A SEMIOTIC READING OF DISCOURSE ISSUES IN TUNDE KELANI’S AGOGO EEWO

Abstract

Studies have investigated Tunde Kelani’s Agogo Eewo from the political, literary and sociolinguistic perspectives, but the exploration of the discourse issues embedded in the movie has not been teased out through the instrumentality of semiotic resources. This paper, therefore, investigates the deployment of semiotic elements in portraying inherent issues in Agogo Eewo. Twelve purposively extracted plates were analysed using Kress and van Leuween’s social semiotic approach to multimodality. The narrative and conceptual representational meanings of visual grammar are used to reveal political decadence, social vices and cultural elucidation in the movie. The political decadence is shown through bribery and extrajudicial killing, and the social vices are revealed by means of immorality through sexual innuendo, deployment of youth for vandalism, and self-aggrandisement. Cultural
elucidation shows how actions and objects project societal beliefs and values in the Yoruba sociocultural milieu. Gaze, gesture, props, demonstration, salience and vector are some of the semiotic resources used in meaning realisation in the movie. The study concludes that there is a synergy in the use of semiotic resources and thematic preoccupations in Tunde Kelani’s Agogo Eewo