The Structure of Face-To-Face Casual Conversation Among the Akans

Abstract

The social act of conversation passes through routine procedures before it is achieved. This paper tries to find out the structure of face-to-face casual conversation openings and closings among the Akans. It also seeks to juxtapose the structure of face-to-face conversation to that of telephone conversation as proposed by Coronel-Molina (1998). 20 dyads of natural conversation from the residents of Amamoma are sampled for the study. Recordings of the conversations of residents of the community serve as the corpus for analysis of the study. The study considers the structure of openings in two forms: presence and absence of interlocutors, and that in whichever case we could have greetings and how-are-you sequence. The identification and recognition sequence only occurs in the absence of interlocutors. However, the closing section of conversations are categorized into three: introductory closings – announcing closure and new topic introduction/recapitulation, intermediate closings – future arrangements and transmitted greetings, and final closings – terminal exchanges. Also, even though conversations occur across different modes, that is, face-to-face and telephone, there seem to be some sort of generality and universality in the structures of conversation (especially, openings) that occur through those media.