Stylistic Analysis of Chief Dr. Samuel Ioraer Ortom's Inaugural Speech, "Our Collective Vision for a New Benue"

Abstract

The idiolect has remained the basic yardstick for the measurement of speech variation within a mutually intelligible speech community. This idiolect - linguistics habit of a speaker, treads the ‘La Parole’ Path of language proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure which culminates into the present day stylistics. The inaugural speech of Governor Samuel Ortom is the data for this work. This research hinges on descriptive grammar as methodology. This is an approach to the study of grammar which seeks to account for the way the speakers actually use their language without reference to an approved standard or the grammatical structure of another language. Ndimele (2008:48). This work presents the meaning of language, stylistics, style, speech, political discourse and the various styles employed by the speaker to drive his point home. These styles range from the physiological structure of the speech, morphological analysis, syntactic analysis, and semantic analysis to figurative expressions and some unique presentations. The styles are discussed from the perspective of style as a choice and style as a deviation. Through this work, the researchers discovered that the governor’s speech is not only a beautiful rhetoric but a stylistically unique speech in terms of language use.