Dialectical Re-Lexicalization in Festus Iyayi’s Literary Idiolect: Componential Analysis Approach

Abstract

A conflation of factors such as the social situation that provides the universe of discourse in Festus Iyayi’s novels, the ideological leaning of the writer and the paradigms of the characters of the literary works condition the literary idiom of the three novels under study- Violence, The contract and Heroes. The dialectics of defining and redefining of concepts from opposing paradigms with the privileged comprador class, on the one side of language use, and the underprivileged class, on the other, produce the conflicts in the novel, linguistically speaking. The audience is then left to appreciate how the members of the two classes either use the key terms in the novels from the conventional meaning paradigm or from the subversive perspective. This study then, using the componential analysis approach, explores this creative relexicalization and reaches the conclusion that the social situation or reality in the fiction the metaphor for language and language is the metaphor for the social reality. And this accounts part for Iyayi’s literary idiolect in the novels.

LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research, 8(2), 92-100, 2011