CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
- Background to the Study
A lot of similarities exist in the definitions of language. From another angle, there are highly technical usages of the word “language” reflecting the way the term has been applied figuratively to all forms of human behaviour such as language of writing, media, politics, music, law and advertisement. Halliday (1971:332) also succinctly puts the function of language thus:
Language serves for the expression of content. The speaker or writer embodies language, his experiences of the internal world of his Consciousness, his reaction, cognition, and perception and also his Linguistic acts of speaking and understanding.
The major challenge about defining language is that of trying to summarise its contents in single sentences. According to Sapir (1921:8), language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, thoughts and emotions by means of voluntarily produced symbols. This definition presents language as a primarily human characteristic for the purpose of communication. To Chomsky (1957:13), language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length as set of physical patterns that are arbitrarily combined to make the communication process effective. From Chomsky‟s definition, it‟s obvious that language consists of several elements each with a different way of operation but combined together to produce unlimited constructions. Therefore to Chomsky, language is a functional element used by humans for the purpose of communication. From the perspective of the above definition of language by Sapir (1921:8) language communicates ideas, emotions, thoughts, and desires which, when put down in a literary text, is referred to as literature.
Stylistic analysis which this research focuses on is the end product of two modes of analysis. That is, the literary and linguistic approaches to the analysis of literary texts. While the role of the literary analyst is to bring out the style that is the literary elements used by the writer to interpret themes, the linguist on his part takes the codes as his domain, and the meaning of the work becomes relevant as far as it illustrates the use of language. Widdowson (1975) explains the function of literary stylistics as the interpretation and evaluation of literary text as works of art, and that the primary concern of the analysis is to explicate the individual message of the writer. Widdowson also clarifies the function of the linguistic stylistic analyst as the decoder of messages and exemplifiers of how the codes are constructed.
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A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ADICHIE’S THE THINGS AROUND YOUR NECK AND PURPLE HIBSUS 1-2..docx
