Sarcastic Feminism: A Lexico-Syntactic Analysis of Judy Syfers’ I Want A Wife

This work examines the relationship between language and the plights of women as espoused by Judy Syfers in her text “I Want a Wife”. It seeks to establish the concerns of the writer and the choices she made in her agitation and struggle for women liberation. To achieve this, Feminist CDA approach was adopted in order to critically identify the implications of the writer’s lexical items within the context of her language. This would enable us demystify her language and see how gender power is constructed; see where women are placed on the ladder of power and the effort the writer makes to ameliorate the social status of women. Thus, attention was given to lexis and syntax (noun phrase). This helped us to find out that the context in which the writer agitates for women liberation is within the family and its attendant responsibilities. It was discovered through the examination of syntax of the language that the use of sarcasm and rankshifting were paramount. Through rankshifting, the writer presented the enormity of women’s plights, and condemns such man-made, imposed and killing plights using sarcasm

Shared Knowledge and Communication: A Pragmatic Analysis of Taofiq Azeez’s Brigandage

Pragmatics is the study of meaning as used in context and interpreted by the listener. Bearing the focus of Pragmatics in mind, this work adopts Cooperative Principles formulated by Paul Grice to analyse Taofiq Azeez’s Brigandage. The aim is to see how the cooperation between the characters facilitates communication in the text and to determine the extent to which the characters in the text observe the principles formulated by Paul Grice. This work also identifies the implicature generated by the characters as they break the maxims. That is, what meaning a character implies as he fails to observe the maxim(s). Some data were collected from the text and analysed. It was observed that interlocutors, as represented by the characters, strive to cooperate with each other but, for obvious reasons, flout the maxims; thus, implying additional meaning beyond what is explicitly said. The study revealed that non-observance of maxims does not impair communication owing to the fact that listeners, through shared knowledge, infer the implied meaning from the speaker’s contribution and this sustains communication