English in the Caribbean: Variation, Style and Standards in Jamaica and Trinidad

Description

This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. Based on data from the International Corpus of English, it focuses on variation at the morphological and syntactic level between the educated standard and more informal educated spoken usage. Dagmar Deuber combines quantitative analyses across several text categories with qualitative analyses of transcribed text passages that are grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and recent approaches to linguistic style and identity. The discussion is situated in the context of variation in the Caribbean and the wider context of world Englishes, and the sociolinguistic background of Jamaica and Trinidad is also explored. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, world Englishes, and language contact.

Dagmar Deuber is Professor in the Department of English at Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster, Germany, where she holds the Chair of Variation Linguistics. She has also taught and conducted research at the University of the West Indies in St Augustine, Trinidad.

'Corpus linguistics meets sociolinguistics meets creole studies: this thorough study offers fresh perspectives on the intricacies and interdependencies of standards, styles, variability and the creole continuum in Jamaica and Trinidad.' Edgar W. Schneider, University of Regensburg 'This book is a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the complex relationships between style, linguistic variation, and emergent standards in the more formal spoken English of Jamaica and Trinidad.' Donald Winford, Ohio State University