A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF COMPLIMENTS IN HAUSA SOCIAL CONTEXTS

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A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF COMPLIMENTS IN HAUSA SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Abstract:

The purpose of this research is to investigate the speech act of complimenting among the Hausa native speakers. A compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker for some “good” (possession, characteristic, skill, etc) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer Holmes, 1988:17. The research aims at examining the basic strategies of compliments along with their responses within the Hausa social contexts. It also examines how social variables like age, gender, and social relationships affect the expression of compliments and compliment responses. In any communicative situation, people grapple with choices as to which form of language to use in a variety of social situations, therefore making speech a complex human activity. This sociolinguistic complexity can either make or break social relationship among members of a community. One hundred native speakers of Hausa language take the two forms of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with 12 scenarios in each, to cover the possibility of different social situations. The speech act data (compliments) are analysed according to models proposed by Pomerantz (1978), Wolfson and Manes (1980), Herbert (1989), Ye’s (1995).The data are then tabulated based on frequency and percentage of occurrence using the Microsoft Excel programme 2007. The study then reveals three basic compliment expression strategies namely admiration, appreciation, and feeling. These strategies are realised either explicitly or implicitly by the use of certain semantic carriers like positive verbs, adjectives and nouns. Also revealed by the study, are the three compliment response strategies: acceptance, mitigation, and rejection. Like in other speech communities being studied, this research reveals that compliments are aimed at showing solidarity in order to consolidate social relationship in the Hausa community, and that they are highly context sensitive. Accordingly, the study reveals some commonly used compliment structure by the participants.

A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF COMPLIMENTS IN HAUSA SOCIAL CONTEXTS

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