A Contrastive Lexico-grammatical Analysis of Selected Extracts from Two Anglophone African Novels

The current dissertation investigates the lexico-grammatical properties in two contemporary novels (namely Faceless and Everything Good Will Come) authored by female writers (Amma Darko and Sefi Atta). Drawing on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1978; Halliday & Hasan, 1985/1989; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004/2014; Eggins, 1994/2004; Bloor & Bloor, 2004; Fontaine, 2013; Thompson, 2004, etc.), and more specifically on linguistic stylistics, the study identifies, describes and interprets the linguistic features which disclose the lexico-grammatical patterns/properties used in the aforementioned literary works for a better understanding of the meanings encoded by their authors. From a clause-to-clause grammatical analysis of the six extracts drawn from the two prose fictions, the Mood and Transitivity choices of the writers at stake have been scrutinized and compared. The contrastive approach adopted has revealed noticeable similarities in the novelists’ stylistic devices and idiolects to depict such obnoxious African societies’ realities as poverty, corruption, male bigotry, and obsolete cultural practices which make women peripheral and submissive.