Stylistic Study of Purple Hibiscus

Abstract

This paper did a linguistic-stylistic study of the novel with emphasis on determining how the author manipulated language to create aesthetic patterns and values. Using the notion projection method in selecting data from the texts, a linguistic model like the Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) was applied in the analysis of certain aspects of identified literary language. The TGG features were used to describe foregrounding, hypotactic, paratactic, code-mixing and code switching rhetorical patterns and fragmentary structures. This not only showed the inter-relationship among literature, languages, linguistics and stylistics but revealed the literary artists (un) conscious ability to manipulate language.