Pragmatics of Oyiwaladↄŋŋ (Thank You): The Case of Ga
Keywords:
Oyialadɔŋŋ ‘Thank you’, discourse marker, conversational analysis, politeness,Abstract
The study considers the marker Oyiwaladɔŋŋ (thank you) in Ga ( Niger Congo, Kwa branch), under the expressive speech act and linguistic routine The marker has a variety of functions and explore the factors (social and situational) affecting the different uses of ‘thank you’. Content analysis involving the conversational theory of relevance in existing works is adopted for this study. We are looking at the basis for ‘thank you’ and its variants as polite strategies. The study discovered ethnographic situations and communicative events for Oyiwaladɔŋŋ (thank you) including, (1) Oyiwaladɔŋŋ for humor, (2) for acceptance of services, (3) for irony or sarcasm in conversations, (4) for phatic functions, (5) for dismissal of a person or service, (6) for rejection of an offer or services and (7) gratitude for major or minor favour.
References
Agyekum, K. (2014). The Pragmatics of Requests in Akan Communication In A Legon Reader
in Ghanaian Linguistics,211-226.
Agyekum, K. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Thanking in Akan. In Nordic Journal of African
Studies 19(2), 77-97.
Agyekum, K. (2008 b). The Pragmatics of Akan Greetings. Discourse Studies 10(4),489-512.
Agyekum, K. (2006). Akan Apology: A Repair Mechanism in Akan Social Interaction. South
African Journal of Linguistics 26(2), 53-68
Aijmer, K. (1996). Conversation Routines in English: Convention and Creativity. New York:
Addison Wesley Longman.
Anderson, G. (1998). The Pragmatic Marker ‘like’ from Relevance Theoretic Perspective. In
Jucker, A.H. & ZIV, Y (eds) Discourse Markers. Description and Theory ,147-170 Amsterdam; Philadelphia John Benjamins
Clark, B. ( 2013). Relevance Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Coker, W. (2013). Language and communication in a structuralist society. Language Discourse
& Society, 10.
Crystal, D. (2004). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Ernst Klett Sprachen.
Hinkel, E. (1992) Pragmatics of interaction: expressing thanks in a second language. Applied
Language Learning 5 (1), 73–91.
Hornby, A. S. (2015). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (9th edition), Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Olateju, M. & Adesanmi, T. O. (2006). Thank You as Discourse Marker. An Encyclopedia of
The Arts. Vol. 4 (4), 265-276.
Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2004). Relevance theory, 606-632. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Wilson, D.,& Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and Relevance . Cambridge University Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
By submitting and publishing your articles in the African Journal of Applied Research, you agree to transfer the copyright of the Article from the authors to the Journal ( African Journal of Applied Research).
