Aspects of the Grammar of Past Tense and the Present Perfective Aspect in English and Echie: A Contrastive Account

The absence of a parallel equivalence in the grammar of past tense and perfective aspect in English and Echie is significantly responsible for the errors that occur in the related sentences of the Echie second language learners of English. This article is a contrastive analysis of the grammar of past tense and present perfect tense in English and Echie and it highlighted the structural specifics of each of the languages. Using the descriptive research design, the data for this study were gathered through the primary sources (ten competent native speakers of Echie were interviewed) and the secondary sources (examples generated from textual materials). Our description showed a complete range of morphological differences in past tense and present perfect tense of English and Echie as seen in the use of 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons singular and plural respectively. The paper concludes that the parametric variation in the past tense and perfective aspect of English and Echie languages show that every language is unique in some sort. Key Words: Contrastive, grammar, tense, parametric, descriptive,  interference; language

On Polar Question in Echie and English: A Transformational Approach

The formation of polar question also called a Yes-No question, appears to be language-specific, a situation which makes Echie speakers to find it difficult to accommodate the system of the English language, vice versa. This paper, using the qualitative design and the transformation approach, investigated the structural forms of both languages. The analysis showed great structural differences in both languages: while there is a swop in the position of the subject and the auxiliary in English, there is no such in Echie. In Echie, there are two forms of polar question realization: the resumptive pronoun type and the emphatic construction type. The paper noted that, although, the structural and derivational forms parametrically differ, polar questions exist in both languages and also perform the same syntactic and functional communicative roles. Key Words: Polar, resumptive, inversion, emphatic, transformatio

Bootstrapping Web Archive Collections From Micro-Collections in Social Media

In a Web plagued by disappearing resources, Web archive collections provide a valuable means of preserving Web resources important to the study of past events. These archived collections start with seed URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) hand-selected by curators. Curators produce high quality seeds by removing non-relevant URIs and adding URIs from credible and authoritative sources, but this ability comes at a cost: it is time consuming to collect these seeds. The result of this is a shortage of curators, a lack of Web archive collections for various important news events, and a need for an automatic system for generating seeds. We investigate the problem of generating seed URIs automatically, and explore the state of the art in collection building and seed selection. Attempts toward generating seeds automatically have mostly relied on scraping Web or social media Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). In this work, we introduce a novel source for generating seeds from URIs in the threaded conversations of social media posts created by single or multiple users. Users on social media sites routinely create and share narratives about news events consisting of hand-selected URIs of news stories, tweets, videos, etc. In this work, we call these posts Micro-collections, whether shared on Reddit or Twitter, and we consider them as an important source for seeds. This is because, the effort taken to create Micro-collections is an indication of editorial activity and a demonstration of domain expertise. Therefore, we propose a model for generating seeds from Micro-collections. We begin by introducing a simple vocabulary, called post class for describing social media posts across different platforms, and extract seeds from the Micro-collections post class. We further propose Quality Proxies for seeds by extending the idea of collection comparison to evaluation, and present our Micro-collection/Quality Proxy (MCQP) framework for bootstrapping Web archive collections from Micro-collections in social media

A pragma-syntactic analysis of slogans on t-shirts

The T-shirts and the slogans on them are used to achieve different discourse and communicative themes. The T-shirts help to describe people, events, positions and situations. This article written the confines of the theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis and the qualitative design, investigates five different types of T-shirts. The T-shirts and the inscriptions on them as exemplified in the themes of readiness, position and desire, happiness and celebration, and protest are used to describe the wearers, address situations and pass information to the public. The paper therefore concludes that T-shirts and the slogans scripted on them perform different types of illoucutionary actions which cause different forms perlocutionary reactions Key Words: T-shirts, slogans, themes, multimodal, cloth; communicatio

Social media, Keyboard Disruptors, and Fake Protesters during protest movements in Nigeria

Social media platforms continue to flourish as practices encompassing them become deeply embedded in many cultures. As more people embrace social media platforms, their affordances and opportunities are leading to improved communication, and helping hold authorities to account. While social media do help to hold authorities to account, those in leadership roles are beginning to use these platforms to bolster their perverse objectives. To understand the latter better, this study aims to examine methods that the Nigerian authorities adopted to discredit, disrupt, and conceal the killing of protesters during the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. This study adopts a mixed methods approach comprising of qualitative content analysis of tweets and replies (N=10,622) regarding critical and counter tweets about the protests, and responses from a semi-structured interview (N=20) of ‘fake protesters’ during the 2020 #EndSARS protests. Findings show that the Nigerian authorities adopted a two-throng approach of using hoodlums to perpetrate violence with the hope of destabilizing the protests, and used influencers and celebrities online to disrupt, destabilize and conceal the killing of protesters during the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. The paper contributes to knowledge in three ways. First, it empirically conceptualizes Keyboard Disruptors. Second, the paper uncovers that while social media platforms have decentralized communicability, that they, however, have improved the capabilities of the authorities in the dissemination of propagandistic materials as well as having the capabilities to repress a protest movement. Third, the study delineates a typology of protest disruption tactics during the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria

Social media, Keyboard Disruptors, and Fake Protesters during protest movements in Nigeria

Social media platforms continue to flourish as practices encompassing them become deeply embedded in many cultures. As more people embrace social media platforms, their affordances and opportunities are leading to improved communication, and helping hold authorities to account. While social media do help to hold authorities to account, those in leadership roles are beginning to use these platforms to bolster their perverse objectives. To understand the latter better, this study aims to examine methods that the Nigerian authorities adopted to discredit, disrupt, and conceal the killing of protesters during the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. This study adopts a mixed methods approach comprising of qualitative content analysis of tweets and replies (N=10,622) regarding critical and counter tweets about the protests, and responses from a semi-structured interview (N=20) of ‘fake protesters’ during the 2020 #EndSARS protests. Findings show that the Nigerian authorities adopted a two-throng approach of using hoodlums to perpetrate violence with the hope of destabilizing the protests, and used influencers and celebrities online to disrupt, destabilize and conceal the killing of protesters during the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. The paper contributes to knowledge in three ways. First, it empirically conceptualizes Keyboard Disruptors. Second, the paper uncovers that while social media platforms have decentralized communicability, that they, however, have improved the capabilities of the authorities in the dissemination of propagandistic materials as well as having the capabilities to repress a protest movement. Third, the study delineates a typology of protest disruption tactics during the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. Keywords: digital activism, social media, soro soke, #EndSARS, Keyboard Disruptors, Fake Protesters DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/105-07 Publication date:December 31st 202

Examining the role of social media and mobile social networking applications in socio-political contestations in Nigeria

Social media platforms continue to flourish as practices encompassing them become deeply embedded in many cultures. As more people embrace social media platforms, their affordances and opportunities are leading to improved communication, and helping hold authorities to account. To further scrutinize the importance of these platforms, this study interrogates the role of digital media in socio-political contestations in Nigeria by examining the media used to mobilize, coordinate, and document the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. Analyses of survey data collected in 2020 during the protests in Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria (N = 391) show that demonstrators who were 30 years and older and used WhatsApp and Facebook to learn about the protests as well as coordinate their participation in the protests are more likely to report participating on the first day of the protests than protesters who are younger than 30 and used other media platforms. Findings further illustrate that digital enthusiasm facilitated by hedonic-experiential and epicurean communication on WhatsApp and Facebook eventuated a process of emotional contagion through connective repertoires that created propitious emotional conditions for mass collective protest actions. Finally, the article discusses how the use of WhatsApp and Facebook gave protesters strategic communicative power during the protests.</p