Pronominal Group as Signals of Authority, Opposition and Solidarity in the Poetry of Two Modern African Poets

Abstract

This paper examines the use of pronominal forms as signals of authority, opposition and solidarity in Obu Udeozo's Excursions and Cyclone and Tanure Ojaide’s The Fate of Vultures. The pronominal group expresses the role relationship between and among participants in a discourse. These poets use pronominal forms specifically to identify the various ‘speaking voices’ in their poetry collections and to reveal their ideological positions. They also use these pronominal forms to enhance the ideational content of their poems. The issues raised in the poems and the events and situations described concern ‘us’, ‘you’ and ‘me’. My examination of the exploitation of personal forms in this paper derives from the need to use the tools of linguistics (stylistics) to explicate the poetry collections already highlighted. It is also motivated by the fact that despite their simplistic nature, the pronominal forms are meaning-signalling devices in the poetry collections. In our adoption of a linguistic approach, we are motivated by the opinion that linguistics can be a useful aid to the analysis of texts and can complement the efforts of literary criticism.

Key words: Solidarity; Opposition; Authority; Pronominal; Group and language