Use Example To Treat Medial Omission

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

We would observe that the revised versions of the headlines comform with the rules of Yorùba standard language whereas in the original ones, àti has yielded place to comma. The omission of àti, a vital syntactic element, enables the newspaper to achieve brevity, compactness and tone of informality. This strategy makes the headlines cispy and orally lighter

Relative clause is one important syntactic element that enusures sentences conform with standard language. Omission of relative clause renders a sentence ungrammatical in ordinary discourse. However, this element is mostly omitted in the headlines of Yorùbá newspapers for some communicative effects. For example:

again, we observed that comma, is contrived to take the place of relative clause in each of the above headlines. In standard language, the relative clause 'tí í ṣe' or 'tó jẹ' meaning (who is) is manadatory because the would render the headlines ungrammatical. However theory of foregrounding allows such a deviation in literary language and it is effectively utilized in the headlines of Yorùbá newspapers for compactness, economy of efforts and space.s

It appears there is no vital elemet that the Yoruba newspaper headlines could not omit in order to cast cripsy and compact headlines. Other frequently omitted syntactic elements in the headlines of Yorùbá newspapers inlude prepositions and phrases as exemplified in the following:

Sheu Jabar figbe ta, èmi kò sálọ soko wa ( Alálàyé, 03/05/2000 p.8)

Sheu jabar cries out, I did not run to my village

ó ní (says) would take the place of (,) in SY

Save me! All of Toibu, my husband's wives, become insane, am no longer interested.

The above example is interesting because two syntactic elements were omitted. We observed that the first comma takes the place of a relative clause 'tí í ṣe' or 'tó jẹ', while the second comma takes the place of 'nítorí náà' (therefore). The headline could be recast and still remains catchy, cripsy and even save more space and efforts ssuch as this:

Ẹ gbà mí!

Gbogbo ìyàwó tí ọkọ mi bá fẹ́ ló ń ya wèrè,

n ò ṣe mọ́ o - Bọla

The revised headline reduces the omitted elemnts to one and makes it more compact but the writer choses the original version to make the headline dramatic, explicit and unambiguous to serve one of the fuctions of headline which is clarity.

Ellipsis in Headlines of Yorùbá newspapers

Ellipsis is a kind of reduction and it is used to avoid repetition. It can be defined as a device of leaving out a word or words from a sentence deliberately when the meaning can be understood without them. Ellipsis can be defined as the omission of words recoverable or understood from the situational or the surrounding text (Yoo, 2011). Lyons (1977:589) regards ellipsis as one aspect of context dependence of spoken utterances of every day conversation. He views ellipsis as "one of the most obvious effects of contextualization and decontextuualization…consists in supplying some element or elements from the preceding context". Thomas (1974: 43), on the other hand, defines ellipsis as "a communicative option to omit from sentences contextually available elements that are structurally required by the elements that do appear in those sentences". According to Halliday and Hassan (1976: 144) ellipsis is "substitution by zero" and the idea behind this is the fact that an elliptical item is the one which leaves particular structural slots to be filled from a preceding or following part of the sentence.

Use example to treat medial omission:

Hááà, nígbà tó wọlé tán, àní nígbà tó désàlẹ̀ lọ́hùn-ún... (Aláròyé, 24/04/2010:19)

Syntactic features of Yorùbá newspaper heaadlines

Syntax refers to the rules for ordering and connecting words into sentences. In general, it deals with the interrelationship between all elements of sentence structure and the rules governing the arrangement of sentences in sequences. While these rules must be followed, the theory of foregrounding allows various posssibilities that could be explored for effective linguistic communication. Our study identifies four types of headlines in Yorùbá newspapers. They include: verbal, nominal, adverbial and functional headlines.

Verbal headlines

A verbal headline contains a verb phrase or part of a verb phrase that is not dominated by a noun phrase. The occurence of verbal headlines are less frequent in our corpus, the percentage ranges from 5% to 18%. The type of verbal headline used in Yorùbá newspapers is one with finite verb phrases. Yorùbá newspapers use verbal headlines in a number of situations such as when negative verbal statements are to be made, when the time and manner in which an action or event took place is to be specifically mentioned.

Though more economical than the nominal headline in terms of space, the verbal headlines are much less used because they are prone to ambiguity. However the effectiveness of verbal headlines lie in their ability to geneate suspense thereby drawing reader's attention. On the whole, verbal headlines are informative, precisie, attractive and economical. They do not require much efforts from the writer (to generate) and the reader (to read).

Functional headlines

On the strenght of the analysis of our corpus, functional headlines can be generally grouped into four: statements, questions, dirctives and exclamative. 100 headlines were chosen randomly from the 12 newspapers we considered. This helps us to exemplify four types of functional headlnes we discovered in our corpus.

Statements : These types of headlines are designed to provide some information. this is in line with one paramount basic function of the headlines which is to inform readers. This type constitutes the largest group of functional headlines and example are so many:

Headlines in this group are constructed to give reader cogent information contained in the report.

Questions: In Yorùbá newspaper headlines, questions are used primarily to attract the reader and not because of the lack of information. Questions are used to differe from other headlines and be actching. When used, they show what is being written about and what question is being answered in the reports or article. In such a situation, readers are not expected to givean answer because that is the duty of the article. For example the article which is introduced by the headline:

T.B. Joshua, ṣé wòlíì ni tàbí gbájúẹ̀? (àjọrò, 14/10/2001:9)

The reader will learn whether T.B Joshua, a popular pastor in lagos, Nigeria, is actually doing what he professes or using his church to swindle unsuspecting members of the congregation. Question makes headline inviting and raises reader's curiousity to learn about new findings. Though many of the question in our corpus do not possess the proper interogative structure, yet they are well cathing and seduce the readers.

Another example is:

Directives : One notable reason for using imperative structure in the headlines of Yorùbá newspapers is to engage readers, persuade them to support the opinion or views of the newspapers. Examples of directives are many in our corpus and mostly used to gain support of the public to puruse a cause or an action. For example:

In the above example, the headline is used to give directive to the government on one hand and rally support from the public on the other hand.

Excalamative: Exclamation sometimes occur in the headlines. Such headlines are introduced by 'háà' and 'ó mà ṣe o' and end with exclamation mark. When used they are contrived to express surprise, disblief and unsual. Such excamation triggers emotions of the reader and feel the story such that may sometimes be moved to respond with appropriate feelings such as being sombre or shedding tears. Examples of such headlines are:

Ó mà ṣe o!

Great revelation

When this is done, it is to emphasis the context and intensify the effect of emotional reaction the story would generate from the reader.

Frequency of types of functional headlines in Yoruba Newspapers is given in the below table.

Statements

52

52%

Questions

20

20%

Directives

15

15%

Exclamative

13

13%

Total

100

100%

As shown in the table, most of the headlines are statements. This is rightly so because the main function of headline is to report infromation which is the notion of automatization that requires writers to use lan­guage in a way of making communication easy; quickly recognisable and understandable wheras questions, directives and exclamatives are less used.

Designation.

This is the process of naming. According to Kniffka (1980), the essential structure of a headline includes an action and an agent. Though the agent may sometimes be left unclear. But when the designation of the agent in a headline is clear, it allows subtle valorisation or devalorisation:

In this example, the designation is Hausa, a dominant Nigerian tribe that occupies the northern part of the country. The verbal phrase used to describe the Hausa’s reactions to perceived political marginalisation is demeaning especially when we consider the Hausa’s political prowess in the governance of Nigeria. The text producer has the choice of ‘ ń binu’ (angry) which actually captures the context of the story which reads in part:

However, the choice of ‘ń sunkún’ is to ridicule the entire Hausa race who have dominated Nigeria’s political landscape from 1960 to 1999 when, Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba man became the president whereas only a very few Hausa individuals are referred to in the report. The next examples show further how designation is used in headlines of Yoruba newspapers.

In this example, while the writer might be showing Obasanjo as a firm and decisive Commander-in-Chief, the use of the name 'Obasanjo' robs the president his authority and portrays him as a sectional leader who is indifferent to the political agitation of the Hausa people who constitute the majority of Nigeria’s population. A curious reader, who ordinarily we expect to be a Yoruba or a Yoruba speaking person becomes concerned and would want to know why President Obasanjo could have done to the Hausa. This headline attracts attention because of the name. If the official title ‘Ààrẹ’ which means president was used it would not have generated much interest hence the newspaper consciously manipulated the president’s last name to get attention. Same goes for the next headline;

Designation is used to create tension in the reader because it is reported that Hausa and Yoruba, two different tribes who are, traditionally, political enemies fight in a Yoruba town. This presupposes that the whole of Hausa and Yoruba people are engaged in the physical combat whereas the article is about just one Hausa man called Muhammed Useni and a Yoruba man, Femi Ogunleye who is the former’s landlord. The essence of their disagreement was not political but borders on paternity of a child whose mother they both had affairs with. Again if the headline had read:

an average reader would just gloss over the headline and conclude it was not a new thing for two men to ‘fight’ over the paternity of a child. The tribal designation, Hausa and Yoruba, is the magic wand, the eye catcher, to raise interest in the story.

The above examples illustrate an extremely common feature of the process of designation in the headlines of Yoruba newspapers where the name of a tribe or an individual is used to refer to decisions, actions and representation of the whole. The effect of this is to generate interest, arouse curiosity and force the potential reader to buy the newspaper.

Another instance where designation is used as a process of generalisation or personification is:

Obasanjo, in this context is used to refer to the Federal Government of Nigeria because he is the head of the government who appointed Bola Ige as a minister. The newspaper resorted to this ploy to show the hierarchy between the two public figures. Though as at that moment Bola ige seemed to be more popular than Obasanjo among the Yoruba as a result of his involvement in the struggle toward the realization of democratic government, yet Bola Ige was still accountable to Obasanjo.

Closely related to this is what we refer to as nationality adjective which performs the same function as designation. A similar process is involved in this kind of designation in the sense that Yoruba newspapers mobilise a nation’s name to refer to an individual or a group’s action. In the following example:

From the context of the report, the members of National Assembly refused to appropriate funds for the President Obasanjo to acquire a new presidential jet which made him to board a commercial airline. The headline attributes some feeling of shame to the country as a whole and by extension to every Nigerian whereas only a handful members of National Assembly made that decision. In spite of this, the newspaper blames the country for it.

Presupposition

Many of the headlines we have discussed so far are examples of presupposition. Maingueneau (1996) says presupposition refers to those elements in text or discourse which are presupposed; which are presented as self-evident and unproblematic to understand, such that when used in headlines they do not hinder effective communication. Pressupotion in Yoruba newspaper headlines automatizes the message; makes it clear and leaves no room for confussion or guessing as to cause and effect of a action.

The headline presupposes the existence of a trade dispute between the government and

the labour union but the government dares the labour union perhaps after dialogue has

failed to resolve the dispute.

There are two major forms of presupposition identified by Maingueneau (1996). The first is

inscribed in the linguistic structure and referred to as linguistic presupposition, while the

Second, pragmatic presupposition is derived from the relationship between the headline

and its context and carries pragmatic significance. In the Yoruba newspapers, linguistic

presupposition could be derived from syntactic structure. For example:

The structure of the above sentence presupposes that a man has coveted another man’s wife. The only question to be asked is: why has he done that? This type of linguistic presupposition in Yoruba newspaper headlines enables the newspaper to draw the reader out of his shell and take a further step to read the story in order for his ‘why’ to be answered and see if the wife snatcher has any justification at all. Similar examples include:

The two examples will attract ‘why’ and ‘what’ questions from the reader and will heighten his curiosity with a view to finding satisfactory answers.

Pragmatic presupposition is implicit and relates to the action or reaction expected of the

reader and derives from the relationship of the headline and its context. In the following

example:

E fi awon ole epo jofin

Kayemo, 06/03/2012 p.1

Prosecute oil subsidy thieves

The fact that the information concerning the originator of the idea of ‘prosecuting’ is suppressed transforms the headline into an appeal to the reader for agreement, if not action. Headline such as the above can be taken as simply informational, or can be seen as adding to pressure for the government to be affirmative in its quest to fight corruption in the oil industry.

Similar Example is:

E gbosuba fun NADECO

Iroyin Yoruba, 17-23/04/2000. P.5

Referring in Yoruba newspaper headlines.

In any discourse, oral or written, the addresser must first be able to refer to themselves, hearers and third parties, as well as other animate beings, inanimate or physical objects and concepts. In order for communication to be successful, Yoruba newspaper writers must enable readers to identify the entities mentioned in the discourse by using appropriate referring expressions (or references). Scollon and Scoollon (2000:53) argue that it is impossible to imagine a sentence that does not make reference in some form. Yoruba newspaper headlines are no exception in this matter. Although references contribute much to headline construction, the overwhelming trend in headline research is to focus on issues like grammar of headlines and headline production. Even at that level the attention has always been given to English newspapers. Referring expressions in headlines of Yoruba newspapers has never received little attention from scholars. Given these facts, this section investigates the use of referring expressions in Yorùbá newspaper headlines, more specifically, person references.

Referring expressions (or references) are those linguistic forms used by a speaker or writer to enable a listener or reader to identify certain human or nonhuman entities (Yule, 2000). And in this sense, person references are those linguistic forms used by Yorùbá newspaper writers to enable their readers to identify a person or a group of people. Those linguistic forms can be proper nouns like 'Obasanjo', noun phrases which are definite like "omo Yoruba, awon Hausa" or indefinite such as "a bride," and pronouns like "o" and "wọn.". They way people are named in Yorùbá newspapers can have significant impact on the way those individuals are viewed.

Ariel (1990) says that the accessibility of an entity is manifested by its state of activation in our memory system. An addresser uses different kinds of referring expressions to mark different degrees of accessibility for an entity. Therefore, referring expressions can also be called accessibility markers. She further divides referring expressions into high, intermediate and low accessibility markers. Those references originally used to refer to a certain entity in our encyclopaedic context are low accessibility markers, such as definite descriptions and some proper names. Those originally referring to an entity in physical context are intermediate markers, such as deictic. And those seem to be used to refer only to an entity in linguistic context are high accessibility markers, such as pronouns and zeros *foot note Ariel (1990:17).

Three factors determine types of referring expressions employed by the Yoruba newspaper writers. These are similar to what Ariel 1991 calls "Informativity," "Rigidity" and "Attenuation" (Ariel, 1991).

By ‘Informativity,’ we mean the amount of lexical information that the expression provides about the entity. "The more lexical information the marker provides the better it is suited for the retrieval of less accessible material" For example,

Gómìna ìpínlẹ̀ Kwara ṣèléri

láti kọ́ ọsibítù ìgbàlódé

Akéde Odùduwà (27-02-2012 p.8)

supplies more detailed information than

"Gómìna ṣèléri láti kọ́ ọsibítù ìgbàlódé’’

Similarly:

Afárá Olùsọjí n’Íbàdàn di pàkúté ikú

Akéde Odùduwà, 14-11-2011. P.1

is more informative than ‘Afárá di pa[kúté ikú.

The effect of supplying detailed information in headlines conforms with the principle of automatization which requires that costituents of text should give sufficient information that will prevent ambiguity with a view to making communication easy and quickly understandable. Besides supplying additional informationas in the above example forecloses ambiguity which may impede quick processing of information.

The second principle is "Rigidity." It targets at how uniquely a referring expression is to pick out a unique referent (based on form). This is context dependent, but some markers are more "rigid" than others, and to that extent it is more specific than the informativity. This criterion is useful when no apparent difference between two noun phrases in terms of lexical content of the headline is discernible. For examples

The distinction between ‘ọmọ Yorùbà’ and Ẹ̀yin ọmọ Yorùbá is that the former refers to a larger set than the latter; therefore, the latter is more rigid. The more rigid an expression is, the lower the degree of accessibility it codes. The effect of contriving rigidity in Yorùbá newspaper headlines is to make headlines more vivid and sensational. By so doing, a high degree of importance is attached to message of the headlines and places more pressure on the reader to read the story in order to find out how he is, or could be affected if he did not heed the call for

The third criterion is "Attenuation," which is close to Givón’s (1983) proposal concerning phonological size. According to this criterion, phonologically heavier forms mark lower degrees of accessibility. Phonological size is measured by the length of the expression and by stress or lack of it. Comparisons of length are valid only when no change in informativity is involved. For example, the contrast between expressions like ‘ Shooting Stars Sports Club/ 3SC’ and Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida/IBB’ in these examples:

3SC and IBB in the above examples are shorter than the former, and therefore mark a higher degree of accessibility. Applying the criterion of attenuation in Yorùbá newspaper headlines creates some stylistic effects. It makes the lexical constituents of a headline slender and memorable.

When writing headlines for the Yorùbá newspapers, the editor or text producer cannot avoid using expressions to refer to human or nonhuman entities. These referring expressions are known as (accessibility markers). This section explores the use of person references in headlines of Yorùbá newspapers. We examined person references from the business, sports, entertainment and news sections. Our study produces the following results:

Last names are used more often than other types of names in the headlines of Yorùbá newspapers. Different sections (excluding the news section) and different newspapers use intermediate accessibility markers more often than they use low or high accessibility markers. The news section use a large number of low rather than intermediate or high accessibility markers. In addition, the Sports section has the largest number of last names; the entertainment section uses first names most frequently and the news section uses indefinite descriptions most frequently.

First name + modifier: refers to the expression where a modifier is placed before or after a person’s first name as in the case of the following example:

Sàwábà onífúji

ṣe ayẹyẹ ọgọ́ta ọdún n’Ìbàdàn

Aláriya Oòduà 05-03-2010. P.12

Since "First name+ modifier" is more informative than "First name," it is less accessible. But compared to "Last name," it is less rigid in picking out a referent. Therefore, it is more accessible than "Last name’’.

Last name + modifier: refers to the expression where a modifier is placed before or after a person’s last name such as:

Since "Last name+ modifier" supply more information about its referent than "Last name" only, it is less accessible. But compared to "Short definite description," it is less rigid in picking out a referent. Therefore, it is more accessible.

Definite description: refers to descriptions whose referents are definite, for example, ‘

We consider this as a kind of referring expressions used in headlines especially when the agents being referred to could not be named for legal reasons or when the newspaper is not too sure of the event being reported. This approach is adopted to starve off litigation that might arise if the agent’s name is mentioned.

To conclude, when referring to a person by name, the most common practice in Yorùbá newspaper headlines is to use the last name as in the following examples:

Sometimes, first or full name can also be used.

In contrast, "full name + modifier" is used very rarely in the headlines of Yorùbá newspapers.

Such distribution among different types of names is very reasonable. Names are often used to refer to figures familiar to the target readers. If editors or the text producer always refers to these famous figures by a long expression (for example, "full name + modifier"), readers may find the headline too long and too boring and didn’t carry much significance for them. A very scare example of ‘full name + modifier’ is:

Mákẹ́tà fọlọpa mú Sunny T Adéṣọ̀kan ọmọ Nna tó ń kọ fújì.

Akéde Àgbáye, 26-03-2012. P.18

In all, whatever referent strategy used by the Yorùbá newspaper writers perform a function within the text. These strategies project meaning and social values onto the refrent because they identify the groups that they are associated with.