Eco-discourse and Advocacy in J.P. Clark's Selected Poems through the Transitivity System

Abstract

African literature uses language elements, especially those that pertain to transitivity, to help portray and promote environmental issues. Even though ecological issues are getting more attention in the genre, this is still the case because the systematic investigation of how ecological themes and advocacy are linguistically constructed through the transitivity system, particularly the preponderance of material processes, has been largely ignored by previous discourse analyses of J.P. Clark's works. This has left a critical gap in our understanding of the interaction between linguistic choices and environmental discourse in Clark's poetry. It is crucial to make clear how J.P. Clark reflects and promotes ecological consciousness in his poetry through linguistic choices in light of Nigeria's environmental issues. Identifying how the transitivity system discloses ecological themes and advocacy, analysing the eco-debate in a selection of Clark's poems, and discussing the poetry's relevance to current environmental discourse are the three main objectives of this study. This study uses the transitivity technique to analyse advocacy and eco-discourse in some of J.P. Clark's poetry. This study focuses on two poems: Night Rain and The Casualties. This study aims to examine how Clark uses language to describe systems, people, and events to promote ecological themes and environmental consciousness. The transitivity framework, a component of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL), is used to do this. As part of the transitivity system, J.P. Clark employed the three primary processes—material, mental, and relational—to explain the world around him and within himself. The eco-discourse advocacy was made clear by his process choice, which included representations of the actors, senser/cognisant, carrier, sayer, and behaver, among others, who were acting upon the processes. Analysis of the poet persona reveals meaning potentials such as doing, happening, sensing, seeing, feeling, thinking, being, attributing, talking, and behaving.