Proverbs as a Discourse Strategy in Some African Literary Texts

Abstract:

This paper examines the proverb genre as a discourse strategy in some African Literary texts. Specifically, eight (8) proverbs are purposively selected from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. The qualitative and descriptive research designs are adopted for this study. These approaches use few data for the analysis to be more detailed and explicit. The qualitative approach is deemed appropriate for our analysis because the study is a corpus based. Referential and Contextual Theories of Meaning are adopted as the main analytical framework for the study. It is discovered that pragmatics or contextual theory is a veritable analytic linguistic framework which studies the meaning of utterances in the context which they are used. Since proverbs are aspects of culture, this study has shown the inextricable link between proverbs, specifically African or Nigerian proverbs and language. It is also shown that context plays a major role in deriving the meanings of these proverbs. it is discovered that young adults or children do not make use of proverbs when talking to elders, because the proverb genre is the wisdom attached to elders in the African society. The study thus concludes that the proverbs in Achebe’s novels are more rhetorical, epistemological and didactic than analytical.