A Lexical Pragmatic Analysis of Proverbs in Femi...

This essay is a pragmatic reading of moral and socio-political decadence in Femi Osofisan’s Midnight Hotel. It does this by analyzing ten out of twenty-five proverbs deployed in the text. In analyzing the proverbs, this essay observes that each has at least an ad hoc constituent which requires semantic modulation to get at the meanings of the proverbs. This modulation is not arbitrary, but contextually negotiated until the reader reaches his optimal relevance. Wilson and Carston argue that metaphors are cases of ad hoc constructions (7), for instance, when a speaker says, ‘The boy is a lion’. While a literary scholar would see this as metaphorical, Wilson and Carston believe that the above sentence is a case of the use of an ad hoc†¦show more content†¦One of such is with Ossie Onuorah Enekwe where he says that: To get desperately close to the spectator, to each and every one I have trapped in the darkness or half light, to penetrate very close and intimate, like a knife in the ribs. I want to make that spectator happy but uncomfortable. I want to turn him open, guts and all, spice him, cook him in the filthy, stinking broil of our history. I want him washed inside out, in the naked truth, and then I sew him back again a different man. (18) The playwright’s closeness to a reader of Midnight Hotel is predicated on the contemporary subject matters raised in the text. It is true the essence of the play is to effect a social change (as it is with most literary works), but this change cannot occur if the reader finds it difficult to comprehend what the text says. Thus this essay lends a hand in that direction, by working out an easy, systematic, pragmatic format for understanding Osofisan’s Midnight Hotel. Commenting on the playwright’s art, Awodiya submits that â€Å"Osofisan is prolific and theatrically fertile in creating flexible dramatic forms that have great stage adaptability† (15). Awodiya further notes Osofisan’s penchant for invoking traditional African elements of music, dance, songs, mime and improvisation (15). One of such is proverbs with which he attaches the African sense. Awodiya acknowledges that