Individual multilingualism in a multilingual society is often associated with a mass education system. The Kenyan situation illustrates the intertwined complexity of the pedagogical and socialising aspects of language contact in such a system. Using ethnographic observation of classroom interaction in three primary schools, determinants of teachers' language choice and codeswitching among English, Swahili, and mother‐tongue are explored: official school policy, cognitive concerns, classroom management concerns, values and attitudes about societal multilingualism. Analogously to monolingual modality switching, codeswitching between languages often provides a resource to focus or regain students' attention, or, to clarify, enhance, or reinforce lesson material. Instructional demands and inconsistent patterns of use, however, may also lead to linguistic insecurity and the mislabelling of content or conceptual problems as language competency problems. Understanding the complex role of language, and h...

Socialising multilingualism: Determinants of codeswitching in Kenyan primary classrooms

The Effects of Duration and Sonority on Contour Tone Distribution— Typological Survey and Formal Analysis

The major functions of reduplicative constructions will be presented for the open word classes from a variety of language families. Typical functions will be outlined for verbs and adjectives such as number (plurality, distribution, collectivity), distribution of an argument; tense; aspect (continued or repeated occurrence; completion; inchoativity), attenuation, intensity; transitivity (valence, object defocusing), or reciprocity; and for nouns, such as number, case, distributivity, indefiniteness, reciprocity, size (diminutives or augmentatives), and associative qualities.

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Reduplication: Form, function and distribution

The relevance of emotion for language and linguistics is considered from three perspectives: (a) the conceptualization of emotions, (b) the expression of emotions and (c) the grounding of language. As to the conceptualization perspective, research on the emotional lexicon is discussed. Not only content words (N, V, A), but also prepositions are relevant ( to long for, hate against ). From the expression perspective, it is claimed that the expression of emotions takes place on all linguistic levels: phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and on the level of figurative language use (metaphor and metonymy). ‘Grounding’ of language in emotion means that emotion is one of the preconditions for the functioning of language (emotion is part of the embodied grounding) and for its coming into existence, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. Keywords: language; emotion; conceptualization; expression; figurative language; grounding; embodiment

The relevance of emotion for language and linguistics

Subject: Reliability theory deals with the probabilistic and statistical study of industrial systems, which are expected to complete their function during a given interval of time. The core of the PhD proposal is about a system which is accumulating deterioration with time. The deterioration level is classically modelled by a Gamma process [Van Noortwijk 2009]. A lot of papers from the literature deal with the study of preventive maintenance policies for this kind of processes. However, most of them consider the repairs (or maintenance actions) as perfect, which is not always the case in an industrial context. The subject of this PhD proposal is on the modelling and on the study of the impact of imperfect repairs on gamma deteriorating systems, from both probabilistic and statistical viewpoints. Extending virtual age models for lifetime recurrent events which have been developed in [DoyenGaudoin 2004], the idea is to consider that an imperfect repair removes some part of the deterioration accumulated by the system or that the system is partially rejuvenated by the repair. The efficiency of the repair is then measured by a Euclidian parameter, which corresponds to the proportion of deterioration (or age) removed by the maintenance action. In this context, different models will be considered, according to whether a repair removes some part of all the deterioration/age accumulated since the system was first set up or only since its last repair (or models in between). Also, the analysis will depend on the maintenance scheme, which can be periodic, random but independent of the system intrinsic deterioration (e.g. repairs are performed at the points of an independent Poisson process), or random with dependence, where a repair can be induced by the reaching of some given threshold by the system deterioration level for instance (see e.g. [Mercier – Castro 2013]).

LN Omondi

Papers

The Major Syntactic Structures of Dholuo

Reduplication as a Linguistic Phenomenon.

Proceedings of the Third Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, Kisumu, Kenya, August 4-9, 1986

Dholuo Emotional Language: An Overview

Language, Gender and the Law