Relevance Theoretic Reading of Unigwe’s Night Dancer and on Black Sisters’ Street

Abstract

This work examined the linguistic features of two selected novels: Night Dancer and On Black Sister’s Street written by Chika Unigwe. The study assessed how the various assumptions/tenets of relevance theory were exploited and violated in the texts. Utterances of different characters were collected in order to ascertain whether they upheld the tenets of relevance or not. Sperber and Wilson’s (1986;1995) relevance theory was adopted as the theoretical framework for the study. A text-based descriptive methodology was used to analyze the utterances of the characters. Drawing examples from the selected texts, the findings revealed that the writer’s language violated as well as exploited the assumptions of relevance. The study concludes that there were more violations of the assumptions than the exploitation. This is consequent upon the writer’s bid to report her message using a unique language form. Considering concepts like implicature, explicature, reference assignment and the two main principles of relevance theory, this study exposes the reader to the socio-psychological variables in the texts. From the findings, the researcher concludes affirmatively that relevance theory (just as Grice notes) shows that an essential feature of most human communication is the expression and recognition of intentions.