Abstract

---

The linguistic study of style or stylistics has increasingly gained currency in the study of literature in the past three decades or so. In fact, with the publication of Leech and Short's monumental book entitled Style in Fiction in 1981 (reprinted in 2006), new insights have been provided on how to study prose style. But before the printing of this book, it is reported that the study of style had been carried out in poetry, another genre of literature. Literature is said to find its expression in language (Osunbade, 2009, 2013). This means that language cogently serves a specific artistic or aesthetic function in literature. In this perspective, Fowler (1981)opines that literature is the creative use of language. With this mind, stylistic scholars put forth that a writer's linguistic resources encode his/her idiosyncratic style or individuality as well as his/her mindset. It is against the backdrop of the foregoing conceptual or/and theoretical hypothesis that this paper is set. It aims at unveiling the stylistic value of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003) from a systemic-functional perspective propounded by MAK Halliday and his followers (Halliday 1971; Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 1985/1989, Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004, Eggins 1994/2004, Bloor ad Bloor, 2004, Fontaine, 2013, etc.). It specifically seeks to apply Leech and Short's checklist of four categories, namely: lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context, to three systematically selected extracts, with the view of underpinning the salient linguistic features therein which overtly realize the writer's style and mind-style.