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SYSTEMS OF CONVERSATIONAL INTERACTION: A STUDY OF THREE EAST AFRICAN TRIBES A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA By Chet A {Creider IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY June, 1973 University ot NAIROBI Library 0549611 2 UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI INST. OF AFRICAN STUDIES LIBRARY. Acknowledgement s It is a pleasure to acknowledge the institutional and individual support which was received in connection with this research. The financial support which made the project pos­ sible was provided under a National Institute of General Medical Sciences Graduate Training Grant No. GM 0116U and a National Science Foundation Grant No. 2790. In Kenya I was affiliated with the Institute of African Studies of the Uni­ versity of Nairobi and there received much assistance at a number of points in my work. 0 I am indebted to my adviser, Dr. H. B. Sarles, for supportive trust over an extended period of time, for advice at numerous junctures and most importantly for having ensured that I was properly equipped, both intellectually and in terms of technical skills, to undertake a project such as this. I am grateful to Dr. A. N. Tucker for encouragement when I still felt very much in the dark as I attempted to understand the Kipsigis language and for freely sharing with me his vast knowledge of Luo and Kalenjin. For patiently spending hours learning the intricacies of phonetic transcriptions, making transcriptions of the video­ taped conversations, and going over the forms of their lan­ guages with me again and again I would like to thank W. A. Cheruiyot, A. Serser, J. Mageso, E. C. Keino, A. Rono, B. A. Mitei, D. A. Bor, S. J. Ong'or, V. Juma, B. Birundu and > P. Kenani. Finally I would like to express my appreciation to all the families and individuals who so kindly allowed themselves to be recorded. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. Introduction .................................. 1 1.1 Purpose of the study .................... 1 1.2 Field work context ...................... 3 1.3 The three tribes ........................ 9 Footnotes to Chapter I ....................... 16 II. The Linguistic Organization of Interaction . 18 2.1 Introduction ............................ 18 2.2 Word t o n e .............................. 21 2.2.1 Word tones of Kipsigis .......... 21 2.2.2 Emphatic t o n e .................. 22 2.2.3 Stress .......................... 23 2.3 Sentence level t o n e .................... 2U 2.3.1 Questions ...................... 2k 2.3.2 Emotionality and downdrift .... 26 2.3.3 Register s h i f t s ................ 28 2.3.U L u o ............................ 30 2.3.5 Gusii .......................... 33 2.h Semi-words .............................. 3** 2.5 Supra-sentence linguistic organization . 39 2.6 Illustrative conversations.............. **9 Footnotes to Chapter I I ..................... 78 III. Body Movements in Interaction ................ 8** 3.1 Description of body m o v e m e n t s .......... 8U 3.2 Functions of body m o v e m e n t s ............ 90 3.2.1 Association with s p e e c h ........ 90 3.2.2 Utterance-associated behaviors . 92 3.2.3 Word, phrase and clause related b e h a v i o r s ...................... 96 3.2.U Posture shifts .................. 107 3.3 Comparison with American English ........ 107 Footnotes to Chapter I I I ..................... 11** IV. Gestures ...................................... 116 U. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n............................ 116 h.2 Description of gestures ................ 119 U. 3 Usage and occurrence .................... 129 **.l* Comparisons ...................... 135 Footnotes to Chapter I V ..................... 1**0 V. Factors Affecting Body Movements in Interaction. 1*<1 5.1 Mechanical f a c t o r s ...................... 1**1 5.2 Social F a c t o r s .......................... 1**3 VI. Sunmary and Comments .......................... 1**8 Appendix: Grammatical Sketches of Kipsigis, Luo and Gusii................................. 157 Footnotes to Appendix .................. 182 Bibliography.......................... * • • • 183 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 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 speak­ ers, of 'naturalness' and 'appropriateness.' The research reported here is a study of the conversational interaction systems in three different African cultures with three very different languages. While the bulk of the work consists of description and language-specific generalizations, the central question as to why all of 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 they do not (usually) indicate direction by verbal means. Although it may be argued that the natural' context for 'lan­ guage' is conversational i teraction, 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 lan­ guage have progressed beyond the sentence and these studies have for the most part dealt vith 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 con­ ceived as an attempt to fill these gaps by providing some basic information concerning the behavioral organization of human interactions in non-European cultures. > 1.2 The Field Work Context Bearing in mind the difficulties of highly detailed examinations of body movements in interaction (McQuown, ed., in preparation, 1956-), it was decided that a study which operated at a fairly gross level might be both feasible as well as likely to yield useful information from which to plan further work profitably (and hopefully also insightful in its right). A comparative study was set up in an attempt to make field work maximally profitable and because it seemed likely that in the short period of field study it would not be possible to attain a deep level of 'intuitive' insight into the interaction systems of any one culture. The Western part of Kenya is inhabited by a number of tribes of various diverse origins which both prior to and since the coming of the British have lived relatively apart from one another (except for occasional cattle rustling in the past, a small amount of intertribal trading, etc.). Three of these tribes were selected on the basis of linguistic and cultural distinctness and residential propinquity (so as to make prac­ ticable field work among all three simultaneously): the Kip- sigis, the Luo and the Gusii."^ In section 1.3 the interrela­ tionships of these three tribes, past and present, will be briefly sketched. Shortly before this study was planned, portable video tape recording equipment became available. In addition some . \ of the portable recorders were provided with stop- and slow- motion analyzing feature. Thus two of the objections which !» might be made against video equipment were eliminated. As the disadvantages of cine equipment are numerous (noisy, sound-picture synchrony awkwardly achieved, dependent on good lighting conditions, long delay between filming and viewing pictures, etc.) it was decided to rely principally on television equipment. This equipment consisted of a Sony portable video recorder and playback unit (with a stop motion feature)— AV-3^00, a video camera with zoom lens, con­ denser microphone and playback monitor. As the equipment could be powered by 12 volt car battery for playback purposes, the outfit was almost entirely independent of mains electricity (only the recording batteries required to be charged with mains current). In practice the system, except for a few problems dis­ cussed below, worked beautifully. Recording was feasible under a great variety of lighting conditions from high noon to evening dusk (both difficult to handle with cine film). The camera and recorder were silent and because the equipment could be set up at some distance from the individuals being recorded, camera shyness was not a great problem. Playback and analysis similarly presented no mechanical problems. It was very convenient not to have a time lag while waiting for the film to be developed, and (as anyone who has spent any amount of time analyzing cine films will appreciate) it was convenient to be able to play the tapes back through an essen- \ tially quiet and cool tape recorder. The equipment, h ver, did have a number of drawbacks with respect to the f ibility of 'live' recording (it should 5 be noted, however, that these same drawbacks would also be present with the use of cine equipment). First, focussing was relatively critical and difficult to achieve accurately with a moving subject. Second, the equipment was heavy enough so that extended recording without the use of a tripod was im­ possible. Third, the small condenser microphone mounted in the camera itself did not provide sufficient audio quality to be useful, and it was necessary to use a separate microphone placed near to the speakers. For all of these reasons it was not possible to film people under conditions where they were as free to move about as they would be if they were not being filmed.

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