A LEXICAL STUDY OF THE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICAN WOMANHOOD IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S NOVELS

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dc.contributor.authorDahunsi, T. N., & Olaleye J. I.
dc.date.accessioned2026-04-17T21:16:02Z
dc.date.available2026-04-17T21:16:02Z
dc.date.issued2018
dc.description.abstractThe early African writers have been accused of using negative portraitures to project African women in ways that subordinate them to their men counterpart. This study closely investigated this perception using the language of narratives as the object of analysis. It is a lexical analysis that adopts comparative frequency analysis of male and female characters and their pronominal referents; analysis of character’s identity projection patterns; and analysis of comparative masculine-feminine gender semantic prosodies. Five works of Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People, Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease, and The Anthills of the Savannah were used for the study. The result shows that male characters are more frequently projected than female characters; the narrator consistently foregrounds the identities of male characters by presenting them mostly either by direct names or a combination of names with appositional information; whereas the identities of female characters are often suppressed by presenting them with descriptions and appositional information. The comparative character identity projection pattern connotes male characters’ visibility and female characters’ facelessness across texts. Both masculine and feminine genders were also presented in ways that make them to have different semantic prosodies. While the masculine gender was projected to have positive semantic prosody, the feminine gender was projected to have negative semantic prosody across texts. The paper concludes that Chinua Achebe’s narrative style that consistently projects the masculine gender as visible, domineering, strong and brave, but the feminine gender as faceless, subservient, weak and inconsequential.
dc.identifier.urihttps://www.jecaoauife.com/volume-1-1-table-of-content
dc.identifier.urihttps://uilspace.unilorin.edu.ng/handle/123456789/17309
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherObafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife
dc.relation.ispartofseriesVol. 1; No. 1
dc.titleA LEXICAL STUDY OF THE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICAN WOMANHOOD IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S NOVELS
dc.typeArticle

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