TEXTUAL CUES AND CHARACTERISATION IN CHILDREN’S FICTION

Abstract

Studies on language as a tool for fictional characterisation have hardly focused on children’s fiction, which motivated this study to fill this knowledge gap. Culpeper’s (2001) model of characterisation, complemented by Halliday’s transitivity processes, served as the framework. Four children’s fictional texts were purposively selected: two human stories (Aisha Nelson and Idowu Oluwasegun’s Aku the Sun Maker and Mimi Werna and Edwin Irabor’s Magical Rainbow River); and two personified animal stories (Chinua Achebe and John Iroaganachi’s How the Leopard Got His Claws and Fary Silate and Awwalu Sakiwa’s Drought and the River of Blessings). The study identified situational cues like folk ontological beliefs and the allocation of weighted roles to animals by their physiological/physical attributes. Both explicit and implicit textual cues aided character reading in the data. The explicit textual cues are the narrator’s presentation, self-presentation and other-presentation, with seven representational modes/strategies: description, introspection, collectivisation, individualisation, identification, exclusion and nomination. The implicit textual cues are lexical/syntactic like conditional modals and imperative sentences; and paralinguistic/visual features like kinesics. The study concludes that the interpretation of characters in children’s fiction is supported by situational, explicit and implicit textual features that index their representation to align with children’s worldviews.