Stress Patterning and Politicking: A Study of Campaign Speeches of Selected Ibibio/English-Bilingual Politicians

Abstract

The work investigated the use of word stress and accentuation by the Ibibio/English-bilingual politicians in politics and implication of the use of the prosodic feature in the Ibibio socio-politico-cultural environment. The data for the study, recorded campaign speeches, were gathered between January and April, 2015. Word stress was analyzed based on Metrical Phonology framework propounded by Liberman & Prince (1977) accentuation was studied with the help of a computer digitalized system –PRAAT (version 5.1.25) developed by Boersma and Weenink. The analysis showed that subjects accented both grammatical and content words in their utterances and there was a proliferation of accented syllables in the speeches –a characteristic of the native Ibibio language of the subjects. Thus the tempo was dragged and the rhythm was mostly syllable-timed. While the conclusion therefore was that the subject do not use stress and accentuation the way native speakers do, the implication for the subjects' performance was that subjects wanted to be down to earth with the electorates and did not want to alienate themselves even if they had the ability to be sophisticated in the language. The study recommended that researchers should no more over dwell in finding out whether the Ibibio and Nigerian speakers of English speak the language with native-like intuition or not, but in extracting the peculiar characteristics of Nigerian English that make the language Nigerian and adoptable for both political and academic purposes.