Contextualizing Morphosyntactic Features in Wole Soyinka’s Ake-the Years of Childhood

Abstract

The term ‘morpho-syntax’ has a dual meaning because it is a combination of both morphology and syntax. These two are language components that a stylistician can adopt in any write-up. This act by a stylistician is what brings about the uniqueness of a write-up which is based on individual’s use of language. It is also termed the morphology of linguistics adopted by a writer to achieve communicative effectiveness. Wole Soyinka’s language is said to be complex to most readers, possibly due to the morpho-syntactic features inherent in his text. Thus, the thrust of this paper is to identify the morpho-syntactic features and to discover the reason for the complexity of Wole Soyinka’s language in his book titled: Ake- The Years of Childhood. Using the functional stylistics as our model of analysis, we examined factors that are obviously and silently responsible for his complexity of languages, such as code-mixing, direct translation from Yoruba into English, a single word or sentence having several interpretations, coinages and his sentence structures. From our analysis, we discovered that the factors mentioned above are actually responsible for the complexity of Soyinka’s language and truly his use of language stands as a barrier to general readers comprehending most of his works.