DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS STUDIES

This project work examines the communication strategies employed by AI-driven chatbots and their effects on user interactions. In an era where conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT, Meta AI, Google Assistant, Gemini, and Replika are increasingly integrated into everyday communication, understanding how these systems shape human-machine interactions has become crucial. The purpose of this study was to analyze the communicative behaviors of chatbots through the lens of Grice's Cooperative Principle and the Social Presence Theory, with the aim of identifying the strategies they use, assessing their effectiveness, and evaluating their influence on user trust, engagement, and satisfaction. The motivation for this research arises from the growing role of chatbots not only as information providers but also as relational companions, raising questions about both their benefits and their risks in human communication. Chatbot-user conversations were collected and critically analyzed to evaluate how responses adhered to Grice's maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner, while also examining how chatbots projected social presence through empathy, personalization, and human-like responses. The study also identified communication strategies such as personalization, empathy framing, positive reframing, immediacy of response, and explanatory clarity. The findings
revealed that chatbots generally adhere to the Cooperative Principle by providing relevant, clear, and concise responses, though occasional lapses occur in the form of repetition and overgeneralized statements. Through Social Presence Theory, the study found that chatbots successfully simulate human-like warmth and empathy, creating a sense of companionship and
trust for users. The research recommends that chatbot developers integrate more adaptive communication strategies that balance factual accuracy with empathy and personalization. By doing so, AI-driven systems can strengthen both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of user interaction, leading to improved satisfaction, trust, and long-term adoption.

This study investigates Ẹdo personal names from a morpho-semantic perspective to show how the internal structure of names and the cultural context of the Ẹdo people work together to create meaning. Data for the study were collected through oral interviews with native speakers and from published sources. The names were analyzed using basic morphological description and the Principle of Compositionality, which states that the meaning of a complex word is derived from the meanings of its parts.
The findings reveal that Ẹdo names are not mere labels but meaningful expressions that reflect the people’s worldview, beliefs, and social values. The study shows that Ẹdo names come from several sources, including kinship, birth circumstances, personal traits, religious beliefs, and the cultural understanding of destiny and reincarnation. Each category of names carries messages about identity, family structure, moral behavior, spirituality, and the historical pride of the Ẹdo people. The analysis demonstrates that Ẹdo names serve as tools for preserving cultural heritage, transmitting values, and reinforcing the social structure of the community. This work contributes to existing knowledge by providing a detailed linguistic analysis of Ẹdo anthroponyms and by showing how language encodes cultural knowledge. It also emphasizes the need to document and preserve Ẹdo names for future generations, as they remain an important part of the people’s linguistic and cultural identity.

This research effort offers a thorough identification, categorization, and discussion of the effects of cartoons on young children's language development and learning. This study analyzes how parents can be held accountable for their children's daily intake of cartoons by outlining the various benefits as well as risks that these programs have for their development. The goal is to emphasize both the good and negative effects of animated programs on kids. In order to accomplish the study's objectives, the researcher used the observational learning model to analyze the questionnaire that was completed by 25 parents and children living in the Ovia North East local government area of the Nigerian state of Edo. The study found that parents are okay with their kids watching or streaming a variety of animated shows, and some parents are okay with their kids preferring the English language to the local dialect. The researcher suggests conducting more research on how parents might affect and manage their children's language development.

Le thème de la révolte et du chaos est un sujet complexe et récurrent dans l'histoire, la littérature et la philosophie. Il explore les tensions entre la conformité sociale et l'expression individuelle, entre l'ordre établi et le désir de changement. (Camus, 1951). La révolte et le chaos sont souvent liés car la remise en question des normes actuelles peut entraîner des situations de désordre et de confusion. La révolte peut prendre diverses formes, telles que des mouvements politiques contre des gouvernements tyranniques, des mouvements sociaux qui cherchent à ébranler les institutions de pouvoir, ou même des révoltes personnelles contre des obstacles sociaux ou psychologiques. Un sentiment d'injustice, d'oppression ou de frustration face à des circonstances perçues comme inacceptables ou inéquitables est souvent la source
de la révolte.

Reduplication is a prevalent morphological process in language that involves the repetition of all or part of a word. This research examines the reduplication processes in the Urhobo language, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Nigeria. By incorporating the morphological doubling theoretical framework, this study meticulously examines diverse reduplication patterns along with their semantic and grammatical functions. This study offers insights into how reduplication contributes to word formation and meaning in Urhobo. The research also explores the syntactic constraints that govern reduplication in the language, providing insights into the linguistic structure of Urhobo. By investigating reduplication in Urhobo, this research enhances our understanding of morphological processes and contributes to the broader field of linguistics

Among languages of Africa, Igbo is considered in the literature to give a model instance of vowel harmony based on the [ATR] feature. A record of the regular and the irregular examples are exhibited here, guided via autosegmental phonology. Along these lines, the present examination looks at vowel harmony and disharmony in Igbo on the premise of a corpus of exact information drawn from noncontiguous provincial dialects. The reason is to present empirical data to demonstrate the conventional depictions made on the basis of the standard Igbo. It likewise demonstrates that exemptions are noticeable, as instances of disharmony, which have not gotten satisfactory consideration in the writing, and would like to attract regard for them by concentrating on them. Inclining toward the autosegmental phonology for this record is down to earth as the hypothesis all the more exquisitely represents the inside constituents of the CV skeleton and the relative autonomy of a V-put as against a C-put, essential to the operation of vowel harmony. More than one vowel is observed to be opaque over the dialects, however share regular formal portrayal.