Response-Comment Elements in Yorùbá Conversational Discourse

Response-Comment Elements in Yorùbá Conversational Discourse Adeleke A. FakoyaLagos State University, Nigeria 1. Introduction The application of discourse analysis to Yorùbá discourse is expected to add a new perspectiveto the understanding of the language and its usage in context, and also give the learner or analyst new tools with which to cater for certain pragmatic as well as discourse needs. Since the central aim of much language use is understanding or communication, then our focus as analysts should be to reinforce users’ or members’ interpretive skills especially as regards a few ‘nuggets’ of language that people typically employ to ‘say’ so much without necessarily ‘speaking’ that much. These nuggets – referred to in this paper as response-comment elements – constitute a small class of words in Yorùbá, having very limited (if any) content or conceptual meaning but exhibiting remarkable pragmatic force in context. As discourse analysis is a study of language in context, this paper will only consider each of the response-comment elements in a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence. The reason for this is that the elements cannot be studied in isolation because of their peculiar feature of being dependent on context for their interpretation. The Yorùbá language has quite a lot of expressions that can substitute for the ones studied inthis paper, but the study will be restricted to the ones that have established idiomatic ...