Abstract:
This essay seeks to analyse interpersonal meaning and conversational style in a street children’s
talk from Amma Darko’s Faceless (2003). Drawing its theoretical underpinnings from
interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1981, 1982, 2015; Hymes, 1974; Tannen, 1979a, 1980a;
1984/2005; 1987; Coupland, 2007, etc.) and systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1971; 1978;
Halliday and Hasan, 1985/1989; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004; Halliday and Webster, 2009;
Eggins, 1994/2004; Eggins and Slade, 1997; Fontaine, 2013, etc.) and combined with quantitative
and qualitative research methods, the present study aims to examine how two street children (Fofo
and Odarley) conversationally involved in the talk use language to negotiate social (group) identity
and social relations. It also intends to describe the linguistic/Mood features which characterise
or/and constitute the speech/conversational style or/and speech/communicative behaviour of these
street children. The findings reveal that the speakers’ spoken interaction is marked by such
stylisitic features as a predominant use of full declaratives, a considerable proportion of elliptical
structures, minor clauses, inexpliciteness or indirectness, lack of a general/overall theme,
contextualisation cues like code-mixing, code-switching or style-shifting and such paralinguistic
or/and prosodic features as reduplication and suspension marks/points. All these denote that the
tenor of the talk is informal. |
