A Phonological-Semiotic Study of Vowel Harmony and Emotional Valence in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Feminist Poetry
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Abstract
This study examines how vowel patterning participates in the construction of emotional valence in four poems by Ama Ata Aidoo: Images of Africa at Century’s End, For My Mother in Her Mid-90s, Juliana (The Translation), and Whom Do We Thank for Women’s Conferences? Drawing on Peircean semiotics and affective phonological theory, the paper combines quantitative vowel-category analysis with qualitative semiotic interpretation. More than 1,300 vowel tokens were manually annotated according to front/back and open/closed distinctions, and a chi-square test was conducted to assess whether vowel distributions differed significantly across the selected poems. The statistical result showed no significant cross-poem variation in vowel-category distribution, indicating that emotional valence is not marked by fixed or statistically distinct vowel profiles. However, the semiotic analysis revealed that localised vowel clusters often align with emotional and rhetorical shifts within individual poems. Through Peirce’s categories of iconicity, indexicality, and symbolism, the study shows how vowel texture may support meanings of grief, intimacy, resistance, bodily presence, and feminist self-assertion. The paper therefore argues that vowel patterning in Aidoo’s poetry functions less as a deterministic emotional code than as a situated phonostylistic resource. By bringing affective phonology into dialogue with African feminist poetics and Peircean semiotics, the study contributes to literary phonostylistics and offers a cautious model for analysing the affective force of sound in African women’s poetry.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Amen Ahabue (Author)
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