THE PREDOMINANT STYLISTIC DEVICES USED BY NGUGI WA THIONG’O IN HIS LATEST NOVEL WIZARD OF THE CROW AND WHY HE USED THEM

Parallelism: It is the use of pattern repetition in a literary text for a particular stylistic effect.

Parenthetical expression: It is used to give more information and also as an after thought in a statement.

Passive expression: This is the use of words in the past tense to show the time of action.

Cohesion: It is a linguistic phenomenon which explains the way discourse is structured or organized with regard to message. It is a binding force that ties together stretches of utterances.

Coherence: This is the arrangement of sentence in a logical order.

Punctuation marks: Are signs in writing to divide sentences and phrases and to make meanings clear.

Figure of speech: A figure of speech is an expression used figuratively rather than literary. It gives a deeper meaning to word. Some examples are:

Metaphor: Is a comparison between two dissimilar things which have something in common.

Simile: It is a clear comparison between two dissimilar things. These two unlike items however share something in common. It is this common characteristic that is emphasized by the use of like or as  - as.

Hyperbole: It is an overstatement where the speaker exaggerates what he is saying out of proportion.

Metonymy: This is using a word for something to refer to another with which it has become closely associated.

Personification: It is giving human quality to an inanimate object.

Slang: Very informal words and expressions that are more common in spoken language, especially used by a particular group of people.

Colloquialism: A word or phrase that is used in conversation but not in formal speech in writing.

Connotation: It is the additional meaning the word gains because of the different environment in which a word has been used in the past.

Archaism: This is the use of old and middle English words which are no longer in general usage today.Some examples are, "thereto", "thou".

Clichés: They are phrases or ideas that have been used so often that it no longer has much meaning and is not interesting.

 A way of stylistic analysis is taking a text and analyzing it at the various levels of linguistic organization - phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic levels. It is the identification of patterns of usage in speech and writing. It is usually made for the purpose of commenting on quality and meaning in a text.

1.2     STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Though many works have been done on the style of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's other novels, not much has been done on his style in Wizard of the Crow, which is his most recent novel, published in 2007. Consequently, the researcher intends to examine the style of Ngugi in this latest novel.

Secondly, most of the works did not use quantitative stylistic analysis to determine the predominant or most frequently occurring devices. They often simply listed out all the devices used.

1.3     OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

The objectives of this study is to identify the predominant devices used by Ngugi wa Thiong'o in his novel Wizard of the Crow and what he achieved by using those devices.