Abstract:
This paper is a morphological and pragmatic study of significant word
formations in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow. Ngugi borrows
sense and morphological patterns of lexical items from source domains
– military, medical, zoological, biblical – to create his own vocabulary.
That is to say he attempts a corrupt version of lexical items which
originally belong to other registers in order to transfer the sense and
notions of source domains into the context of the novel.This study is a
linguistic analysis of those lexical formations. Ngugi deploys affixation,
compounding, clipping, and blending to form new words to elicit
humour and satirize aspects of political hegemony in Wizard of the
Crow.
