Accommodationist Styles in Selected Works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo

SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: English Language & Literature

CONTRIBUTORS:

Nzeakor, N.C;
Chukwu, E;

ABSTRACT:

This research intentionally investigated the literary works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah and Akachi Adimora- Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets and Trafficked to reveal their accomodationist styles. Over the years, researchers who engaged in the study of style and stylistics concentrated their analysis on the old methods where, every literary and linguistic works, were analysed from phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic levels. This research had opened another vista for the analysis of works based on accommodation and its principles. The research being a textual analysis, purposefully selected a total number of seventy-three (75) accommodation items both linguistic and non-linguistic, convergence and divergence from the selected works of these writers to demonstrate their levels of accommodation. Six research questions were formulated which helped the researcher in providing answers to the issues/questions raised. The communication accommodation theory propounded by Howard Giles (1973) and the Ethnography of communication theory by Dell Hymes (1962) formed the theoretical frameworks for this study. These theories whose major concerns were language, culture, and identity for the communication accommodation theory and communication, culture and context for ethnographic theory equally helped in the analysis of the research questions. After the analysis, the findings showed that both writers used different characters in their novels to demonstrate different levels of accommodation, and the different reasons why people accommodated others and also the different contexts and speech events that aided accommodation. The researcher concluded that language users accommodated convergently when they belong to the same culture, when they love their communication partners and the context they find themselves. Language accommodation convergence led to peaceful co-existence while divergence communication behaviours were demonstrated when people do not belong to the same culture, hate their communication partners and it led to quarrels, hatred and in extreme cases death. The researcher recommended that language users, especially lecturers and students, should teach and learn how to accommodate convergently, so as to live peacefully in the academic environment and the society. Researchers were also advised to look out for other ways and means of analyzing literary and linguistic works, different from the old method. Again researchers should engage themselves in the non-verbal aspect of language to show how accommodation can be applied.