GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

ABSTRACT

Songs are integral part of oral performance which gives oral literature its total integrity, impact and full realization. Poetry, one of the genres of literature (written or oral) is a performative art whose nature lends itself to linguistic (literary) and paralinguistic (non-literary) modes of communication. Therefore, for an effective communication of desired meaning to be realized in this art, there is much need for the analysis of the features that brings to lime light the beauty of this genre. It is on the basis of this that this paper was carried out to explore the phonological features inherent in the Amaeke- Item war songs. To realise the objectives of this study, a descriptive survey research design which uses random sampling technique was used. The analysis of the linguistic features of the text revealed instances of parallelism whereby words and phrases which are denotatively distinct were drawn together thereby providing a basic structuring principle analogous to meter in metrical poetry. From the analysis of the data, it was discovered among other things that there are lots of dialectal variations in the pronunciation of many lexical items as opposed to that of the standard Igbo. Very common in the lect is the preponderant use of the voiceless alveolar fricative/s/ being replaced with the voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ in the standard Igbo. It was also observed that anywhere Labio-velar approximant /w/ appears at the end of a lexical item, what usually follows it is the half- closed unrounded vowel /e/. This applies also in some lexical items containing the labialized velar nasal/ nw/. one of the recommendations was that research on the analysis of our indigenous literature and culture should be encouraged as this will help to unravel the richness and beauty of our cultural heritage.

KEYWORDS: Aesthetics, Amaeke Item and Oral Performance