A linguistic stylistic study of Wole Soyinka’s Night and Death in the Dawn

Linguistic stylistics explores the linguistic features of a text; it is primarily concerned with the use of language and its effect in a text. This study is aimed at analyzing the language structure/system of Wole Soyinka’s ‘Night’ and ‘Death in the Dawn’ to render a linguistic description, that is, identifying the linguistic deviant features of Soyinka’s poems and describing how they deviated from the known rules to create effect. Some aspects of Niazi & Gautam’s (2010) framework, as well as Onwukwe’s (2012) concept of foregrounded irregularities at the lexical, syntactic and semantic levels were adopted in the analysis of the data collected from a selection of deviant words and structures in the poems. Findings reveal that the syntactic level has the most deviant structures while the lexical level has the least deviant lexemes and that the language system of Wole Soyinka’s poems deviated in ways that make words: violate the class to which they originally belong, inflect words which do not require inflections, create compounds not seen in the lexicon of the language, make structures violate the selectional restriction and category rule and give rise to figurative language. In conclusion, the choice of words in a literary work is very important as it creates certain effects on the readers of that work which is what Soyinka accomplished by deviating from the known linguistic norms. This research hopes to contribute to the understanding of Soyinka’s poems and serve as a  reference point for scholars who wish to carry out a similar research.