THE STRUCTURE OF YORUBA GREETINGS

           ABSTRACT

Recent researches in the area of social greetings have established that contrary to earlier scholarship, greetings are not semantically empty expressions, and that they are used for more functions than initiating social interaction. The present paper briefly discusses different types of greetings with varied situations in which a greeter uses various greeting forms appropriate to particular context in the Yoruba culture. This project examines the different types of Yoruba greeting sequences and the sociolinguistic factors that account for their structuring. Politeness is one of the most important aspects of human communication in which human beings have to observe the basic conventions of politeness if they want to exist in peace together. Yoruba genuinely tend to oil the wheels of social interaction by adhering to a set of long-standing conventions. They do this not merely to make life easy for themselves, but out of respect, consideration and affection for their fellows. The framework for this research is our model framework called the Co-operative politeness hypothesis as it centers on describing and analyzing the ethnography of greetings among the Yoruba people. Chapter one is basically an introduction highlighting the general background of the study such as geographical location of the people, while chapter two shows the relevant Literature on greetings, ethnography. Chapter three examines the Co-operative politeness hypothesis as the framework for this project and the Global views on the concept of greetings. Chapter four is basically data analysis and discussion. Chapter five comprises the summary, recommendations, conclusion and references.

Keywords: Greetings, politeness, ethnography, communication, endangerment.