STORIES WE LIVE BY: CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS AND ECOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION DISCOURSES IN SELECT NIGER DELTA POEMS

Abstract

The quest for environmental protection is no longer domesticated only within the natural sciences. Academic researchers from language and literature are also contributing to such clarion call to oppose activities that degrade the environment. In contribution, this paper studied selected Niger Delta poems on environmental degradation within the purview of ecolinguistics. Using the purposive sampling technique, twenty-seven excerpts of the data were taken from ‘Delta Blues’ and ‘When Green was the Lingua Franca’ written by TanureOjaide. Charteris-Black’s Critical Metaphor Analysis and, Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory guided the qualitative analysis of the selected data. The findings revealed the various metaphorical expressions with which the poet used to depict the oil exploration activities in Niger Delta states in Nigeria. It also revealed interesting ways these activities have been conceptualized and talked about in these eco-poems. Consequently, the following Conceptual Metaphors, amongst others were realized: ‘NIGER DELTA OIL WEALTH AS DEATH/DEATH BED’; ‘AS PAIN’; ‘NIGER DELTA OIL EXPLORATION ACTIVITIES AS WAR’ and ‘AS TOTAL ENSTRANGEMENT OF HUMAN BEINGS FROM THE ECOSYSTEM THAT SUPPORT THEM’. It discovered that the poet’s linguistic choices evoked these concepts in our cognitive systems with which we interpreted the level of environmental degradation in the area. From these findings, the study concludes that language has being effectively used in such eco-poems to create awareness and call for redress in the unguarded oil exploration activities in the Niger Delta, which constitute stories that Nigerians will always live by.