Nominal and Pronominal Address in Jamaica and Trinidad


Book Description

This book examines the various patterns of nominal and pronominal address used in Jamaica and Trinidad, the two most populous islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. Given that the Anglo-Caribbean context has so far been largely neglected in address research, this study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the linguistic means Jamaicans and Trinidadians have at their disposal and make use of to address each other. A particular focus will be on variation in the speakers’ address behaviour with regard to their sex, age, social class, ethnicity, and regional background. The study draws both on data from a self-compiled corpus of postcolonial Jamaican and Trinidadian literary works, and on questionnaire and interview data collected during fieldwork. This book contributes to the ever-growing body of research in the field of nominal and pronominal address, and will be relevant to researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and World Englishes.




Conversation in World Englishes


Book Description

Turn-taking is a fascinating feature of conversational interaction, due to its systematic and ordered nature. However, research has so far focused mainly on American and British conversations, with other varieties of English receiving much less attention. This pioneering book addresses this gap by exploring turn-taking patterns and cultural variation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English. Bringing together research from the fields of Conversation Analysis and World Englishes for the first time, Neumaier conducts an empirical study based on authentic audio data of interactions in these global varieties of English, and demonstrates that conversational strategies differ between speaker groups with different cultural backgrounds. Shedding new light on the impact of cultural and sociolinguistic factors on conversational patterns, it is essential reading for advanced students and scholars interested in language, variation, and social interaction, as well as those working in the fields of Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics, and World Englishes.




Language and Human Relations


Book Description

Exploring practices in the family, school, the workplace, this book investigates the varied ways people choose to address one another.







Address Variation in Sociocultural Context


Book Description

This study looks at the sociocultural context of five Italian regions and at the situational context of restaurant encounters (a sub-type of service encounters) to examine address variation in spoken Italian—with a focus on singular address pronouns tu, voi and lei. It offers a thorough examination of distance and power dynamics between waiters and customers in a wide range of restaurant types. This book marks the introduction of Italian to the field of regional pragmatic variation and it will be of interest to linguists, Italianists and researchers more broadly working on service encounters. The author offers a new dimension to the understanding of social interaction and language use in contemporary Italy, uncovering cultural and linguistic differences between even adjacent geographical areas within a modern European nation state.




Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems


Book Description

Topics covered in this volume include: the system of Czech bound address forms until 1700; Spanish forms of address in the 16th century; and pronominal usage in Shakespeare.




Trinidad and Tobago


Book Description

This volume describes the English and English Creole of Trinidad and Tobago. Sources from the early 19th through late 20th centuries are gathered from a wide range of materials: novels, editorials, advertisements, cartoons, proverbs, newspaper articles, plays, lyrics of traditional songs and calypsos, and oral interviews. Many of the older texts are now made easily accessible for the first time. The introduction includes descriptions of the historical background, the sound system, grammar and vocabulary, speech styles, social and linguistic interaction of Creole and English, and implications for education and spelling. The older sources demonstrate much closer links to other Caribbean English Creoles than previously recognized. The texts and recordings of oral interviews are invaluable resources for researchers and teachers in linguistics, Creole Studies, Caribbean studies, literature, anthropology and history.




Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings


Book Description

This is a theoretically oriented study of the pragmatics of Vietnamese person reference (kinship terms, personal pronouns, naming set and status terms). Drawing upon linguistic data from a radically different non-Western society and the seminal insights of Volosinov, Bakhtin, and Leach, it offers a critical analysis of the major theoretical premises of dominant approaches to denotation and connotation, to knowledge of language and to knowledge of the world. The study suggests that the pragmatic presuppositions of Vietnamese person-referring forms figure in the native definitions of linguistic meanings as prominently as any denotative features. It is argued that the significance of pragmatic implications should be analyzed in relation to the native speaker's conception of the world.







Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues


Book Description

This book is a corpus-based study examining thou and you in three speech-related genres from 1560–1760, a crucial period in the history of second person singular pronouns, spanning the time from when you became dominant to when thou became all but obsolete. The study embraces the fields of corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and historical sociolinguistics. Using data drawn from the recently released A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and manuscript material, the aim is to ascertain which extra-linguistic and linguistic factors highlighted by previous research appear particularly relevant in the selection and relative distribution of thou and you. Previous research on thou and you has tended to concentrate on Drama and/or been primarily qualitative in nature. Depositions in particular have hitherto received very little attention. This book is intended to help fill a gap in the literature by presenting an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of pronoun usage in Trials, Depositions, and, for comparative purposes, Drama Comedy.