, syntax, and semantics to sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language acquisition, computational linguistics and beyond. This broad scope and the quality of the articles contained within holds out the promise of continued advancement in linguistic research on African languages

Wonder, education, and human flourishing:Theoretical, empirical, and practical perspectives

The premise that underlies this volume is that there are strong interconnections between wonder, education and human flourishing. And more specifically, that wonder can make a significant difference to how well one’s education progresses and how well one’s life goes. The contributors to this volume – both senior, well-known and beginning researchers and students of wonder – variously explore aspects of these connections from philosophical, empirical, theoretical and practical perspectives. The three chapters that comprise Part I of the book are devoted to the importance of wonder for education and for human flourishing. Part II contains four chapters offering conceptual analyses of wonder and perspectives from developmental psychology and philosophy (Spinoza, Wittgenstein, philosophy of religion). The seven chapters that form Part III contain a wealth of ideas and educational strategies to promote wonder in education and teacher education. This volume not only underlines and articulates the importance of wonder in education and in life but also offers fresh perspectives, allowing us to look with renewed wonder at wonder itself