It took close to three hours for the high Profile language bench of Professors from the English Department of the University of Yaounde I, to carry out a rigid and meticulous cross examination of Nelson Akeh Temesas’ Ph.D thesis on Friday, March 17,2023 on the campus of the University of Yaounde 1 for the award of a Mention Tres Honorable worth 16.5/20.
His master piece is titled: “Projection in diplomatic discourse: A pragmatic appraisal of speeches of some Cameroonian and Nigerian diplomats”.
Professor Samuel Atechi acting as the President of the jury, in examining the candidate’s thesis dwelled lengthily, on issues of sociolinguistic concepts, forms and methodology. He appreciated the constructive presentation of data collected on the field and judged the work to be of a great importance and contribution to research, while, Professor Valentine Ubanako paid attention to matters of background information, research problems, literature review and theories put in place to facilitate the understanding of the work. The latter who is a reputed wordsmith, never hesitated to applaud the candidate’s commitment in handling a topic bringing together two neighboring nations, with a comparative and Contrasting usage of tenses. Meanwhile Professors Carlos Nkwentisama and Stephen Ambe Mforteh were preoccupied with elements of syntax, reference and methodology.
The 388 Ph.D thesis is a combination of five chapters, with data made up of 30 discourses produced by Cameroonian and Nigerian diplomats between 2000 and 2019.Comprising of commemorative speeches, press releases, marketing speeches and addresses to the United Nations plenary sessions. The data is divided into two corpora, notably 15 Cameroonian and 15 Nigerian diplomatic speeches.
The Senior Contract worker at the Translation and Interpretation service, at the Ministry of Communication, in his 25 minutes presentation, in both corpora, identified the discursive elements and then independently analysed each corpus. With discursive elements focused on pronouns, arguments from authorities, expressing ideology, positive self-presentation,branding, boosters and hedges.
The results of his work shows that, both Cameroonian and Nigerian diplomats, effectively use these eight discursive elements identified to construct self and give a positive image of their respective countries. While Nigerian diplomats tend to focus more on building or presenting their nation as the giant of Africa. Cameroonian diplomats on the other hand, tend to build the idea of Cameroon as the giant in the CEMAC sub-region. Thus explaining the reason why Nigerian diplomats largely make use of the “l”, first person pronoun, contrary to their Cameroonian counter parts who considerably employ the first person plural “We” to construct a self and build image of their country.
It was after the presentation of these intriguing and well defended findings, that the jury members unanimously awarded him a score of 16.5/20, with the grade Mention Tres Honorable. Doctor Nelson Akeh Temesas, is also author of some published and unpublished scientific articles in international journals.
By Brian Mboh