Intersectionality and complexity in the representation of ‘queer’ sexualities and genders in African women’s short fiction
- Authors: Du Preez, Jenny Boźena
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Sexual minority culture , Sexual minorities' writings , African fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism , Gender identity in literature , Short stories, South African , Feminism in literature , Political poetry , Eroticism in literature , Lesbianism in literature
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/119047 , vital:34697
- Description: This thesis sets out to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about queer sexualities and genders in Africa by examining their depiction in selected post-2000 African women’s short fiction written in English. Post-2000, the short story form has become the primary vehicle for queer representations by African women writers, and is thus an important development in the burgeoning body of queer literature by African writers. Broadly speaking, this literary formation can be defined as anti-homophobic, feminist and politically pragmatic. Using an intersectional lens, this thesis sets out to examine four significant strands in the political work these stories engage in. The chapters are structured around four main points of contention that have particular significance at the intersection of ‘queer’, ‘women’ and ‘Africa’. Firstly, I examine South African short stories that perform what I call queer conversations with history: imaginatively asserting a queer South African history, writing back against a male-dominated and heterosexist literary canon and, in doing so, contributing to the reimagination of the contemporary South African nation. Secondly, I analyse short stories from Africa that foreground the family, both as social formation and ideology. I examine how these stories ‘fracture’ this powerful and naturalised heterosexist concept by depicting the tensions and contradictions that queer characters experience in relation to family. Thirdly, I consider short stories from various African contexts that work to reconceptualise queer sexuality in relation to religious discourse in order to challenge homophobic and patriarchal religious authority. Finally, I examine queer, feminist erotic short stories by African women writers that challenges various colonialist, racist, sexist and lesbophobic discourses that have historically stifled the portrayal of sex and erotic experience between women.
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Investigating the linguistic effectiveness of early reading schemes in isiXhosa: a phonological and orthographical analysis of three isiXhosa Grade 1 graded reader series
- Authors: Katz, Jennifer L
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Education, Elementary -- South Africa , Literacy -- South Africa , Xhosa language -- Readers , Native language and education -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/92798 , vital:30748
- Description: Literacy in South Africa is in crisis. Inadequate learning and teaching materials, extensive curriculum changes, under-resourced schools and under-qualified teachers are all contributing factors to an alarming situation. Grade 1 African language reading schemes in South Africa are failing to provide young children with the necessary and appropriate practice required to facilitate home language literacy acquisition (NEEDU 2013). A detailed analysis of three isiXhosa Grade 1 graded reader series will show the short-comings of texts translated from English with no cognisance of isiXhosa phonic structures and little appreciation for the agglutinative nature of Nguni languages. Formulating a new, effective approach to the development of African language readers to facilitate reading literacy is urgent and of national importance. The innovative phonics-based methodology, as well as an appropriate instructional level used to develop the Vula Bula Grade 1 isiXhosa readers appears to be a viable blueprint for the development of early readers that can effectively help to ameliorate current deficient literacy levels in African languages. This research thus combines applied linguistics with literacy materials development.
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The morphological complexity of L1 Arabic-speaking children
- Authors: Issa, Iyad
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Cognition in children , Reading , Arabic language -- Orthography and spelling , Arabic language -- Orthography and spelling -- Study and teaching , Arabic language -- Study and teaching , Arabic language -- Phonetics
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/92831 , vital:30754
- Description: Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic system in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form different categories of words. In addition, Arabic orthography is considered to be loyal to the morphographic principle (Ravid, 2012), where morphemes correspond to graphic representation regardless of the pronunciation, especially in the non-vowelized texts. This study made a detailed classification of spelling errors in a word dictation task, based on morphological structures, undertaken by 107 Typically-developing learners (TD) and learners with learning disabiities (LD) attending the same schools. All participants ranged in age from 7 years, 3 months to 15 years, 2 months (grades 2 to 8). The spelling task was made up of 400 common words representing all morphological forms in different conjugations and grammatical classes. The results indicated that learners made three types of errors: errors with respect to the root, errors with respect to the word pattern, and errors with respect to both the root and the word pattern. The results also showed that TD and LD learners follow a similar pattern of complexity even though the LD group produced more errors than the TD group. The results revealed that MA and PA exhibited significant positive regression (b= 9.398, 16.106 respectively) with spelling, indicating that learners with higher scores in PA and MA have higher scores in spelling. The results argued for the crucial contribution that morphological awareness makes towards the general spelling abilities among learners and provide additional evidence for the nonlinear growth of morphological knowedge in spelling. In addition, spelling errors suggested that the spelling process goes in a hierarchical way where words can be accessed and processed either according to the root or according to the stem. Intact verbs are processed according to their root and word pattern. Some weak verb forms, whose radicals undergo modifications, are processed according to their stem, while those whose radicals are fully represented in the spoken word, are processed according to their root and word patterns. Therefore, roots or stems are firstly accessed and attached to basic word patterns (the grapheme without diacritics and affixes). Thereafter, prefixes and, then, suffixes are attached to the word pattern and, finally, diacritics are accessed and attached to the word pattern.
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The morphotactic constraints of verbal extensions in isiXhosa
- Authors: Mkabile, Hlumela
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Xhosa language -- Grammar
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/92849 , vital:30749
- Description: Bantu verbal suffixes, also known as extensions, follow a rather rigid pattern when they attach to the verb. Studies (e.g. Hyman 2002, Good 2005, 2007, among others) have shown that the order followed by these extensions is: Causative, Applicative, Reciprocal, Passive (CARP). Although this pattern is widespread across Bantu, some variations in the ordering of these extensions have been observed in some languages (Kathupa 1991, Simango 1995, Sibanda 2004, among others), which suggests that the template is not as rigid as one might think. This study investigated the morphotactic constraints between four verbal extensions in isiXhosa, the Causative, Applicative, Reciprocal and Passive. It focused on the morphotactics of the transitivising extensions (Causative and Applicative) in the first instance, and morphotactics of the detransitivising extensions (Reciprocal and Passive) in the second instance. The study found that although the co-occurrence of causatives and applicatives is a regular feature in Bantu languages, isiXhosa has restrictions on the co-occurrence of these extensions on some verbs. The study also found that although Causative-Applicative is the expected order the language permits Applicative-Causative in certain contexts. With respect to the detransitivising extensions, the study revealed that there are limited contexts in which these extensions co-occur and, crucially, that these extensions are freely ordered in the language.
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Truth and reconciliation and other stories: a critical multimodal investigation of representations of post-apartheid South Africa in children's picturebooks: volume 1
- Authors: Smith, Jade
- Date: 2019
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MSc
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/97614 , vital:31458
- Description: Expected release date-April 2021
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Vowel harmony in isiXhosa: an OT and acoustic study of [ATR]
- Authors: Kilian, Kelly
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Grammar, Comparative and general -- Vowel harmony , Xhosa language -- Vowels , Xhosa language -- Phonetics
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/67678 , vital:29128
- Description: The vowel harmony system in isiXhosa is centred on a process of vowel raising. All mid-vowels preceding a high vowel take on the feature advanced tongue root (ATR) (e.g. thɛnga ‘buy’ → thengisa ‘sell’; bɔna 'see' → bonisa 'cause to see') (Harris 1987). The process of mid-vowel assimilation for the feature [+ATR] is consistent in all instances in which the mid-vowel occurs preceding a high vowel trigger, unless harmony is blocked by the low opaque vowel [a]. This is the analysis presented in Jokweni & Thipa (1996) the only previous literature to address the vowel harmony process of isiXhosa in detail. As an alternative approach to the rule-based phonology applied in the analysis presented by Jokweni & Thipa (1996), I propose the introduction of Optimality theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky 1993, Bakovic 2000, and Pulleyblank 2002). I will present a map of the harmony system of isiXhosa using OT, while also presenting acoustic data to supplement the selected examples provided in Jokweni & Thipa (1996). This acoustic investigation will determine whether the harmonic feature is ATR, and how this feature patterns among vowels in different phonological contexts. In this paper vowel harmony is achieved through the implication of numerous rules, and with very specific directional and prosodic limitations on the spread of [+ATR]. Using generalisations based on my own collected data as well as those reported in previous literature, I have developed a constraint ranking to account for the harmony process in isiXhosa. By adapting the No-disagreement approach to harmony (Pulleyblank 2002), the final constraint ranking has the capacity to derive the optimal phonetic candidate for every harmony case. A selection of spread constraints is used to account for the raising as well as blocking processes, by driving either regressive or progressive spreading. Within the original No-disagreement approach a spread constraint would recognised only one feature in its prohibition of disagreeing segments. However, in the adapted approach the spread constraint driving [+ATR] assimilation is combined with a feature of correspondence (Krämer 2001) which considers the height as well as the ATR value of the sequential segments. The constraint is therefore adapted to consider more than one feature and is not activated unless the sequential segments agree for this particular feature. The regressive spread constraint is therefore only activated when the consecutive segments have an agreeing height value. The introduction of this adaptation was necessary to provide a more nuanced OT approach with the capacity to effectively characterise the idiosyncrasies observed in this harmony pattern. The harmony constraints are therefore no longer contradict one another by simultaneously driving harmony in opposite directions. Furthermore, the direct acoustic analysis is completed by means of the PRAAT software, to answer the salient question of the definitive harmonic feature. To provide a multiplicity of empirical evidence I have recorded utterances containing a number of vowel combinations. Each combination positions the alternating mid-vowels in a particular phonological context from which instances of ATR alternations have been extracted and phonetically analysed. Using the generalisations reported in Jokweni & Thipa (1996) as a starting point, the acoustic signal of each mid-vowel within a set phonological context is annotated for a predicted ATR value. Hence, if a mid-vowel occurs preceding a high vowel it is annotated as [+ATR] etc. The data sets representing each of the mid-variants found in a specific phonological context are then plotted into vowel charts and compared by means of statistical analysis (Baayen 2008, Bluman 2000). The results are then used to determine whether any significant phonetic alternation is occurring, and what the acoustic distinction between [+ATR] & [-ATR] variants is essentially comprised of. The final acoustic results indicate a significant difference between the mid-vowel ATR variants extracted from specific phonological contexts. Hence, due to co-articulatory effects or some other phonological influence the realisation of [+/-ATR] variants exist along a spectrum, and are therefore not phonetically consistent, but indicate a different acoustic make-up across the various groups.
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