A LEXICO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF THE DISCOURSE OF DICTATORSHIP AND CORRUPTION IN HELON HABILA’S WAITING FOR AN ANGEL

Abstract

Previous studies have concentrated on the literary and other dimensions of the linguistic analysis of Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila. However, little or no study has revealed the lexico-semantic features deployed by the author in the discourse of dictatorship and corruption. This paper, therefore, explored the lexico-semantic elements existing in the clauses used to depict the theme of dictatorship and corruption in Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel. Purposive sampling was first used to collect textual data from the text. Then, the stratified sampling method was used to select a sample population to represent the whole population. The selected clauses were categorized into five extracts, and a qualitative research design was employed for the analysis. M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar served as the framework through which a textual analysis was carried out. The findings reveal that in the depiction of dictatorship and corruption in Waiting for an Angel, there were suitable collocations of words, e.g., ‘political detainees’, ‘brutal warders’, ‘stealing money’, ‘hiding money’, ‘crack down’, etc. The right registers of words were also selected from the requisite semantic domains like prison, the military and police, Nigerian lexicons, oppression and abuse, etc., and relevant figures of speech were also used by the writer to explicate the themes sufficiently. The lexico-semantic items deployed by the author enriched the discourse of dictatorship and corruption in the novel.