A Semiotic Study of the Nigerian Newspaper Obituary Announcements

A PhD Thesis Proposal And Research Design

By

Stella Ononrekpenre Igene (Mrs.) PGA/ART/9306182 Department of English and Literature University of Benin Benin City

Supervisor:- Prof. Ogo A. Ofuani

January 2007

1 1.1 STATEMENT OF PURPOSE This research applies a semiotic approach to the study of the Nigerian Newspaper Obituary Announcements (NNOA). The study explores the meaning potentials of the NNOA as a semiotic system. This involves identifying the constituent units in the system and examining how these units interact to make meaning. To achieve this, the tasks of this study are set out as follows: A. To identify the signs within the text. B. To identify the codes within which these signs have meaning. C. To identify the structural relationships between the various signifiersintratextual references to other signifiers present in the text. D. To identify the paradigm sets within the codes intertextual references to signifiers which are absent from the text. E. Finally, to examine the ideological functions of the signs within the text and of the text as a whole in order to reveal the reality the text seeks to construct. (Chandler DIYI) The study is not just interested in the message of the obituary at the linguistic and structural levels (the level of denotative and connotative meanings which Barthes calls the first and second order levels of signification). It is interested in the message of the NNOA at the third order level of signification which according to Underwood is a matter of the cultural meanings of signs (6).

1.2

SCOPE The study embraces obituary announcements in some selected Nigerian

newspapers, over a period of three years (2000-2003). The newspapers are The Guardian, The Punch, The Vanguard and The Champion. Although there were no observed differences between features of obituary announcements in one newspaper and another, the papers chosen had the largest number of obituary announcements in them. We had also considered The New Nigerian newspaper to represent the Northern part of the country but it did not carry any obituary announcements for the period under study. This could be attributed to the fact that this method of announcing death is not a common feature of the dominant Islamic culture in the Northern part of Nigeria. There were however announcements of people from northern Nigeria in the newspapers selected.

2 On the whole five hundred and twenty five obituary announcements were collected for the study. Of this number, one hundred obituaries that represented observed characteristic features were specifically used for analysis. The features identified are: A. B. Title: e.g. Transition, Call to glory, etc. 1. 2. 3. C Preambles: e.g. with gratitude to God for a life well spent Manner of death (if indicated) Place of death (if indicated)

The personality of the deceased: 1. A photograph of the deceased (a) (b) (c) 2. 3. 4. 5. the general background of the picture the dress and/or ornaments or such other paraphernalia of dress. any sign of religious inclination e.g. a cross or crescent and star.

Titles held by the deceased in society e.g. social, religious, academic titles. Sex Age at death Positions held in life time.

Funeral Arrangements: (depend on the culture/ religion of the family). 1. Christian Funeral Arrangements: - Service of songs, funeral service and outing service. 2. 3. Islamic Funeral Arrangements: - Burial service, fidau prayers Traditional Religious Funeral Arrangements: (this depends on the age, culture, status and gender of the deceased): - Burial rites and wake keeping ceremonies.

Place of Burial: (This also depends on the age, status and gender of the deceased). It could be ancestral home, family compound, cemetery or the residence of the deceased.

Survivors/Announcers: - Parents, spouses, offspring, other relations, committee

of friends of the deceased and/or his survivors and corporate organizations.

1.3

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY The method of research involves a close examination of the NNOA text. We

identified the major signs within the text and the sub-signs which constitute them. Using

3 Pierces sign typology, we identified that the features of NNOAs basically sub-divide into the three major sign forms or types:A. The Indexical Sign: This sign is made up of the titles, the preambles and the sub signs that make up the personality of the deceased as follows:1. His/her titles, academic qualifications, honours, awards, career positions, his/her survivors:- children, grandchildren, friends and well wishers, and the announcer/sender of the obituary. B. The Symbolic Signs: All language is symbolic to the extent of its conventionality. This sign consists of the sub-signs of the preambles funeral arrangements and the place of death and burial. C. The Iconic sign consists of the photographs of the deceased persons and such other icons presented in the photographs like religious, social and environmental icons. We identified the codes within which these signs have meaning as social, religious and cultural codes, etc. Without these codes, meaning in the NNOA cannot be activated. This is important because the sign we choose to use gains much of its meaning, not so much from what it is but what it isnt. Its meaning is determined by the rejection of all other signs we have chosen not to use (Underwood Denotation and Connotation 1). The signified of the various signs were then analyzed by examining structural relations between various signifiers present in the text (syntagmatic relations). At the same time, we examined provision for choices from a range of alternatives at every slot in the syntagm. These choices form the paradigmatic axis of the signs. The research deals with each of the signs in the syntagm by examining the paradigmatic choices made and the ones left out. Particular attention is paid to how the choices contribute not only to the meaning of the signs but also to the meaning making processes that help us interpret the text as a whole. Meaning or signification takes place at three levels. Following the thesis of Roland Barthes, the first level of signification produces the denotative or definitional meaning of the sign. The second level of meaning is connotative and it refers to the socio-cultural and personal associations (ideological, emotional, etc.) of the sign. (Chandler Denotation and connotation 1). At the third level of signification, denotative and connotative meanings combine to produce ideology

4 (OSullivan et al 287). Meanings at this level derive from the way society uses and values the signs. They are drawn from the stock of images, notions, concepts and myths which are available in the culture in a particular time (Underwood, Signification and ideology 5).

1.4 1.4.1

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Semiotics Semiotics is generally defined as the study of signs. It was founded by the Swiss

linguist, Ferdinard de Saussure, who is particularly referred to as the father of modern linguistics. He laid out the general principles of semiotics in his collection of writings entitled Course in General Linguistics (1916). Apart from Saussure, other key figures in the development of modern semiotics are Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles William Morris, Roland Barthes, Algirdas Greimas, Yuri Lotman, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva and Thomas Sebeok among others. Semiotics has been specifically described as the study of communication i.e. the way any sign functions in the mind of an interpreter to convey specific meaning in a given situation (Leeds-Hurwtz 1). This means that semiotics as an approach to the study of texts focuses on the communication phenomenon as a whole. This includes verbal (language in speech and writing) and non-verbal communication (anything that stands for something else). As Barthes puts it, almost anything in society is meaningful and can be a significant sign to a speech community e.g. car, dress, etc. In this sense, semiotics takes as much interest in the message of photography, advertising and television etc. as in the written discourse of literature and in how meaning is produced as well as what it is. In the same vein, Wales sees semiotics as the analysis of signs and sign systems and their meanings specifically those involved with communication between humans in different societies and culture. She goes on to define the scope as verbal language in all its different media of speech and writing and also non-verbal communication systems such as gestures, movements, dress and the mass media (416). In his own definition, Thomas Sebeok sees semiotics as sign action the subject matter of which is communication which is concerned with the study of signification (12-13). This process of semiosis, Chandler says, dates back to the Greeks and involves some factors: That which acts as a sign (the sign vehicle), that which the sign refers to (the designatum), the

5 effects on some interpreters in the virtue of which the thing in question is a sign to that interpreter (the interpretant) and the interpreter (the sense made of the sign). At the heart of semiotics is semiosis. Charles Williams Morris in his own definition sees semiotics as the study of ordinary objects in as far as they participate in semiosis (20). He asserts that semiosis is the process by which something functions as a sign (3). This definition of semiotics focuses on the use of the sign in a social context and situation. Included in this definition is sign action in relation to the creation and interpretation of meaning. In similar light, Pierce defines semiosis as an action, an influence which involves a cooperation of three subjects such as signs, its objects and its interpretant (5.848). Eco expands on this concept in his own definition, which sees semiosis as the process by which a culture produces sign and/or attributes meaning to signs (Semiotics and its Philosophy 26). In this sense, semiotics and semantics have a common concern with meaning but as Sturrock puts it; Semantics is concerned with what signs mean while Semiotics is concerned with how signs mean (22). Semiotics, in Morriss view, also embraces traditional branches of linguistics thus: Semantics: (the relationship between the signifier and what it stands for), Syntactics: (the formal structural relationship between signs) and Pragmatics :( the relationship of signs to the interpreter) (6-7). In summary, semiotics investigates latent connotative meanings with emphasis on the significance which the readers attach to the signs within the text (Chandler Introduction 7). 1.4.2 The Concept of Sign The most important feature in a semiotic study is the sign. Thomas Sebeok identifies the sign as one of six factors in communication which separately and together makes up the rich domain of semiotic research (16). The factors are: message, source, destination, channel, code and context. The message is the sign; the sign producer is the source; the sign receiver is the destination. The channel is the medium through which the sign is given; the code is a set of rules by which the message is produced and interpreted while the context is the environment in which the sign is used and interpreted. Sign here is defined as everything that, on the grounds of previously established social conventions, can be taken as standing for something else (Eco A Theory of Semiotics 16).

6 Signs are considered here in terms of their functions in the communication process as vehicles or carriers of meaning. They must naturally have a material basis but their essence is the mediation of information between two systems (Lang 3). There are two dominant models of what constitutes a sign. Ferdinard de Saussure proposed one and the other is by the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Pierce. Saussure presents a dyadic model of the sign as consisting of a signifier the form which the sign takes and the signified the concept the sign represents. According to him, the sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier and the signified. This relationship he calls signification (Saussure 67). For him a sign must have both a signifier and a signified within a particular context. He argues that a sign is more than the sum of its parts its value is determined by the relationship between the sign and other signs within the system as a whole (112-113). Leeds-Hurwitz sums up the signifier as the explicit material aspect of a sign present during the interaction, while the signified is the tacit or immaterial element of the sign (23). It is literally absent yet functionally present because it has been referred to or invoked. Although the signifier is treated by its user to be standing for the signified, it is generally understood that there is no intrinsic, direct or inevitable relationship between the signifier and the signified. In other words, no specific signifier is naturally more suited to a signified than any other. In principles therefore, any signifier could represent any signified depending on the context of usage. The linguistic sign is therefore primarily arbitrary and specifically the link between the signifier and the signified (Saussure 6769). Pierce offers a three-pronged model of the sign often popularly referred to as the semiotic triangle. It defines the sign as consisting of the representamen: - the form which the sign takes, (similar to Saussures signifier),the interpretant: - not an interpreter but the sense made of the sign; (signified),the object: - to which the sign refers (does not feature directly in Saussures model). The interaction between the representamen, the object and the interpretant is referred to by Pierce as Semiosis (5.483). Other variants of the Piercean model, also basically triadic, present three elements of the sign. Noth presents the model of the sign as consisting of the sign vehicle: the form of the sign, sense: the sense made of the sign and referent: what the sign stands for. Another variant is that of Ogden & Richards in which the terms used are: symbol, thought or reference and referent.

7 Whatever notion of the sign one chooses to adopt, signs generally take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects and even gestures (Chandler Sign 1). Such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning according to the conventions of code (Chandler Sign 5).

1.4.3 The Concept of Code The conventions of codes represent a social dimension in semiotics. Code is defined as a set of practices familiar to users of the medium operating within a broad cultural framework (Chandler Code 2) for example dress codes, moral code, and so on. Hall rightly observes that there is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code (131). Codes are, therefore, frameworks that help both producers and interpreters of texts in creating and understanding texts. Selection and combination of signs are made relative to codes with which we are familiar. This, according to Turner, is in order to limit the range of possibilities of meaning they are likely to generate when read by others (17). To interpret texts appropriately, the sign receiver has to read signs with reference to appropriate codes which are usually determined by various contextual cues provided in the texts and the environment in which they operate. The medium employed influences the choice of codes for interpretation. Codes help to organize signs into meaningful systems which co-relate signifiers and signified. When applying a code to a text, we need to be careful because we may find that a particular code may have to be revised and transformed. In this situation, continuing to read with the same code may now produce a different text which in turn modifies the code by which we are reading and so on (Eagleton 123). Codes help to make communicating experiences easier. As Gombrich observes, we are not usually over-conscious of our acts of interpretation with familiar codes but sometimes a text requires us to pin down the most appropriate signified for a key signifier (35). This concept is especially significant when a specialized use is made of a particular signifier within a context, in which case the context works into the code, for example (jokes and puns). Codes originate from the culture and society in general and are therefore dynamic systems that evolve over time. They are, thus, historically as well as socio-culturally situated (Chandler Glossary 24).

8 The interpretation of any text is likely to change, as interpretative codes evolve. This is the reason the interpretation of the same text may differ from culture to culture and at different periods in time. A major part of the work in a semiotic study is to seek to identify the codes within which the production and interpretation of meaning in any text is achieved. The primary and most persuasive code in any society, according to Eco, is its natural language within which (as with other codes) there are many sub codes. Stylistic and personal codes are often described as sub codes (Theory 263).

1.5

FORMS OF THE SIGN Various definitions of the sign indicate that the sign takes various forms. The

most general form is the linguistic sign which takes the form of words, phrases etc. Pierce offers the typology for signs which has broadly characterized signs into three forms:- the symbolic sign, the iconic sign and the indexical sign. 1.5.1 The Symbolic Sign This is the form of the sign that is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional such that the relationship between the signifier and the signified that constitutes the sign has to be learnt in relation to the context of its usage. It is a a sign which refers to the object it denotes by virtue of a law usually an association of general ideas which operates to cause the symbol to be interpreted as referencing to that subject (Pierce 2.249). In this sense all words, sentences, books and other conventional signs (linguistic signs in terms of their conventionality) are symbols. Saussure however chooses to deal with linguistic signs not strictly as symbols since the ordinary everyday use of symbols refer to examples like a pair of scales (signifying justice) and he insists that such signs are never wholly arbitrary. They show a vestige of natural or rational connection between the signifier and the signified (195.68, 73).

1.5.2

The Iconic Sign The iconic sign is a sign which represents its object mainly by its similarity

(Pierce 2.276). A sign is an icon in so far as it is like that thing and is used as a sign of it (2.247). For Pierce icons include every diagram even though there be no sensuous resemblance between it and its object, but only an analogy between the relation of the parts of each (2.279).

9 Referring to the portrait of a person for instance, Pierce assets as far as on the grounds merely of what I see I am led to form an idea of the person it represents, it is an icon (2.92). This is in fact a broad perception of the iconic sign. It is generally agreed that there are no pure icons and therefore that there are in fact varying degrees of iconicity which are always dependent upon the properties of the medium in which the form is manifest (Lyons 105). 1.5.3 The Indexical Sign An indexical sign is a sign that indicates something. It is a sign whose signifier we have learnt to associate with a particular signified (Underwood 2 of 2). A clock indicates the time of the day, smoke indicate fire, etc. The index is connected to the object as a matter of fact. According to Pieirce, psychologically the action of indices depends upon association by contiguity and not upon association by resemblance or upon intellectual operations (2.306). Although Pierce has broadly outlined these forms of the sign, there are no definite boundaries between them. The three forms are not mutually exclusive. The form of a sign depends on the way in which the sign is used in a particular context and the purpose for which the sign is used within that context.

1.6

REVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP Obituary announcements or death notices are articles about recent deaths as

opposed to memorials or tributes paid to dead people in general. They are of various types; those from the electronic media like radio and television death notices; those from the print media like magazines, newspapers, posters, billboards and more recently mobile billboard death notices. This research is concerned with the Nigerian newspaper obituary announcements. According to Fries, death notices belong to a traditional text-type which includes various kinds of announcements, particularly those of births and weddings, but also those of various ceremonies such as doctorial degrees and the like (Two Hundred years of English death notices 539). In an earlier study on German and English death notices, cited in Nwoye (Obituary announcements as Communicative Events 18), Fries writes that death notices occur in printed form, particularly in newspapers and journals, are comparatively short; they usually consist of only a few lines. These lines he says may, however, be arranged in such a way that they fill a whole page in a newspaper.

10 According to Nwoye, Enkvist regards obituary announcements as template texttype whose macro-structure is set in advance and where the text producers, so to say, enter new data into pre-existing gaps as when filling a hotel registration card or an income-tax return (Nwoye Obituary Announcements as.18). In these studies it was observed that the name of the deceased is the only absolutely compulsory feature of the obituary if the intended communication is to be effective, but considers the following features as obligatory: A. An introduction (with gratitude to God) B. Name of deceased + title if any C. Date, place and manner of death D. Burial arrangement E. Survivors F. Some identification of the announcer/sender (Nwoye 3). Apart from characterizing the structure of NNOAs, Nwoye in the above study observes that obituary announcements usually serve the purpose of communicating the death of and/or information about the funeral arrangements for a particular person to a designated audience. In addition, the study also shows how Nigerian English deals with the issue of death particularly the manner in which death is reported through metaphors and other linguistic devices of indirectness (17). In a similar study, Kachru examines the linguistic features of the use of peculiar traditional references to death in Indian English. He observes that the context of the culture necessitates the use of indirectness in reference to death in Indian Obituary announcements (336). Our study shows that the use of metaphors or linguistic features of indirectness constitutes signs whose signification is modified not only by context but also by the situation in which they carry meaning. It also goes on to determine the systems of signification involved in the meaning making process and the various ways in which the several systems collaborate in the transmission of meaning in NNOAs. In another study on the Information Load of Nigerian Death notices Nwoye also observes that Nigerian death notices go beyond a simple announcement of death to include information about the socio-economic status of the deceased and/or his survivors (202). This information he concludes, is encoded in both the linguistic and structural aspects of the notices (204).

11 Our study examines the NNOA not only from the linguistic and structural aspects (which would account for meaning at denotative and connotative levels), but we also at the level where these denotative and connotative meanings are reinterpreted in the context and the situation of the text-producer audience situation. Meaning at this level derives from the way society uses and values the sign. From this perspective, our conclusion is that the NNOA in announcing death represents the views and perceptions of life, death and dying in the Nigerian society and that the socio-cultural codes of tradition, taboos, beliefs, religion and such other practices are some of the instrument by which the NNOA derives meaning beyond the mere announcement of death.

1.7.

THESIS STATEMENT The NNOA is a semiotic system consisting of indexical signs, symbolic signs, and

iconic signs which signify the immortality of the human being as presented in the life and achievements of a deceased person and those of his survivors.

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