Faculty Profile

Dr. Samuel Gyasi Obeng
Director, African Studies Program
Professor, Linguistics Department
Email: sobeng [AT] indiana.edu

Education:
Ph.D. (DPhil.) University of York, England, U.K., 1988
B.A. with Honors, University of Ghana, Legon, 1981

My training was in impressionistic- and socio- phonetics, Firthian phonology, African Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at the University of York in England. There, under the influence of John Kelly, John Local and Robert LePage, I developed an interest in examining the linguistic and discursive resources used by interactional participants to manage institutional and informal interactions. I also developed a lifelong commitment to the documentation of African languages, especially those that are endangered.

My work on socio-phonetics combines techniques in conversation analysis with phonetic observation to examine how conversational participants employ phonetic cues like pitch, volume, pause, rhythm, tempo, and voice quality to change speaking turns, to repair (correct speech errors, recover words, and deal with mishearing and non-hearing in speech), to resolve overlapping or simultaneous talk, and to handle short listener responses like “yes,” “mmhm,” etc. produced when someone else is speaking.

"Within pragmatics my work focuses on indirect speech acts, institutional discourse, and onomastics.

My research attempts to answer such questions as:

• How do African languages inform current theories on verbal indirectness and politeness?
• Why do participants engaged in social interaction avoid the obvious when speaking the unspeakable?
• What discourse strategies do disputants and arbitrators in juridical interaction utilize and what warrants the use of such strategies?
• What discourse strategies do political actors engaged in ‘communicative difficulty’ use and what warrants the use of such strategies?
• What do African personal names tell us about the relationship between language, culture, and communication?

My work has revealed that indirectness is motivated by politeness and the social and political dangers associated with inappropriate talk; indirectness may be expressed through evasion, circumlocution, euphemisms, proverbs and metaphors, pronouns mismatching, names and name-calling, hedging, and so forth.

My research in sociolinguistics focuses on multilingualism. I have been concerned with contact languages, language and ethnicity, and language attitudes. I have collaborated with colleagues to examine the structure and use of West African Pidgin English and West Africanisms in Costa Rican English-based Limonese Creole, a language spoken by Afro-Costa Ricans. I have also worked on language use in education in Africa.

My work on African names demonstrates that, besides providing insights into important cultural or socio-political events, African names are important channels for ‘speaking’ for and about African societies including showing human relationships and social roles, the polarity in human behavior, the name-givers’ hopes, dreams, and aspirations; geographical environment, religious beliefs, and philosophies of life and death.

Language description and documentation have also been another major focus of my research. My commitment to documenting and describing endangered languages is motivated by the fact that some of these languages are undocumented and have a diminishing number of speakers. My work on language documentation has culminated in grammatical sketches of these languages.

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