Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics) by Author "Nakijoba, Sarah"

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    Pragmatic markers in L1 Luganda-L2 English bilingual spoken discourse : a relevance-theoretic approach
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Nakijoba, Sarah; Huddlestone, Kate; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this dissertation, I examine the manifestation of Luganda and English pragmatic markers as embedded elements, and analyse the procedural roles they play in facilitating interaction in bilingual spoken discourse. Pragmatic markers (PMs) are procedural expressions such as so, but, and kubanga (because), which facilitate interaction by guiding the hearer towards an interpretation intended by the speaker. Spoken interactions involving bilingual speakers of L1 Luganda and L2 English are characterised by spontaneous code-switching, in which certain Luganda PMs are used in English utterances as though they were native PMs, and vice versa. By focusing on the English PM so and the Luganda PM kubanga as code-switched PMs in Luganda and English respectively, the study aims to analyse their manifestation as single PM occurrences and as PMs occurring in monolingual and bilingual combinations. The study examines the contextual, operational and domain status of PMs as embedded elements, assesses their procedural roles in facilitating interaction within their contexts, and establishes whether the procedural roles they play as embedded elements in bilingual discourse are similar to, or different from, the roles they would play in related monolingual contexts. The analysed PMs are extracted from a Luganda-English bilingual spoken corpus of 192 000 words. The corpus was obtained from verbatim transcriptions of 23 hours of audio recordings of interviews and discussions with 41 adult L1 Luganda-L2 English bilingual speakers. The analysis is theoretically informed by two approaches. The first is Blakemore’s (1987, 2002) Relevance-theoretic (RT) notion of procedural encoding, which assumes that PMs constrain the implicatures of the utterances they introduce by guiding the hearer to the relevant contextual assumptions, thereby reducing their processing effort. The second approach is Myers-Scotton’s (1993a, 2002) Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model, which explains the structural configurations of embedded PMs within bilingual clauses. The findings show that, as expected, the Luganda and the English PM systems are in contact. During bilingual communication situations, bilingual speakers take advantage of the availability of the extra resources and they employ PMs from both systems. To enhance communication, speakers select PMs which they judge to be more relevant in encoding certain procedural relations from either language. So and kubanga are examples of such PMs. As embedded PMs, so and kubanga operate predominantly as code-switches, which occur singly and in monolingual and bilingual PM combinations. Coexistence of Luganda and English PMs is evidenced in functional overlaps in which more than one procedurally identical PM from Luganda and English co-occur in the same environment and in literal translation where PMs in functional competition are partially or completely translated. So and kubanga are multifunctional PMs and they operate on different planes and domains to signal context-dependent procedural information. In general, the procedural roles they encode as embedded elements are not significantly different from the roles they play in similar contexts in monolingual discourse. To achieve more universal conclusions about the nature, manifestation and procedural underpinnings of the contested aspects related to PMs, the study recommends a comprehensive analysis based on multi-modal and cross-linguistic data, as well as integrative synchronic and diachronic approaches to the analysis of PMs.