The Supra-Lexical Pragmatic Techniques in Selected Novels of Zaynab Alkali and Chimamanda Adichie (Published)
This study examines the supra-lexical pragmatic techniques employed in Zaynab Alkali’s The Virtuous Woman and The Stillborn, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. Using Linguistic Relativity, a variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, as the study’s theoretical thrust, and the content analysis technique as its method, relevant pragmatic expressions were extracted and analysed. The result shows that Alkali and Adichie employed different pragmatic features that are non-lexical. The English used for literary communication in the selected texts differs from other world Englishes. The English variety embodies the worldview of Nigerians which is expressed in quite different ways. It was also found that Adichie’s texts contain more Igboisms than Alkali’s texts contain Hausaisms. However, Alkali’s texts have more transliterated local idioms and proverbs than Adichie’s. Regarding the occurrence of nativised figures of speech, there is no significant difference between the ways both authors employed these figures of speech although Adichie’s use of these pragmatic features is higher than Alkali’s.
Keywords: African literature, Nigerian Literature, literary discourse, pragmatic techniques, supra-lexical pragmatics