ANALYSING THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION IN WOLE SOYINKA’S ALAPATA APATA: A SOCIO-FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to carry out a linguistic analysis of Wole Soyinka’s play entitled Alapata Apata. The contention is that, like several West African writings, Wole Soyinka’s literary works are influenced by his culture and mother tongue. In order to find out how the writer has made culture-based assumptions in the speech of the characters of his play, the paper is hinged upon Saville-Troique (2003)’s theory of ethnography of communication and Eggins (2004)’s theory of interpersonal meaning advanced by systemic functional linguistics. The descriptive methodology based on quantitative and qualitative approaches has been adopted in the study. The analysis reveals, at the sociolinguistic level, that the writer has used such interlingual features as Nigerian Pidgin, code-switching, code mixing and other linguistic devices to represent his artistic and ideological perspective of the African literature. The study of interpersonal meaning shows that various mood-types including declarative, interrogative, imperative, and features of modality are used by interactants to realize the tenor of discourse which is the role- relationship that exists among the characters of the play. By describing the factors that help to highlight the way communicative events achieve their objectives, this study has made it easy to decode some utterances meanings that facilitate the understanding of the language of the play