Browsing by Author "Alphonce, C."

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    The linguistic landscape of urban Tanzania: An account of the language of billboards and shop-signs in district headquarters
    (United States International University-Africa, 2018) Lusekelo, A.; Alphonce, C.
    In examination of language use in public domains in Tanzania, this paper articulates the state of multilingualism in the composition of signposts in district headquarters countrywide. The paper challenges the suggestion that Tanzania is primarily a Kiswahili speaking country. It also challenges the suggestion that Tanzania consists of English as an official language with limited domains of use. While it is claimed that ethnic community languages are a vehicular of communication in domains related to informal settings and homesteads, the paper argues for the presence of in linguistic landscape. Findings from five regions of Tanzania, namely, Arusha, Iringa, Kagera, Manyara and Mbeya indicate the dominance of bilingual Kiswahili-English signposts in urban centres. Further, findings display dominance of English-only signposts, which is a good testimony that this public domain makes use of English rather than Kiswahili. Furthermore, on the basis of font-size and font-colour, English words turn more prominent than Kiswahili words. Nonetheless, on the basis of word counts, Kiswahili is significantly used in bilingual signposts than English. Thus, this article concludes that the importance of English surpasses Kiswahili in the language use in bilingual signposts in urban Tanzania.
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    The significance of word order variation in Iraqw sentences
    (DUCE, 2021) Alphonce, C.
    This paper investigates the significance of word order variation in Iraqw, a Southern Cushitic language found in Tanzania. The paper is based on the communicative approach in analysing the variation of word order beyond the grammatical point of view. By scrutinizing the syntax of Iraqw, this paper hopes to make a welcome contribution to the comparative syntax of Cushitic languages scattered across the northern sub-Saharan area (Sudan, e.g., Beja; Ethiopia, e.g., Oromo; Somalia, e.g., Somali; Eritrea, e.g., Afar; and Tanzania, e.g., Gorwa, Alagwa, and Burunge). The primary data presented in this paper were collected from a sample of Iraqw native speakers living in Mbulu. Supplementary data came from Iraqw documentary materials. The findings revealed new generalizations about Iraqw syntax. Firstly, although the basic word order of the Iraqw sentence is SOV1, this order is not always fixed in that it is affected by the communicative needs of the communicator. Secondly, grammatical agreement between the arguments and the verb enables flexible positioning of elements to reflect their information status in the discourse. Thus, either the subject or object and the verb can be re-ordered. Thirdly, the re-ordering of elements follows the rule that communication always develops from what is known (topic) to what is unknown (comment) in the context. The topic thus tends to occur in sentence-initial position, and the comment is placed in sentence-final position. It could be concluded that permutation of elements in the sentences is therefore determined by pragmatic and informational criteria.
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    The structure of the Iraqw noun phrase
    (Language Association of Eastern Africa, 2022) Alphonce, C.
    The structure of the noun phrase (NP) is demonstrated to differ among languages. Albeit studies that paid attention on Southern Cushitic languages in general and Iraqw in particular, their contribution is selective to the general grammar of the language while the structure of the NP is scarcely described. This study contributes to the description of the language through an empirical explanation of the elements and the morphosyntactic properties of the NP in the language. It describes the orders of the elements, their co-occurrence, and constraints to illuminate the structure of the NP of the language. It draws on the data collected through elicitation and text collection. The qualitative analysis of the data obtained revealed that Iraqw NP demonstrates four different peculiar characteristics (i) the Iraqw NP is constituted of the head noun with or without dependents. The dependents of the NP are possessives, demonstratives, indefinite markers, the distributive determiner, adjectives, quantifiers, numerals, genitive constructions, and relative clauses. The dependents follow the head noun, except the distributive determiner, which precedes the head noun. (ii) The attested order of the dependents is N>[Poss>Dem/Indef]>[Gen>Adj>Num/Quant]>[Rel]. (iii) Possessive, demonstrative, and indefinite markers are non-lexical words that occur immediately after the head noun. (iv) In spontaneous speech, the NP with up to three dependents is preferred.
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    A syntactic analysis of relative clauses in the Southern Cushitic language, Iraqw
    (DUCE, 2018) Alphonce, C.
    The article offers an account of the syntax of relative clauses in Iraqw, a Southern Cushitic language of the Afroasiatic Micropylum spoken in northern Tanzania. It examines the structure of relative clauses, relativization strategies, relative markers and noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (AB). Using the descriptive research design, coupled with the qualitative approach, data were generated through elicitation. 8 informants were sampled through snowball technique to inform the study. Text collection was also done to identify relative clauses. The analysis of the data obtained revealed the following: (i) Iraqw displays postnominal relative clause, the feature that is common in most of the world and African languages; (ii) Iraqw speakers typically use overt morphological relative markers, namely demonstrative suffixes (-i?/-ka??,-si?ng, -qa??1 and -da??), and independent construct cases (oo, ar and awa) and covert phonological marker, the construct suffix (marked into the head noun by high tone); (iii) the language uses the gap strategy for relativization of nearly all grammatical relations, except the object of comparison, which uses resumptive pronoun; (iv) the direct object of ditransitive verbs uses both gapping strategy and resumptive pronoun; (v) Iraqw can relativize all six grammatical relations on the accessibility hierarchy, although the object of comparison is hardly relativizable.
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    Toponyms and identity in Hanang’District: Their origin and meaning
    (Sciendo, 2019) Alphonce, C.; Sane, E.
    This article is centred on place identity in Hanang’ District. Informed by the literature about place identity, the study describes the origin and the sociolinguistic meaning of place names following the analysis of 110 names that were collected from different places around Hanang’ District. Snowball sampling was appropriately used to obtain 15 informants for face-to-face interviews. Our analysis revealed that many place names in Hanang’ are predominantly from Datooga language and a few from Kiswahili, Nyaturu, Iraqw, Alagwa and Maasai. The qualitative analysis of the names revealed that the names have informative content deriving from landscape features, plants, people, animals and names of birds, events, activities, and the behaviour of some objects in the place. Sometimes, post-modification is done for descriptive specification. This is to say that marked geographical features and events in a particular place characterise the place in Hanang’. Therefore, place names in Hanang’ serve to describe the people’s history, beliefs, or label important features. There is a trend of shift in a number of place names in Hanang’ as a result of contact with the Bantu speakers. This has, consequently, contributed to the replacement of some indigenous sounds by the Kiswahili sounds that contributed to the loss and/or hybridization of names in terms of spelling and pronunciation