Communication as sociocultural meaning exchange: The example of Richard Wright’s Black Boy

Abstract

Communication is expected to result in meaning exchange. However, when definite meanings could not be established in a communication exchange, an odd situation usually results. Such situations are observed to actually go beyond syntactic and logical misnomer in the communication process. This paper thus examines the semantic oddities in Richard Wright’s Black Boy. It made use of the linkage points of such linguistic approaches like pragmatics, semiotics, presupposition and truth-condition semantics to do a semantic analysis of the novel. It found that sociological factors have a great deal of influence on the odd way of interpreting utterances/communication signals in the text. The paper therefore advocates that there is the need to incorporate co-text sociological elements as being of relevance to meaning analysis.