This book is a collection of studies about forms of address in the world’s languages, with a focus on contrast and difference. The individual chapters highlight inter- and intralinguistic variation in the expression of address and its sociol-cultural functions across media, registers, geographical… read more
The chapter presents the results of an investigation of vocative use in telephone service encounters in the British housing market. The investigation is based on 300+ “mystery shopping” telephone calls placed with real estate agents servicing four socio-economically different areas of a city in… read more
In lingua franca communication the participants operate under the assumption of mutual intelligibility despite the fact that they are often unable to know whether their interlocutors’ variety of English in fact provides the same repertoire of linguistic expression and hence the context to decode… read more
This paper discusses methodological aspects of the use of electronic language corpora for the study of connectivity. We demonstrate how a corpus-based approach was used to investigate functional characteristics of coordinating elements in sentence- or utterance-initial position across different… read more
