|
When people talk, their speech will always carry more information than the bare referential meanings of the spoken words. Inevitably, information about the social situation, e.g. the relationships between the participants of the discourse will be encoded in the choice of words, or even in the decision to speak or to remain silent. The things a person can, may and eventually will say are dictated by codes of social behaviour.
The three presentations of this seminar want to illustrate this aspect of language use in social interaction in a few African societies, and elaborate on some codes of behaviour that play an important role in daily conversation in these African societies.
* Gerrit Dimmendaal elaborates on conventionalized and ritualized use of language in greetings. He explains what social information can be inferred from the greetings of some east African pastoralist groups, using Brown and Levinson's model of politeness strategies and communicative styles. These strategies will be compared with those found amongst speech communities in other parts of the continent.
* Anneke Breedveld discusses some social emotions (with some resemblance to English "shame") that prescribe a manner of speaking (in low voice) and even avoidance of speaking (in public to certain relatives). Her data are from two Fulfulde speaking communities, one from Mali and the other from Cameroon.
* Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall are known for their outstanding ethnographic work among the Hamar in Ethiopia. Their latest work involves the study of ideophones, where they focus on the use of rhetoric in relation to politeness theory.
|
