Peculiarity in the Coinages, Collocations and Allusions in Wole Soyinka’s "the Interpreters"

Abstract

Soyinka has often been labelled as an ‘obscure’ and ‘difficult’ writer. One text which helps in giving him this reputation is The Interpreters which has not enjoyed as wide a readership as other texts published at the same period. This paper is an attempt to delineate the peculiarities in the way Soyinka uses familiar literary devices and by so doing the paper argues that an understanding of these peculiar usage goes a long way in demystifying the text under study and to a large extent may serve as a clue to studying other works of the author. The paper uses the lexico-semantic approach in conjunction with the concept of the context of situation to examine samples of texts drawn from the novel. The analysis shows the language in the novel is characterised by peculiar collocations, coinages distorted idioms and some syntactic gymnastics. The paper demonstrates that the so-called obscurity could be erased if one understood Soyinka’s pattern of gymnastics with words and sentence structure.