COMPARISON OF LINGUISTIC PATTERNS AND METAFUNCTIONS IN THERE WAS A COUNTRY BY CHINUA ACHEBE AND WAITING FOR AN ANGEL BY HELON HABILA

This thesis is a stylistic study undertaken of the linguistic patterns and metafunctions in Chinua Achebe‘s There Was a Country and in Helon Habila‘s Waiting for an Angel. The aim was to seek explanation for their differences or similarities in the choice of words and sentences in their exposition on a common subject matter: the Nigerian military in governance since Independence; and to find out if their language choices of patterns and metafunctions were attributable to their differences in age, education, socio-cultural background or writing experience. For the comparative and contrastive analyses, the Systemic Functional Grammar theory of M. A. K. Halliday in conjunction with the Critical Discourse Analysis and Chomsky‘s Transformational Generative Grammar, was used. Samples of patterns and examples of metafunctions were selected from the first 200 pages of There Was a Country and the first 100 pages of Waiting for an Angel. These samples were analysed under specific linguistic patterns, i.e, lexical semantic patterns, as well as the interpersonal metafunction. At the end of the analyses the findings showed that the two authors converged in what can be termed the language universals but also diverged greatly in their sampled linguistic patterns and usages. The explanation was adduced to the fact that while There Was a Country is Achebe‘s autobiographical work, Waiting for an Angel is a debut historical fiction by an author who is at least thirty years younger and still writing and honing his skills. The researcher found Habila‘s deliberate abandonment of grammatical and syntactic rules to depict different socio-economic and educational backgrounds of the characters creative, compared with Achebe‘s laid back déjà vu style which consistent with a valedictory memoir. The conclusion drawn from the study was that social context was indeed a significant variable between the two writers under review in their use of language to depict relationships between social groups. Thus Halliday‘s Systemic Functional Linguistics theory was found tilting toward the Systemic Functional Generative Grammar (SGG) of Fawcett (1973) which combines attributes of SFG and TGG, illustrating that no two individuals use language in identical ways. The comparison showed that in factual story telling such as There Was a Country Achebe was restricted in his choice of patterns, a restriction that is not required in the nonfiction, Waiting for an Angel. Suggestions were made to encourage further studies in two-author comparative studies in stylistics and discourse analysis, so as to increase the repertoire of knowledge in this branch of applied linguistics.