A Phonaesthetic Analysis of Joe Ushie’s Yawns and Belches


Published in AKSUJEL - June, 2024

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Abstract

In exposing the abysmal economic mismanagement, despoliation and widespread pillage in the public domain by the powerful elites, committed artists have no choice than to bring creative ingenuity to bear on the process of redeeming the society, especially the vulnerable population and the mass of the underprivileged among whom the artist co-exists. To carry out such patriotic task, the writer relies on language, not just as aesthetic utility, but also as tool of artistic mediation in the pursuit of creative involvements. Against this backdrop, this research examines the phonaesthetic devices in Joe Ushie’s Yawns and Belches and the stylistic effects to both form (aesthetics) and content (meaning)in the rendition of the poems in the collection. To achieve the purpose of the paper, linguistic stylistics has been adopted for its conceptual thrust to explore the linguistic features and their effects towards aproper understanding of the text. The research is library based; therefore, books, journal articles, audio-dictionary facilities and internet sources are used as sources of its data collection. The dominant phonological features evident in the selected poems designate the criteria for our selection; hence, both qualitative and quantitative analyses have been adopted. The researchers purposively selected three (3)out of the fifty-seven (57)poems in this collection to examine the phonological properties of alliteration, assonance, consonance, meter, onomatopoeia, repetition, rhyme, intonation and their contributions to meaning. Findings of the work reveal that Ushie’s phonostylistic idiolect as evident in the selected poems is more of segmental features than the prosodicones. In conclusion, the work demonstrates the binary relationship between sound and sense, as well as its formation to the literariness of literary compositions. The sensitivity of the readers and critics to the sound properties in poetry appreciation has been recommended.

Keywords: Phonaesthetic Analysis Yawns and Belches

Cataloging & Classification: Bi-annually , Vol.5(1) pp. 1-20

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