Paper Title
Beggary Art: A Stylo-Semantic Study of Twins’ Songs Among Theyoruba of Nigeria

Abstract
Begging is the practice by whichan individual goes pan-in-hand to solicit for alms. Rao, (2003) sees beggars aspeople who have resigned themselves to fate and only look up to others for daily support as they curry people’s pity.The phenomenon of begging is not alien to any culture. The degree to which the practice is tolerated in any society is what makes the difference among the various people of the world. This paper is an exploration of the practice of begging and its associated characteristics, though with a specific emphasis on the type of begging that is practised by mothers or parents of twin children in the Yoruba part of Nigeria.This class of beggars has songs composed for their vocation. The data for this research consists of five songs which were extracted from the public domain in different Yoruba communities across Ibadan, Akure, Oyo, Ilorin, Ogbomoso, Ado Ekiti and Ikare-Akoko. They were collected from the roaming singers themselves, and some others from popular knowledge among the people. The study is pinned to a couple of theories, such as the Hallidayan systemic functionality of language and its relevance to the society. It is also anchored to David Crystal’s tradition of tonal variations as a plethora of stylistic choices in language encounters. For the data I translated, I used the sense-for-sense literary technique as expounded inEugene Nida’s ideology. The analysis showsan avalanche of verbal variations,cadence, repetition, parallelism, and emotional manipulation for obvious psychological appeal. The result reveals that begging happens worldwide and begging,using the medium of songs, isartistic, entertaining, historical, religious, cultural and above all, intellectual. The songs are constructed to be emotional, exploiting basic human instincts, and for which reason, givers freely give, in addition to satisfying their own needs for giving. Keywords - Beggars, Beliefs, Culture,Songs, Twins.