CO-CONSTRUCTION AS UNITY AND FREEDOM MARKER: A SYNTACTIC READING OF BEN OKRI’S TALES OF FREEDOM

Abstract

Literary texts often concern themselves with central subject matters and themes which insightful readers are expected to explore by paying attention to the lexical and semantic choices the writers have carefully employed. This paper holds that thematic preoccupations in a work of art do not reside only in the lexical and semantic choices made by the writer but can also be deciphered at the other levels of language such as the syntactic. With insights from MAK Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), this paper adopts a syntactic approach to meaning construction by examining how characters, through structured dialogues, co-construct meaning and themes in Ben Okri’s Tales of Freedom. The paper which theoretically discusses the nature of co-construction examines the forms and functions of co-construction and delves into the resourcefulness of co-construction in coding the major themes in Okri’s Tales of Freedom. Descriptive analysis reveals the resourcefulness of co-construction as a syntactic category in “thematising” freedom, unity and, dialectics between freedom and slavery, as the author deploys co-construction in the text under study to produce grammatically coherent structures, enhance cooperation, seek collaboration and, to present a collective statement. The paper concludes that co-construction as a syntactic category has been very resourceful in coding the central themes in Ben Okri’s Tales of Freedom.