Cohesive Devices in Yoruba Texts: A Study of Ó Le Kú
Keywords:
Cohesion, ellipsis, conjunction, reference, cohesive devicesAbstract
Cohesion is a relation that occurs on the semantic level of communication which links sentential elements together into a unified whole. There are several cohesive relations that link the sentences into a text. The essence of this study is to examine the extent to which Halliday and Hasan (1976) model of cohesion (precisely cohesive devices) is used to achieve unity, meaning, understanding and readability in Yoruba literary texts, using Ó le kú as a case-study. Ó le kú is a prose text written by Akinwumi Isola, a renowned Yoruba literary artist. The data for the study consisted of Yoruba sentences selected from the novel. The data was extracted from the novel by reading through the text severally to note the different types of cohesive devices used by the author and their effect on the interpretation of the text. The paper investigates the extent to which the author of Ó le kú uses the textual resources of cohesion and cohesive devices to link ideas in the sentences used in the text and examines the effect that the cohesive devices used have on the quality of message passed across in the novel. In this paper, we deal with reference, ellipsis and conjunction. These mechanisms of cohesion, common to all languages, make a series of sentences coherent, so they do not seem to occur randomly. The purpose of ellipsis and reference is to avoid the burdening repetitions within the text, and to make the whole text cohere. Coordinating conjunctions were used as joining or linking devices in the text. The author based on the outcome of the study used intermixed styles to convey his message to the readers.
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