An Analysis of Sentence Structures in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter: A Stylistic Approach

Abstract:

This study analysed sentence structures in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter. It employed a linguistic-stylistic approach with emphasis on examining how the author’s structures created aesthetic patterns and values. The Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) was applied in the analysis of certain aspects of the literary language. For clarity, the tree diagram was occasionally used to display constituent parts of sentences/clauses arising from the various sentence patterns. TGG features were used to describe sentence patterns like foregrounded, elliptic, parallel, fragmentary structures. This not only underscored the inter-relationship among literature, linguistics and stylistics, it revealed Ba’s (un)conscious ability to manipulate language through the transformational power of the TGG. Though found an appropriate framework for the analysis of literary language, a major implication of the use of TGG in this study is its inadequacy to describe/account for contexts in situation.