MEANING CONSTRUCTION IN SELECTED POLITICAL ESSAYS OF NIYI OSUNDARE AND RAY EKPU

Abstract

Essays published in the print media by Niyi Osundare and Ray Ekpu are known for addressing public concerns globally. However, in spite of the landmark contributions of these essays to Nigeria’s sociopolitical development, not much systematic study has been done on them. The study was, therefore, designed to examine selected political essays of Osundare and Ekpu in order to determine their meaning constructions based on their stylo-linguistic choices, as well as their points of convergence and divergence.

M.A.K Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, supported with relevant aspects of Aristotle’s Rhetorical Model, served as framework. Thirty essays were purposively sampled, 15 each from Osundare’sand Ekpu’s publications in Newswatch where they both published between the second and the fourth republics (1979 – 1999). These essays captured issues of Nigeria’s political development in these eras, and were subjected to linguistic-stylistic analysis.

The essays exploited alliteration and assonance to reinforce meaning and provide information. Capitalisation and italicisation foregrounded discourse subjects in order to underscore their enormity. The predominant nominal groups in the selected essays were modifier, head and qualifier (mhq), head and qualifier (hq) and modifier and head (mh)types. They were employed for effective description and thematic projection of discourse themes such as misappropriation of nation’s resources, increasing unemployment, monstrous inflation, grinding poverty, gross socio-economic inequality and wide-spread disillusionment. Declarative structures were for factual information, evaluation and elaboration in relation to the issues addressed in the essays. Interrogatives were used for elicitation, accentuation and petition. Whereas elicitation conveyed the essayists’ inquisitive mood, accentuation made the issues addressed prominent. Through petition, the essayists challenged the cause of the issues accentuated in order to proffer solution to them. Imperatives such as “Let us talk this week about Nigeria”, “Let us mount the horse of memory” and “Jail those journalists” were used for invitation, instruction and suggestion. The essays issued instruction and by implication requested some action by way of response from the reader. Parallelism provided a multidimensional representation of the issues addressed. Reiteration created lexical links between words in the discourse. While synonyms and antonyms amplified meaning, collocations were pressed into satirical function. Osundare’s and Ekpu’s essays employed biblical and historical allusions to situate issues within specific contexts. They utilised evidential clauses, reliable sources, self-inclusive pronouns and metaphors for persuasion. Osundare’s essays used the mhq, hq and mh patterns for effective description and thematic projection and the mhpattern for discourse headlines. Conversely, Ekpu’s essays employed the mhq and mh patterns for effective description and the hq and mhq patterns for thematic projection and discourse headlines. Osundare’s essays deployed both the Yes/No and Wh-question types for elicitation, accentuation and petitioning, while Ekpu’s essays used the Wh-question for elicitation and accentuation. Osundare employed the imperative mood for instruction, invitation and suggestion whereas Ekpu deployed it for instruction.

Niyi Osundare and Ray Ekpu largely deployed stylo-linguistic devices such as parallelism, evidential clauses, self-inclusive pronouns, metaphor and collocations to unveil and denounce sociopolitical ills in the country. They employed these devices to underscore their political stance.