TEXT PROCESSING AND DISCURSIVE DYNAMICS IN SELECTED EUROCENTRIC AND AFROCENTRIC HYMNODY

Abstract

Hymnody, especially, in the Christian religious worship, is a communicative form whose uniqueness has provided limitless contents for scholarly considerations in Nigeria and beyond. Existing studies in Christian hymns have largely concentrated on their contents as music forms with sparse scholarly considerations for the linguistic elements that constitute their discursive dynamics in worship. This study, therefore, investigated the hymnal-text processing with a view to examining discursive dynamics that project the psycho-social and psycho-spiritual effects in comparative term, and discussing the linguistic elements that unmask the text-consumers in their ancestral and colonial environments. van Dijk’s psychology of text processing was complemented with M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic Functional Grammar to account for mental representation of communicative event and the psycho-social and psycho-spiritual effects of the hymns. The hymns were purposively selected for context-dependent analysis in comparative term. Hymnal discourse analysis unearth distinct indigenous flavours of Eurocentric and Afrocentric perceptions. Presented in poetic form, the selected hymns revealed creative interrogation and stylistic variations that provide the deep sense of spirituality. In addition to pronominal references that distinguished the age of the hymns, other lexico-grammatical features manifested in the forms of nominal, adverbial, participial and interrogative expressions, structural inversions, possessive adjectives, personalized and shared imperatives and other deliberate lexical choices with which the hymnodists perform important lexico-semantic and pragmatic functions within their psycho-social and psycho-spiritual contexts. However, the two hymns comparatively demonstrated similar discourse issues such as prayer, peace, provision, submission, salvation, grace, implicit and explicit appreciation, devotion and loyalty. Unlike Fanny Crossby’s Eurocentricism which bothers on individualistic method of request to gain divine approval, Bola Ilori’s hymn depicts a unique Afrocentric ‘phatic communion’ that establishes inherent dialogic rhetoric. This reveals African hymnodist’s way for submissive request, deployed to gain divine approval, which is communal in nature. Eurocentric and Afrocentric hymns are communicative forms, essentially uniform in their discursive dynamics and stylistic innovations that produce effective ‘terrestrial-celestial’ interactions, but basically distinguished by the ‘ethnosentential’ facility of the African or Nigerian indigenous flavours.