An Examination of Cohesion as a Discourse Stylistics Strategy in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru

Abstract

While much of the critiques on Achebe and Nwapa’s works over years have concentrated on their content and meaning.  Thus, the present one is concerned with their form how they have applied elements of cohesion to arrive at their divergent meanings and opinions. The paper examines cohesion as a stylistics strategy employed in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru. Stylistics is the study of the linguistic features of a literary text such phonological, lexical, syntactical features which directly affects the meaning of an utterance or a text and the study of style is aims at identifying linguistic variations which include cohesive devices. The aim of the paper is to identify and describe how Achebe and Nwapa uses cohesive devices to foreground the meaning in the novels under study. This is qualitative research, and since it is a study of cohesion as a stylistic feature, the paper adopts a descriptive approach. The paper adopts Halliday and Hasan’s model of cohesion within Systemic Functional Grammar which which sees cohesion as Semantic relations as a theoretical framework;. The study concludes that cohesion is an indispensable linguistic device necessary in making a text convey the intended meaning to its readers. Citation: Roselyn Shirley Kotein-Trinya,  Arnold Stanley Udisi, and  Timibofa Ayebanoa (2021)  An Examination of Cohesion as a Discourse Stylistics Strategy in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, Vol.9, No.1, pp.62-71,