Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born is a novel known for its extensive portrayal of the ills and anomalies in the Ghanaian society right after independence. The majority of studies on the novel have overwhelmingly concluded that corruption is the preoccupation of the text. This view appears skewed in many respects. This paper argues that the corpus assisted approach can contribute methodologies to support objective investigation of the subject matters of the text. This study, adopting the corpus-assisted approach in a mix of numerical data and qualitative description of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born, used frequencies of the occurrence of pejorative terms in the text to determine the dominant subject matters in the novel. The approach reveals that “rot” and “decay” are the most dominant motifs used, followed by “filth”, “corruption”, and “bribery”. It suggests that clusters, i.e., recurrence of words, characters’ association with the words, and context of use serve as textual cues in thematic exploration. The approach aids in revealing that the real intent of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is that the total breakdown of the society rests on seemingly insignificant characters. The paper has implications for methodological approaches to thematic analysis of literary texts, particularly, the novel.
This study is a stylistic analysis of the dominant patterned repetition – schemes – in Ghanaian Hiplife lyrics. Schemes constitute a broad range of repetitive structures in literature. They represent the grammatical or linguistic breach of expressions, literally, to allow further emphasis and attention through some elements of repetition manifested in the phonological, graphological or formal patterning of these expressions. Data for this study came from fourteen hit Hiplife songs released between 1994 and 2018. The data were analysed within Leech’s (1969) framework for the stylistic analysis of schemes. The analysis revealed that both free repetition and parallelism were used in the data. Free repetition manifested in various kinds, such as epizeuxis and ploce, while epistrophe, symploce, anadiplosis and epanalepsis were the kinds of parallelism found in the data. These schemes were used to achieve an aesthetic effect and also highlight the necessity borne out of spontaneity and artistry of delivery of message. The paper has implications for literary studies in schools as the data are readily available and familiar to current students Again, it has huge relevance to African Stylistics as the concept has been generally seen as alien to the African context.
Songs are one of the oldest forms of literature and they continue to play important roles in the socialization of members of a society. Considering the importance of songs, this study sought to analyze ambiguity in Ghanaian songs focusing on songs produced by one of the vibrant production houses in Ghana ‘Ruff town Records’. The study was based on 15 sampled songs by Ebony Reigns and Wendy Shay, the leading artistes of the record label. The study revealed instances of ambiguity in 10 of the sampled songs with the causes of these indeterminacies being mainly phonological intonation and lexical choices. These ambiguities were euphemistically deployed mostly to highlight sexual images. The study has implications for revealing the trends and patterns of contemporary Ghanaian music. It is therefore recommended that more studies should be carried out on Ghanaian songs, focusing on other styles and presentation techniques employed by song writers.
Literature mirrors societies. While the plethora of studies on African literature, spanning from the early 21st century, have discussed literary texts in their political spectrums, recent studies using transitivity analysis have offered new and objective understandings of these novels. Nonetheless, most transitivity analyses have been fixated on characterization, style and themes. Against this background, the purpose of this study was to use corpus procedures to examine the transitivity of verbal process types in Adichie’s recent novel Zikora. Assisted by corpus linguistics, the study used transitivity as an analytical framework to analyse the verbal process in the text. From the analysis, three major findings are reported from the discussion. First, through the verbal processes, the Adichie deconstructed the myriad suffering and subjugation of women through dialogic means and taking responsibility for their livelihood. Second, the foregrounded verbal processes reflect the attribution of processes to other characters than accounting for the literary effects projected through the clauses. Finally, while the writer used the projected clauses to attribute the verbal processes to others, the dominant use of the first-person mode of narration identifies a sharing of roles to account for the writing of the literary work. Following these findings, the study extends the scholarship on literary stylistics and provides implications for further research in other genres of (African) literature.
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