Dialogism amid Heteroglossia of the Translinguistic Process of Relexification: The Subversion of Colonial Cultural and Linguistic Imperialism
Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation
Razieh Eslamieh
1
(Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Islamic Azad University Parand-Robat Karim Branch, Parand, Iran)
Keywords: Lexical borrowing, Code-mixing, Cushioning, Linguistic transposition, Relexified language,
Abstract :
Most postcolonial African writers choose English as the language of their literary works for the reason of wider audience reception but come to indigenize it to decolonize the colonial tool, i.e. colonial language. The translinguistic process of relexification means subverting colonial cultural imperialism and colonial linguistic imposition through the dialogic interaction opened in the wake of using colonial language to represent the voices of the dispossessed amid a heteroglotic milieu. Relexification is the linguistic reflec- tion of polyglotic multilingual postcolonial milieu. Studying relexification in Chinua Achebe‟s rural nov- el, Things Fall Apart, the present paper intends to delineate that while colonial literary discourse is mostly monologic as it voices mainly the colonizer, postcolonial literary discourse is the dialogic bringing to- gether of voices and forces from both sides. The synchronic study of relexification can reveal that the hy- bridization strategy triumphs on three axes of linguistic transposition, rhythmic transposition, and folklor- ic transposition. The paper is limited to linguistic transposition. First through the theoretical saturation method, samples of lexical borrowing, cushioning, and code-mixing were spotted in the corpus. Next the samples were thematically analyzed to derive implications of relexificatin in textual context. Discourse analysis revealed broader dialogic and subversive implications of relexification in postcolonial polyglot discourse. Implementing literary relexification in his novels, Achebe extends the frontiers of English by creating a new English literary form.
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