A Lexico-Semantic Reading of Chimamanda Adichie’sPurple Hibiscus

A key purpose for exploring the language of a text is to determine the extent to which a given author has organized and deployed its limitless potentials to encode or relate the intended message and social vision. With M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, as the analytical template, this study, therefore, investigates aspects of lexico-semantic patterning in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, such as simplicity of lexical choices, collocation, semantic fields, selectional restriction rule, category rule violation, imagery and lexical relations (i.e. synonymy), in order to establish their connotative implications and how they cohere in the text, to foreground the author’s artistic target, in conjunction with other linguistic elements and cultural and contextual variables. The study reveals that the construction of a literary text is a linguistically conscious activity, as the lexico-semantic nuances and dynamics of Adichie’s text explored are critical and strategic both stylo-rhetorically and in message delivery. It confirms the fact that the linguistic choices a writer makes from the plethora of options at his/her disposal are engendered by subject matter and context, as these twin elements choose their own variety of language. According to Jindal and Syal (2010:18), “... in studying language which is the subject-matter of linguistics, we mark or sub-divide the area in order to study it in an analytical and systematic way.” Alo (1995:13) expounds this thesis inter alia:Language is a complex phenomenon and to be studied effectively, it is broken into major levels or areas. Within modern descriptive linguistics, language is studied from the following angles: phonetics, phonology, grammar (comprising morphology and syntax), lexis and semantics.Instructively, stylistics (which is the study of linguistic style) focuses on all the constitutive layers or dimensions of language use, which are deployed by language users in distinctive ways to transmit textual messages and achieve aesthetic effects. Alo (1998:5) avers that the descriptive study of style accounts for language use in texts from three distinct perspectives, in terms of focus and methodology viz: style as deviation (i.e. from linguistic norms or conventions), recurrence (i.e. of language patternslexical, phonological, syntactic, etc), and textual function (i.e. variations in sentence structure found in texts and their functions as elements of emphasis, focus and foregrounding), through the following constituent levels of language study: (i)Phonology (sounds/sound effects) (ii)Lexis (word usage and diction) (iii)Grammar (word and sentence structure) (iv)Semantics (units of meaning) (v)Graphology (Orthography or writing system) (vi)Pragmatics (Language of action or getting things done) 1Niger Delta University, Faculty of Arts, Department of English and Literary Studies, Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. Email: eyeibo@gmail.com 2Stanbic Ibtc Bank, Victoria Island, Lagos.