Adichie’s Thematic Construction of a Post-Colonial Nigerian Nation-State in Two Excerpts from Her Purple Hibiscus: An Experiential Meaning Scrutiny

Abstract

This article digs into Adichie’s world view of the post-colonial Nigeria via her use of the English language in two extracts culled from her Purple Hibiscus. To go into details, the study examines how Adichie makes use of particular types of transitivity patterns to weave into her text her thematic construction of Nigeria after independence. To this end, the Experiential Meaning has been used as a theoretical lens given that the exploration of the transitivity properties in/of a text can provide a full insight into how the writer encodes his/her experience of the world therein as advocated by Systemic Functional Linguistics scholars like Halliday (1971/1976), and his followers Hassan (1985/1989), Eggins (2004), and Matthiessen (2004/2006). As a matter of fact, the study offers a linguistic analysis of the selected extracts, a summary of the findings, and the ensuing interpretation. Actually, the interpretation of the findings has revealed that Adichie has encoded tremendous meanings through her outstanding use of such process types as material, mental and verbal processes. The distribution of these key processes in the analyzed extracts per participant has also highlighted both some of the author's key characters and to what extent these latter ones embody her perceptions of the social, religious and political issues that she artistically tries to castigate in her novel under examination. The study ultimately opens up to further explorations embracing such other fields of the Systemic Functional Linguistics as the interpersonal and textual meanings.