A pragmatic study of selected songs by Joseph Kamaru

Abstract

Songs and singers have been with us since time immemorial but occasionally one comes along who is very talented and captures a people's imagination and somehow his songs simply refuse to be forgotten and somehow keep on being sung long after the musicians could be said to be past their time by commentators. One such musician is a Gikuyu singer, Joseph Kamaru whose songs are the subject of this study. One distinctive feature of Kamaru's music is his usage of a variety of figures of speech. The primary aim of this study was to find out and identify figurative language as used by Joseph Kamaru. The data for analysis was collected from his recorded music which is available through Compact Discs which was supplemented by both written and oral interview from Joseph Kamaru himself and those listeners who enjoy his music. The songs were then transcribed in the original Gikuyu and then translated bearing in mind that it is very possible for meaning to be lost in translation and therefore tried to be as close to the original meaning of the figurative language in Gikuyu as possible in order to get the meaning in English. Where this was not possible, we tried to explain the figurative language using the English equivalent. This was later analyzed using the Neo-Gricean theory of conversational implicature as popularized by Laurence Horn. The analysis showed that indeed Joseph Kamaru uses a lot of figurative Language principally idioms and Proverbs to pass his message. The thesis is organized in a way that, that the first chapter gives a summary to the framework of the study, the statement of the problem, the objectives of the study, hypothesis and the theoretical framework that was used in the study. Included in this chapter is the Literature review. Chapter two dwells on the analysis of the data from a selected number of songs that were used to identify the various figures of speech that Joseph Kamaru has used in his songs. In the chapter we relate the uses of the figures of speech to the Neo-Gricean Theory of conversational implicature that is the Q and R principle and tries to see whether the theory works. Chapter three deals with the views of the listeners of Kamaru's songs with a view to fmding out whether they understand the figurative language and whether the said figures of speech impede their understanding of the songs or whether it makes the songs loved. The last chapter deals with the summary of the findings conclusions and recommendations for further study.