Turn-Taking Mechanism in Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are not to Blame

Abstract

Conversation analysis is an approach which deals with verbal and non-verbal aspects of language in a situation of everyday life. Dialogues in Ola Rotimi’s The gods are not to blame are classified as naturally occurring conversations because they involve two or more interlocutors (characters) who employ turns to deliberate on issues that are related to the roles the gods play in the lives of human beings. So, as pertinent as conversation analysis is in dealing with matters bothering human beings, no enough research has been carried out on it. Therefore, this paper seeks to undertake study on turn-taking mechanism in the above named text so as to see how it is being used by the characters in it. The paper adopts sacks et al, (1974) conversational model as its theoretical framework. The text is analysed and the results show that aspects of turn-taking mechanism such as starting up, taking over, interruption, filled pauses or verbal fillers, silent fillers ellipses, questions, declarative sentences and silence run through the text. Lexical items such as “oh”, “well”, “no” are also used in the text to take turns. Turns are allocated on the bases of current speaker select next speaker, current speaker self-select and current speaker continuous. The study also found that the use of turn-taking mechanism in the text makes the conversations run smoothly. The study concludes that conversation analysis is an excellent tool for studying naturally occurring conversations. Glob Acad J Linguist Lit; 2022, 4(3): - DOI :