Speech Style-Shifts in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People

Abstract

This paper examines the use of speech style shifts by interlocutors engaged in dialogues. In verbal discourse interactants employ different speech styles in different situations. This is because no one speaks in exactly the same manner on all occasions. A number of factors inform these shifts in speech style such as the speaker, the addressee, the setting, topic of discourse and the purpose of the discourse among other factors. Using Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People, this study seeks to identify the speech style shifts in the dialogues of the characters and the motivation for the shifts. It also seeks to determine the way the shifts affected the relationships between the characters as well as the power structures that are at play. To achieve these objectives, six sample excerpts purposively selected from the text were used as data while Ethnography of Communication (EOC) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) were used as theoretical frameworks. Findings revealed that the different speech style shifts identified were influenced mainly by the situation, addressee and social distance.