This study is an investigation of instances of conversational failure in interaction as evidenced by speakers of Black South African English (BSAE) , with a particular focus on the role of prosody in conversational (a)synchrony. The data analysed consist of six conversations, one SAE-SAE (South African English) encounter, four BSAE- SAE encounters and one BSAE- BSAE encounter. After a theoretical framework is set up, the analysis is conducted by means of two triangulation research processes based on Ethnomethodology. The analysis consists of an investigation into selected extracts which participants and informants alike perceived as 'stressful'. An attempt is made to isolate the sources of each instance of pragmatic failure. Prosodic features are found to be important in establishing and maintaining theme and conversational synchrony. But other factors are also involved. The analysis reveals two major influences of asynchrony: deviance in the use of (in order of importance) prosodic, lexical and syntactic cues to discourse functions; and a mismatch in the application of socio-cultural principles guiding conversational behaviour. The study leads into a brief outline of aims, objectives and conversational competence at a tertiary level and concludes with suggestions for further research.

This study is an investigation of Xhosa English as used by teachers in the Grahamstown area of the Eastern Cape. The aims of the study were firstly, to compile a 20 000 word mini-corpus of the spoken English of Xhosa mother-tongue teachers in Grahamstown, and to use this data to describe the characteristics of Xhosa English used in the classroom context; and secondly, to assess the usefulness of a corpus-based approach to a study of this nature. The English of five Xhosa mother-tongue teachers was investigated. These teachers were recorded while teaching in English and the data was then transcribed for analysis. The data was analysed using Wordsmith Tools to investigate patterns in the teachers' language. Grammatical, lexical and discourse patterns were explored based on the findings of other researchers' investigations of Black South African English and Xhosa English. In general, many of the patterns reported in the literature were found in the data, but to a lesser extent than reported in literature which gave quantitative information. Some features not described elsewhere were also found. The corpus-based approach was found to be useful within the limits of pattern-matching. / KMBT_363 / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in