The Old Chief Mshlanga: A Verbal Art Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18309/ranpoll.v56.1818Keywords:
Verbal Art; SFG; GSP; African continent; Black PeopleAbstract
This study analyses the semiotic choices that make up Doris Lessing’s autobiographical story – The Old Chief Mshlanga – to understand how the narrator’s perception of herself and the African continent changed as she grew closer to the local people. It is part of a collection of African stories written to depict her early years in the continent, while voicing the hardships imposed on the natives by the immigrants. Our choice resulted from our interest in the African people and for having in Lessing one of the outstanding channels for their clamour against enslavement. The study draws on Hasan’s (1989) Verbal Art theory and Halliday’s (2004) Systemic-functional Grammar (SFG). Despite subscribing to Hasan’s (1989) view that for an analysis to be validated it needs to be exhaustive, and having taken such approach ourselves, we, for matters of space, limited to presenting some extracts we found will better reach our objective, which were segmented according to Hasan’s (1989) Generic Structure Potential (GSP). This decision resulted from our understanding of language as the expression of a social activity, and that, as Hasan wrote, the text’s contextual configuration (CC) “is an account of the significant attributes of this social activity” (Hasan, 1989, p.57).
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