Description:
The current study is analytical account of ways in which language is estranged in literary writing. It used “Son of Woman” by a Kenyan novelist, Charles Mangua. The study was delimited to redundancy and word order levels of syntactic defamiliarization. This was achieved by sorting sentences that belonged to the two clusters of syntactic defamiliarization and thereafter different instances of defamiliarization were re-sorted in each cluster in search for evidence of defamiliarization in the ordering of structural strings. The findings show that the novel abounds with different kinds of syntactic defamiliarization, with stylistic deixis and sentential asyndeton being most recurring. It has been concluded that this richness in syntactic craftsmanship for aesthetic ends makes the novel a masterpiece in linguistic witting.