A SOCIO SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF EDO TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE ITEMS

ABSTRACT

Marriage is the most important institution in the world. It is part of the rhythm of life, almost everyone must participate in it. It is performed in every society of the world, but it’s mode of conduction differs from one society to another. Items used in performing this ceremony differ as well so does their meanings. This project carries out a socio semiotic analysis of Edo traditional marriage items from a socio semiotic perspective of language, through this work the various items used and their significance are shown. The statement of the problem in this work is seen as the unavailability of adequate research work on this part of the culture with respect to marriage. In order to provide answers to the objective which is the analysis of the marriage items, relevant literatures related to this work were reviewed and the pierce’s model of semiotics which formed the basis of the theoretical framework was used in the analysis of data gathered for the purpose of this work. The qualitative research design was adopted for this work while the primary method of data collection was through elicitation of information from older informants. From the research, it was found out that the items used in the ceremony are significant and context based. It was also realized that some of the items also have some misconceptions attached to them based on the various perspectives on some of the informants, in all twenty two(22) items were analyzed.