‘What is in a Name?’ Naming Practices in Four Texts of Amma Darko

Abstract

The study aims at exploring the names and naming practices in four texts of Amma Darko, namely Beyond the Horizon, Faceless, The Housemaid and Not Without Flowers. The categories of names studied comprise personal names, place names and animal names. The study, an interface between literature and language, adopts the theory of Duranti’s (1997) Three Interconnected Theoretical Framework to provide insight into the function of language (names) in culture in the areas of indexicality, performance and participation. A complementary theory is the Description Theory of names with particular reference to Replacement Theory of (proper) names which views a name as describing the object it names. The research design is qualitative. It uses the purposive sampling technique. The analytical procedure is a triangular analytical framework. The analysis suggests that names are not created, deployed or used arbitrarily but can dictate the roles of their referents. Also, names are found to have thematic and sociocultural significance. Archetypes created are in the areas of character trait, theme and ideology. The findings in this thesis contribute to the scholarship in onomastics (traditional and literary) as well as to language and culture with sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropological implications. The findings also have implication for further research.