February 2020

Tabooing insults: Why the ambivalence?

This paper examines insults, both verbal and non-verbal, on the premise that societies the world over have adopted an ambivalent attitude towards the creation and use of insult. The ambivalence argument is grounded in the sheer preponderance of both institutionalised and informal usages of verbal and non-verbal insults, through the arts mainly, as well as the tabooing regimes of insults in the same societies. The paper...

Author(s): Moses Nii-Dortey and Edward Nanbigne  

February 2020

Socio-cultural perspectives on death announcements in Ghanaian newspapers: Some sociolinguistic evidence

Death announcements are presumed to provide a socio-cultural icon for examining the society’s collective attitude towards death and dying. The present study attempts to investigate the death announcement genre in Ghana from a sociolinguistic viewpoint in order to highlight the underpinning sociocultural perspectives. To accomplish this task, the study deployed both qualitative and quantitative content analysis of...

Author(s): Afful Archibald Joseph Benjamin