Greeting Dynamics in Chukwuemeka Ike’s The Potter’s Wheel and The Bottled Leopard

Abstract

Communication is ruled-governed; so are greetings which serve as a polite way of communication. The rules vary depending on the cultural context and the weight given to greetings and their function vary from culture to culture. This paper examines greeting dynamics in Chukwuemeka Ike’s The Bottled Leopard and The Potter’s Wheel in order to examine the strategies adopted by the interlocutors. The corpus used for analysis consists of excerpts taken from The Bottled Leopard and The Potter’s Wheel.   The theoretical framework adopted for this study is that proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) which seeks to account for how politeness norms are encoded in greetings. Our analysis shows that the interlocutors employed greeting strategies such as questions, physical contact, personalization of the greeting and thanking.

Keywords: Greetings, Culture, Rule-Governed, Context, Strategies, Communication, Politeness.