Toponymy in Igbomina Yoruba Language: An Anthropological Linguistic Perspective

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Anthony Ayodele OLAOYE

<p>Toponymy, the study of place names, is an interesting geo-linguistic phenomenon in the ethnography of the Igbomina Yoruba people of Kwara State, Nigeria. The author is interested in the anthropological linguistic aspects of the topic. The research question is: what is the anthropo-linguistic significance of toponyms? Through the interview method of data elicitation, the author gathered information from Igbomina Community kings (Oba), Opinion leaders and custodian of public places, village squares and local museums. The study reveals that place names are very strong and reliable indices or records of people’s historical origin, their genetic relationships, their culture and philosophy. The author then classifies toponyms according to their anthropo –linguistic functions. The following typology of place names, were identified and analyzed: personal, place names, communal, ascriptive, descriptive, honorific, sacred/religious, taboo, etymological and general place names. It was found that toponyms are diachronic, geo-linguistic date marks which could be used in tracking down the history and age of a community, their migration and settlement, their language and dialect variation, the history of language change and language reconstruction, including language documentation.</p>

Author(s):  
Claire Bowern

I survey the history of work in historical morphology and recent advances in the study of morphological change. Morphology has played an important role in historical linguistics, from arguments concerning constraints on the regularity of sound change, to language classification. I describe how inflectional morphology interacts with other linguistic systems in language change (particularly phonology and syntax), and discuss arguments regard the autonomy of morphology change. Morphology has been considered quite stable in language, which would appear to make it a valuable source of evidence for the reconstruction of remote genetic relationships; however, while several families have been proposed where the argument relies on morphological categories alone, such evidence does not constitute a reliable argument for relationship in the absence of cognate material.


Author(s):  
Kathryn M. de Luna

This chapter uses two case studies to explore how historians study language movement and change through comparative historical linguistics. The first case study stands as a short chapter in the larger history of the expansion of Bantu languages across eastern, central, and southern Africa. It focuses on the expansion of proto-Kafue, ca. 950–1250, from a linguistic homeland in the middle Kafue River region to lands beyond the Lukanga swamps to the north and the Zambezi River to the south. This expansion was made possible by a dramatic reconfiguration of ties of kinship. The second case study explores linguistic evidence for ridicule along the Lozi-Botatwe frontier in the mid- to late 19th century. Significantly, the units and scales of language movement and change in precolonial periods rendered visible through comparative historical linguistics bring to our attention alternative approaches to language change and movement in contemporary Africa.


Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen ◽  
Francisco Apurinã ◽  
Sidney Facundes

Abstract This article looks at what origin stories teach about the world and what kind of material presence they have in Southwestern Amazonia. We examine the ways the Apurinã relate to certain nonhuman entities through their origin story, and our theoretical approach is language materiality, as we are interested in material means of mediating traditional stories. Analogous to the ways that speakers of many other languages who distinguish the entities that they talk to or about, the Apurinã make use of linguistic resources to establish the ways they interact with different entities. Besides these resources, the material means of mediating stories is a crucial tool to narrate the worlds of humans and nonhumans. Storytelling requires material mediation, and a specific context of plant substances. It also involves community meeting as a space of trust in order to become a communicative practice and effectively introduce the history of the people. Our sources are ethnography, language documentation, and autoethnography.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
E A Villegas Vázquez ◽  
J C Leyva Chipol ◽  
K C Cervantes Gómez ◽  
S I Valencia Almeida ◽  
F G Márquez Celedonio ◽  
...  

Abstract Introduction Within the current context in our Mexico, major states of violence for women have been manifested on a daily basis without having any more reason than being female. Veracruz is the first place in feminicides in Mexico with a rate of 3.44 per 100 thousand women. Research question: What is the intensity of the violence committed and victimization in the courtship of young students of the Upper Middle level in the Veracruz - Boca del Río area, according to their gender? Material and Methods A cross-sectional, prospective, observational and analytical study was carried out from December to February 2020. Middle-high school students from the Veracruz-Boca del Río region were included, who had a dating relationship and were excluded those who did not accept to participate. The variable “violence committed and victimization in courtship” was quantified with the CADRI instrument. The spss v22 software was used, Sudent's T was calculated for independent samples, with statistical significance p &lt; 0.05. Results 741 students were included. There was a prevalence of violence committed of 86.2% and victimization of 89.2%. Of the total number of students who suffered and committed violence, women occupy 66.3% and 66.7% respectively. There is a difference in the intensity of violence between women and men in verbal-emotional violence (4.5 ± 4.2 vs. 3.4 ± 3.4), physical violence (0.6 ± 1.3 vs. 0.36 ± 3.6) and violence in general (5.7 ± 5.7 vs 4.3 ± 4.8) (p &lt; 0.05), while victimization scores do not make a difference between both genders (p &gt; 0.05). The history of psychological and sexual violence in previous relationships, as well as sexual violence in daily life are more frequent in the female sex (p &lt; 0.05) Conclusions The violence generated is more intense in women, however, they also have a history of having suffered violence more frequently in previous relationships and in their daily lives. Key messages Women suffer more aggressions at different stages of their lives, which may increase the risk to tolerate aggressions or be more aggressive or suffer mental health problems. We must study if the violence generated by women is a response to a previous aggression from their boyfriend.


1961 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 258
Author(s):  
Elliott V. K. Dobbie
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (10) ◽  
pp. 2977-2981
Author(s):  
Merve Uca ◽  
Kenan Sivrikaya ◽  
Canatan Taşdemir

Aim: The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of exercise and smoking history of the COVID-19 patients on their recovery course and time. Methods: In this respect, as the data source, we observed a total of 310 patients, 176 males 134 females, who tested positive for COVID-19, had no chronic disease, and received inpatient or outpatient treatment. The patients also filled out a personal information form covering their demographic background, including smoking and exercise history. All participants received favipiravir as the standard medication, and their symptoms and the durations of these symptoms were evaluated using the focus group interview method. We analyzed the data on SPSS 17.0 utilizing Independent T-Test, one-way ANOVA, Chi-Square, and Pearson Correlation tests. Results: The results revealed significant differences between former smokers and those who never smoked and quitted smoking by recovery time (p<0.01). There were also significant differences between those doing exercises actively and those who never did or quitted exercise (p<0.01). Again, with regard to recovery time, we found significant differences between groups that quitted exercise in different periods (p<0.05) and between those with different weights (p<0.05). In addition, we reached smoking cessation time and exercise history had positive relationships with recovery time. Conclusion: Considering the results, we concluded that non-smoking and exercise had a positive impact on avoiding adverse effects of the COVID-19 disease. Keywords: Covid-19, exercise, smoking, sports, acute respiratory syndrome


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Zehentner

Abstract This paper discusses the role of cognitive factors in language change; specifically, it investigates the potential impact of argument ambiguity avoidance on the emergence of one of the most well-studied syntactic alternations in English, viz. the dative alternation (We gave them cake vs We gave cake to them). Linking this development to other major changes in the history of English like the loss of case marking, I propose that morphological as well as semantic-pragmatic ambiguity between prototypical agents (subjects) and prototypical recipients (indirect objects) in ditransitive clauses plausibly gave a processing advantage to patterns with higher cue reliability such as prepositional marking, but also fixed clause-level (SVO) order. The main hypotheses are tested through a quantitative analysis of ditransitives in a corpus of Middle English, which (i) confirms that the spread of the PP-construction is impacted by argument ambiguity and (ii) demonstrates that this change reflects a complex restructuring of disambiguation strategies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 122 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Matthew Gardner Kelly

Background/Context Dealing mostly in aggregate statistics that mask important regional variations, scholars often assume that district property taxation and the resource disparities this approach to school funding creates are deeply rooted in the history of American education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article explores the history of district property taxation and school funding disparities in California during the 19th and 20th centuries. First, the article documents the limited use of district property taxation for school funding in California and several other Western states during the 19th century, showing that the development of school finance was more complicated than standard accounts suggest. Then, the article examines how a coalition of experts, activists, and politicians worked together during the early 20th century to promote district property taxation and institutionalize the idea that the wealth of local communities, rather than the wealth of the entire state, should determine the resources available for public schooling. Research Design This article draws on primary source documents from state and regional archives, including district-level funding data from nine Northern California counties, to complete a historical analysis. Conclusions/Recommendations The history of California's district property tax suggests the need for continued research on long-term trends in school finance and educational inequality. Popular accounts minimizing the historical role of state governments in school funding obscure how public policies, not just market forces shaping property values, create funding inequalities. In turn, these accounts communicate powerful messages about the supposed inevitability of funding disparities and the responsibility of state governments to correct them. Through increased attention to long-term trends in school funding, scholars can help popular commentators and policymakers avoid assumptions that naturalize inequality and narrow the possibilities for future funding reforms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Blas Arroyo

AbstractBased on a corpus composed entirely of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, mainly private letters from the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries (c. 1960), this paper analyses the results of a variationist study on the historical evolution undergone by the Spanish modal periphrases with three distinct auxiliary verbs (haber, tener, deber). Using the heuristic tools of the comparative method, the data show that variation has been constrained by a handful of common factor groups over almost five centuries. Nonetheless, with the odd exception, these factors have conditioned each verb in a different way. Moreover, the sense of this variation changes as time goes by, with especially relevant reorganisation in the first part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, there is a notable association between these constraints and the degree of markedness and the frequency of the conditioning contexts, giving support to a usage-based approach to language change in which cognitive processes such as entrenchment play a decisive role. These data also allow a particular profile to be traced for each modal verb in the history of Spanish, in which tener and haber finally undergo a complementary distribution, whereas deber follows a different pattern. After several centuries of stagnation, tener becomes the star in the deontic firmament of spontaneous communication, diffusing abruptly as a change from below in the twentieth century, and replacing haber, which had been the unmarked variant for centuries.


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