Lexico-Semantic and Pragmatic Stylistic Devices in Selected Tiv Novels

Abstract

Previous studies on the select Tiv novels had always ignored focusing on lexico-semantic and pragmatic stylistic devices in these novels.  This study investigates the relevance of lexico-semantic and pragmatic devices for meaning realisation in Shija’s Whispers of Distant Drums (2005), Gar’s The Blood of the Ram (2009), Kwaghchimin’s A Star of Hope (2010), Tijah’s Slow Men at Work (2012) and Norya’s The Luminous Flame (2014), works possessing very rich graphological and phonological stylistic devices. This study has adopted Leech’s (1969) model of foregrounding because it properly accounts for the use of parallelisms (repetitions) and deviations in the novels and uses it to explore the significance of lexico-semantic and pragmatic deviations in the texts.  As for data presentation and analysis, the authors examined the select novels by reading between the lines, selecting lexes, picking semantic and pragmatic devices as well as grouping these under lexis, semantics and pragmatics and relating them to their stylistic uses. It was been discovered that lexical items used in the texts portray Tiv culture. It was also learnt that both denotative and connotative meanings have been used in the novels. For semantic and pragmatic reasons, characters in the select novels employed lexico-semantics and pragmatic devices such as borrowing words and proverbs from Tiv, Hausa and French, as well as employing code-switching, code-mixing and pidgin. The paper concludes that the lexico-semantic and pragmatic devices deployed have given different shades of meaning to the understanding of the novels.