The pragmatic import of ‘Orí’ in Yorùbá conversational discourse

Abstract

Among the Yorùbá of Nigeria, of all the parts of the human body, Orí [English: head] features most frequently in linguistic thought and action, but although numerous researchers have considered its spiritual values, orí’s conversational worth has been greatly overlooked. While acknowledging the spiritual associations of this top part of the body, this paper uses fragments of naturally occurring speech-in-context – surreptitiously collected among several Yorùbá interlocutors – to generate a tentative typology for Orí and concludes that the invocation of the head, whether in reference to one’s own or to that of another, has socio-pragmatic significance, and can serve various discourse functions, e.g., as a strategy for opening, commenting on, marking, and closing talk sequences. The discussion identifies perspectives – other than spiritual – from which this vital detail of the human frame could be ex-amined, given its frequency in much Yorùbá conversational discourse.