DISAMBIGUATION AND EXPLICATURAL MEANING IN CONVERSATIONS: INSIGHTS FROM ADICHIE’S PURPLE HIBISCUS

‘NIYI OSUNBADE

Abstract

Scholars have studied Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (PH) both from the literary and linguistic perspectives, with greater attention being devoted to it from the literary one. Linguistic studies on PH have however been approached from the stylistic and pragmatic angles. This paper complements the pragmatic ones by applying insights from Sperber and Wilson’s relevance- theoretic notion of explicature to pragmatically investigate how language is used to explicitly thematize a range of issues across different discourse domains in conversations in the novel through, disambiguation strategy.The findings reveal three thematic foci: resistance against domestic violence, love, and rejection of religious imposition, as parts of the explicatures of characters’ conversations in the novel, recoverable fairly differently through disambiguation. The study concludes that the relevance-driven investigation of explicatures in the conversations in Adichie’s PH is significant for aiding a context-sensitive understanding of domestic, health and religious challenges of the characters in the novel, and has an input in facilitating its overall interpretation for pedagogical use.

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