Stylistic Analysis of Chief Dr. Samuel Ioraer Ortom's Inaugural Speech, "Our Collective Vision for a New Benue"

Abstract

The idiolect has remained the basic yardstick for the measurement of speechvariation within a mutually intelligible speech community. This idiolect -linguistics habit of a speaker, treads the ‘La Parole’ Path of language proposedby Ferdinand de Saussure which culminates into the present day stylistics. Theinaugural speech of Governor Samuel Ortom is the data for this work. Thisresearch hinges on descriptive grammar as methodology. This is an approach tothe study of grammar which seeks to account for the way the speakers actuallyuse their language without reference to an approved standard or the grammaticalstructure of another language. Ndimele (2008:48). This work presents themeaning of language, stylistics, style, speech, political discourse and the variousstyles employed by the speaker to drive his point home. These styles range fromthe physiological structure of the speech, morphological analysis, syntacticanalysis, and semantic analysis to figurative expressions and some uniquepresentations. The styles are discussed from the perspective of style as a choiceand style as a deviation. Through this work, the researchers discovered that thegovernor’s speech is not only a beautiful rhetoric but a stylistically uniquespeech in terms of language use.