ABSTRACT
Turn-Taking in conversation varies from one language to another
because Turn-Taking is usually bound by natural etiquettes attributable
to the people‘s culture. Turn-Taking in Yorùbá conversation is no
exception. It reflects to a large extent the culture of the Yorùbá
People. Hitherto, politeness, honorific pronouns, greeting, proverbs,
prayer etc. are major factors in Yoruba Turn-Taking. The major
preoccupation of this work, however, is to examine how Yorùbá people
take turns especially in a media settingwhere the interlocutors express
themselves in their local dialects on weekly discussion topics. The
greatest influence on this work is Sacks et al. (1974). Not only did
Sacks and his associates pioneer the field of Conversation Analysis,
their many discoveries about how interlocutors take turns successfully
are still very relevant. The uniqueness of this research, however, lies
in the analysis of Turn-Taking in Yorùbá conversation in juxtaposition
with Sacks et al.‘s Turn-Taking which focuses only on how interlocutors
take turns in American English conversation. The subject of this
research is the audience of Mìnìjọ̀jọ̀, a weekly Yorùbá
discussion programme which airs on Africa Independent Television (AIT)
on Sundays between 1pm and 2pm. The audience comprises of speakers of
major Yorùbá dialects like the Ìjẹ̀bú, Ìjèṣà, Ẹ̀gbá, Èkìtì, Ìbàdàn and
Oǹdó dialects. Through disguised observation (with the permission of
the producer of the programme) as well as audio and video recordings,
the data for this research were collected, transcribed according to
Conversation Analysis methods and then analysed. During the analysis,
one very important finding is that some Turn-Taking rules are exempted
in a media setting because certain media ethics override such
Turn-Taking rules in Yorùbá conversation. It is of interest, however, to
discover that proverbs in most Yorùbá conversations form Adjacency
pairs and at other times, overlapping utterances. In all, this research
presents how Turn Allocation Component/Technique, Interruption/
Overlapping, Adjacency Pairs, Back-Channel Communication, Silence,
Repair and Non-Verbal Communication operate in Yorùbá conversation. It
is hoped that this work contributes to subsequent researches on Yorùbá
Turn-Taking since there are very few literatures that address
Turn-Taking as an important aspect of Yorùbá conversation.
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.0 Background to the Study
As far as human relationship is concerned, conversation is an
essential tool that promotes interaction among human beings. Only in
monologues, where only one person speaks throughout, is the concept of
conversation discarded and this is mainly a feature of drama.
Fundamental to dialogues and multilogues (conversation involving more
than two persons), however, is Turn-Taking. Turn-Taking in a
conversation ensures discipline in who speaks, at what point, and for
how long. It is like a sharing device, an
‗economy‘ operating over a scarce resource (Levinson, 1983:297). It
is also a crucial mechanism in human-system interaction in which the
interlocutors yield and take turns, guided by Turn-Taking cues (Duncan
& Fiske, 1977).
In discussing Turn-Taking, therefore, a mechanism guided by a set
of rules can be identified (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1978). This
mechanism includes a local management system which will indicate a
Transition Relevance Place (TRP), Turn Construction Units and
regulations by signals and Allocation Systems. In all, silence is
abhorred, so much so that even when there is silence, it is still
interpreted as an action. Although Turn-Taking is regarded as a
prerequisite to every organized conversation, every culture has its
unique Turn-Taking qualities.