Hyponymic Presentation of Niger Delta Issues in Tanure Ojaide’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper undertakes a lexical study of Tanure Ojaide’s poetry with a view toi interpreting the meaning relations between the hypernym (super-ordinate term) and the hyponyms in the presentation of Niger Delta issues in the selected poems. The study is essentially based on the premise that hyponymic classifications are of interest in texts due to the pieces of information they give about a writer’s culture and word-view. The paper adopts the Lexical Field approach. This is a Structuralist semantic approach to the study of lexis based on the idea that one can identify, within the vocabulary of a text, particular lexical sets covering particular areas of meaning (semantic field). Our data was purposively sourced from three different poetry collections of Tanure Ojaide with respect to appropriateness of subject matter and linguistic features. Our attention was mainly focused on the content words. The study discovered that the poet uses superordinate terms and co-hyponyms in the presentation of Niger Delta issues in the selected poems. It was also found that Ojaide uses hyponymic lexical relation to project aspects of his culture and world-view and the current realities of the Niger Delta region. It finally discovered that lexical items in hyponymic relation enable the poet to realise the textual meta-function of language – cohesion.