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

Hawaiʻi Creole in the public domain

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

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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 1981) 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.
Keywords: Hawaiʻi Creole, language and humor, heteroglossia, marginal languages, indexicality ideology, public speech
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
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
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