Personal Names as Sociopolitical and Cultural Metaphors: A Case Study of Ebedei-Umueziogoli
Abstract
Particularization of human persons in many African sociocultures, particularly in Ebedei-Umueziogoli is suffused with ritual, wherein power-symbols are actively involved. A great deal of investigations have been carried out on naming, but the examinations mainly border broadly on syntactic, historical, pragmalinguistic, ethnolinguistic, sociocultural and causativity descriptions, thereby omitting one of the essentialities of naming: the ritualistic particularization of human person in sociopolitical and cultural metaphors. This article demonstrates objectification of names as sociopolitical and cultural metaphors in relation to Ebedei-Umueziogoli community. Subsequently, forty-nine namees were interviewed to elicit data. Six were purposively sieved out to demonstrate names as sociopolitical and cultural metaphors due to strategic roles they played in the community. The data was described linguistically using functional grammar as a touchstone and subsequently with Black’s Interaction Principle (1979) to explicate the nounal metaphorical operations. All the namees suggested that they were existentially, sociopolitically, culturally and metaphorically the embodiment of the meanings of their names, albeit ambiguously, because some aspects of the perlocutionary forces of the names remained unactualized in the namees’ lives.
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