Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.p Clark-bekederemo’s Poetry

Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.p Clark-bekederemo’s Poetry

Chapter One of Deictics and Stylistic Function in J.p Clark-bekederemo’s Poetry

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

language tends to be reflected in its grammatical and lexical structure…” Against this

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.