Writer as Clairvoyant: A Pragmatic-onomastic Study of Soyinka’s The Road and Ibadan’s Socio-political situation in 1999-2009

Abstract

This study is designed to validate the claim that Wole Soyinka, the first African Nobel Laureate in Literature, is a clairvoyant. The work is based on events in The Road and socio-political situation in Ibadan (the largest metropolis in West Africa) between 1999 and 2009. Thus, the thrust of the research is to juxtapose the purposively selected character names in Soyinka’s The Road with the actual (nick) names in use in real life. The theoretical framework adopted is relevance theory. The study partly indicated that the playwright uses clipping, coinage, compounding and lexical borrowing as his naming strategies; and partly that the textual names parody certain bearers of such names in the larger society.