Conversational Strategies in Ola Rotimi’s The gods Are Not to Blame

Abstract

This paper examined the conversational features used by characters through talk in Ola Rotimi’s The gods Are not to Blame. Several studies have been carried out on Ola Rotimi’s works but this study was motivated by the scanty scholarly studies on the conversational strategies used in the text. In order to bring out the features of conversation in the text, the text was critically read, and salient conversational features were identified. The features were interpreted according to the messages they expressed in the text. The findings revealed that conversational features such as monologue, turn taking, turn allocation, speech overlap, error and repair mechanism, adjacency pairs, and insertion sequence were used to generate different effects in the text. The study concludes that the conversational features employed by the author create orderliness and regulate participants’ talk in the interaction towards actualising the thematic goals of the text. Thus, the study indicates that conversation analysis gives a deeper and better understanding of human utterances as portrayed through the characters in the text, thereby increasing the readers understanding of the text.