The English Tone Phrase and the Rising Nucleus in Nigerian English (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Realisation of the Rising Tone in Nigerian English
Journal of English Language and Literature, 2017
Nigerian English differs significantly from British English with the obvious disparity in the use of the rising tone and the meanings associated with it. This paper analyses the realization of the rising tone and the extent to which its use in Nigerian English differs from that in British English. Recorded utterances and spontaneous conversations were collected and analysed. A list of conversations got from O'Connor and Arnold (1987) were administered to fifty subjects whose responses were recorded and examined. The tones were analysed to show how the rising tone is used in Popular Nigerian English (PNE) to achieve pragmatic effect in communication. The result showed significant differences in how PNE and BE speakers use the rising tone, how they associate meanings to it, and how the pattern of the rising contrast.
Tone Nature of Nigerian English An Acoustic Analysis - AJHCER.Vol15.No
Afropolitan Journal, 2024
Abstract Many research on tone in Nigerian English dwelt around Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages. This work acoustically analyzed tone in Nigerian English (NE) focusing on some other Nigerian indigenous languages. The intention is to investigate spoken English of other speakers of Nigerian Indigenous languages and to add to the existing data on tone in Nigerian English. The study is based on the corpus gathered from twenty (20) respondents made up of final year undergraduates, Masters of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy students taken from two Universities in Nigeria. The respondents major in English language, and they fall into variety lll of Banjo’s(1971) classification. This study adopts Metrical Phonology as its theoretical framework, and itemploys perceptual and acoustic methods of data analysis. The findings reveal that majority of the respondents realized the weak syllables in again /әˈgein/, magnet /ˈmægnɪt/, tested /ˈtestɪd/with high tone, as against the pronunciation of the “Control” who speaks the Standard British English (SBE). Acoustically, the spectral slides show that the articulatory quality of sounds realized by the respondents are heavy and thick which indicates the prosodic quality of the first acquired language of the respondents. It was discovered that the respondents used longer time to realize some syllables compare to that of the Control. This study concludes that elements of Nigerian indigenous languages found in Nigerian spoken English is evidence that the variety of Nigerianspoken English has the nature of tone language. This corroborates Gut, (2002); Udofot, (2007) and Fajobi (2012). Keywords: Tone, Pronunciation, Nigerian Spoken English, Nigerian Indigenous Languages, Syllable
International Journal of Linguistics Studies
Although scholarly attention has been drawn to the stress correlates of the sub-varieties of Educated Nigerian English (ENigE) without a conclusion on modes of determining stress patterns in the varieties, therefore, the current study provides insights into the stress correlates in the sub-variety. Two regional sub-varieties of ENigE, namely: Educated Yoruba English (EYE) and Educated Igbo English (EIE), are compared to describe the correlates of the stress of ENigE. Data were collected from twenty (20) university degree graduates (ten men and ten women). The participants have Igbo and Yoruba as their first languages (L1), satisfying Udofot’s 2004 classification for an educated variety of NigE. The participants read the prepared phrases and compounds to acoustic cues for stress placement in educated NigE. Acoustic signals such as pitch, intensity and duration are employed. The thresholds of significant difference are set at p<.05. This allows me to explore the interactions betwee...
The effect of the rising tone on the meaning of “Now” and “Ehen” in Nigerian Spoken English
International Journal of English Research , 2017
Nigerian English is one among the numerous existing varieties of English around the world. It has been observed to possess specific peculiarities in the use of intonation, and in other aspects of English Language like semantics and grammar. It differs significantly from the RP variety with the obvious disparity in the use of the rising tone and the meanings associated with it. This is a study to show the connection between tone use and semantics. English words may have the same or slightly different meanings all around the world but it is obvious that meanings could vary even with the choice of tone - rising or falling. In this study, spontaneous speeches of thirty Nigerians were collected over a period of five years. The subjects included those who have completed their secondary school, university graduates, lecturers and professionals from various fields. Part of the data was collected from the statements of actors on Nigerian movies. The speeches of few elementary school students who are believed to come from well-to-do homes, have educated parents and attend good schools were also analysed. At the end of the study, the result shows that “now” has different meanings in Nigerian Spoken English. When it is said with a rising tone, the meaning does not always indicate time. ‘Ehen’ is not an English word but when said with a rising tone, its meaning is close to that of the rising ‘now’ (when not indication time). Sometimes, the two words co-occur in the same sentence.
Phrasal Stress Patterns in Educated Igbo and Yoruba Accents of English
Journal of the English Scholars’ Association of Nigeria, 2020
There is a growing interest in the geo-tribal peculiarities of Nigerian English. However, not much has been done to account for the similarities and differences that characterise phrasal stress patterns in educated Igbo and Yoruba accents of Nigerian English. This scarce attention compels a comprehensive study of the phrasal stress patterns of educated Igbo and Yoruba English in order to discuss how these geo-tribal Nigerian accents of English are related or different from Standard British English, which serves as the normative Standard for them. A specially prepared text, which was read by sixty (60) educated Igbo and Yoruba speakers of English was analysed perceptually, theoretically and statistically. Descriptive statistics of simple percentage using SPSS was employed to calculate the occurrences of tokens and chi-square was used to check the levels of significance between the phrasal stress patterns in Educated Igbo English (EIE), Educated Yoruba English (EYE) and SBE at 0.05. Optimality theory serves as the theoretical framework for this study. Sound Forge and Praat were used for processing the speech files and the acoustic analysis respectively. The findings show that 70.45% of educated Igbo and 80.95% of educated Yoruba speakers of English assigned prominence to the leftmost lexical item for noun phrases (satisfying LHR), while 70% of educated Igbo and Yoruba speakers of English assigned prominence to the main verb in verb phrase constructions, which conforms to SBE. The study concludes that the patterns of phrasal stress assignment in EIE and EYE are significantly different from SBE, albeit there are certain similarities.
THE FALL-RISE IN NIGERIAN ENGLISH INTONATION
Convergence: English & Nigerian languages , 2007
A native-speaker-like use of English stress and intontatiion patterns has been called 'the final hurdle' which the majority of speakers of English as a second language 'never manage to cross' (Banjo 1976), and this is true of Nigerian speakers of English. This paper appears to be the first published paper to have an exclusive focus on the incidence in Nigerian English of a particular intonation pattern, namely the fall-rise. it shows that the fall-rise, so common in British and American English, occurs much less frequently in Nigerian English, and the one-syllable type occurs hardly at all. The paper also discusses whether or not the non-use of the fall-rise results in the loss of important communication possibilities.
In view of the emerging peculiarity of Nigerian English as one of the nonnative Englishes, especially at the level of phonology, this study investigates the English intonation tunes employed by Nigerian speakers of English for Noun Phrase Subjects and Clause-Modifying Adverbials. Forty television reporters in Nigeria were used as subjects. The intonation analysis of their reports recorded on air, using simple percentage calculation, reveals that, in both instances, there is a preponderance of rise tune as against fall-rise preferred in British English. They obtained 89.3%, and 87.9% rise tune respectively. The study concluded that the overwhelming preference for rise tune in Nigerian English in these syntactic structures is not unconnected with the fact that many Nigerian speakers of English have difficulty in producing complex intonation tunes due to unavailability of this tune type in their linguistic repertoire. It is hoped that this study shall widen the scope of research on the characterisation and description of Nigerian English.
Stress Assignments of Loanwords among Nigerian Speakers of English
Journal of linguistics and education research, 2022
Nigerian English like a variety of world Englishes has received scholarly investigations at the segmental and suprasegmental levels. At the suprasegmental level, studies on the major varieties of Nigerian English have identified the characteristic nature of stress assignment and interactions, but little or no research has explored stress assignment on loanwords in Nigerian English. The study examines the stress placements on loanwords among educated Igbo and Yoruba speakers of English. A well-prepared text was read by sixty (60) educated Igbo and Yoruba speakers of English, and Daniel Jones' 8th Edition Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary served as a baseline. The study uses Praat 6.0 to ascertain the degree of prominence of each syllable in the tokens among the respondents (dependent and control). The samples are analyzed using the metrical theory of stress for theoretical relevance (Liberman, 1975). [19] Findings revealed that the stress patterns of educated Igbo and Yoruba speakers of English in loanwords are 65% and 70% (respectively) closer to British English (hence, BrE). The study showed that educated Igbo and Yoruba speakers of English preferably stress the second syllable regardless of what is obtainable among the native speakers.
Syllable phonotactics in educated Nigerian spoken English
2016
There exists a dearth of corpus driven research on syllable phonotactics of Educated Nigerian Spoken English (ENSE). This study is geared towards filling this gap. It is a descriptive research project into the consonant cluster phonotactics of the spoken English mono-morphemic and polysyllabic words of educated Nigerians. The research considers the various reduction modes whether by insertion, substitution or elision (deletion) and the phonetic environments in which these phenomena thrive in Educated Nigerian Spoken English. The data comprised part of a corpus drawn from the International Corpus of English (ICE), Nigeria data, namely the broadcast interviews (b_int), broadcast news (b_new) and the unscripted speeches (un_sp). The ICE Nigeria data was compiled between 2010 and 2012 at the University of Augsburg and the University of Münster, Germany. The (One million) ICE Nigeria corpus is available online and accessible to interested linguists across the globe. 20 Nigerian postgradu...
The functional motivation of the High Tone Syllable in Yoruba
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 1999
The High Tone Syllable (HTS) in Yoruba has mostly been analyzed in purely syntactic terms äs a subject marker or, more recently, äs an agreement marker which occupies the position of Tense (Dechaine 1993). We would like to show that this type of analysis systematically fails to accountfor a number of properties of the HTS such äs its incompatibility with the negation marker (k)o 'not' and with Ist and 2nd person non-emphatic pronouns. We claim that these properties can be explained if the High Tone Syllable is defined äs an operator which actualizes or validates the relationship between a predicate and a subject within a state of affairs. 1. Remi Sonaiya thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the research fellowship award which enabled her to carry out the work reported here while spending a sabbatical year at the