Education, Featured
By Benprince Ezeh
PETER Salovey, President, Yale University, has announced that the school will co-sponsor two upcoming meetings of the African Linguistics School that will be devoted to collaborative training and research on generative linguistics in Africa.
Salovey told a news conference in Lagos on January 17 that the first of these Yale-sponsored meetings would take place in Benin Republic in July 2021.
He explained that the co-sponsorship would allow Yale to contribute to the study and preservation of African languages and foster a deeper understanding of the shared features of all human languages.
“Language is a central aspect of human life and plays a unique role in sharing knowledge, ideas, beliefs, and hopes and in building relationships. As African nations expand their global roles, Yale is committed to advancing the study of African languages, to integrating such study into contemporary scholarship, and to expanding the community of African scholars in this area of inquiry. Yale’s support of teaching and research efforts like those achieved by the African Linguistics School will be central in achieving these goals,” he said.
According to him, Generative linguists study the principles that underlie all natural languages and reflect the capacity for communication that uniquely identifies the human species.
He added that the African Linguistics School, ALS, exposes young linguists in Africa to cutting edge research in linguistics with the aim of enriching linguistic theory with their insights into the languages and dialects spoken on the continent.
“The Generative Linguistics approach has great intrinsic value in the development of linguistic theory,” according to Yale’s Veneeta Dayal, the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics, who along with her colleagues Professor Robert Frank and Professor Raffaella Zanuttini, initiated Yale’s collaboration with ALS.
“We know a lot about languages of Western Europe but to get a holistic understanding of the human language faculty, the base has to be broadened. African languages are a rich source of information about possible grammars,” said Professor Dayal.
“As we work to unlock the secrets of human language and study how children acquire language, we will gain insights that can be applied in the development of artificial intelligence and speech recognition systems. Such developments will allow the benefits of these burgeoning technological advances to be shared with speakers of a broader slice of the world’s languages, including the great many spoken in Africa,” said Professor Frank.
The co-sponsorship announcement comes as President Salovey is in Nigeria this week to meet with the university’s partners, friends, and colleagues for further collaborations that deliver on the promise of the Yale Africa Initiative, an ongoing effort by Yale to prioritize and expand partnerships on the continent.
“This initiative is part of a broad commitment across the university to build on our longstanding relationships in Africa,” said President Salovey. “In partnership, African institutions and Yale are opening up avenues of discovery that could be transformative for millions of people around the world,” Salovey said.
On his part, Thordeus Iheanacho, associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine with his Health Action for Psychiatric Problems in Nigeria, including Epilepsy and Substances, HAPPINESS Project colleague Charles Dike, also an associate professor of psychiatry at the medical school, both hail from Imo State, said that Yale, which is in partnership with IMO State Government, would want to expand mental health programme in the state.
The two understand how badly underserved the population is, especially in the rural areas, stated: “There are no psychiatric hospitals across the 2,135-square-mile territory, and the state counts only one full-time psychiatrist to serve its nearly 5 million residents. You can imagine if Connecticut had one psychiatrist and no psychiatric hospital,” said Iheanacho.
Iheanacho, who in 2018 launched with the support from Dike, a programme to train primary care workers in Imo State to screen for, assess, and treat mental health conditions, depression, psychosis, and anxiety. “Most of these people would otherwise not have access to treatment or else would have travelled five or six hours to get it. Anything we can do to push the needle, even if we can only get 100 people into care, it’s worth it,” he said.
He described how his interest in psychiatry as a profession blossomed when he encountered the advanced mental health system and care in Dublin, Ireland and England. “When I went there for my postgraduate studies, I saw how effective treatments can be, and that person with psychiatric disorders can recover and live full lives,” he said
Dike also traces his initial interest in improving mental health care in Nigeria to his study abroad. “Growing up and attending medical school in Nigeria, psychiatry was not considered an Important or desirable career choice.
“It wasn’t until my exposure to it in England that I fell in love with it, I had not believed any medical specialty would supplant my natural and rigid inclination toward the surgical specialties,” Dike said.
– Jan. 21, 2020 @ 16:39 GMT |
Tags: research on generative linguistics in Africa Yale University eyes training
