Dr. Obadele Kambon - PhD Graduation - University of Ghana 2013 - July 26, 2013

Dr. Obadele Kambon 2013 UG-Legon Vice Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Thesis - Humanities

Comments from the external examiner:
The main findings of the research point to the fact that (a) An overwhelming majority (98%) of Full Lexicalized-Integrated SVCs have nominal counterparts; 2% do not; (b) Only 3% of Partial Lexicalized-Integrated SVCs have nominal counterparts; 97% do not; (c) Clause Chaining Serial Constructions appear to nominalize haphazardly and/or unsystematically as frozen sentences or figures of speech (idioms, proverbs, etc.; (d) The primary function of such forms, he identified, were what Charles Morris (1971) calls denotata and designata; Full Lexicalized-Integrated SVCs behave as lexicalized idioms and because of this, four criteria of idiomaticity namely -- collocability, familiarity, flexibility and compositionality -- are applied to them; and (g) There is systematicity in the pattern of nominalization behavior of serial verb nominal across the main Akan dialects.
This work recapitulates and substantially extends work already done on Akan SVCs Osam, Agyeman and others. A major contribution of the dissertation is the detailed discussion and exemplification of issues relating to nominalization of SVCs. This is the first attempt at such a detailed discussion and exemplification and the candidate deserves commendation. His categorizations are original as is his attention to scholarly detail and to showing the relationship between and among the three major Akan dialects. One could conveniently argue that this is one of the strongest points of the dissertation.
Very little has been done on Akan nominalization in general and little to nothing on SVC nominalization in particular, so this study is a trailblazer or a path-finder! Syntacticians and semanticists will cite this work and continue with the discussion and issues it raises for the next couple of decades. I am impressed with the details and both the candidate and his advisors must be commended for the high degree of systematicity employed in the synthesis and analyses done in the study.
The candidate drew his conclusions based on the actual data collected and on the results (synthesis and analysis of the data) thereby making the analytical claims have functional validity and protecting them from standing insulated from public scrutiny. This is, again, commendable.
The recommendations for future research, especially, his call for comparing SVNs with other types of nominalizations, is in the right direction more especially due to the scantiness and dearth of knowledge about nominalizations in general about Akan and other West African languages in particular.
The dissertation is very well written and I am willing to pass it without any reservation whatsoever. The content is excellent as is its rendition.

Comments from the internal examiner:

The study does a good job of relating the data and findings to broader theoretical debates in the Functional/cognitive linguistic literature. For example, study results suggest that, at least in the Akan data examined, higher degrees of semantic integration in complex forms correlate with lower degrees of iconicity. Further, the subtype categories of serial verb constructions identified by Osam (1994) are "fuzzy" categories in terms of ability to undergo nominalization. This supports the prototype approach to categorization, rather than a classical "sharp-boundary" approach to categorization though the author does not particularly draw it out rhetorically, the study sits squarely within the linguistic sub-field of Lexicography: the study is a detailed investigation of speakers' lexical knowledge of nouns formed (either historically or productively possibly in the moment of speaking) from serial verb constructions. In my view, the lexicographic work, bringing out native-speaker knowledge about the complex forms including in some cases how this may have changed across time and may vary by dialect, may be one of the most enduring contributions of the study. Many of the item-by-item findings could, for example, largely be incorporated into an etymological dictionary of Akan.
The study contributes new information to understanding the cross-linguistic and Akan-internal typology of nominalizations of serial verb constructions. The minute detail on dialect variation is valuable for sociolinguistic variationist studies.

Asakosɛm (About Afrikan Combat Capoeira)

http://www.singhofjudah.com/20....18/04/12/father-of-a

For years, controversy has brewed around Gandhi statues placed outside India. On several continents — Europe, Africa, and North America — people of all backgrounds have stepped forward to protest the Indian political figure. In Ottawa, Canada at the University of Carleton, a statue installed in 2011 has galvanized student leaders to demand its removal.

In November 2017, an African student at Carleton published a letter in the student newspaper saying, bluntly, “Remove the Gandhi statue.” Kenneth Aliu, president of Carleton’s African Studies Student Association, believes history has been twisted to conceal Gandhi’s racist past. “His proximity to whiteness as one who continually espoused anti-Black rhetoric is, perhaps, one of the reasons behind his apotheosis,” writes Aliu. He explains, “For you to deify Gandhi, some people have to be erased from history. You don't engage with how his activism as a whole was detrimental to certain segments of society.”

Controversy centers around the argument that Gandhi was the “father of apartheid” — a shocking claim to make about a person who is sometimes valorized as “the greatest man who ever lived” — and that he systematically dehumanized black Africans while living in South Africa from 1893-1914.

Repatriate to Ghana Group Consultation

https://www.abibitumi.com/prod....uct-category/afrikan

mdw nTr Study Group (Twi + English)

wHm mswt wsTnw kmt mdw nTr

https://www.abibitumi.com/crowdfund/

https://www.abibitumi.com/crowdfund/

Dynast Amir interviews Dr. Kambon: Should Afrikan=Black Diasporans have their own Nation State in Afrika?