A Pragmatic Study Of The Daily Swahili Conversation

This research aimed to study how to identify the pragmatic meaning of daily Swahili conversation in Bukavu and Uvira(two cities in eastern D.R.Congo).Previous researchers have studied polysemous and homonymous nouns,and verbs in the Swahili language as well.There was also a comparative study of the Costal Standard Swahili and the Swahili in Bukavu from the morpho-syntactic aspect.However,there leaves a gap in the pragmatic study of daily Swahili conversations.Therefore,this thesis set out to study the pragmatic meaning of daily Swahili conversation in Bukavu and Uvira mainly from the perspective of the cooperative principle,with turn-taking theory as a back-up.The method and techniques used in this study for data collection included interviewing,recording,and generating conversation.Interviewing was involved in the interactions between the researcher and the native speakers of the Swahili language,and the generating conversation was used in creating a context where Swahili speakers engaged themselves in the conversation for the researcher to record and collect data.Screening conversation was used to break words down into their basic parts to determine their basic meaning.Screening also helped in checking what the speakers implicated while conversing so as to distinguish what was said and what was implied.Then,the daily Swahili conversations were transcribed focusing on what was said and when it was said by the speakers.Altogether,this study covers65 daily Swahili conversations,which took up to 15 hours,plus 45 minutes,they were transcribed and translated into English.The research shows that daily Swahili conversation utterances that carry pragmatic meaning are more common than others,and those utterances uttered to mislead the audience are composed of speaking turns that carry metaphorical meaning.It also shows that Swahili’s pragmatic meaning in its expressions/utterances implies the meaning of words depending on the context.The daily spoken Swahili in both Bukavu and Uvira cities also curries a specific objective in speaking turns that are assigned in daily conversation,especially in a metaphorical sense.The results also showed that the pragmatic meaning in daily Swahili conversation can be interpreted if only the listener or the audience knows the conversational rules of the language that its speakers used while conversing.