Abstract

The culture of any group of people can be defined by their habits, experiences and activities which in turn justify their language use and define their social roles. As a fundamental tool for expressing culture, language use in Childe Internationale from a semantic and pragmatic perspective provides an interdisciplinary account of the literary text. As a social semiotic, language serves as a means of expression for the meaning of the social system, and the linguistic system is in turn structured in a way that the social context is predictive of the text. Therefore, this study focuses on language as an information system for the cultural context of Wole Soyinka’S Childe Internationale through the salient and relevant semantic and pragmatic theories. Childe Internationale is chosen for this study because it is preoccupied with the major theme of clash of Cultures, and is richly endowed with features that explicate the above- mentioned theoretical issues in a linguistic analysis of this type. This work employs the complementarist approach to the study of meaning within the systemic functional model of linguistics, to investigate the pragmatic and semantic features of the text for a balanced and comprehensive interpretation. Using the relevant semantic and pragmatic features such as collocation, pun, technical registers, componential analysis, coinages and borrowings, truth conditional semantics, illocutionary acts cooperative principles, conversational and conventional implicatures presupposition turn taking, stage directions the understanding of the illocutionary force of the text which is an important aspect in the study of meaning is enhanced. Finally, this study defines language as a cultural behavior through which its speakers become different personalities, in consequence of their membership of a society and their occupancy of social roles.