NEUTRALITY AND GENERALISATION IN NON-AGENTIVE RECEPTIVE VOICE: A CRITICAL LINGUISTIC STUDY OF EL-RUFAI'S THE ACCIDENTAL PUBLIC SERVANT

This paper presents and analyses the use of non-agentive receptive voice as a system of linguistic choice in El-Rufai’s The Accidental Public Servant and the linguistic components in such constructions. The objective is to find out how the use of such construction stands to be a choice from the set of options and how this choice creates some contextual implications. The data for the analysis are streamlined first using corpus software (The corpus software used is AntCon 3.5.8. text analysis software) and then, purposive sampling is used to select some fourteen (14) strands of clauses for the analysis. From the findings two different types of pragmatic/contextual implications are found, namely, neutrality and generalisation. These implications are, in essence, the effects that come up in non-agentive voice construction. These are what Simpson (1993) calls ‘pragmatic and contextual implications’.