Abstract
This paper undertakes a textual analysis of Nnamdi Anumihe's Chartered Messenger, examining how the author deploys linguistic and textual strategies to construct meaning around the themes of corruption, integrity and social justice in contemporary Nigeria. Using De Beaugrande and Dressler's (1981) seven standards of textuality as an analytical framework, the study investigates the novel's textual architecture. The analysis shows that Anumihe deploys cohesive devices such as: anaphoric and cataphoric reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion, which together create textual unity and guide readers’ interpretation. Coherence is achieved through semantic field networks, temporal patterning, metaphorical consistency and structural parallelism that mirror the cyclical nature of moral choice in Nigeria. The paper also explores the novel's intertextual dimensions, tracing connections to religious narrative, Nigerian literary tradition, the 2004 banking crisis and popular culture. Anumihe's use of code-switching, banking discourse and multilingual references produce authentic characterisation while the use of occasional didacticism and binary moral categorisation limit textual complexity. The study concludes that Chartered Messenger achieves textuality through the strategic deployment of linguistic resources, functioning simultaneously as literary artefact and social commentary.
Introduction
Nnamdi Anumihe’s Chartered Messenger, situated in contemporary Nigeria, captures a landscape of pervasive corruption, exploitation, vaulting ambition and crime festering underneath the gloss of a deceptive corporate image. This article interrogates how the author deploys linguistic and textual strategies to construct meaning around the themes of corruption, integrity and social justice in Nigeria using De Beaugrande and Dressler's (1981) seven standards of textuality as an analytical framework. Text linguistics is concerned with the processes involved in the construction of utterances within context. It treats texts as communicative systems and seeks to uncover and describe the grammar of text, as opposed to the grammar of the isolated sentence. It moves beyond the traditional grammatical concern with well-formed sentences to consider the form of a text, its setting, and the manner in which it is situated within an interactional communicative event. Because text is the central concern of text linguistics, it is necessarily viewed in broad terms, encompassing an entire literary work and taking into account its form, whether written or spoken, as well as its syntactic and semantic interpretation.
Content
What makes a text a text is the texture of the text. Texture is the basis for unity and semantic interdependence within a text (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Any text that lacks texture would simply be a bundle of isolated sentences bearing no relationship to one another (Crane, 1994). A feature of texture is 'sequential implicativeness', as suggested by Schegloff and Sacks (1974). This refers to the property of language whereby each line in a text is linked from, or linked to, the previous line. In effect, the criteria of textuality refer to the features that define a text as a coherent and meaningful unit of grammar. De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) describe a text as a 'communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality', without any of which the text will not be communicative; non-communicative texts are treated as non-texts.
Textuality in texts can be described as the basic attributes that binds the elements of a text together. It is the set of structural, linguistic and contextual features that makes a written or spoken piece function as a unified meaningful text rather than a random collection of words. According to De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) textuality in texts is achieved using seven standards which includes coherence, cohesion, situationality, intentionality, contextuality, intertextuality and acceptability. These are the essential quality that turns a text into an object of study. However, post-structural linguists treat textuality as open, plural and fluid. They emphasize that text boundaries and meaning are actively constructed by the readers’ interpretation rather than fixed properties.
Textuality in African fiction often examines how authors encode their cultural worldview, identity and socio-political realities. It also features in how an author maps out characterisation and grammatical choices to create cohesive, culturally grounded literary meanings. In the Nigerian context, most studies on textuality investigate how authors adapt standard English through: local idioms, proverbs, code-mixing to reflect authentic cultural backdrops. In Nigerian novels, textuality features in how linguistic choices, lexical cohesion, transitivity patterns and cultural hybridity combine to construct meaning, themes and identity within the text: Nigerian prose authors explore dimensions of textuality by adapting the English language through: mother-tongue transfer, semantic extension and intertextuality (from folktales, myths, events, etc.), to establish a dialogic cultural framework. Despite considerable body of scholarship on textuality, in general, and on De Beaugrande and Dressler's seven standards in particular, comparatively little of these works have engaged book-length prose fiction from contemporary Nigeria. Most studies prefer shorter genres such as: news reports, political speeches and folktales (Rahma et al., 2022; Umar et al., 2023). The substantive problem is that, no study has been conducted on the text under study, Chartered Messenger. This leaves a gap in the application of the textuality model to the Nigerian novel of social realism like, Nnamdi Anumihe’s Chartered Messenger, a gap this study seeks to close. The objective of this article, therefore, is to interrogate Anumihe's use of linguistic devices to achieve textuality in Chartered Messenger, with particular attention to cohesion, coherence and intertextuality as the cohesive devises deployed by the author. This study adopts these parameters in analysing Anumihe's Chartered Messenger, examining the author's deployment of various literary devices in the achievement of textuality within the text.
...
Textuality in texts can be described as the basic attributes that binds the elements of a text together. It is the set of structural, linguistic and contextual features that makes a written or spoken piece function as a unified meaningful text rather than a random collection of words. According to De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) textuality in texts is achieved using seven standards which includes coherence, cohesion, situationality, intentionality, contextuality, intertextuality and acceptability. These are the essential quality that turns a text into an object of study. However, post-structural linguists treat textuality as open, plural and fluid. They emphasize that text boundaries and meaning are actively constructed by the readers’ interpretation rather than fixed properties.
Textuality in African fiction often examines how authors encode their cultural worldview, identity and socio-political realities. It also features in how an author maps out characterisation and grammatical choices to create cohesive, culturally grounded literary meanings. In the Nigerian context, most studies on textuality investigate how authors adapt standard English through: local idioms, proverbs, code-mixing to reflect authentic cultural backdrops. In Nigerian novels, textuality features in how linguistic choices, lexical cohesion, transitivity patterns and cultural hybridity combine to construct meaning, themes and identity within the text: Nigerian prose authors explore dimensions of textuality by adapting the English language through: mother-tongue transfer, semantic extension and intertextuality (from folktales, myths, events, etc.), to establish a dialogic cultural framework. Despite considerable body of scholarship on textuality, in general, and on De Beaugrande and Dressler's seven standards in particular, comparatively little of these works have engaged book-length prose fiction from contemporary Nigeria. Most studies prefer shorter genres such as: news reports, political speeches and folktales (Rahma et al., 2022; Umar et al., 2023). The substantive problem is that, no study has been conducted on the text under study, Chartered Messenger. This leaves a gap in the application of the textuality model to the Nigerian novel of social realism like, Nnamdi Anumihe’s Chartered Messenger, a gap this study seeks to close. The objective of this article, therefore, is to interrogate Anumihe's use of linguistic devices to achieve textuality in Chartered Messenger, with particular attention to cohesion, coherence and intertextuality as the cohesive devises deployed by the author. This study adopts these parameters in analysing Anumihe's Chartered Messenger, examining the author's deployment of various literary devices in the achievement of textuality within the text.
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Conclusion
This study sets out to interrogate how Nnamdi Anumihe's Chartered Messenger achieves textuality, using De Beaugrande and Dressler's (1981) seven standards as its analytical framework. The textual analysis confirms that the novel successfully meets the criteria for textuality, functioning as a coherent communicative event that achieves its intended artistic and social purposes. The novel's textual architecture effectively balances accessibility with complexity, creating multiple entry points for diverse readerships while maintaining thematic coherence and narrative unity. Anumihe's sophisticated deployment of cohesive devices, reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion, demonstrates technical mastery of textual construction, achieving a seamless integration between surface grammar and deeper semantic structure, while the novel's intertextual richness positions it as a meaningful contribution to contemporary Nigerian literature, one that dialogues with established literary and religious traditions while addressing pressing social concerns.
This study concludes that Chartered Messenger is a textually accomplished, but an interpretively conservative novel. Its cohesive and coherence-building resources are deployed with genuine sophistication, and lexical segregation. The 'integrity' and 'corruption' fields identified in the discussion above, forecloses much of the moral ambiguity that a subtler treatment of the same subject matter might have sustained. The novel's textuality, in other words, is achieved partly at the expense of its complexity. The very devices that make the text so legible, the binary semantic fields, the recurring journey metaphor, also produce a somewhat predetermined moral universe in which outcomes are legible from the outset. This is not a flaw in textuality as such, but it does mark the limit of what the novel achieves as literary art, as distinct from what it achieves as social commentary. Greater linguistic nuance in character representation, a more sophisticated exploration of moral ambiguity, and a reduction in didactic intervention would, in the present writer's assessment, elevate the novel from effective social commentary towards a more enduring literary achievement.
Chartered Messenger exemplifies how a skilled author can deploy linguistic resources to produce a text that functions simultaneously as entertainment, social criticism and cultural preservation. The present study's contribution has been to demonstrate how textuality is achieved at the level of cohesion, coherence and intertextuality across a single, full-length Nigerian novel.
This study concludes that Chartered Messenger is a textually accomplished, but an interpretively conservative novel. Its cohesive and coherence-building resources are deployed with genuine sophistication, and lexical segregation. The 'integrity' and 'corruption' fields identified in the discussion above, forecloses much of the moral ambiguity that a subtler treatment of the same subject matter might have sustained. The novel's textuality, in other words, is achieved partly at the expense of its complexity. The very devices that make the text so legible, the binary semantic fields, the recurring journey metaphor, also produce a somewhat predetermined moral universe in which outcomes are legible from the outset. This is not a flaw in textuality as such, but it does mark the limit of what the novel achieves as literary art, as distinct from what it achieves as social commentary. Greater linguistic nuance in character representation, a more sophisticated exploration of moral ambiguity, and a reduction in didactic intervention would, in the present writer's assessment, elevate the novel from effective social commentary towards a more enduring literary achievement.
Chartered Messenger exemplifies how a skilled author can deploy linguistic resources to produce a text that functions simultaneously as entertainment, social criticism and cultural preservation. The present study's contribution has been to demonstrate how textuality is achieved at the level of cohesion, coherence and intertextuality across a single, full-length Nigerian novel.
References
Aboh, R., & Uduk, H. (2017). Meaning in discourse: An introduction to discourse analysis. Ibadan: Kraft books
Anumihe, N. (2008). Chartered messenger. Zelon Enterprises.
Boychuk, E. I. Yakovlev, A. I. (2025). Cohesion and coherence in African tales: Sociocultural and linguistic analysis. In Contemporary approaches to linguistics and teaching methods in business and professional communication (TILTM 2024). Springer.
Crane, P. (1994). Texture in text: A discourse analysis of a news article using Halliday and Hasan’s model of cohesion. The Journal of Nagoya University of Foreign studies. (30). 131-157.
Crystal, D. (1992). An encyclopedic dictionary of language and languages. Basil Blackwell.
De Beaugrande, R. A., & Dressler, W. U. (1981). Introduction to text linguistics. Longman.
Fettahoğlu, H. (2022). The textual analysis of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, (26), 1014-1023. https://doi.org/10.29000/rumelide.1074148
Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. Routledge.
Hatch, E. (1992). Discourse and Language Education. Cmbridge University press.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. Longman.
Kehinde, A. (2003). Intertextuality and the contemporary African novel. Nordic journal of African studies, 12(30. 372-382.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
McCarthy, M. (1991). Discourse analysis for language teachers. Cambridge University press.
Neubert, A., & Shreve, G. M. (1992). Translation as text. Kent State University Press.
Nwankwo, U.C and Eme, C.A. (2026). Lexical Cohesive devices in Liwhu Betiang’s Beneath the rubbles. The Journal of Pan African studies.6(8), 186-203.
Osisanwo, W. (2008). Introduction to discourse analysis and pragmatics. Femolus-Fetop.
Rahma, A., Chelsea, J., & Agustina, I. W. (2022). The seven standards of textuality in news texts: A discourse analysis. STAIRS: English Language Education Journal, 3(2), 123-138. https://doi.org/10.21009/stairs.3.2.6
Renkema, J. (1993). Discourse studies: An introductory textbook. John Benjamin publishers.
Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1974). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 7(4), 289-327.
Trask, R.L. (1975). Language: The basics. London: Routledge.
Umar, M., Iliyasu, H. A., & Bashir, A. A. (2023). A stylistico-linguistic examination of the textual discursiveness and unification. International Journal of Arts, Languages, Linguistics and Literary Studies, 12(5), 52-60.
Werlich, E. (1976). A text grammar of English. Quelle & Meyer.
Notes on contributors
Vivian Chizobam Ajoku is a Researcher in Digital Media and Language use in Development
Communication. She holds a PhD inSociolinguistics from the Department of English and Literary studies,
University of Calabar, Nigeria. [email protected]
Godwin Oko Ushie is a Professor of Stylistics. He has been teaching for close to three decades. He currently
teaches Text Linguistics, Stylistics and Phonolgy in the Department of English and Literary Studies,
University of Calabar, Nigeria. [email protected]
Anumihe, N. (2008). Chartered messenger. Zelon Enterprises.
Boychuk, E. I. Yakovlev, A. I. (2025). Cohesion and coherence in African tales: Sociocultural and linguistic analysis. In Contemporary approaches to linguistics and teaching methods in business and professional communication (TILTM 2024). Springer.
Crane, P. (1994). Texture in text: A discourse analysis of a news article using Halliday and Hasan’s model of cohesion. The Journal of Nagoya University of Foreign studies. (30). 131-157.
Crystal, D. (1992). An encyclopedic dictionary of language and languages. Basil Blackwell.
De Beaugrande, R. A., & Dressler, W. U. (1981). Introduction to text linguistics. Longman.
Fettahoğlu, H. (2022). The textual analysis of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, (26), 1014-1023. https://doi.org/10.29000/rumelide.1074148
Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. Routledge.
Hatch, E. (1992). Discourse and Language Education. Cmbridge University press.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. Longman.
Kehinde, A. (2003). Intertextuality and the contemporary African novel. Nordic journal of African studies, 12(30. 372-382.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
McCarthy, M. (1991). Discourse analysis for language teachers. Cambridge University press.
Neubert, A., & Shreve, G. M. (1992). Translation as text. Kent State University Press.
Nwankwo, U.C and Eme, C.A. (2026). Lexical Cohesive devices in Liwhu Betiang’s Beneath the rubbles. The Journal of Pan African studies.6(8), 186-203.
Osisanwo, W. (2008). Introduction to discourse analysis and pragmatics. Femolus-Fetop.
Rahma, A., Chelsea, J., & Agustina, I. W. (2022). The seven standards of textuality in news texts: A discourse analysis. STAIRS: English Language Education Journal, 3(2), 123-138. https://doi.org/10.21009/stairs.3.2.6
Renkema, J. (1993). Discourse studies: An introductory textbook. John Benjamin publishers.
Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1974). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 7(4), 289-327.
Trask, R.L. (1975). Language: The basics. London: Routledge.
Umar, M., Iliyasu, H. A., & Bashir, A. A. (2023). A stylistico-linguistic examination of the textual discursiveness and unification. International Journal of Arts, Languages, Linguistics and Literary Studies, 12(5), 52-60.
Werlich, E. (1976). A text grammar of English. Quelle & Meyer.
Notes on contributors
Vivian Chizobam Ajoku is a Researcher in Digital Media and Language use in Development
Communication. She holds a PhD inSociolinguistics from the Department of English and Literary studies,
University of Calabar, Nigeria. [email protected]
Godwin Oko Ushie is a Professor of Stylistics. He has been teaching for close to three decades. He currently
teaches Text Linguistics, Stylistics and Phonolgy in the Department of English and Literary Studies,
University of Calabar, Nigeria. [email protected]