The Grammar of Interpersonal Meaning in Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants

Abstract

The aim of this article is to use the analytic and linguistic tools drawn from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to inquire into the language of Wole Soyinka’s play entitled: A Play of Giants. In order to stress how the protagonists interact with one another, the paper focuses on the study of interpersonal meaning. The method of analysis is that of sampling. The data, thus, includes two excerpts selected and analyzed through the linguistic features of mood, modality and adjuncts. The findings reveal that the two texts display various mood-types, mainly declarative, interrogative and imperative mood, as well as features of modality, including modulation and modalisation, which are combined with adjunct features to contribute to the realization of interpersonal function and to decode the tenor of discourse in the play. The work concludes that interpersonal meaning is an important theory as it has made it easy to decode the language and style of the writer and account for how the writer has satirized the characters of the play to address some of the political issues confronting contemporary Africa.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n5p299