Browsing by Author "John, Philip Hayab"

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    Narratives of identity and sociocultural worldview in song texts of the Ham of Nigeria: A discourse analysis investigation
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) John, Philip Hayab; Visser, Marianna W.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of African Languages.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation investigates the social and linguistic communicative resources of spoken discourse embedded in the lyrics of the songs produced by members of the Nigerian Ham, the Hyam linguistic heritage community as a form of group, cultural, and identity-related analysis. The study considers Ham songs as narratives of world making (Herman 2009: xii) exploring public discourses concerned with the contestation of values and perceptions that are predictably part of societies in transition from traditional rural lifestyles to modern urban daily life. The drift from the rural area to the metropolitan, beside the multicultural nature of the cities, gives rise to encounters and contestations over a broad spectrum of sociocultural belief systems as (new) identities are (re)constructed to make the selfvisible. Essentially, the study focuses on the linguistic (linguistic lexical-semantic and discoursesemantic) expressions in the narratives inherent in the song texts. Theoretically, the study engages a multi-perspective approach which integrates the analyses of (i) narrative, (ii) genre theory, and (iii) appraisal theory. These approaches combined have shown to have integral components for the interpretation of Ham songs. Discourse observed as a system of address and verbal art or stories take place within a sociocultural and historical context (Halliday, Matthiessen 2014). Discourse linked with narrative establishes the function of language as a gateway through which society could comprehend the conception and worldviews of the Ham of themselves and the world around them. This thinking echoes the suggestion of Martin and Rose (2008) that the aim of a story (narrative) is to exemplify how characters struggle with the difficulties and dilemmas of life. In this way, the study undertakes to establish how the context songs in Hyam language are engaged in preserving kinship and morality/ethical consciousness and worldview among the Ham (John & Madaki 2014, 2015, 2016) and the role of narratives in the production of the identity of the Ham (Czarniawska & Gagliardi 2003, Frank 2010) The dissertation employs the notion of “small stories” (Bamberg 2006, Georgakopoulou 2006b) as well as ‘big stories’ (Lyotard 1984), to expound on ordinary events of society in addition to grand narratives. The basis is that narrative reveals a consciousness that people utilise stories in typical situations to construct (and perpetuate) a sense of who they are (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008:2, De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2015, Popova 2015). More so, the formation of identity and belonging (Bamberg 2007) is the constituent of this dissertation. Related to this is genre theory engaged to categorise Ham songs into a recurring structure of patterns and meanings which enact the social life of their culture (Martin & Rose 2008). Correspondingly, appraisal theory is utilised as “a framework for analysing the language of evaluation” (Martin & White 2005, White 2009a: 2). To this end, the study is concerned with evaluating the rhetorical configurations and components in the carefully chosen songs to consider their import in understanding the worldview of the Ham. The inspiration for the study stems from the curious observation that in the face of the growing following of Ham songs with persistent communal expressive objectives, there was scarcely any dedicated study which examines the rhetorical features that the singers employ with an orientation to the theoretical approaches of NARRATIVE, GENRE, and APPRAISAL. I argue, in the dissertation, that these approaches, manifestly, are vital to the understanding of the stories, the configurations, and the raptures of stories the narrators/texts in the songs take on. Besides, that Hyam remains a spoken language primarily, only in the process of being documented through a Bible translation project, the researcher’saim, above all, is to seek to enrich a primarily oral language into writing by engaging familiarity with the International Phonetic Alphabets. However, the point of departure of the study is, while most research on songs in Africa is concerned with the question of politics which relates to control of nation-states or of power relations (for example, Mvula 1986, Njogu & Maupeu 2007, Musiyiwa 2013), the stories in Ham songs incline to focus on a society in the fringe, expressing its disquiets about origin, validation of culture, support to customs, instruction, esteem or criticism of conduct, and worldviews (Okpewho 1983: 24, John 2014).