A Study on the Foreground in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign God’s Inc
Abstract
The study is a graphological inquiry on foregrounded elements in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign god’s Inc. The various paralinguistic graphological devices in the text complement the verbal signifiers and foreground critical and strategic aspects of meaning in relation to context of situation and textual function. Conventional wisdom that is linguistically oriented has it that, to properly decipher a literary work, it is essential to examine the linguistic peculiarities- styles, of the writer. Interestingly, stylistic analysis opens up forays for the appreciation of any literary work. This assertion necessitates a graphological inquiry on the select text, as it bears relevance to prevailing socio-cultural realities of contemporary Nigerian society.
Consequently, the research design for the study is Content Analysis. This framework addresses various stylistic and semantic orientations through a treatise of the several foregrounding elements. Admittedly, the study established the prevalence of some distinct foregrounding elements which may pose challenges to readers. And these elements express great ideas, consequential to the entire narrative. It is quite revealing as the research outlines the fact that foregrounding as an analytic tool is of great stylistic import in the sense that they help writers to express contextual or stylistic meaning, enhance text aesthetics and appeal as well as aid readers to conveniently comprehend and interpret the ideological propositions of writers contained in text.
By extension, language performs a multitude of functions constantly unveiled in relation to communication needs. The study therefore concludes that interpretation of textual meanings without proper recourse to the covert nuances of graphological patterning would be largely ineffective and fall short of the requisite standards in linguistic analysis of texts.
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
1.0 Background to the Study
Foregrounding is a term usually used in art, having opposite meaning to background. It is a very general principle of artistic communication that work of art in some way deviates from norm which we, as members of society, have learnt to expect in the medium used and that anyone who wishes to investigate the significance and value a work of art must concentrate on the element of interest and surprise, rather than on automatic pattern. In stylistics, the notion of foregrounding, a term borrowed from the Prague School of Linguistics, is used by Leech and Short (48) to refer to ‘artistically motivated deviation’. Foregrounding refers to any attention-catching device in a text including lexical or structural repetition, coupling, collocation, etc. which makes parts of a text to stand out in specific contexts. The term traverses the entire gamut of discourses and presupposes any deliberate device, linguistic or paralinguistic, which authors and writers deploy to emphasize or make prominent a particular aspect of a text. It is a major component of arts criticism, helping scholars to distinguish between the background and foreground of paintings.
Writers deploy diverse ways not only to encode and disseminate their artistic vision and message but also to achieve formal aesthetics in their works. This study explains why writers take advantage of the elasticity of language in sundry ways in their discourses, in the sense that ‘language implies the availability of an internal structure which makes it possible for the writer or speaker to construct texts that are not only coherent but also situationally appropriate’ (Adeyanju,87). In addition, this study also explains why writers employ various paralinguistic devices to complement linguistic choices, make meaning more precise as well as enhance the aesthetic texture and appeal of the texts.
Among the latter set of stylistic resources (paralinguistic devices) highlighted above are graphological elements or patterns such as italicization, capitalization, dashes and ellipses. These paralinguistic resources help writers to capture particular pragmatic senses in texts and aid the readability, comprehension and interpretation of linguistic forms in given situational or textual contexts. According to Adegoju, graphology concerns ‘such matters as spelling, capitalization, hyphenation, typography, lists, underlining, italicization, paragraphing, color, etc. which can all create different kinds of impact, some of which will cause the reader to react differently’ (160).
Ngara (17) echoes a similar viewpoint when he observed that graphology covers such areas as the layout of the text, color, shape of the printed marks, punctuation, paragraphing and spacing, etc. Short (54-57) adds that splitting of a word to separate letters, writing all words together without orthographical spaces, etc., are also graphological patterns or symbols. Etymologically, the term has Greek roots; grapho’ meaning writing and logos meaning word. Basically, it focuses on or deals primarily with handwriting. The term has, however, become very crucial and strategic in linguistic circles particularly in descriptive stylistics and its uses have extended to the study of all subtly meaningful symbols and signs including pictorial devices, which help writers to communicate messages. It is apparently most effective and applicable to an ideophonic language like English, whose writing system largely depends on a set of symbols and signs. According to Alo (5), the descriptive study of style rests on the analysis of language resources which can be found at the various levels of language description including the following: phonology (sounds/sound effects), lexis (word usage and diction), grammar (word and sentence structure), semantics (units of meaning), graphology (orthography or writing system) and pragmatics (language for action or getting things done).
A close look at the above outline etches the fact that stylistic analysis is an empirical linguistic tool whose insight and methodologies do not only cover all aspects of language use but also accounts for all the linguistic choices made by individual authors and speakers in all communicative engagements or situations. Hence, Alo (1) posits that the verbal style encapsulates or embodies “… all the devices of language that are used to achieve communication goals in speech and writing …’ Mullany and Stockwell (15) corroborate this view point inter alia: Stylistic analysis can be conducted…across the linguistic rank-scale, from phonology, morphology and lexicology through syntax and semantics, and up to text or discourse levels.
The significant point, however, as earlier mentioned, is that style which is central to stylistics, distinguishes one form of language use from another at all these constitutive levels or layers, according to the specific interactive or communicative context. Hence, Wales in Missikova (18) defines style as variation in language, literary or non-literary, the set or sum of linguistic features as the characteristics of an author or as the choice of items and their distribution and patterning. Crystal (440) lends credence to this view when he defined style as situationally distinctive uses of language by an author or speaker. Turner (7) adds that stylistics focuses on variation in the use of language, often, but not exclusively, with special reference to the most conscious and complex uses of language in literature.
The term ‘foregrounding’ had its origin with the Czech theorist Jan Mukařovský. It is how Mukařovský’s original term, aktualisace, was rendered in English by his first translator Paul Garvin in the 1960s. It refers to the range of stylistic variations that occur in literature, whether at the phonetic level (alliteration, rhyme), the grammatical level (inversion, ellipsis) or the semantic level (metaphor, irony). According to Leech (56-57), foregrounding manifests in linguistic parallelism and linguistic deviation and can be studied from lexical, grammatical, phonological, semantic and graphological angles. Leech and Short (48) are of the view that there are essentially two kinds of foregrounding viz: quantitative and qualitative foregrounding. Quantitative foregrounding is deviating from some expected frequency while qualitative foregrounding is the deviation from the language code itself. Yankson (3) alludes to the latter kind of foregrounding when he defines it as ‘…the aesthetically intentional distortion of the linguistic components of a text’. He opines that ‘the normal language code is the background. Any deviation from the normal code is the foreground, because it brings the message to the forecourt of the reader’s attention’. In the same vein, Halliday (98) describes the term as ‘motivated prominence’ given to a particular textual feature, in the sense that it covers all the linguistic and paralinguistic strategies used by literary artists or other authors to make parts of a text prominent which contribute substantially to their cumulative meaning, and attract the attention or close scrutiny of scholars and readers alike. There are two main types of foregrounding; parallelism which can be described as unexpected regularity while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity. As the definition of foregrounding indicates, something can only be unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular context. This context can be relatively narrow, such as the immediate textual surroundings (referred to as a ‘secondary norm’).
No doubt, foregrounding is a relevant, even indispensable, strand of textual texture, particularly in literary texts by its very nature and function, as outlined earlier. Babajide (131) highlights the relevance of foregrounding in graphological analysis inter alia: foregrounding is a major device in the graphological aspect of a text. This simply means bringing a certain item to the fore. Foregrounding manifests in different forms such as capitalization, italicization, dashes, and all sorts of signs and symbols used to demand attention. As such, the present study focuses on analyzing foregrounded elements which have been deliberately deployed by Okey Ndibe to draw attention to critical and strategic aspects of meaning in his Foreign God’s Inc. The idea noted earlier is to demonstrate the fact that there is an intrinsic connection between visual appeals and meaning interpretation in texts, the appropriation interpretation of meaning in discourse is not entirely dependent on the use of formal linguistic elements.
