STYLE AND LANGUAGE IN ORAL LITERATURE A STUDY OF TALES FROM IGBERE

STYLE AND LANGUAGE IN ORAL LITERATURE A STUDY OF TALES FROM IGBERE

ABSTRACT

Analyses of oral literature have for long concentrated on function and form, with little or no attention paid to the aesthetic and linguistic aspects. This work applies linguistic principles to the analysis of oral literature. The purpose is to arrive at an interpretation of the tales, based on the structure, to enable us study some of the lexical and grammatical categories isolated from the tales, and to attempt constructing a tentative theory of the linguistic properties of oral tale. After the introduction, the work is divided into four chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to the text. Chapter two presents a literature review of related works, chapter three is our research method while chapter four analyses a selection from our corpus, while five concludes the thesis. While analyzing lexical and grammatical categories in the tales, this thesis further argues that to understand the meaning of oral literature, one has to understand its distinctive language and style and concludes that narrators use words deliberately to achieve the reaction they desire from the audience.