ELLIPSIS AS A LINGUISTIC MARKER OF COHESION AND COHERENCE IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S LITERARY WORK

ABSTRACT

Ellipsis connects sentences together without altering the intended meaning of the text. This study aims at proving that Chinua Achebe is one of the many literary writers that has adopted the phenomenon as a form of language use, to unify texts, promote coherence, save time, reduce redundancy and also as a form of aesthetics. Using his first three official novels; things fall apart, arrow of God and no longer at ease {the African trilogy} as case study, the work exposes the level at which the writer uses ellipsis, the type of ellipsis present and how they form cohesive ties between sentences for better comprehension and coherence in his literary texts. The research is a qualitative one. It adopts the 1976 Halliday and Hassan’s theory of ellipsis as its model framework which was the basis of the data analysis by grouping them into the different types of ellipsis they fall under.The study was able to determine the predominant form of ellipsis in his works by calculating their frequency of occurrence using the calculation of percentage frequency. At the end of careful study and examination, 153 elliptical sentences were extracted from the three books. 80 of these sentences were presented. An overall total of 33 sentences were nominal with a percentage of 21.5%, 49 were verbal {32%} and 71 clausal{46.4%}. At the end of the analysis and discussions, it was gathered that ellipsis is not just a linguistic marker of cohesion and coherence in Chinua Achebe’s literary works, but also a marker of aesthetics and sarcasm, and that ellipsis can also be seen as a feature/attribute of characters in literary works. The research acknowledged few difficulties and a disadvantage of ellipsis which is the constant case of ambiguity and some texts that seemed elliptical {nominal ellipsis} but could not be accounted for as a type of ellipsis using the 1976 theory. Therefore, the researcher recommends further studies to find out what theory of ellipsis best accounts for cases as such and also, on Chinua Achebe’s later works to find out if the use of ellipsis was continuous or temporal.