The pragmatics of Kirundi marriage discourse: Speech acts and discourse strategies

This dissertation is a descriptive study of speech acts encoded in Kirundi marriage transactional discourse and the strategies used by the participants to encode them and attempts to understand the interrelationships between the speech acts and the strategies.; Chapter 1 states the objectives and describes the data to be studied and the approach to go about it. Chapter 2 provides the reader with some background information on Burundian society and culture in the area of matrimony.; Chapter 3 explores the conversation activities and the management of the interactions between the interactants in the sociocultural context of marriage transactions. Formality, participations, status are discussed and shown to be crucial factors for the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of the participants' verbal contributions. Chapter 4 investigates the nature and the function of the speech acts performed by the interactants. The speech act identification and categorization are based on the social aspects of linguistic action and on the conventionality and contextuality of discourse. Chapter 5 inquires into the strategies applied by the interactants to encode and decode them. Chapter 6 is a summary and conclusion.