A SOCIO-STYLISTIC INVESTIGATION OF SUNSET AT DAWN
Abstract
As one of the Nigerian civil war memoirs which discuss and mirror, poignantly, issues and events associated with the war, Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn has not been much explored most especially from the perspective of socio-stylistics. Motivated by the paucity of works on the text in linguistic scholarship, this study therefore explores the socio-stylistic features of the text with particular attention to the influence of the socio-context of the war on the use of language in the text.All the instances and contexts of war in the text were sampled and subjected to content analysis using insights from the ethnographic theories and approaches to style. The study revealed that the socio-context of war in which the author found himself exerts a considerable influence on the use of language in the text. This study therefore argues that analysing Nigerian Civil War Memoirs (NCWM) using a socio-stylistic approach enhances a better understanding of the memoirs. It equally illuminates the discourse value of socio-stylistics and provides additional useful material for civil war discourse, most especially in Nigeria.
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