A Pragma-Stylo-Semantic Analysis of Proverbs 26, Verses 4 and 5

Although, the majority view of scholars supports the position that the Proverbs of Solomon are influenced by the Instructions of Amenemope of ancient Egypt, the book of Proverbs is believed by Christians to be one of the poetic books of the Bible known for words of wisdom. The first twelve verses of chapter twenty-six are devoted to the fool. With the possibility of being drawn into conversation with the fool, verses four and five become instructive to the wise. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that a pragma-stylo-semantic interpretation of these verses cancels out the overt contradiction. The semantic and pragmatic presuppositions, as well as the stylistic features of the verses are unravelled to arrive at the underlying connections that unify their interpretations. Also, time-lapse or gap is considered fundamental and analysed using the concept of “appropriateness” in terms of possible compliance with the instructions in the two verses by a single agent. The paper proposes a schematic diagram supportive of the concept of "appropriateness”. The various levels of linguistic, situational, psychological, sociological and cosmological contexts of the text have been examined with the illocutionary forces of the text investigated. These are done with the purpose of arriving at a "global" or "total" meaning. At the end, the analysis indicates a non-contradictory, context-determined phenomenon

The Study of Reduplication and Retriplication in the Yoruba Language

The Yoruba language, a regional lingua franca in Nigeria, which belongs to the Kwa sub-family of Kordofanian phylum of the larger African language family, is spoken in Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Liberia, Brazil, Cuba, etc. The language attests a very productive feature of reduplication which has attracted the attention of many scholars. But its extended form, tagged, “retriplication” in this paper, remains largely unexplored. This study examines the form and functions of reduplication and retriplication which are two morphological processes where the former serves as a pedestal to the latter. While applying the participant observation method to elicit data from main Yoruba cities in Nigeria, the Pulleyblank (2009) model, as well as the descriptive and context usage approaches are employed to analyse and discuss the data. The study reveals that while reduplication process actualises intensification, nominalisation, emphasis and comparative qualifying, retriplication serves for more intensification, wider nominalisation, more emphasis and superlative qualifying. The research further reveals that, while all cases of verb and adjective reduplicates can be retriplicated without generating unacceptable utterances in Yoruba, the gerundive reduplicates cannot culminate in retriplication. However, kinship reduplicate allows retriplication when stretched to the third generation.  The paper concludes by calling for more study on retriplication in other languages of the world, particularly, African and Asian languages that massively exhibit the two phenomena