A Study of Names and Dialogues as Functional Tools in Iyayi’s The Contract
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study discusses the manner in which names of characters and their dialogues have been deployed for meaning projection by Festus Iyayi in the novel, The Contract. It reveals the message projected in the novel as the predatory nature of man in the absence of law and order. This is foregrounded in the elitist insincerity and hypocrisy of the Nigerians, as they try to cover up their hidden crime by taken chieftaincy titles and by showing some open good that will reveal them otherwise. The names and dialogues of the characters involved are discussed as used to reveal religious, geographical and ethnic as well as continental spread of these characters. This is with a view to showing the universality of decay and corruption and above all human cannibalism. Dialogues are encoded using varieties of English to show differences in social status for the same purpose. The paper relies on the systemic text-linguistic model of literary text analysis where it is asserted that every literary text has a central message it projects and it is projected at three meta-levels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".