Clara Doo-Oron Stephanie Vande-Guma

The topic focuses on analysing the bride price negotiation process in order to ascertain whether the tradition is demeaning to women or not. By means of the combination of two approaches to genre studies: Miller’s (1984) treatise on “Genre as Social Action” and the Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) genre studies, the investigations focus on using both ethnographic and linguistic methods to collect data via direct observation of actual bride price negotiation events (i.e. Kém ú Kwásé) and analyses of transcribed texts of the dialogue generated during the negotiations. It is expected that findings would specify the manner in which the bride price is negotiated, the roles assigned to men and women in the course of the event, if it is used as an avenue for enrichment or a representation of the value of the woman (and the girl child) in the Tiv cosmos.