Systems of Conversational Interaction: a Study of Three East African Tribes

Abstract

1.1 Purpose of the study When people interact with one another in conversation, there is much accompanying behavior which is not purely linguistic-- both verbal and body movement behavior. The purely linguistic behavior itself is not the same as what one might find, e.g., In a grammar of the language which the people speak. Yet all of this behavior gives a very strong impression to an outsider, and particularly to a member of the same culture as that of the speakers, of 'naturalness' and 'appropriateness.' The research reported here is a study of the conversational interaction systems in three different African cultures with three very differentjla~guages. While the-bulk of the work consists of description and language-specific generalizations, the central question as to why all or this behavior is 'natural' is answered with the hypothesis that, at least in dyadic interactions, all of . { the linguistic and non-linguistic elements are part of a single system of interaction. Rather than constituting separate 'channels' which function independently, the verbal and non-verbal modes are completely interdependent. This is not to say, however, that their roles or functions are interchangeable. Under normal conditions people don't attempt, e.g., to express the question 'How are you?' by wholly non-verbal means, and 4>hey-do not (usually) indicate J direction by verbal means. Although it may be argued that the naturar context for 'language' is conversational interaction, language has not been studied extensively in this context nor has the context itself been studied. It is only in recent years that studies of language have progressed beyond the sentence and these studies have for the most part dealt with narrative, i.e., monologue (e.g. Grimes and Glock 1970). Although it is now over twenty years since the publication of Birdwhistell's Introduction to Kinesics (1951), no treatments of kinesic behavior in languages other then English have appeared. The present study was conceived as an attempt to fill these gaps by providing some basic information concerning the behavioral organization of human interactions in non-European cultures. j. ,. )