Multimodality in Òkó Folktale Discourse and its Sociosemiotic Purposes

Abstract

Every society is a priori dynamic. The social existence of a society can be attributed to its discourse potentials in that the fundamental resource that brings about functionality in a society is the discourse systems by which that society can be defined. Firstly, ‘discourse’ in a broad sense can simply be understood as making sense of our environment through a process of meaning creation, meaning recognition, meaning representation and meaning exchange in a social context. Hence every community can be perceived as a discourse entity. Secondly, a discourse community is not merely a product of reality, but a dynamic and evolving process. And thirdly, the discourse defined here represents the entire way of life of a people (culture) and its transmission process. Perhaps this is the most abstract use of the term (see van Dijk, 1977, pp. 3–4 for different uses of the term ‘discourse’). A community discourse unfolds in what Fairclough (2003, p. 25) refers to as ‘social events, social practices, and social structures’ and the most important resource for mirroring, reconstruing and transmitting culture in a preliterate society is the folktale or folk narrative. This therefore, provides a good rationale for focusing on the folk narrative in this study as a means of highlighting processes of socialisation in the Oko-speaking community.