Pragmalinguistic Basic Research on the Ring Languages of Cameroon (3): Communication Strategies of Requesting, Complaining and Apologizing in the context of culture-specific norms and moral concepts

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Located at the interface of African linguistics, ethnopragmatics and conversational discourse analysis, this project aims at documenting and analyzing the speech practices in two languages of the Cameroonian Grassfields, Isu and Men, and the way these practices contribute to the construction of cultural norms and social identities. The previous research period was geared towards an ethno- and pragmalinguistic analysis of speech acts of requesting, complaining, and apologizing in their cultural context. In continuation of this line, the presently envisaged research will be focused on gaps of documentation and zoom in on those areas where the analysis has not yet been completed or where existing hypotheses have not yet been found to be sufficiently supported by empirical data. More specifically and practically speaking, research will be guided by the following sub-goals: (a) dedicated documentation of speech acts of apologizing by means of a refined methodology, (b) in-depth pragmalinguistic analysis of requests and complaints with regard to testing the hypotheses spelt out in the work report, in particular those concerning the internal hierarchies of up- and downgrading strategies, (c) systematic lexico-semantic and pragmatic analysis of additional speech acts which could be recognized within the domain of requests, complaints, and apologies, but which are distinct from the ones identified so far on the basis of their lexicalization in indigenous terminology, as specified in the work report, (d) targeted collection of statements and reflections of cultural insiders about values and norms underlying the communicative behavior so as to facilitate empirical feedback of the hypotheses presented in 2.4 of the work report, (e) systematic cognitive-semantic analysis of functionally related speech acts in a comparative perspective with special regard to parallelisms and divergences in conceptions and contextual parameters.