FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF SENTENCES IN AKÍNWÙMÍ ÌṢỌ̀LÁ’S PROSE TEXTS

Abstract

A sentence is a unit of grammatically linked words, grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, command or emphasis. Existing studies on Akinwumi Ìṣọ̀lá’s texts have concentrated on the stylistic analysis without a comprehensive syntactic and functional analysis of the texts. This study was designed to investigate the syntax of Ìṣọ̀lá’s prose texts such as the sentence forms and their textual, interpersonal as well as experiential metafunctions with a view to establishing the sentence forms and their functions.

A combination of the Bare Phrase Structure of the Minimalist Program and Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) was adopted as framework. The three prose texts of Ìṣọ̀lá: Ó le kú, Ṣaworoidẹand Ogún Ọmọdé were used. Thirteen thousand, four hundred and thirty-nine sentences were used in the texts comprising Ó le kú (3,325),Ṣaworoidẹ (7,053)andOgún Ọmọdé (3,061),respectively. Data were subjected to both syntactic and functional analyses.

Structurally, the texts have the simple, compound, complex and compound-complex sentences while functionally, four sentence-types: declarative, interrogative, imperative and emphatic, are identified. The identified sentences also referred to as clauses in SFG, have three functions: textual, interpersonal and experiential. The textual function is the message, represented as Theme and Rheme while the cohesive devices are employed to show the connectivity in the texts.There are three distinctions of Theme in the texts: topical, interpersonal, and textual. Topical Theme conveys information in the discourse, interpersonal Theme shows the character’s attitudes while textual Theme links a clause to the rest of the discourse. Cohesive devices identified are reference, conjunction and ellipsis. The interpersonal function is the exchange, analysed through Mood and Residue. The Mood comprises the Subject and Finite while the rest of the clause is the Residue. There are three types of Mood in the texts: declarative, interrogative and imperative, functioning as statement, question and command, respectively. The experiential function is a representation of the author’s world analysed through transitivity which comprises processes, participants and circumstances. Processes include the material, mental, verbal,behavioural, relationaland existential. Each process selects its participant, for instance, participants for the material process are the actor and the goal while mental process has the senser and the phenomenon as its participants. Identified types of circumstances are location, manner, extent, cause, role, matter, accompaniment and angle.

Akínwùmí Ìṣọ̀lá employs various linguistic forms to demonstrate that meaning realisation begins from the choice of sentence types as well as their functions in the construction of a text. Using various types of Themes andexploiting interpersonal and experiential metafunctions, the author uses Yoruba to accentuate the three functions of language in the prose texts.