Lexis and style in Tanure Ojaide’s <i>Delta Blues and Home Songs</i>

Abstract

This paper, lexis and style in Tanure Ojaide‟s Delta Blues and Home Songs, examined how meaning is negotiated through the use of cohesive devices and other stylistic features in the text. Previous studies have concentrated on phoric relations in the text as well as on the text‟s treatment of environmental issues without much attention paid to how cohesive devices coalesce in the text to produce meaning. Data for the study comprised five poems purposively selected from Ojaide‟s Delta Blues and Home Songs. Also, the study undertook a qualitative research procedure. Equally, since the paper focused attention on the use of language (lexical choices) to address social situations, the theoretical base adopted was Halliday and Hasan‟s (1976) Cohesion Theory. The research discovered that style and meaning are inseparably linked. This was revealed through the assessment of the author‟s deployment of cohesive devices like reiteration, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy as well as the stylistic features of hypotaxis and parataxis. The paper was concluded with the notion that by the author‟s placement of cohesive and stylistic features in the foreground, meaning in the text became more pronounced and clearly underlined.