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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 28:3 (2018) ► pp.417–438

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Hawaiʻi Creole in the public domain

Humor, emphasis, and heteroglossic language practice in university commencement speeches

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 27 August 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.16015.saf
Abstract
In light of a belief that Hawaiʻi Creole (HC) is mostly inappropriate in public domains of society, this study examines how it was employed in two university commencement speeches by a local politician in Hawaiʻi. The analysis adopts the perspective of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, M. Holquist (ed.), C. Emerson, and M. Holquist (trans.) Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) in order to describe how HC is used together in the speeches with English and also some Hawaiian words. By focusing on the contrastive indexical meanings attached to all three languages, the analysis describes how the speaker combined humor and serious advice in his speeches. In particular, a focus is given to a specific feature of the HC grammar, the negative imperative, that was used by the speaker to underscore his main points. Discussion of the analysis considers the potential of the perspective of heteroglossia to understand the usage of HC in the public domain in Hawaiʻi to construct formal speeches of a decidedly ʻlocal’ style.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Hawai’i Creole: A brief description
  • 3.HC in the commencement addresses
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1HC for humor and emphasis
    • 4.2Negative imperatives
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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