GENERAL
INTRODUCTION
1.0
Introduction
The
introduction presents the reader with the research aim and objectives. It also
explains how the work will be of immense help to language study and analysis.
It shows how committed the researcher is to the accomplishment of the aim. To
do so, the discussion (chapter One) starts off with a critical view on the
background of the study, the historical background of the speakers (of Owon
Oge), sociolinguistic profile of the people as well as the genetic
classification of the Owon Oge dialect of the Arigidi cluster language.
The research carefully chose the auto
segmental phonological theory under the popular generative phonology as a
workable theoretical framework for the study as it proves to be the most
suitable. With the help of language informants in the native community (L1
speakers), and the use of the Ibadan wordlist of 400 basic items, the
researcher was also able to gather and analyse data in the language.
1.1 General
Background of the Study
Obviously,
there have been limited efforts of research works geared towards Owon Oge. Even
their history, tradition, culture, festivals, people and religion are not well
documented. This issue isn’t restricted to the socio-cultural and historic
aspect alone, no real efforts have been made towards revamping the linguistic
aspect of the people. Hence, this work will be a good point of departure for
further linguistic research works on the Owon Oge dialect and of Arigidi
cluster at large.
Owon
Oge is a dialect of Arigidi cluster spoken in the Akoko-North region of Ondo
State, Nigeria. Its native speakers are found in Oke Agbe in Oge town, Ondo
State. They can also be found in some parts in Kogi State, Nigeria. In terms of
population of speakers, the SIL website ethnologue, Owon Oge (as a dialect)
takes part of the allocated number of speakers for Arigidi cluster (SIL, 1993).
This study aims to:
- Briefly introduce the reader to the socio cultural and historical profile of the speakers.
- Showcase the phonological sound system of the language.
- Display the tonal and syllable inventories as attested in the language.
- To itemize with ample illustration the various phonological processes present in the language.
In addition to this, the research will also proffer some
recommendations for the betterment of the linguistic studies and analysis of
this language of study.
1.2 Historical
Background of the People of Oke Agbe
As stated above, native speakers of Owon Oge dialect are the
Oke Agbe people found in Akoko region of Ondo State. The people of Oke Agbe
migrated from Ile-Ife to their present location about 600 years ago. The
migration was due to the royal tussle for power in the Yoruba dynasty back
then. The people of Oke Agbe moved alongside some other tribes like Akin
poroporo.
Quite a number of the people are
literate. This is as a result of the contact with the Missionaries and the
encouraging education system generally in the South Western Nigeria.
1.3 Sociolinguistic
Profile of Oke Agbe
The people of Oke Agbe have a very rich sociolinguistic
profile just like many African people. These include their system of government
with the king as the head. The king is assisted by chiefs (each of them handles
a designated portfolio). They advice and relate with the king on governance and
policing making. Generally, their traditional policy is similar to the Yorubas.
Christianity, Islam and African
Traditional Religion (ATR) are the religions practiced within the community. A
rough estimate of the religious percentages is as follow: Christians 78%,
Muslim 20%, Traditionalists 2%.
Traditionally, the people of Oke
Agbe wear the normal Yoruba attire. The women are seen with the regular ‘iro
and buba’ outfit while the men wear the popolar ‘danshiki’. The ladies have
liberty of picking from the amazing hairstyles as observed also in the Yoruba
culture.
The economic system of Arigidi is
mainly based on agriculture. However, with the acquisition of education and
special skills, youths in the community have chosen the available white collar
jobs and other technical based professions like tailoring, vulcanizing, auto
mechanic, electrical and electronics etc.
Among their festival is annual Ere festival. It is a
two-three day grand celebration of their culture and heritage. Literally, ‘Ere’
means ‘property’. This festival is a colourful festival that attracts the
presence of all indigenes of the community both home and abroad. It is usually
staged in the month of September. The first day of the festival celebrates and
welcomes guest with the display of their tradition. The second day is tagged
‘Ogiriga day’. This day is used to display their military strength. The
warriors will be dressed in their traditional military attire with their weapon
(guns). They will entertain the guest with their war songs and movement.
According to the informant, the festival is always a remarkable one.
Traditionally,
every other notable event like marriage ceremony, naming ceremony, burial and
even coronation are in line with the conventional Yoruba customs.
1.4 Genetic
Classification
Genetic classification is a
sub-grouping of all related languages into their genetic nodes (groups of
languages in each of which one language is more closely related to the other in
that group than to any language outside the group).
Rublen
(1987 p.1) states that “the idea that groups of languages that share certain
systematic resemblance have inherited those similarities from a common origin
is the basis for genetic classification”. Worthy of note is the fact that
genetic classification is an offshoot of the theory of genesis. Genesis, then,
is derived from the word ‘gene’ (which means cell). Thus, languages are said to
be genetically related if they share certain genes (feature) in common.
In
this plight, languages of the world can be divided into certain compartment
based on striking similarities in their linguistic items. However, language
might be similar because they belong to the universal sets, this doesn’t mean
that such resemblance can be traced to common origin.
Genetic
classification makes two statements. First, it affirms that certain languages
are in fact related to each other (i.e. maintain similar ancestral relation).
Second, that it typifies how the languages are interrelated in the form of
branching diagram or nodes.
1.4.1 Genetic Classification of Owon Oge
Owon
Oge is a dialect of the Arigidi language. Just like many others, it will fall
under its mother language, Arigidi. Arigidi belongs to the category of the big
Niger-Congo language family. Niger-Congo happens to be the biggest family in Africa
sub-grouping. Below is a diagrammatic representation showing the genetic
classification of Arigidi language with some other related languages coming
from the same ancestor (i.e. Niger-Congo language family).
Atlantic-
Congo
Limba Mansoanka Mel Niger-Congo
atlantic
Volta
Congo Kru Ega
Benue-Congo B-C Plateau
Bantoid 
Akokoid Yoruboid
Arigidi
Owon oge Afa
Aje Ese etc
A map of Oke Agbe
1.5 Scope
and Organization of Study
The ultimate goal of this study is
to theorise the aspect of phonology in Owon Oge dialect. Extensive
investigation shall be made on how sounds or phonemes undergo phonological
processes. Using the auto segmental theory, it shall indicate and illustrate
how sounds interact within contiguous environment in the language.
For
this purpose, this research work has been conveniently divided into five
chapters. The first chapter, which is an introductory chapter, introduces the
reader to the general introduction or justification of the study, historical
background and the socio-cultural profile of the speakers ranging from the
marriage system of the speakers, birth and naming ceremony, educational
background, etc. Chapter one also has in its fold; scope and organization of
the study, data collection and analysis, theoretical framework. Chapter two
presents an insight to the phonological system of the language (Owon Oge)
together with the other basic phonological concepts attested in the language.
Having
carried out an inventory of the tones and the syllable structure of Owon Oge,
Chapter three then examines and accounts for the principles involved in the
arrangement of phonemes to form a syllable and to establish processes that
underlie the modification of tones before they reach their actual phonetic
forms which is the core of this research— phonology of Owon Oge.
Chapter
four takes care of the phonological processes in Owon Oge. With relevant
examples from the language of study, the chapter will display various
phonological processes attested in the language.
Chapter
five contains the conclusion, summary and recommendations, to mark the end of
the dissertation.
1.6 Theoretical
Framework
This project is theoretically
modelled according to ‘generative’ grammar, a theory propounded by Chomsky in
the 1950s. A generative grammar consists of a set of formal statements which
delimit all and only all possible structures that are part of the language in
question. The basic aim of generative linguistics is to present in a formal way
the tacit knowledge native speakers have of their language. Theories are bundles of abstract representation existing in the
linguistic repertoire of a linguist. The relevance of these theories lies in
the practical sense.
Generative Phonology is particularly
associated with the works of the American linguist, Noam Chomsky and his
followers. The joint work on phonology by Chomsky and Halle published in 1968
as ‘Sound Patterns of English’ (SPE) marked the emergence of generative
phonology as a new theory and framework of description.
Generative Phonology is an
alternative to ‘taxonomic’ or ‘classical’ phonemics. It is an ambitious attempt
to build a description of ‘English’ phonology on a transformational-generative
theory of language (Clark Yallop and Fletcher, 2007 p.129). Chomsky criticizes
the taxonomic phonologists concerned with segmentation, contrast, distribution
and biuniqueness and puts forward the view that phonological description is not
based on analytic procedures of segmentation and classification but rather a
matter of constructing the set of rules that constitute the phonological
component of a grammar.
1.7 Data
Collection
Samarin (1967 p.43) says “the kind
of corpus a field researcher obtains is determined by the purpose and the
techniques he adopts in his data collection”. The focus of this research is
largely for language description and primarily for showing oppositeness of some
utterances with a view to explaining the semantic implication of such in Owon
Oge.
The
data is meant to be collected through contact or informant method. Linguistic
data for this study were obtained by making use of proficient informants with a
vast knowledge of the language, from the native community.
1.7.1 Ibadan 400 Wordlist of Basic Items
Through
the use of the Ibadan 400 word list of basic lexical items, linguistic data
were collected. It afforded the researcher the opportunity to recognize
individual lexical items. Two language helpers were engaged both of whom are
native speakers of Owon Oge who have lived in their village for over two
decades. The data were written down and transcribed for the purpose of
analysis.
1.8 Data
Analysis
To ensure clarity, all data supplied
by the informants were accurately transcribed using the standard international
phonetic alphabets. The component word or constituent of the sentences of the
language were, as well, carefully glossed and subsequently translated.
The
data collected were strictly worked upon according to native speaker’s
rendition without any permutation modification or imposition of correctness so
as to make significant linguistic generalization about the language using the
data at hand and to typify utterances that have linguistic values.
The
process of elicitation also followed the hierarchical patterning in data
analysis thus;
DATA PATTERN OBSERVATION
HYPOTHESIS 
EXPERIMENTATION/VERIFICATION LAW/THEORY
1.9 Brief
Review of the Chosen Framework
This project is theoretically built
on the mode of Generative Grammar (G.G.). The generative approach of language
puts greater emphasis on the need for a linguistic analysis to have explanatory
power, that is, to explain adequately what the native speaker intuitively
‘knows’ about his language (Hawkins, 1984 p.22). Generative grammar’s meaning
is something like ‘the complete description of a language’, that is, what the
sounds are and how they combine, what the meaning of the words are, etc.
(Davenport and Hannahs, 2005 p.4).
Generative Phonology is particularly
associated with the works of the American linguist, Noam Chomsky and his
followers. The joint work on phonology by Chomsky and Halle published in 1968
as ‘sound patterns of English’ (SPE) marked the emergence of generative
phonology as a new theory and framework of description.
Generative Phonology is an
alternative to ‘taxonomic’ or ‘classical’ phonemics, and on the other an
ambitious attempt to build a description of ‘English’ phonology on a transformational-generative
theory of language (Clark Yallop and Fletcher, 2007 p.129). Chomsky criticizes
the taxonomic phonologists concerned with segmentation, contrast, distribution
and biuniqueness and puts forward the view that phonological description is not
based on analytic procedures of segmentation and classification but rather a
matter of constructing the set of rules that constitute the phonological
component of a grammar (P.129).
1.9.1 Motivation for Generative Phonology
Generative Phonology is a theory
which built on the insights of taxonomic phonemes even while re-modelling the
focus of phonological analysis (Oyebade, 2008 p.9). It seeks to resolve many
issues that the former theory (Taxonomic Phonemics) left unaddressed. These
include: Linguistic intuition, Foreign accents, Speech errors and Language
acquisition.
Talking about ‘Linguistic
Intuition’, the question that Generative Phonology attempt to answer is ‘how do
we know that native speakers know the sequential constraints of their own language
(Hyman, 1957 p.19)’? Chomsky and Halle (1968 p.38) affirm that knowledge of the
sequential constraints is responsible for the fact that speakers of a language
have a sense of what sounds like a native word and what does not. In other
words, speakers usually subject the sounds of foreign languages they intend
pronouncing to the phonological pattern of their own language.
A third motivation for GP is ‘speech
errors’. Oyebade (2008 p.11) reports that a large number of utterances heard by
man are defective, possibly as a result of slips of the tongue, stress, stage
fright, paralinguistic factors, psychological, as well as physiological
factors.
The final motivation of GP is
‘language acquisition’. The errors children usually make when they are
attempting to discover the phonology of their own language during the stage of
language acquisition is quite revealing.
1.9.2 Operational Levels of Generative Phonology
There are two operational
levels/representations of generative phonology: the underlying level/representation
and the surface level/representation. Between these two extremes is an
intermediary that mediates or the underlying level to generate surface
representations. The mediators are phonological rules (Oyebade, 2008 p.15).
1.9.3 The Underlying Level
The underlying level/representation
is also called the phonemic or phonological level/representation. The
underlying representation represents the native speaker’s tacit knowledge
(Chomsky and Halle, 1968 p.14) specifically propose that phonological representation
are mentally constructed by the speaker and the hearer and underlie their
actual performance in spelling and “understanding”. The underlying
representation are relatively abstract and do not manifest surface variants.
1.9.4 The Surface Level
The surface representation, on the
other hand, is the physical instatiation of underlying forms (Davenport and
Hannahs, 2005 p.122). The surface representation can be likened to performance
– the actual use of language. It is also called the phonetic level because it
deals with the physical manipulation of the organ speech to produce linguistic
forms. It is accompanied with a lot of nuances that do not characterize the
native speaker’s competence, hence, its predictableness. They are complete with
lexical items and reflect the grammatical rules of the language.
1.9.5 Phonological Rules
Since the underlying/phonemic level
differs from the surface level, phonological rules serve as mediators between
these two extremes. Phonological rules link them together. Phonological rules
are facts that are expressed in formal statements which act on the information
stored in the human’s (native speaker’s) instinct. Phonological rules that act
on underlying forms of the language to yield surface phonetic forms.
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