Codes and Consequences: Choosing Linguistic Varieties

by Carol Myers-Scotton (Editor)

Overview

Carol Myers-Scotton has edited a collection of essays that covers the choice of one style of English over another in everything from Bible translations to "surprise in poetry" to supervisor-worker interactions on the automobile assembly line. An important theme developed to varying degrees in these papers is the notion that speakers and writers, as rational actors, exploit the unmarked-marked opposition regarding audience expectations so as to convey messages of intentionality charged with social or psychological import.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195115222
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/20/1998
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Carol Myers-Scotton is the Carolina Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of South Carolina where she teaches courses in sociolinguistics, language contact phenomena, and discourse analysis. She has published widely on codeswitching and is the author of Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa (OUP, 1993) and Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching (OUP, 1993).

Table of Contents

	Contributors	ix
I.	Overview
1	Introduction	3
2	A Theoretical Introduction to the Markedness Model	18
II.	Stylistic Choices In Literature
3	Implicatures of Styleswitching in the Narrative Voice of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses	41
4	Marked Grammatical Structures: Communicating Intentionality in The Great Gatsby and As I Lay Dying	62
5	Markedness and References to Characters in Biblical Hebrew Narratives	89
6	Literariness, Markedness, and Surprise in Poetry	101
7	Villainous Boys: On Some Marked Exchanges in Romeo and Juliet	124
III.	Stylistic Choices In Spoken English
8	Markedness and Styleswitching in Performances by African American Drag Queens	139
9	Styleswitching in Southern English	162
10	Marked Versus Unmarked Choices on the Auto Factory Floor	178
IV.	Stylistic Choices And Second-Language Acquisition
11	"Not Quite Right": Second-Language Acquisition and Markedness	195
	Index	215