Experiential Meaning in Arrow of God and Petals of Blood: A Comparative Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective - Softcover

This research work explores the experiential meaning in both Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964) and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (1977). Indeed, two excerpts from each novel under study have been culled and thoroughly analysed on the basis of the Hallidayan experiential meaning theoretical framework. To descend to particulars, the scholarship has provided a summary of the findings from the transitivity analysis carried out, the distribution of the identified process-types per studied excerpt, their interpretation, and ultimately offers a comparative study of both novels under study on the basis of the findings. At this point, the scholarship, in the light of the findings of the analysis, highlights to what extent Achebe’s fiction shares common features with Ngugi’s one while underlining striking differences between them. Likewise, following the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics theory applied here, limits to Ngugi’s stand that “literature written by Africans in a colonial language is not African literature, but “Afro-European literature” have been highlighted.

Born in Benin, Dr. Daniel T. Yokossi is one hundred percent a native speaker of Waama language. He carried out his undergraduate studies between 2000 and 2013, but also his graduate studies from 2013 to 2015 at the University of Abomey-Calavi. In 2015, Mr. Daniel T. Yokossi brilliantly defended his doctoral dissertation in his alma matter.