Context of Culture in Femi Osofisan’s Many Colours Make The Thunderking

Abstract

Existing linguistic explorations on context have considered meaning relative to word use in the environment it occurs and the contexts of interactions that aid meaning. This study, however, is a departure from this direction as it considers the context in terms of the use of lexical items relative to such contextual aspects as participants, setting, acts and so on based on Yoruba cultural practices to construct a text. Osofisan’s Many Colours Make the Thunderking was purposely chosen because it is rich in data. To this, we apply Hymes's (1964) schema of SPEAKING with insights from other relevant principles of context such as Odebunmi (2006), and Kecskes (2014) as they are culture oriented. The contextual features of the setting/ scene, participants, acts and knowledge are found to characterize the data. Where they are found, they largely project the knowledge of Yoruba cultural practices as reflected in the interactions of the characters. Also, the identified contextual features specify the felicity accorded to the speaker and the speech, the act sequence which relates the steps that occur in the process of the narration, and the shared cultural background that is mutual between the interlocutors. The contextual features significantly enhance our ability to identify and determine Yoruba cultural practices that are employed to construct utterances in the play. The study apart from contributing to existing studies on cultural discourse will set a template for analysis of the context of culture in African literary texts and provide a means to identify how cultural means are employed to determine authorial preoccupation in African literary texts.