Augustine Agwuele
San Marcos, TX
Host: Thomas Widlok
Afrikanistik
Research Project
“Deictic and verbal gestures in Yoruba construal of time”
As individuals in a language community speak about past, present, and future events, they call on arrays of communicative devices, such as postures, facial expressions, head and hand movement, and gestures, i.e., non-verbal signals, to complement their verbal utterances. Such co-occurrence of verbal and nonverbal signals is not haphazard, rather it is coordinated, functional, and meaningful, varying across language groups. Underscoring the place of gesture in their society, Yoruba people esteem highly that child of whom it is said ‘understands face’ (mọ ojú) and ‘recognizes body’ (mọ ara). Thusly socialized, Yoruba people employ different verbal expressions to communicate time and manual gestures to spatially situate time. The goal of this unfolding project is to explore Yoruba gesture morphologies pertaining to time, to understand their cultural frame of reference that informs their conceptualization of time, and their gestural enactment of it in communicative situations. It is also to examine interactions between their verbal expression and their gesturing of temporal deixis.
Augustine Agwuele
Vita
Augustine Agwuele is a professor of linguistics at the department of anthropology, Texas State University. His interest is in phonetics and in the intersection of language, language-use, culture, and society. In phonetics, he explores how perceptual constancy is imposed on contextually variable speech signals. Using this as his fulcrum, he studies everyday language (verbal and nonverbal) use in quotidian interactions of different peoples, especially of west and east Africa, for ‘lawfulness’ to their seemingly intractable and 'trivial' responses to daily existential issues. He is the author of The Symbolism and communicative contents of dreadlocks in Yorubaland (2016), editor, Body Talk and Cultural Identity in the African World (2014), co-editor of Essays in Speech Processes: Language Production and Perception (2016), and Routledge Handbook of African linguistics (2018)
Research Areas
- Coarticulation
- Communicative gestures
- Language, culture, and society
- Peoples and cultures of Africa
Publications (Selection)
Some books
2016: The Symbolism and Communicative contents of Dreadlocks in Yorubaland. NY., Palgrave Macmillan
2016: Essays in Speech Processes: Language Production and Perception. Sheffield, Equinox Publishing. (Co-editor, Andrew Lotto)
2015: Body Talk and Cultural Identity in the African World. Sheffield, Equinox Publishing
2012: Development, Modernism and Modernity in Africa. NY., Routledge
Some Journal Articles related to theme
2021: “Exertion is not connected to success’: everyday Yoruba discourse of work and success' Africa: Journal of the International African Institute [In press]
2016: "Culture trumps fact: 'race' in the language of educated American Elites”, Social Analysis 60 (2). 97-115
2014: “Repertoire of Yoruba hand and facial Gestures” (Gesture, 14 (1)):70-96
2012: “Indexicality of Wọ́n: Yoruba Language and Culture” Journal of African Cultural Studies. Volume 24, Issue 2: 1-13
Some book articles
2021: ““Igboro ni mo wa”: Popular Linguistic Innovation among Yoruba youth in urban cities” In, Deborah Pellow and Suzanne Scheld (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Africa and Urban Anthropology [In press]
2021. “Fichee- Cambalaalla (ፍቼ ጫንባላላ) of the Sidaama People s” In Akinyemi, Akintunde & Falola, Toyin (eds.) Handbook of Oral Traditions and Folklore. NY. Palgrave (with Tafesse, Matewos Karo)
2018: “Coarticulation: Segmental and Suprasegmental Interaction in Yoruba,” In, Agwuele Augustine and Bodomo, Adams (eds). Handbook of African Linguistics (pp.121-149). NY., London. Routledge.
2016: “The Animal-to-Human Speech Connection- Harvey Sussman’s conjectures” Augustine Agwuele and Andrew Lotto (eds.) Essays in Speech Processes: Language Production and Perception (pp20-29) Sheffield. Equinox Publishing
Contact
Professor Augustine Agwuele
Linguistics
Department of Anthropology
Texas State University in San Marcos
Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies
Fellowship: 01.10.–31.12.2021
E-mail: aa21(at)txstate(dot)edu