Deviant Collocation As A Writing Technique In African Literature: A Stylistic Study of Helon Habila’s Measuring Time. (Published)
This paper appraises the use of deviant collocations in Habila’s Measuring Time. Ordinarily, collocations are words or expressions that naturally co-occur. But some literary artists have as a matter of fact made some incongruous blending for stylistic stand point and to unravel the ills in their environments. This inquiry adopts the systemic functional Grammar because it highlights the functions of language, the descriptive methods of data analysis, the primary and secondary data collection methods. It was discovered that language use depicts the afflictions of the people like the twins La Mamo and Mamo in the novel. Thus, elements of language as used in the Measuring Time stand for Habila’s ideological orientation. He therefore, uses deviant collocations such as personification, paradox, oxymoron, grotesque scheme, hybridity and so on to unearth the sense of fragmentation, despair and perplexity, which define his fictional Keti community, which is a paradigm for Nigeria and indeed Africa.
Keywords: African literature, Deviation and Collocation, Language, Style
Style of Nigerian English Conversation: A Discourse-Stylistic Analysis of a Natural Conversation (Published)
The study entitled ‘Style of Nigerian English conversation: a discourse- stylistic analysis of a natural conversation is a linguistic stylistic analysis of educated Nigerian English conversation. The study following the example of Davy and crystal (1969) was aimed at identifying the common features of conversation in educated Nigerian English in relation to the linguistic features of conversational English. Our findings showed that Nigerian English conversation has the features of inexplicitness of expressions, randomness of subject- matter and general lack of planning;, normal non-fluency and gap-fillers; the use of in-group slang and abbreviations known to participants; extreme informality, etc. In specific terms, Nigerian English conversation closely approximates the Standard English conversation in terms of its style and interactive qualities as a language in use in social contexts. The study discovered, that, Nigerian English conversation, apart from the common core – features which it shares with the general conversational English, has some indexical markers which locate it in its socio-cultural and sociolinguistic context as English as a second language
Keywords: Conversation, Discourse-Stylistics, Nigerian English, Style