ABSTRACT
This research examined iconic representation of textual meanings in Osundare’s Random Blues and Waiting Laughters. The purpose was to demonstrate that the poet deployed the resources of language in representational patterns in order to enact the encoded meanings in the texts as they helped to realise the poet’s thematic thrust. The iconic elements studied include graphological, phonological, lexico-semantic and syntactic patterns, with recourse to their functional potentials in the texts. The theoretical approach adopted for analysis is M.A.K. Halliday’s style as prominence. The approach affirms that both deviant and non-deviant linguistic structures with communicative value make for prominence and aid the understanding and analysis of texts. Hence, it accounts for the various uses of the resources of language and the motivations behind the selections and combinations. The iconic features observed in the texts were extracted and analysed in order to show how the poet adapted various linguistic expressions to literary functions. The work found out that Niyi Osundare’s Random Blues and Waiting Laughters’ linguistic forms are representational in projecting the themes of delayed hope, betrayal, deprivation, political manouevry, leadership ineptitude, bureaucratic bottlenecks, oppression and suppression, etc. The study also revealed iconic sequences such as unusual lineation patterns and stanzaic forms, lexical truncation/fragmentation, lexical cramping, alliteration, assonance and consonance, lexical and formal repetitions, coinages, metaphors, lexicosemantic puns, italicization, quotation marks, onomatopoeia and ideophone as well as symbols and/ “lexico-graphics”, all culminating into linguistic iconicity or language-meaning enhancement which formed the crux of this study. Keywords: iconicity, stylistics, arbitrariness, imitative, analogue.
