Lexico-Semantic Devices and Contextual Meaning in Kofi Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother and Comes the Voyager at Last

Abstract

Literal and implied meanings are inherent in literary texts and studies abound, that have examined how intended meanings are construed and understood, in various texts adopting various semantic and pragmatic principles. However, this study investigated Kofi Awoonor’s two literary texts: This Earth My Brother and Comes the Voyager at Last, to determine the lexico-semantic choices deployed and how such features enhance meaning in the texts. This is to enhance the comprehension of intended meanings in the texts as scholars have described the texts as not easily accessible as it is written in poetic renditions. The study adopts the pragmatic principle from Mey’s perspective as a theoretical framework to account for contextual meaning(s), and complements that with M.A.K Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), to explain lexico-semantic realization of construed and/or intended text meaning(s). The findings showed that lexical items are deployed in texts to point to meaning(s), argument(s), motives and goals of the researched texts. The lexical items lead to the understanding of the major theme(s) of texts. Some of the lexical features that occurred luxuriantly relate to concepts such as decay, corruption, death, slavery, native/home land, oppression, and freedom. The findings of this study concluded that lexico-semantic devices and context contribute greatly in enhancing the understanding of the study texts.