Keywords
Dialogic features, interaction, characterization, Soyinka’s play
Abstract
The human quotidian life is characterized naturally by communication which is essentially interactional. Life transactions are effected through interpersonal interaction and via it human vision, mission, strengths and weaknesses are observable. For instance, the garrulous/taciturn polarity in human description is drawn on the basis of attitude to participation in conversation. Dialogues in plays are a facsimile of the daily conversations and are designed to arrest human attention as worthwhile through their similitude. Literary conversation is for this reason a choice data for discourse analysis. This paper examines the features of joint production of conversations in Wole Soyinka’s The Trial of Brother Jero, Jero Metamorphosis and The Beatification of Area Boy to identify the discoursal facilities employed to make each of the play an interact and reveal the process involved in the playwright’s successful characterization. Two samples of exchanges are drawn from each of the plays and the underlying dialogic devices identified. The devices found include characters’ judicious employment of the two canonical acts of giving and demanding, issuing of collective speech act, preponderance of personal pronouns, intrusion or interruption, lexical and structural repetition, greetings, vocative, hesitancy and modality. The devices are shown relevantly to relate directly to the author’s creation and characterization of Amope as shrewd and flippant; Jero as calculative, selfish and crook; Rebecca as robotic and sheepish; CEO as officious and, and the Military Officer as bossy and soldierly. The paper concludes that the success of the plays as interacts is predicated on the playwright’s endowment of the imaginary characters the conversational cooperative ability and human cognition that make them aptly employ speech acts and discourse strategies.
