This paper aims to analyse Helon Habila’s Oil on Water through the framework of literary pragmatics which deals with the production and interpretation of texts. In order to highlight the inner thoughts and feelings of the writer through the utterances of his characters, the article focuses on the different types of voice in the novel. The corpus under study has been sampled purposively and studied through a qualitative approach. The analyses reveal that categories of voices such as voice mash, voice trash and voice crash are used to project the views of the author, including his perceptions, feelings and beliefs. The study concludes that these linguistic items have made it easy to understand Habila’s perspectives in his literary artifact.

The moon image has rich associative meanings in both Chinese and western cultures. Since the moon which is symbol of eternity is accompanied by the development of human beings, therefore its associative meanings have always been enriched and developed in both Chinese and western cultures. Although the moon image in Chinese and western cultures has similar associative meanings, the reasons for their formations are quite different. In addition, the moon image shows great differences in Chinese and western cultures, which is due to the uniqueness of the two cultures. This article aims to analyze the moon image in Chinese and western cultures from the associative meaning of Leech’s categories, so as to find out their unique expressions of the moon image in Chinese and western cultures, which is of practical significance for cross-cultural communication.

This study investigates heads of compound verbs in Urhobo. The study classified Urhobo compound verbs using Lexicalist criteria as a theoretical frame work. Lexicalism is a theoretical standpoint in modern generative linguistics, according to which the processes that form complete words (derivation and compounding) are accounted for by a set of lexical rules, independent of and different from the syntactic transformation. Headedness refers to a relationship between the positions of units in a linguistic constituent structure. That is, it is the argument of the compound that projects in the compound verb formed. In this regards the verb is taken as the head of the compound verb assigning its features and the properties to the compound formed. The study reveals three groups of compound verb heads, namely: left headed compound verbs, right headed compound verbs, as well as both left and right headed compound verbs. The study also reveals that, there is no overt morphological head in a V-V compound; all the components being verbs, the result become the same category as the head. it is equally reveals that in the Urhobo language, compound verb heads position is determined by the verbs (V1 or V2) that predominantly convey the meaning of the compound. This means that the heads of compound could be left headed; when the first verb conveys the message in the argument, and head right headed when the second verb conveys the message in the argument structure; and both left and right when the pair of verbs jointly convey the message in the argument structure. It therefore means that compound verb formation in Urhobo could be in prefix position, suffix as well as both initial and final positions.