Foregrounded Syntactic Structures and Deviation as Markers of Freedom: A Stylistic Reading of Ben Okri’s Tales of Freedom

Abstract

Although linguistic stylisticians aver that meanings in literary texts are products of interactions among the various levels of linguistic analysis, scholarly investigations of meanings in texts have largely focused on the lexico-semantic level. The paper attempts a stylistic reading of Ben Okri’s Tales of Freedom with focus on investigating the contributions of the syntactic structures and deviations to the meaning-making process. Relying on insights from MAK Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, the paper examines how the grammatical structures in the text are deployed to negotiate and foreground the major themes in the text. Analysis reveals that the central theme of freedom and the sub-themes (dialectics between slavery and freedom, struggles of life and, human life as a journey) are not only projected at the lexico-semantic level but also structurally expressed through stylistically deployed syntactic categories such as equating groups to clauses, curt responses, clusters of syntactic categories, sentence order deviation and, co-constructions. Analysis supports the scholars’ claim that meaning in literary text can be gleaned from the various levels of linguistic analysis. The paper concludes that one of the hallmarks of a good literary artist/text is to foreground meaning at the various levels of the language.