Grammatical parallelism in Igbo: Examples from Anedo's Agwo na ihe o loro

Abstract

Stylistics is the link between linguistics and literature. However, two types have been distinguished, linguistic stylistics and literary stylistics. The former focuses on linguistic forms while the latter handles interpretation and discussion of literary issues manifest in a literary text. Each of them can be done independently or both can be combined. This paper pursues the goal of linguistic stylistics, which operates at different grammatical levels, phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics and syntax. Metrical measurement of stressed and unstressed syllables, rhyme patterns and other sound correspondences involve phonological applications; word classes and forms build around morphology, lexical relations, phrasal and sentential interpretations are the domain of semantics and pragmatics, while description of structural patterns involve principles of syntax. Particularly, it focuses on the analysis of the structure patterns in Anedo's 'Agwo na ihe o loro' for the exemplification of grammatical parallelism (which is a type of linguistic parallelism). The structure type handled is the DP subjects, particularly, those that rewrite as D NP. The DP subjects have been identified and analysed according to their structure types. By this,the parallel frequencies of the structure types are determined. The DP subject type, DP →D NP [Prop N] records the highest frequency of occurrence. This illustrates parallelism between the different occurrences. However, this is noted as loose parallelism since the text is a heterodiegetic story and is constrained to include many structures of the type. This paper has among other things provided material, which will birth a new generation of future writers in Igbo.