Ewusi2015
| Ewusi2015 | |
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| BibType | PHDTHESIS |
| Key | Ewusi2015 |
| Author(s) | Kelly Jo Trennepohl Ewusi |
| Title | Communicational Strategies in Ghanaian Pidgin English: Turn-Taking, Overlap and Repair |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Ghanaian Pidgin English, Overlap, Repair, Creole, Interview |
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| Year | 2015 |
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| School | Indiana University |
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Abstract
A fair amount of work has been done on the strategies that speakers employ to administer their interaction in conversation, building on the seminal work of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) which finds a strong tendency for speakers to use particular strategies in describable ways, as though a set of rules are at work. Other studies indicate conversely that speaker goals and other factors are involved in how speakers manage interaction. Very little study to date, however, explores such strategies used by the speakers of Pidgin and Creole languages. Therefore, the goal of this dissertation is to examine the communicational strategies in one such language—Ghanaian Pidgin English (GPE). In pursuing this concern, I describe strategies that speakers use in handling turn-taking, turn-competitive and turn-noncompetitive overlapping talk, and the repair of perceived difficulties in speech. Recordings were made of interviews with speakers of GPE in informal settings with speakers’ permission by the researcher and a trained research assistant who is also a speaker of GPE, and the conversations elicited were transcribed and analyzed in relation to the literature regarding conversation strategies and analysis to outline GPE speakers’ practices in managing turn-taking, overlap and repair. I discovered that these strategies are describable in GPE and are accomplished in a manner similar to what is predicted by the literature for these strategies in other languages, but also discovered that speaker goals in conversation as well as the cultural mores on communication and status dynamics help to motivate speaker behavior, supporting a claim by proponents both of ‘rules’ guiding speakers and of the influence by other motivating factors that conversation is in fact administered on a turn-by-turn basis by individual speakers as they progress through their interaction.
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