. Introduction
There is no doubt that J.P. Clark-Bekederemo is one of the leading lights of Nigeria’s
first generation of writers. This thesis springs from his historicity, the quantity and
quality of his literary procreations and the prodigious critical attention and acclaim these
works have attracted across the globe. However, unlike other Nigerian writers such as
Soyinka and Osundare, there is an acrite dearth of critical works on the language of the
poet. Eyoh’s (1997) J.P. Clark’s Poetry: A Study in Stylistic Criticism remains the only
full-scale linguistic investigation of the writer’s poetry. The critical fact is that this work
is limited by its triadic focus on the phonostylistic, lexical and paralinguistic affective
aspects of the poet’s idiolect.
There is no doubt that language is very crucial to literary procreation and
discourse. Todorov (1977) highlights this view when he defined literature as a verbal
work of art. The implication is that, to fully grasp the meaning and aesthetics of a literary
text (or any text for that matter), there must be recourse to language at all levels of
linguistic description, because it is the singular medium of its expression. Dada (2004)
explains:
A literary work contains a lot of codes and information that must be decoded in
order to fully grasp the meaning of the work; it has sound patterns, semantic