Short Story Sentence Types and Complexity

Analysis of Magogodi Makhene’s 'The Virus' and Arinze Ifeakandu’s 'God’s Children Are Little Broken Things'

Abstract

This study performed a textual linguistics analysis of two literary works: “The Virus” (The VR) by Magogodi Makhene and “God’s Children are Little Broken Things” (GCLBT) by Arinze Ifeakadu. The texts were intentionally chosen based on the authors' gender. The analysis followed Michael Halliday’s (1985) language model. Each text was carefully read, with sentences isolated and recorded in an Excel sheet. These sentences were then classified according to Quirk et al.’s (1999) typology. Overall, the results show that, in terms of length, “GCLBT” was longer than “The VR”. GCLBT used more declarative sentences, while The VR featured more sentence fragments. Imperative sentences, mainly in The VR, were also prominent. Both texts contained complex interrogative sentences, with a higher frequency, whereas exclamative sentences were infrequent. The findings suggest that the authors’ gender influenced both text length and sentence variation, with the male author's work being longer and more structurally diverse. Conversely, the female author used more sentence fragments and imperatives.

Keywords:

Defamiliarisation, Literary linguistics, Sentence complexity, Sentence types 

https://dx.doi.org/10.56279/ummaj.v12i1.7