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Drawing on the Critical Discourse Analysis grid put forth by scholars such as Van Dijk (2001a&b, 2004, 2006), Fairclough (1989, 1995, 2001, 2003), Van Leeuwen (1996, 2008), Meyer (2001), Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard (1996), Wodak (2001), the current paper exuded how institutional social power is deployed to naturalize ideologies as common sense or common knowledge in a sample text drawn from a contemporary feminist novel, notably Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2006). It also tried to unravel how, through discursive structures and properties, the womenfolk resist or/and transgresses the established sociocultural norms and conventional ideologies as regards gender, role assignment and power. Finally, it advocated the view that only gender-balanced power relations between men and women can ensure a fair social justice and peaceful society. Key Words: Critical Discourse Analysis, feminism, gender, ideology, patriarchy, power

<p><em>This paper attempts a critical reading of Mema (2003) written by Daniel Mengara. The study draws on insights from language and gender studies, feminism and queer theory to critically cross-examine how female masculinities and male femininities are represented in the novel. It holds the view that gendered identities are socially constructed via speech. This means that language encodes means which overtly mark masculinity or/and femininity. However, it should be noted that neither masculinity nor femininity is an exclusive characteristic of the male or the female sex/gender. In this sense, the role(s) an individual takes on in a given context confers either the masculine or the feminine profile upon him/her. This study concludes that gendered identities as portrayed in Mema are intricate, and that in most cases the portraiture of both sexes counters the expectations of African culture</em><em>.</em></p>

This paper seeks to analyze the logical relations in the argumentative essays written by second-year English major students in the Université de Zinder (henceforth, UZ), the Republic of Niger. The students who enrolled for the second year in 2020-2021 were 80 in total, and they all followed a 10-week writing course. At the end of the course, they were asked to write an argumentative essay on two suggested topics. Using the descriptive mixed-method research design, this study randomly selected and examined ten of the students’ essays: 5 on the first topic and 5 on the second one. The logical relations in the texts were described or identified, and the findings thereof were tabulated. The findings revealed that the students used more clause complexes than clause simplexes in their essays, suggesting thus a spoken mode. The findings also indicated that the students deployed a lower number of rankshifted relations compared to the tactic relations found in their texts. This further exuded the speaking character of their texts. On the contrary, the findings showed a relatively small use of clause simplexes, rankshift and hypotaxis the texts, all of which are suggestive of a written mode. Another striking feature noted in some of the essays is the deployment of projection; projection of locutions mainly, but what is generally expected in an argumentative essay is the projection of ideas. The article concludes by highlighting the need to overtly teach EFL students the traits of spoken language and written language. This could be done, for instance, by focusing on the two systems of logical relations, namely: taxis and logico-semantics in the writing class.