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African Languages and Societies Commons

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Full-Text Articles in African Languages and Societies

Press Law Debate In Kenya: Ethics As Political Power, David N. Dixon Jan 1997

Press Law Debate In Kenya: Ethics As Political Power, David N. Dixon

Communication Educator Scholarship

Journalists in many African countries have long been caught between differing ideals i n their relationship between press and government. Two models vie for dominance-the western, libertarian and development journalism models. This article uses Walzer's (1983) theory of distributive justice to illuminate the ethical significance of this debate. A t issue is political power. A case study of the 1996 proposed press law i n Kenya illustrates the ethical arguments mounted for each press model and how the arguments are marshaled not necessarily for moral purposes but to gain political advantage. Finally, a viable third alternative avoids a false dilemma …


Predicate Clefting In Kisi, George Tucker Childs Jan 1997

Predicate Clefting In Kisi, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper examines the focus construction of Kisi, an Atlantic language (Niger-Congo) spoken by some half a million people primarily in Guinea but also in nearby Sierra Leone and Liberia. The data come from work done in 1983-84 on the southern dialect spoken in the Foya area of Upper Lofa County, Liberia. Of particular interest is the presence of what has been known in the literature as "predicate clefting'', e.g., DeGraff 1996. Its interactions and complementarity with negation, an inherently focusing construction (Marchese 1983), evince some complexity. Despite some superficial similarity, however, substantial syntactic differences exist. More similarities exist in …