Pragmatic Markers of Voices in Femi Osofisan's Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels

Pragmatic markers of voices are significant given the roles they play in the building and construction of utterances in culture-based texts. They reveal owners of voices thus enabling us to determine authorial preoccupations in literary texts. However, as significant as they are to the determination of voices and authorial perspectives, they have received little attention in linguistic scholarship. Employing the literary pragmatic theory therefore, this study sets out to examine how to detect voice ownership as indicated by pragmatic markers of voices such as references, deixis, pronouns, tenses and related authorial perspectives in Osofisan's Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels (EATVM), so selected, given that it is rich in data. The study reveals that Osofisan employs the pragmatic markers of voices such as references, deixis, personal pronouns, tenses and so on through his and his characters' voices, voice mash, voice trash, and voice crash, relative to issues of social power, moral and religious deviances, and religious beliefs, in EATVM. The study concludes that a study of pragmatic markers of voices enhances an understanding of voice ownership in literary texts towards determining authorial perspectives in post-colonial African conjured textual universes.