This study describes the vowel system of EkeGusii (“Bantu E.42”)(Guthrie, 1948) in an acoustic phonetics perspective using oral data got from purposively sampled subjects: four adult males, four adult females and four children (two boys and two girls all 8 years old) equally from the two dialects of EkeGusii (EkeMaate and EkeRogoro Dialects). In order to capture the distribution characteristics of the vowel acoustic concentration, the group frequency means are normalized using Lobanov’s (1971) algorithm. Two viewpoints are the subjects of analysis in EkeGusii vowels: (a) acoustic vowel space as projected by the intersection of F2 vs. F1 or quadrilateral, and (b) spatial features of high, low, front and back. These qualities are mainly influenced by the physiology of speakers and social variability as occasioned by gender, age and dialect. The results indicate that children have no gender difference in formants, and have the highest frequencies for all formants, followed by adult females and then adult males. Furthermore, acoustic vowel space and spatial features are affected by gender, age, and dialect. A vowel pattern, replicated by all informants, is realized in the dispersion of the vowels within the chart influenced by gender and age. This study found out that EkeGusii seems to adopt a seven-vowel system of /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/ with a length contrast.

Proverbs are timeless human wisdom in the form of concise figurative speech. They reflect the conceptual experience of the speakers, particularly the elders in speech communities. This study aims at presenting a comparative study between Amharic and Afaan Oromoo proverbs from the standpoint of meta-communication perspective. Meta-communication is conceptualized as communicating about communication. Communication is believed to have many things in common with culture in that it shapes and dictates the communication behavior of a given society. In verbal communication, the use of proverbs is quite often, explicitly to comment on communication behavior. Despite the multifaceted functions of proverbs in several disciplines, the focuses of this study are proverbs as sources of communication that are relevant in linguistics and anthropology. In so doing, sample proverbs have been purposively selected based on semantic criteria and analyzed by using psycho-analysis method. In the analysis of the proverbs, we built a cognitive model for their semantic relationships. This is because the proverbs have relatively stable, conventionalized and contextual meaning of form as continuum, residing in their common conceptual base. Above of all, they are metaphor-dependent as a common on conceptual base. Hence, there are a number of proverbs in Amharic and Afaan Oromoo as well that comment on importance of communication, communication behavior or processes, among others. In both ethno-linguistic groups, thus, employing such proverbs to comment on communication is quite common which tend to show the communication behavior of each group.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the learning strategies used by Indonesian breakthrough level students (CEFR A1) in attempt to master oral Chinese. The collected data are the answers made by students of Mandarin Language Department UNJ who attend Conversation I course (CEFR A1/breakthrough) on questionnaire given. The questionnaire is based on Oxford’s (2000) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) as well as is combined with Li Jiang (2006)’s SILL Oral Chinese. The research results can be used to develop the teaching techniques which stimulate students to use the most useful strategies to master oral Chinese.

The famous deceased contemporary Chinese linguist Prof. Dai Yaojing from Fudan University was invited by School of Liberal Arts of Nanjing University to give anacademic speech, titled The Expression Methods of Chinese Sentence Complexification, at the “Academic Forum on Sentence Complexification Issues” (No.2) on November 24, 2011. The speech focuses on the expression methods of Chinese sentence complexification, involving two major aspects. One is the cooperative relationship between the complexity of the thought’s content and the complexity of the structure, that is, deep in and deep out, shallow in and shallow out, deep in and shallow out, shallow in and deep out (complicated thoughts with complicated structures, simple thoughts with simple structures, complicated thoughts with simple structures, simple thoughts with complicated structures). The other is the types of complexification. From the perspective of three-level, there are syntactic expression, semantic expression and pragmatic expression. In addition, multilingual mixing can also complicate sentences. The syntactic expressions of the sentence complexification include complex sentence structures, long length, multiple levels, etc; Semantic expression is mainly the issue of ambiguity, including five kinds of ambiguity: phonetic ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity, semantic ambiguity and pragmatic ambiguity; pragmatic expression refers to understanding the meaning of a sentence requires a combination of contexts at all levels.

This paper aims at comparing the lexical prepositions of the Ibibio and Igbo languages. Its objectives are to identify what constitute lexical prepositions in Ibibio and Igbo and highlight the similarities and differences between Ibibio and Igbo lexical prepositions. The Ibibio data used for analysis were elicited from two Ibibio native speakers whereas Igbo data were obtained through introspection. The Ibibio and Igbo data were analysed descriptively. The findings of the research reveal that the lexical prepositions obtainable in Ibibio are ke ‘to, in, for, at’, mme ‘with’, anọ ‘from’, and ito/nto ‘from’. In Igbo, some of the lexical prepositions include: na ‘to, in, at, from’, maka ‘for’, and gbasara ‘about’. The similarity observed between Ibibio and Igbo lexical prepositions is that they both occur before a Noun Phrase (NP), that is, they take NP as their complement. In terms of their differences, the preposition ‘to’ is marked in Igbo but is unmarked in Ibibio. The preposition ‘with’ is overtly marked in Ibibio with mme but it is implied in Igbo constructions. Another notable difference between Ibibio and Igbo lexical prepositions is that the English preposition ‘from’ inflects for number in Ibibio but such feature is absent in Igbo. The paper recommends that further comparative researches should be carried out on other types of preposition like the category incorporated prepositions, and other word classes between Ibibio and Igbo in particular and other African languages in general.

This study aims at describing structurally and functionally the pronominal system of the three main dialects of Soqotri, an endangered Modern south Arabian language spoken in the Island of Soqotra, Yemen. A part of the data presented in the study has been taken from my PhD thesis written in 2009. New data were collected from the field in 2012 and added to the study. The Study follows a descriptive method, therefore, showing no argumentation. The study reveals the structure and functions of the Soqotri rich pronominal system. It shows that the three Soqotri dialects (Eastern Soqotri Dialect, Central Soqotri Dialect and Western Soqotri Dialect) have personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, demonstrative pronoun, reflexive pronouns, reciprocal pronouns, relative pronouns and interrogative pronouns. It also shows that these pronouns are usually of two types (independent and dependent) inflecting for person, number and gender.