Asian Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies

Intuitive response is an antagonistic phenomenon in the stylistic analysis of a literary work. This is given the fact that stylistics relies on tangible linguistic evidence to unfold the writer’s meaning or the communicative purposes of an author. This paper however, examined objectivity in Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’. The study employed the different linguistic levels of stylistic analysis as a framework. They are: Syntax, Semantics, Lexis, Graphology and phonology levels of analysis. It is believed that this work will serve as a division of labour between a stylistic analyst and a literary critic.

In development, children often use gestures to communicate before they use words. The question is whether these gestures merely precede language development or are fundamentally tied to it. I examined four children making the transition from single words to two-word combinations and found that gesture had a tight relation to the children’s lexical and syntactic development. First, a great many of the lexical items that each child produced initially in gesture later moved to that child’s verbal lexicon. Second, children who were first to produce gesture-plus-word combinations conveying two elements in a proposition were also first to produce two-word combinations. Changes in gesture also predict changes in language, suggesting that early gesture may facilitate future developments in language.

The purpose of this paper was toe stablish a list of the most frequent semantically non-compositional prepositional expressions for EFL undergraduates, who need to read English academic texts in their fields of study. Made up of a preposition and a noun phrase, prepositional expressions usually function as an adjective or adverb. In this research, high-frequency prepositional expressions were retrieved from the 112 million-word academic section of the 560-million-token Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which contains approximately 100 academic magazines and journals. In consideration of widespread use, the researcher applied a series of selection criteria (viz. frequency, meaningfulness, well-formedness and non-compositionality), while compiling the list. A total of 220 semantically non-compositional prepositional phrases of 2 to 5 words were chosen and they accounted for 1.02% of the total words in the COCA-academic. As with other individual wordlists, this prepositional expressions list may serve as a reference for English for General Purposes as well as English for Academic Purposes syllabi.

Underdevelopment of most African countries in spite of their riches is informed by interest, recklessness, and greed played by dishonest and corrupt politicians; neither religion nor ethnic geographies, because other nations like the United States of America and Switzerland exist as entities irrespective of their differences. That is why, behind the facade of democracy there are vultures that confiscate and share the countries resources into their pockets as portrayed in Parliament of Vultures by Emeka Nwabueze. Most Nigerian politicians lack conscience. Consequently, the once giant of Africa-Nigeria becomes a laughing stock while her neglected youths take to kidnapping and killing. Dramatic art, as a close observer, x-rays the society to reveal to the masses the mysteries that surround them. They disclose to the ignorant masses the impending danger created by unscrupulous and perverted politicians and suggest ways of reformation. Essentially, this paper attempts the analysis of literary influence on politics through the visionary windows provided by Emeka Nwabueze. Politics is a social experience- and social experience is to a literary artist as air is to life. Events within the writer’s environment provide source materials for his imagination with which he creates enduring works of art. To this end, this paper tilts to sociological approach in the analyses of the play. It deduces and submits decisively that literature with its moral force holds much power to sway, persuade or induce, therefore cohere with politics for development of any society.

Literature mirrors society and the two cannot be disconnected. Mine Boy and A Walk in the Night are two tools used by South African writers cum literary critics from other parts of the globe to depict and mirror South African society during Apartheid. This study pinpoints the interface between two protagonists in two fictional prose writings in South African Literature. It is a literary analysis which throws light on Xuma in Peter Abrahams’ novel Mine Boy majored to Michael Adonis in Alex la Guma’s novella A Walk in the Night. Comparative approach was used to explore common and different traits of the two central characters in tandem and to answer two questions such as why one becomes violent and why one engages in a fight for light and against human right. It was found that Adonis is a more violent and bottled with anger character unlike Xuma who is engaged in a struggle for freedom along his stay in the south from the north.