The Discourse Functions of Antonyms in Faceless by Amma Darko
Esther Serwaah Afreh 
and Harriet Appiah Kyeremeh
Issue: Vol.4 No.3 March 2023 Article 6 pp.235-258
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2023436| Published online 10th March, 2023
© 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
This article investigates the discourse functions of antonymy in Amma Darko’s Faceless. It also explores the principles that govern the order of antonymous pairs in Faceless. The study is motivated by an observation, based on corpus data, that certain antonymous pairs co-occur in written data, and that they perform various discourse functions. There is also the argument that certain antonymous pairs tend to be used in a preferred sequence in the sentence. Data was collected from Amma Darko’s Faceless, a novel about the plight of street children in Ghana. The authors argue that in Faceless, antonymous pairs often co-occur within one word class and that these antonym pairs function differently to highlight some of the themes of the novel. The authors also argue that in the novel, antonym sequence is influenced by the following principles: idiomaticity and non-gender, chronology and positivity.
Keywords: antonymy, antonymous pair, discourse function & themes
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Dr. Esther Serwaah Afreh is a Senior Lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Ghana, Legon. She holds an MA in Cognitive Linguistics from the University of Brighton, UK, and an MPhil in English from the University of Cape Coast. Her research has concentrated on issues in Cognitive Semantics, that is, on conceptual content and its organisation in language.
Harriet Appiah Kyeremeh is an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of English, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). She holds an MPhil in English from KNUST, a BA in Linguistics with Spanish from the University of Ghana and a Diploma in Education from the University of Education, Winneba. She is particularly interested in how conceptual metaphor and other cognitive devices reflect in the language of people from different cultural backgrounds.
Afreh, E.S. & Kyeremeh, H.A.,“The Discourse Functions of Antonyms in Faceless by Amma Darko,” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 4, no.3 (2023):235-258. https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2023436
© 2023 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Publishers. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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