Gender Issues in the Lion and the Jewel by Wole Soyinka: A Linguistics-Oriented Analysis from a Systemic Functional Grammar and Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

let alone with Literary Linguistics. As opposed to sex which refers to biological characteristics, gender is culture based. Nowadays, it is actively recommended to include aspects of gender in whatever project we undertake. The present article is an attempt at probing the language used by male and female characters in Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel to see how gender issues are grounded in the play to let it play its didactic role. The aim is to pinpoint the way female and male are represented through a lexicogramatical analysis with a special focus on its transitivity system as suggested by Halliday (1994) to enter Wole Soyinka’s characters ’ inner and outer world as they use language to enable them ‘to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of what goes on around them and inside them ’ (1994:106). That Soyinka considers or does not consider women or just recounts th