Ideational Representation of Domestic Violence in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

Abstract

Language is a means of representing and portraying real and imaginary events, ideas, andrelations or states of being. This paper is a linguistic study of ideational meanings in the novelsunder study.The aim of this paper is to find out how the writer’s linguistic choices serve as ameans through which social meanings and experiences are expressed and understood usingHalliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics Theory. This study offers explanations for the lexicogrammaticalchoices the authors made and how they are analyzed to portray the intendedmeaning of the authors. The study adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods to study theproblem. The data comprise twenty-five (25) clauses purposively culled from the novels. Textualdata were analyzed based on the aim/objectives of the study and the theoretical frameworkadopted. The study reveals that both authors used material and mental processes to depict theparticipants’ physical and mental ordeal (domestic violence) in the hands of a man she callsfather/husband. The study recommends that further investigations should focus on theinterpersonal and textual meanings of the same studied excerpts to help in getting to the coremeanings embedded therein.