Laurels in the Humanities (III)

Here then, Mr President is the intellectually robust cultural activist, profound performance aesthetician and lucid literary theorist, Professor Oladele Olayiwola whom I whole-hearted request you to admit as a Fellow of the Nigerian Academic of Letters. PROFESSOR EGBOKHARE, FRANCIS OISAGHADE. Mr. President, it is my pleasure and delightful duty to present to you Egbokhare, Francis […]

Here then, Mr President is the intellectually robust cultural activist, profound performance aesthetician and lucid literary theorist, Professor Oladele Olayiwola whom I whole-hearted request you to admit as a Fellow of the Nigerian Academic of Letters.

PROFESSOR EGBOKHARE, FRANCIS OISAGHADE.

Mr. President, it is my pleasure and delightful duty to present to you Egbokhare, Francis Oisaghaede, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Ibadan, as a worthy candidate for the Fellowship of the College of Fellows of the Nigerian Academy of Letters for the reasons that shall emerge presently.

Professor Egbokhare studied at the University of Benin where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Linguistics, with a Second Class (Upper Division) in the year 1983. He proceeded to the University of Ibadan and between the year 1984 and 1990, he earned a Masters of Arts and a doctorate degree in Linguistics. He spent his entire academic career, since 195 at the University of Ibadan, rising through the ranks from an Assistant Lecturer in 1985 until 1999 when he took a Professorial Chair in Linguistics. He has remained in Ibadan ever since. From Ibadan, he has made tremendous contribution to the development of his academic discipline, through rigorous research, committed pedagogy and notable administrative engagements.

A prolific scholar and researcher, Professor Egbokhare has to his credit 15 scholarly books and monographs, 36 well-researched articles in peer review journals in national and international outlets. Besides, he has collaborated with distinguished scholars abroad, especially with the well-respected Professor of Linguistics, Schafer, R.P. with whom he has carried out ground-breaking research work and published 35 books and essays in the space of 20 years (1992 and 2012)

Professor Egbokhare is a ground-breaker and a profound innovator in his rare but well-chosen field of scholarship where he has made tremendous contribution to knowledge. In the area of sound symbolism and iconicity, syntax-phonology and language documentation, he engaged in remarkable pioneering studies, specifically, on his mother tongue, emai, an Edoid language. Building on solid research blocks and findings of linguists preceding him in edoid studies (Ben Elugbe, Amayo and Elimelech) he, in collaboration with Professor R.P. Schaefer, has produced a 552 page dictionary of Email (2007) and two volumes of oral tradition narratives running to 1,261 pages. A versatile and compulsive scholar, Egbokare churned out  twenty joint publications on typological studies, syntactic theories and human cognition.

Mr. President, here then is the resourceful , original and deeply focused scholar of phonology, language documentation, the Nigerian linguistic ecology, among others, and  who has carried out intensive research in an indigenous, marginalized language, transforming it into one of the most rigorously studied languages in Nigeria, thus providing a unique contribution to West African language studies, whom I invite you to decorate, most deservingly, with the Fellowship of the Nigerian Academy of letters.

Concluded