Sounds play crucial roles in a poem’s meaning (re)construction. Grasping the content of a literary work such as poetry often requires a profound interpretation of the underlying linguistic cum phonetic codes of its discourse. Extant studies on Nigerian children’s poetry have paid little attention to this aspect of meaning conception, thereby concentrating mainly on the surface lexical constructs. Hence, this study aims to examine imagic iconicity in children’s poems in order to demonstrate how a poem’s thematic realization is inferred through the interpretation of the phonic and acoustic nature of the sounds employed. The study involves five poems: three from Ossie Enekwe’s Gentle Birds Come to me and two from Ikeogu Oke’s Song of Success and Other Poems for Children. The analysis is anchored to insights from Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the iconic sign, and exploits the action of acoustic and phonetic articulation of sounds to determine their functions and effects in the poems. The study reveals how specialized lexemic choices and onomatopoeia (kinaesthemes, phonaestheme or sound symbolism) in children’s poems make each poem functional and purposeful. Thus, children’s poetry contains language structures and configurations that transmit sense and embody what the poem is asserting in a way that interestingly engages the reader.

中文翻译：

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尼日利亚儿童诗歌中的意象性作为主题表现

声音在一首诗的意义（重建）中起着至关重要的作用。掌握诗歌等文学作品的内容往往需要对其话语的潜在语言和语音代码进行深刻的解释。现有的尼日利亚儿童诗歌研究很少关注意义概念的这一方面，因此主要集中在表面词汇结构上。因此，本研究旨在考察儿童诗歌中的意象象似性，以证明如何通过对所用声音的语音和声学性质的解释来推断一首诗的主题实现。该研究涉及五首诗：其中三首来自奥西·埃内奎（Ossie Enekwe）的温柔的鸟儿来到我身边还有两个来自 Ikeogu Oke’s成功之歌和其他儿童诗。该分析以查尔斯·桑德斯·皮尔斯的标志性符号概念为基础，并利用声音的声学和语音发音的作用来确定它们在诗歌中的功能和效果。该研究揭示了儿童诗歌中专门的词汇选择和拟声词（动感主题、音感主题或声音象征）如何使每首诗具有功能性和目的性。因此，儿童诗歌包含的语言结构和配置可以传递意义并以有趣的方式吸引读者来体现诗歌所主张的内容。