Discourse Analysis Of Wddi Mn Oral Game Of Honeymoon In The Eastern Tigrai

In the rural areas of the Eastern Tigrai, when people visit the honeymooners, they oftenrnprefer to play an oral game called wəddi mən, which means 'whose son is...', andrnfunctionally, 'whose bridegroom/ bride is..., fiancé/ fiancée is...', as an entertainment andrnsocio-linguistic event. This paper investigates on the Discourses that are used in wəddirnmən. The main objective of this research is to thematically describe the Discourses ofrnwəddi mən and their functions. wəddi mən is an event that has currently been replaced byrnsome modern entertaining games such as play cards and modern music. Because thisrnsocio-linguistic practice is still oral, it has seriously been endangered. Therefore, it needs tornbe researched and transformed into written status. Thus, this work may be playing its rolernin documenting this oral language use for the first time. rnConceptually, this research considered Osisanwo's (2005) Discourse features cited inrnOsoba & Sobola (2014: 203). These features are: conversation, Discourse participants,rnopening and closing of Discourse, holding floor, turn-taking, overlapping, speech errors,rnrepair mechanism, role sharing, elicitation in talk, and adjacency pairs. Halliday's theory ofrnsystematic functional linguistics (SFL), an approach and theory that views languages as arnsocial phenomenon which is more concerned with the functions and meanings than withrnthe structural aspects of languages, is theoretically framed to this research. rnThis research is designed based on the descriptive approach of qualitative researchrndesign. The data for this research are gathered from the remote rural areas of purposelyrnselected six Weredas of the Eastern Tigrai. The main tools for gathering the data for thisrnresearch have mainly been ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews. rnThis study found out different sociolinguistic and cultural practices reflected by thernDiscourses used in wəddi mən. It has thematized the Discourses based on their functionsrnand meanings. The participants portray the issues of power assignment, power hierarchy,rnpower exercise and power transfer in their interactional communications using thernDiscourses. This research also found out the Discourses of naming and addressing inrnwəddi mən in reflection to the cultures of naming and addressing of their community. It has rn rniii rnalso analyzed how the participants use the Discourses that show how people make and fixrnappointments with other interlocutors thereby reflecting the culture of division of laborrnamong the masculine and feminine genders in their society. Moreover, this study has foundrnout some Discourses that reflect the attitude and the feeling of the bridegroom and thernbride towards each other. Besides, it has come up with findings of taboo Discourses thatrnare used by the participants as taboo as they are for entertainment and life skill training inrntheir interaction. Furthermore, this research has also analyzed gendered Discourses; forrnexample, Discourse of sex preference at first birth in their interaction as a reflection of thernculture of the society. The other concept which this research has come up with is thernDiscourses of politeness during the interactional communications of the participants. Inrntheir communications, the participants address each other using honorific terms not tornbelittle their interlocutors. Finally, the participants conclude the game using the Discoursesrnof blessing as illustrated in the Discourses in 4.17. In the game of wəddi mən, it is the bridernwho blesses the end of the game.

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