Opening and Closing Sequences in Nigerian Pidgin Sales Talk

Abstract

One of the ways that individuals maintain good interpersonal relationships is by using appropriate opening and closing strategies in their conversations. Research on conversational openings and closings has been conducted in different parts of the world. Still, there is a shortage of scholarly works on openings and closings in Nigerian Pidgin. It is this gap that this study addresses. The aim is to discover how closely the patterns for opening and closing conversations in Nigerian Pidgin sales talk follow the sequences identified in prior research. The data comprises fifteen dyads of recorded conversations between salespersons and their customers collected from five different business settings. The duration of the interactions ranges from two to five minutes, and the participants are adult Nigerian Pidgin speakers from various walks of life. The corpus is analysed using Coronel-Molina’s (1998) theory of telephone conversations. The findings show that all four components of conversational opening sequences identified by Coronel-Molina were found in the data- the summons/answer, identification/recognition, greeting adjacency pairs, and “how-are-you” adjacency pairs. For closing sequences, out of the four strategies proposed by Coronel-Morina, only one category was found: the final closing. The findings also show that opening and closing sequences are context and culture-dependent.

Keywords: Openings; closings; Nigerian Pidgin; Sales talk; service providers; summons/answer; identification/recognition; greeting adjacency pairs.