Naming and describing in Tanure Ojaide’s The Fate of Vultures and Other Poems

Abstract

This article is a stylistic study of selected poems in Tanure Ojaide’s The Fate of Vultures and Other Poems. It sees stylistics as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics, and it adopts a critical stylistic approach, using naming and describing as critical stylistic tools to uncover how ideology and social meaning are encoded by the poet in the selected poems. The study applies the Hallidayan experiential metafunction of the nominal group as a linguistic framework with emphasis on nominal group structure and clause structure. In all, five poems are selected from the collection to allow for a qualitative, detailed and rigorous analysis. Our findings reveal that Ojaide explores more of the deictic + thing + qualifier experiential structural type in the nominal group structure to provide detailed social and ideological meaning inherent in the selected poems. We conclude that naming and describing as critical stylistic tools afford Ojaide a means to encode his resistance, political ideology and social meanings in the selected poems.