Essays on Language, Communication and Literature in Africa

Akin Odebunmi is Professor of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis at the Department of English, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His papers have appeared in Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, Linguistik Online, California Linguistic Note, Marang, Nordic Journal of African Studies, Pragmatics and Society and Iranian Journal of Society, Culture and Language, among others. He is also co-editor (with Arua E. Arua and Sailal Arimi) of Language, Gender and Politics, published by the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation, and his reviews of Mira Ariel’s Defining Pragmatics, and Ulrich Busse and Axel Hubler’s Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English have appeared in Discourse Studies. Between 2010 and 2011, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Georg Forster Experienced Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany.Joyce T. Mathangwane is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Botswana. She has researched and published widely in the areas of Bantu phonology and morphology, sociolinguistics, comparative linguistics, onomastics, and the social aspects of HIV/AIDS. Her publications have appeared in various journals, such as Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, South African Journal of African Languages, and Nomina Africana, as well as a number of peer-reviewed books. Her publications also include The Discourse of HIV/AIDS in Africa (co-edited with Emevwo Biakolo and Dan Odallo) (2003) and Ikalanga Phonetics and Phonology: A Synchronic and Diachronic Study (1999).