Molenje, Victor Makuto (2009) Forms and Functions of Discourse Markers in Conversations among Speakers of Kabras. Masters thesis, Kenyatta University.
![[img]](http://thesisbank.jhia.ac.ke/style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png) |
PDF (Forms and Functions of Discourse Markers in Conversations among Speakers of Kabras)
Forms and functions....pdf - Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Download (46MB) | Request a copy |
Abstract
Natural spoken discourse contains many instances of redundant interjections and backchannel utterances, these utterances have not hitherto received much attention and few systematic analyses have been made, since they were regarded as useless spurious expressions. In this study, it is demonstrated that indeed these expr.essions henceforth referred to as Discourse Markers (OMs) are important elements in a conversation given the various functions that they serve. The corpus of this study consisted of conversations captured through tape recording of native speakers of Kabras. The two variables are the gender and age of the respondent. The conversations were collected and analyzed by aid of the Edmondson (1981) model of spoken discourse for the presence of OMs. The results show that conversations in Kabras indeed have OMs just like those identified in English (Schiffrin, 1987, Blakemore, 2002). On the other hand. when it comes to the forms of the discourse markers, it is observed that given that Kabras is an agglutinating dialect, there were more categories for the markers as compared to those categories found in English. These OMs appeared in the beginning. middle and at the end of moves and exchanges. Age cornpanson between young and old speakers of Kabras revealed no significant difference between speaker usage of OMs and age. The study however does show significant gender differences in the usage of OMs by the respondents. Women are observed to use more OMs in their speech as compared to men. It is also evident that women use more OMs that have polite forms as compared to men. Finally. the study demonstrates that OMs are not spurious expressions or expletives, that is expressions whose function is no function at all, but expressions that serve a number of functions in conversations such as, serving to increase the interpersonal relationship among the speakers and also assist in letting the speakers interrupt others politely.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania |
| Divisions: | Africana |
| Depositing User: | Tim Khabala |
| Date Deposited: | 19 Sep 2017 08:40 |
| Last Modified: | 19 Sep 2017 08:40 |
| URI: | http://thesisbank.jhia.ac.ke/id/eprint/2297 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |