Acknowledgments

The present book is a revised version of my PhD dissertation, which has been submitted to and successfully defended at LMU Munich, Germany. Many people deserve my acknowledgment and sincere gratitude for their help and support in enabling me to bring the research project underlying this book to fruition. First and foremost, I am indebted to my doctoral supervisors, Prof. Stephanie Hackert and Prof. Ulrich Detges, for their sincere supervision, valuable support, and professional guidance over the past few years. I would also like to thank Prof. Beat Glauser, who aroused my interest in, and my enthusiasm for, the diverse and fascinating field of address research in one of his sociolinguistics seminars at the University of Heidelberg in 2011.

Secondly, I would like to express my gratitude to several institutions at LMU Munich. My sincere thanks go to the Graduate School Language & Literature Munich, within the framework of which my PhD project has been realized, both for the wide range of courses, colloquia, and workshops offered, and for the funding of my field research in Jamaica. I am also grateful for the financial support for my field trip to Trinidad provided by the International Office. Moreover, I would like to thank the staff of the statistical consulting unit StaBLab for their assistance in the statistical analysis of the quantitative data underlying the present book.

Thirdly, very special thanks go to the many people in Jamaica and Trinidad who helped me in many different ways to make my field research in the Caribbean a successful and rewarding endeavour. I extend my gratitude to the staff of the linguistics departments of the University of the West Indies (UWI) at the local campuses of Mona (Jamaica) and St Augustine (Trinidad) for giving me assistance in ‘entering’ the field, and for providing valuable information for my research project. In this respect, I would like to thank (in alphabetical order) Dr. Terri-Ann Barrett, Dr. Andre Cooper, Dr. Kathy-Ann Drayton, Dr. Joseph T. Farquharson, Dr. Jo-Anne Ferreira, Dr. Silvia Kouwenberg, and Dr. Nicole Roberts. In addition, my sincere gratitude goes to Kerie Bignal, Glenda Leung, Radica Mahase, the members of the Jamaican-German society in Kingston, and, in particular, to all the Jamaicans and Trinidadians who completed my questionnaire and volunteered to be interviewed but who, unfortunately, have to remain anonymous here. In addition to enabling me to gather a large amount of empirical data during my fieldwork visits, all these people provided me with invaluable insights into Jamaican and Trinidadian society and culture which cannot be learned from books.

Fourthly, I am very grateful for the many constructive comments and suggestions I received from the audience both at conferences (e.g., in Bamberg, Bonn, Budapest, Heidelberg, and Stockholm) and in seminars at LMU Munich where I presented earlier drafts of the present book. This feedback served as valuable input and guidance for the completion of my research project.

Fifthly, I would like to express my gratitude to John Hajek, Bettina Kluge, María Irene Moyna, and Horst J. Simon for their interest in my work and for accepting the present book into the Topics in Address Research series. Special thanks go to two anonymous reviewers, whose invaluable comments and suggestions have helped to improve this book.

Last but not least, I wish to thank my parents, my friends, and my partner, Katherina, for their constant moral support, understanding, and encouragement in my linguistic endeavours over the past few years. It is to them that I would like to dedicate the present book.