Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages

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Authors

This collection of papers is designed to establish variational pragmatics. This new field is situated at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology and aims at systematically investigating the effect of macro-social pragmatic variation on language in action. As such, it challenges the widespread assumption in the area of pragmatics that language communities are homogeneous and also addresses the current research gap in sociolinguistics for variation on the pragmatic level. The introductory chapter establishes the rationale for studying variational pragmatics as a separate field of inquiry, systematically sketches the broader theoretical framework and presents a framework for further analysis. The papers which follow are located within this framework. They present empirical variational pragmatic research focusing on regional varieties of pluricentric languages. Speech acts and other discourse phenomena are addressed and analysed in a number of regional varieties of Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. The seminal nature of this volume, its empirical orientation and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in pragmatics and sociolinguistics.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationAmsterdam/Philadelphia
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company
Number of pages371
ISBN (print)9789027254221
ISBN (electronic)9789027290502
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

NamePragmatics & Beyond New Series
PublisherAnita Fetzer
Volume178
ISSN (Print)0922-842x

DOI