The Perception of Hyperbole in Yorùbá Oral Literature: A Sociological Approach

Hyperbole is a figurative language and literary technique in which a speaker or an author uses exaggeration or emphasizes an idea to create strong emotional impressions in Yorùbá oral literature. Hyperbole is a language that consists of linguistics resources employed by literary artists and one of the most important stylistic features often employed by the Yorùbá oral poets, during performance. The Yorùbá poets most of the time take into consideration, the Yorùbá grammatical rules governing the speech, nouns and usage among the Yorùbá people. The main focus of this paper is to analyse hyperbole on how the Yorùbá poets unfold their emotions about the happenings or events in the society in such a way that they will arouse and sustain the interest of the audience. The paper also discusses how conversations and hyperbolic utterances convey messages to the audience with a view to having the easiest understanding of the communication motives. The paper shows that social-cultural relationship between the poet and the audience renders the hyperbolic utterances meaningful and it also contributes to knowledge about the effective use of hyperbole in the Yorùbá society.