Discourse and Social Customs in Ademola Dasylva’s If the gods must be!: An Applied Linguist's Perspective

Discourse and Social Customs in Ademola Dasylva’s  If the gods must be!: An Applied Linguist's Perspective

Adebola Adebileje,

Redeemer’s University, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper aims at linking the poetic text, “If the gods must be!” written by Ademola Dasylva, with its interpretive social context and syntactic structures as employed by the poet in the work. This is achieved by means of identifying the relationship between texts, processes and in their social conditions, both in the immediate conditions of institutional and social structures, a model presented by Fairclough (2001). Fairclough is of the opinion that analysing features of texts in ways which facilitate the productive integration of textual analysis is a part of processes of social change. The following questions provide a clear and systematic applied linguist approach to the text’s analysis: Why is the text written? How is the text constructed? Are there deliberate manipulations of language by the poet? What syntactic choices have been made by the poet? Analysis reveals that the poet’s choice and style of weaving words together has implications for describing and naming characters in the poetic text as they evoke in the readers disparate and varied social and cultural customs of religion, war, food, hunting and drumming among the Yoruba. However, this innovative use of words and wordsmithing by the poet consequently culminates into a synergy of the Yoruba cultural bifurcation.

Key words: Discourse Analysis, Social Customs, Linguistic Analysis