1. Introduction
There is no doubt that J.P. Clark-Bekederemo is one of the leading lights of Nigeria’s first generation of writers. This thesis springs from his historicity, the quantity and quality of his literary procreations and the prodigious critical attention and acclaim these works have attracted across the globe. However, unlike other Nigerian writers such as Soyinka and Osundare, there is an acrite dearth of critical works on the language of the poet. Eyoh’s (1997) J.P. Clark’s Poetry: A Study in Stylistic Criticism remains the only full-scale linguistic investigation of the writer’s poetry. The critical fact is that this work is limited by its triadic focus on the phonostylistic, lexical and paralinguistic affective aspects of the poet’s idiolect.
There is no doubt that language is very crucial to literary procreation and discourse. Todorov (1977) highlights this view when he defined literature as a verbal work of art. The implication is that, to fully grasp the meaning and aesthetics of a literary text (or any text for that matter), there must be recourse to language at all levels of linguistic description, because it is the singular medium of its expression. Dada (2004) explains:
A literary work contains a lot of codes and information that must be decoded in order to fully grasp the meaning of the work; it has sound patterns, semantic relations and syntactic organization. All these must be taken into account when reading a literary text.
The present study, therefore seeks to fill the gap left by Eyoh’s (1997) work in the area of lexis and grammar, by investigating the role deictic words play in encoding the meaning Yeibo: Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Poetry 2 and aesthetics of the texts. Dever (1998) posits that, in creating any text, literary or nonliterary, we must combine words to express complex ideas or relationships in sentences Lyons (1977:249) echoes a similar viewpoint when he averred that “… the function of background, the study demonstrates that lexico-grammatical patterning in a text is as crucial as any other level of linguistic description in encoding the message and aesthetics of literary discourse.
2. Theoretical Foundation/Literature Review Stylistics is the branch of linguistics that focuses on style, particularly in works of literature. Cluett and Kampeas (1979) refer to it as the judgment of “the tangible manifestation of style”. According to Allan et al. (1988), the concept…. studies the characteristics of situationally distinctive use of language and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language.
From the foregoing preliminary statements, we can see the water tight relationship between style and stylistics. It is the workshop of stylistics; the soil on which stylistics is sown. Hence, Babajide (2000) observes that where there is no style, there is no stylistics.
What then is style? Basically, it refers to the way we do things – dress, talk, pray, dance,walk, etc. in a linguistic sense, the concept infers the specific manner a particular speaker or writer expresses himself. Leech and Short (1981) see it as “the way language is used in a literary text, with the aim of relating it to its artistic (or aesthetic) functions” (p.14-15).
According to Tomori (1977), “there is a style in everything we say; so style cannot be isolated from language itself; but it is a distinctive aspect of language” (p. 53).
