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Articles

Vol. 2 No. 4 (2022): KWASU Journal of Humanities

A Stylistic Analysis of Selected Episodes of the Nigerian Nollywood Movie, Jenifa’s Diary

Submitted
July 1, 2024
Published
2022-12-31

Abstract

Nigeria is rated as the country with the second highest number of home video production after India. This underscore the significant impact the movie industry is making on the socio-economic activities of the Nigerian people. The impact pervades all spectrum of social engagement, including but not limited to the way language is used. No wonder that some members of the society sometimes, fashion their linguistic habit in line with those of famous actors or actresses. Consequently, this paper examined the stylistic features that characterise the language use of selected major characters in the Nigerian Nollywood movie, Jenifa’s Diary. To achieve the aim, three episodes were chosen from the sixth season of the movie. The data were downloaded and transcribed into written form. A blend of scale and category grammar with aspects of stylistic features namely: syntactic and lexico-semantic features are deployed for analysis. The analysis of the data revealed that lexical features of repetition, acronymy, meronymy and collocate were employed by the characters in the movie to achieve emphasis, heighten the dramatic essence of the movie through humorous scenes, and create a mental picture of the movie in the mind of the audience. All these are in addition to using various sentence structures and types to reflect different social status and background of the selected characters. In conclusion, an examination of style and characterization of Janifer‘s diary has shown that the linguistic habit of movie characters is a conscious and deliberate effort towards the fulfilment of dramatic essence of their movies.