A Linguistic Study of the Novel I Do Not Come to You By Chance
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background to the study
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It covers the structure (morphology and syntax), sounds (phonology), and meaning (semantics) of a language. It goes deep into the history and relationship between languages, culture and human behaviour. Semantics, as a sub field of linguistics, is the study of the meanings of words and sentences in a language. Pragmatics, which is also a sub discipline of linguistics, is quite similar to semantics because it is more practical and interested in meaning in language in use unlike semantics which looks at language in isolation.
Semantics as a term became popular in the early 20th century. The nature of meaning is a discipline which has drawn scholars from anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy and etymology. Prior to the early 20th century, the philosophers studied semantics. They focused on finding the interrelationship between expressions and their physical representations in the real world.
Semantics is a branch of linguistics that is very important in human existence. Effective communication achieved through language plays a significant role in everyday communication. It is the possession of language which separates human beings from animals. The purpose of any piece of utterance is to remit meaning to a receiver. Hybels and Weaver (1989) in Ndimele (4) say that “understanding is a two-way process” the listener and the speaker. Sometimes, the meaning of an utterance cannot exactly be determined on the surface level; many other factors affect meaning. Semantics looks deep and tries to present meanings to utterances considering the factors surrounding the utterances. Some other times, an expression may sound meaningless or inappropriate in a given context but the same expression will be meaningful and appropriate in another context.
Lexical semantics focuses on the lexical items of a language, which is the basis for understanding meaning in a language. The lexical item could be a single word, a part of a word or a chain of words that make up a meaningful utterance. It reviews meaning, employing different literary devices, as well as techniques. It brings out the in-depth meaning of lexical items by finding out the conceptual, associative, or thematic meaning. It also concerns itself with meaning relations at the word and sentence levels. Words, sometimes do not have meaning in isolation, they share meaning relationships with each other. Words which share semantic features with each other tend to belong to the same field semantically. Words could share relationship with other words through sameness in meaning (synonymy) or as direct opposites (antonyms). A single lexical item could also have several related meanings (polysemy) or even share the same form yet have different meanings (homonymy). At the sentence level, the meaning of a chain of words or a part of a word is examined in terms of paraphrasing, ambiguity, contradiction, tautology, redundancy, meaninglessness, presupposition, anomaly, entailment or proposition.
The meanings of lexical items are not based solely on what they represent on the page but from the interpretation, which we create in our minds. Based on this, the concept, implicature, inference and schemata play roles in passing judgement consciously or unconsciously. Implicature is an additional conveyed meaning. Inference is the assumption we make from a write-up, while schemata is the abstract idea that exists in the mind and is achieved under various circumstances in the interpretation of what we experience. Other factors like shared background between the speaker and hearer, experiences of both parties involved in the speech process, among others, help in piercing together the meaning of lexical items.
The reason for conducting this research work is to find a contemporary Nigerian author, who appears promising and whose works have not been highly exhausted in the lexical semantics field. After carrying out research on modern Nigerian writers, Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come To You By Chance caught my attention. I noticed looking through reviews on the book, some readers commented on the writing style as being strange or unappealing, full of weird adjectives and proverbs, etc. These reviews motivated me to do a lexico-semantic study on the book in other to reveal the deliberate usages of West African English by the author who has aptly and hilariously used expressions that are related to a particular culture and society, and the writing should be taken as such- not as sub-standard English.
