The current study examines the misconceptions and misunderstandings in the speech acts of the characters within three Namibian plays, namely The Oracle of Cidino written by Francis Nyathi, Checkmate by Maria Amakali, and The Bride and Broom penned by David Stone Ndjavera. Furthermore, this research examines the ways, which depict instances where characters’ speech acts lead to misconceptions and misunderstandings in the selected plays. Thereby, delving into these aspects, this study sheds light on the complexities of communication within the selected theatrical works. Moreover, this study examines the impact of miscommunication in discussions, which can culminate differences in understanding of speech acts between the speaker and the listener. The listener, however, is prone to a variety of emotional reactions, which arise from misunderstandings in a conversation - including feelings of joy, humor, embarrassment, regret or self-assumption, and impression of the speaker's utterance. The results of the enquiry evinced that the location-based actions performed by the characters in the three selected plays included declarative, interrogative, and imperative resources that are extracted from three Namibian plays. This is achieved by adopting a discourse analysis research approach, identifying, and explaining speech acts based on five classes of speech acts. Additionally, the current study is established on five functions of speech acts and on the other hand, the declarative statements proliferate the fewest of times since they require specified circumstances to be performed.
This article questions how women are represented in Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel and The Trials of Brother Jero, following a feminist stylistics theoretical framework. The plays were investigated keeping in view Mills (1995) three echelons of enquiry: lexis, syntax, and discourse. Soyinka’s plays are masterfully carved to expose the suppression of women by men. In these plays, female characters are represented through withering words and phrases, which presages their disapproval and also their voluptuous accessibility and attractiveness. Women are represented through a sexist and hidebound lingo. They are rendered as malevolent, deleterious, and calamitous, as they are only credited with transporting hitches to the lives of men. They are presented as creatures of the scrubland, ferocious, barbarous, unschooled, and stumpy. These deleterious attributes were given to them with a direct implication of their subordination by their male counterparts. Also, they are represented as receivers of actions, since men carry out most of the demanding tasks/actions in the plays in comparison to women. Following transitivity choices, this article concludes that men carry out actions and women are acted upon. They are given prosaic jobs such as homemakers, paltry traders, hawkers, child bearers, and caregivers to their husbands and children, whereas men are given more important roles such as schoolmasters and chiefs. Women are not given these arduous roles, as the patriarchy perceives that they are not capable of carrying out those roles because of their emotions and simple mindset. Finally, the article recommends further research with the aim of advancing and improving the representation of women in Nigerian drama. Keywords: discourse, feminist stylistics, focalization, fragmentation, lexis, patriarchy, semantic derogation, sexism, syntax, transitivity choices
The current research presents a cognitive stylistics study of two Namibian novels: Francis Sifiso Nyathi’s The Other Presence and Salom Shilongo’s The Hopeless Hopes. These novels were selected because they present societal problems specific to Namibia from two different perspectives. The study also argues that only a few such Namibian novels have been investigated via conceptualising cognitive stylistics. The researchers have raised three fundamental questions: How does cognitive metaphor help explicate psychological hitches as captured creatively in the two novels? What is the mind’s contribution in conceptualising and comprehending contextual meanings in the two novels? How does content schema contribute to the understanding of the two novels? It is, therefore, against the backdrop of these three questions that the two novels were purposefully selected and studied. Conceptualising and implementing the cognitive metaphor, the current study also analyses the root causes of societal problems, such as unemployment, unfair treatment of people, HIV/AIDS, and witchcrafts, prevailing in the Namibian social fabric. In The Other Presence, it is the HIV/AIDS which is referred to as the other presence. Shilongo’s The Hopeless Hopes also reveals how Robert and the other fellow Namibian ex-combatants gathered at a Big House in Windhoek to hand over their petition to Honourable Zopa. It indicates clearly that the State House is being contextualised as a Big House in the novel, while the ‘Founding Father’ and the former president of the country Honourable Sam Nuyoma is referred to as Honourable Zopa. The contextual meaning of the selected novels can thus only be understood if the readers of these novels have a general background knowledge of the Namibian society. Within a cognitive stylistics theoretical framework, the study also follows a schema theory to explain mental problems and contextual meanings. It manifests how a cognitive stylistics approach to Namibian novels can advance the literary understanding of the multiplicities of themes, such as culture, taboo, superstition, unemployment, colonialism, corruption, and mental health. Keywords: cognitive metaphor, cognitive stylistics, content schema, contextual meanings, mental problems, schema theory
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