Studies have sought to establish the ‘territory of reference’ or ‘patterns of referentialities’ of I, we and you (tri-PP) in academic lectures across disciplinary supercommunities (DSs): Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. These studies are largely from L1 context, and also report on only referents common to the three DSs, without giving attention to those at the interface of two DSs. This study, therefore, is the first attempt to examine the referents of the tri-PP at the interface of two DSs in academic lectures, using a corpus from the L2 context. A corpus of over one hundred thousand words was built for the study, and AntConc was used to search for the occurrences of the tri-PP. Drawing on the contexts and co-texts, the authors determined the referents of the tri-PP. It was found that across the tri-PP, some referents were shared by two DSs. The findings further deepen understanding of the ‘pointing’ role of personal pronouns in classroom lecturer talk and “degree of cross-disciplinary diversity…” Keywords: academic lectures, discourse referent, disciplinary variation, personal pronouns

Over the years, scholars have sought to provide language-based typologies of names, but while attempts have been made for some sub-branches of onomastics such as anthroponymy and toponymy, there is arguably none for ecclesionymy (the study of church names). Consequently, this paper sought to provide a language based typology of the hitherto underexplored area of church names. Data of names of churches in Ghana was built for the present study. Adopting content analysis as the analytical approach, the study realized that church names in Ghana are generally homogenous and heterogeneous linguistically. It was also realized that homogenous/unilingual church names involved English only, Akan only and Ewe only. On the other hand, the heterogeneous church names comprised two types: bilingual and trilingual church names, which contained varied language permutations from the three spheres in Osei Yaw Akoto’s classification of languages in Ghana. The paper concludes by making some recommendations for language-in-religion policy in Ghana. Keywords: Church names, Ecclesionymy, Glocal language, Unilingual

This paper is an expose on how fundraisers in some churches in Ghana use persuasive language, also referred to as ‘loaded words’ on their congregation to stir up their emotions to adhere to their demands and succumb to their instructions and directions. It specifically recounts persuasive expressions or utterances used by personalities who solicit funds from the congregation during fundraising ceremonies and discusses the effectiveness of these expressions. It also presents the perception and reaction of church members on how their thoughts, feelings or behavior are influenced by the astute words of fundraisers. Using a qualitative research approach, five recorded audios are selected, transcribed and codified for textual analysis. Sections of the churches visited were engaged in interactions to inquire about their perception of these modes of fundraising. The findings indicated that most fundraisers who solicit funds for the churches in question are imported, thus, they perform the assigned task to meet the churches’ needs and to also boost their remuneration. It also indicated, based on church members interviewed, that the strategies they use in fundraising, to some extent, are effective tools to sway the congregation to give their monies out when they are still faced with personal challenges. This paper contributes to research knowledge on some less explored areas such as persuasion in the context of fundraising in the Christian mission.

This paper examines graphemic and lexical borrowings in Twi for Academic Purposes (TAP). Textbooks written in Asante Twi by some renowned scholars in the language constituted the dataset for this study. The textbooks were read and all instances of anglicisms or English features borrowed into Twi were collected. The borrowed-features were identified by drawing on our native speaker and scholarly competencies. The dataset was analyzed by drawing on Clyne’s (1977) Borrowing Typology and Haugen’s (1950) Borrowability Scale. Three key findings emerged from the analysis. First, the study yielded that in TAP two letters (<v>,  and <j>) are borrowed towards empowering Asante Twi to enable it to account for words that contain these letters. Second, at the lexical level, it was found that the borrowed words were either integrated or adapted into Asante Twi linguistic environment. The final point was that all the lexical items realized were nominals affirming the primacy of noun on borrowability scales. The findings have implications for developing Ghanaian languages for academic purposes.

Morphological case languages do not necessarily depend on word order to determine their grammatical relations. However, structural case languages depend largely on word order to determine the various grammatical relations. For most configurational languages, the agent/experiencer usually precedes the patient/theme in a simple clause (in the active voice). In the passive voice, the patient/theme occupies the subject position while the agent becomes an object of a preposition (oblique) or omitted as evident in English. Akan, a Kwa language of the Niger-Congo family, being a nominative-accusative language, allows the agent/experiencer to precede the patient/theme in the active construction. In the passive- like construction, however, unlike a language like English, an impersonal pronounoccupies the subject position while the patient or theme remains at the object position. This implies that agents/experiencers do not occur at the oblique position in Akan; neither dopatients/ themes occur at the subject position. Certain verbs (symmetrical verbs), however, may allow the experiencer and the theme arguments to switch positions in the active construction without affecting the meaning of the sentence in the language. This paper seeks to highlight these marked grammatical relations in Akan within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG).