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Offers and Offer Refusals
A postcolonial pragmatics perspective on World Englishes
Editor
This study offers a pragmatic dimension to World Englishes research. It is particularly timely because pragmatics has generally been understudied in past research on World Englishes, especially postcolonial Englishes. Apart from drawing attention to the paucity of research, the book also contributes to theory formation on the emerging theoretical framework, postcolonial pragmatics, which is then applied to data from two World (postcolonial) Englishes, Ghanaian and Cameroon Englishes. The copious examples used clearly illustrate how postcolonial societies realise various pragmatic phenomena, in this case offers and offer refusals, and how these could be fruitfully explained using an analytical framework designed on the complex internal set ups of these societies. For research on social interaction in these societies to be representative, it has to take into account the complex history of their evolution, contact with other systems during colonialism, and the heritages thereof. This book does just that.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 298] 2018. xix, 316 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 26 October 2018
Published online on 26 October 2018
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- List of tables | pp. xv–xvi
- List of figures | pp. xvii–xviii
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1. Introduction: Offers, refusals in postcolonial multilingual societies: New research directions | pp. 1–28
- Chapter 2. Postcolonial pragmatics: A theoretical framework for postcolonial multilingual societies | pp. 29–62
- Chapter 3. Offers, refusals and professional status | pp. 63–136
- Chapter 4. Offers, refusals and age | pp. 137–194
- Chapter 5. Offers, refusals and peer equality | pp. 195–248
- Chapter 6. Postcolonial hybrid structures and social interaction | pp. 249–274
- Chapter 7. Conclusion: On offer-refusal communicative acts: General implications for future research | pp. 275–284
- References
- Discourse Completion Task Questionnaire
- Appendix 1. Discourse Completion Task Questionnaire | pp. 297–298
- Appendix 2. Offer vertical structures in offer situation 1 | pp. 299–302
- Appendix 3. Offer vertical structures in offer situation 2 | pp. 303–306
- Appendix 4. Offer vertical structure in offer situation 3 | pp. 307–308
- Appendix 5. Positions of offer head acts in communicative acts | p. 309
- Name index | pp. 311–312
- Subject index | pp. 313–316
“The volume can serve as a resourceful reference for researchers and students who are interested in postcolonial pragmatics, discourse analysis and variationist sociolinguistics.”
Xinzhang Yang, Xiamen University, China, in Discourse Studies Volume 22(1) (2020)
“This work represents the first book-length publication dealing with pragmatics in postcolonial Englishes and as such is most welcome to anyone interested in these varieties of English and this dimension of linguistic description.”
Anne Schröder, Bielefeld University, in English World-Wide Vol. 41:1 (2020)
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