A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ADICHIE’S THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK

ABSTRACT This study presents a comprehensive stylistic analysis of the lexical and grammatical features in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of twelve short stories exploring themes of identity, diaspora, trauma, and gender. Using a combination of linguistic stylistics, systemic functional grammar, and critical discourse analysis, the research investigates how Adichie’s word choices and sentence structures contribute to meaning, foreground ideology, and shape narrative voice. Lexical items are examined across categories such as colour terms, slangs, religious vocabulary, indigenous lexis, and institutional language. These choices are shown to reflect social positioning, cultural belonging, and emotional states, while also reinforcing themes such as alienation, memory, and resistance. The study further explores grammatical constructions simple, compound, complex, and elliptical sentences, highlighting how syntactic variation reveals character psychology and reflects discourse strategies. Each grammatical pattern is supported with phrase structure tree diagrams and contextual analysis from the stories. The findings reveal that Adichie’s stylistic techniques are neither arbitrary nor ornamental; they function ideationally, interpersonally, and textually to encode experience, identity, and power dynamics. Her integration of Nigerian English, code-switching, and hybrid grammar challenges conventional norms in English fiction and reclaims linguistic agency for marginalised voices. This study contributes to the broader field of African literary stylistics by offering new insights into how language operates at multiple levels in contemporary Nigerian fiction. It affirms the value of stylistic inquiry in deepening our understanding of literature, culture, and ideology.