METAPHORS IN NIGERIAN ENGLISH: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC OVERVIEW

2016

This study adopted the tenets of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson in the analysis of selected political speeches of Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo (OBJ henceforth), Musa Yar’Adua (UMY henceforth) and Goodluck Jonathan (GEJ henceforth). The study discovered that metaphor is a great resource in political communication and that the speakers drew from source domains that represent social, economic and political situations and conditions in Nigeria essentially as conflict and war, building, disease, journey, illness, games and sports, and as a family. The study considers ways in which metaphors facilitate the discourse on Nigerian nationhood and how the speakers exploit metaphorical expressions in communicating their ideologies to Nigerians.

IOSR Journals , 2019

This study is anchored on Odebunmi‘s Pragmatic contextual model and Lakoff and Johnson‘s theory of conceptual metaphor. Various intellectual arguments have been advanced as to the role of metaphor as an important pragmatic agent. The study is a corpus based pragmatic analysis which employs the quantitative method of data selection and analysis. The study employs the antconc digital software for data selection. As a result of the context sensitive nature of this study, ten lexical items were selected from the corpora and fed into the antconc concordance software. The results were then analysed based on their respective context of occurrence. This study is informed by the fact that presidential inaugural speeches as an aspect of political discourse have continued to attract academic interest. This is not unconnected with the fact that this category of discourse is actually employed to achieve certain communicative objectives. The presidential inaugural speech of UmaruYar‘ Adua constituted the body of the data for the research. The text was subjected to a pragmametaphoric analysis. The study discovered a rich deployment of lexical items whose pragmatic and metaphoric import can only be understood when the frequency and context of occurrence are considered. The study established that the president employed pragmatic metaphors to exemplify the past, the present and the anticipated future of the country. The choice of metaphors as a pragmatic tool in describing the state of the Nigerian nation both in terms of the economy and socio-political situations of the country is equally established. The study established the use of developmental metaphor to appreciate the contributions of certain institutions to the achievements recorded across the country; historical metaphor is equally employed in describing the historical antecedents of the country as well as the effects on the Nigerian body polity, evaluative metaphor which evaluates the state of the Nigerian nation. Summarily, the study established that the metaphors used in the inaugural speeches are a function of Nigeria‘s socio-political, economic and religious context.

2011

This study employs a cognitive linguistics approach, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) to investigate bilingual conceptual representation. The study analyses the metaphorical and metonymic expressions commonly used among Akan-English bilinguals in Ghana to talk about different aspects of two basic emotion concepts (ANGER and FEAR) when they speak English. On the one hand, findings from psycholinguistic research on the nature of the bilingual mental lexicon appear somehow inconclusive. On the other hand, cognitive linguistics research on human mental representation tends to focus on evidence from native/monolingual populations. Consequently, this study combines methods from the two related fields of research to explore the nature of the bilingual conceptual representation. In other words, the study analyses bilingual figurative language in order to test two psycholinguistics claims about bilingual conceptual representation. In order to do this, the study includes a cross-linguistic/cr...

Creative Artist: A Journal of Theatre and Media Studies, 2015

New language varieties are evolving across the globe. One example of such varieties is youth language. This paper explores the youth language used by young people of Igbo in South-eastern Nigeria. The Igbo youth language is characterized by extensive use of metaphors. Young people utilize metaphors to express the mechanics of sexual activities and their gratifying appeal. They utilize lexically and contextually driven sexually explicit codes to conceptualize and reconstruct sex and sexual relations within their social universe and group’s dynamics. The study is rooted in Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) which reveals that metaphor is a systematic cognitive device used in the understanding of certain abstract concepts through the application of concrete ones. The study establishes the existence of conceptual metaphors in the language of Igbo youth. The young people use sexual metaphors to structure their experience of women, men and sex in terms of status/...

Sociolinguistic Studies , 2021

The purpose of this Special Issue is to expand our understanding of conceptual metaphors in six of Ghana's Indigenous languages: Asante-Twi, Gonja, Likpakpaln, Mfantse, Nzema, and Safaliba. The authors bring new knowledge to the international community from these understudied languages, which may become inaccessible in the not too distant future, particularly those from oral sources, given Ghana's political embrace of neoliberal global flows of people, goods, and information which expands the reaches of language shift. Nevertheless, the specific metaphor data from the languages in this Special Issue represent the first preliminary examples of documentation and hence are of foundational significance, as the data generate new understandings.

Metaphor is an important figure of speech copiously deployed in political discourse. In this study, we adopted the framework of Charteris-Black's (2004) Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) which derives from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).This framework is interested in exploring the implicit intentions of language users, the ideological configurations and the hidden power relations within socio-political and cultural contexts. It captures the ideological and conceptual nature of metaphor, and transmits truth alive into the hearts of the people by passion. The thrust of this study is the identification, analysis and interpretation of the ideological and conceptual metaphors in the speeches we studied that create a particular linguistic style, conceptualize the speakers' experiences and transmit their ideologies for rhetoric and argumentation purposes. The corpus of this study is limited to the political speeches of Brigadier Sani Abacha in 1984 and 1993, General Ibrahim Babangida in 1985 and 1993, M.K.O. Abiola in 1993 and 1994, and Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in 2013. The study reveals that the speakers use metaphors as tools to enact power and wield influence on their audience. There is further the use of metaphors for the purpose of argumentation thereby promoting self-ideologies and power asymmetric. Furthermore, the study shows that the speakers in the speeches we analysed use metaphors as a strategy to identify with the people so as to create a bond between them. Finally, our speakers use metaphors to manipulate their audience both mentally and conceptually, polarize between them and the conceived enemies, and dominate their audience; and conceal and conceptualize experience in order to reframe realities to suit their interests.

It becomes nearly a norm that when recipients of metaphor belong to a different cultural enterprise, its reading can be significantly fashioned by the sum of the cultural considerations of its interpreters. Following this, what triggers my intellectual concern, is whether the option of intercultural easiness in metaphor comprehension is germane to the scale metaphors are entrenched in physical experiences. The present research has been in reality the immediate corollary of unprompted observations of the manner students interpret metaphors, more particularly those reportedly universal through relying heavily on their mother tongue’s reference frame by way of translation, getting sometimes to a distinct construal. In this sprit, this paper examines the way five English metaphors, ranging from notionally cross cultural ones to culture dependent, are interpreted by fifty Algerian students. In view of that, the works of (1) Lakoff and Johnson (1980; 1999) and Lakoff and Turner (1989), (2) Dobrzynska (1995), (3) Mandelblit(1995), and (3)Boers (2003) altogether sustain the platform on which this paper is founded. Within the confinement of this research, I come to conclude that the comprehension of English metaphors in default of their source context is fundamentally processed by Algerian students having recourse to their mother tongue’s frame exploiting it to its fullest potential, and recruiting the metaphors at work in this target context by way of translation, in the midst of many conceptual and linguistic mismatches. Surprisingly enough, even those physically entrenched metaphors, supposedly universal, are laden with cultural peculiarities. Eventually, the role of the source context is chief in piloting metaphors through the fitting readings. At this juncture, the recipients, after passing by conceptual ambiguities, have the opportunity to fine-tune their interpretations in an attempt to bring them off effectively.

This study is a comparative textual analysis of use of metaphors in three literary genres of prose, poetry and drama as represented by one literary work each. The metaphors were identified, isolated from the text, listed down and classified according to their respective categories as guided by Newmark's (1988) classification of metaphors, namely; adapted metaphors, ii) Cliché metaphors, iii) Dead metaphors, iv) Original metaphors, v) recent metaphors, and vi) Stock or standard metaphors. The overall findings indicate the predominance of poetry, as represented by 'Song of Lawino', over other genres in the use of metaphors though not so in similes. The comparative distribution showed that there was rich diversity in and unequal distribution of metaphors both across the genres and across the metaphor types. Cliché Metaphors dominated above all others in the three texts, with the play towering above all else. As for the similes, adapted Metaphors dominated all other with a total of 90 occurrences with the poetry taking the lead. At structural level, as guided by Tarasova's (1975) typology of metaphors, the findings indicated that there was predominance of metaphors serving the predication function over those with an identifying function, notably in the drama, while structurally, word category was more dominant followed by propositions.

Metaphor use is characterised by conceptual variation that can be explained with reference to culture-specific discourse traditions. Cognitively oriented metaphor analyses that are interested in cultural relativity have so far concentrated mainly on the production side of metaphors and their misunderstanding by ESL learners. This study, by contrast, focuses on variation in metaphor interpretation across groups of ESL/EFL users from 31 cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Its data consist of a questionnaire survey, administered in 10 countries, which gave students the task of applying the metaphor of the “body politic” to one’s home nation. The results show systematic variation between four interpretation models for this metaphor, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY, NATION AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, NATION AS PART OF SELF and NATION AS PART OF INTERNATIONAL/GLOBAL STRUCTURE, as well as some evidence of elaborate polemical and/or political elaboration. The two main versions, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY and NATION AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, were represented across all cohorts but exhibited opposite frequency patterns across Chinese v. Western cohorts, with the former favouring GEOBODY-based, the latter functional interpretations. This finding and the evidence of elaborate metaphor interpretations lead to culture-specific motivations of variation in metaphor interpretation (as well as in metaphor production), specifically with regard to the frequency and distribution patterns of source concepts. Metaphor interpretation analysis can thus contribute to a cognitive metaphor analysis in general and especially to “cultural linguistics” approach to metaphor.

2017

Studies on metaphor usage in political discourse have focused on its rhetoric and conceptual relevance in cognition, leaving out its ideological essence. The foregoing results in underestimating the discourse value and implications of politically motivated metaphors in national politics. This study examines select campaign speeches of two presidential aspirants in Nigeria to determine their choice of metaphors and to comment on their perceived implications for Nigerian politics. Four campaign speeches of the Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressive Congress (APC) presidential aspirants were collected from their respective official websites. A collapse of Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Chateris-Black's Critical Metaphor Theory is appropriated for a critical examination of the derived metaphors. The conceptual metaphors in the text encapsulate two politically motivated ideologies: the supremacist ideology which is expressed as THE NATION IS A PERSON and the sacrificial ideology which indicates that LEADERHIP IS A SACRED RESPONSIBITY. These conceptual metaphors are expressed via sentences in the active voice which are preponderantly used in the text. The study shows that some Nigerian politicians advocate virtually the same ideology-the nation first. Thus, a critical study of metaphors in political speeches provides insight on Nigeria politics.