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Ugandan English: Its sociolinguistics, structure and uses in a globalising post-protectorate
Edited by Christiane Meierkord, Bebwa Isingoma and Saudah Namyalo
[Varieties of English Around the World G59] 2016
► pp. 227–248

Speech acts in Ugandan English social letters

Investigating the influence of sociocultural context

This chapter investigates speech acts in Ugandan English social letters to uncover how English is being adapted to meet the cultural conventions of its Ugandan users. To this end, directive speech acts, particularly requests, will be analysed and compared to other second language varieties of English, using a combination of Postcolonial Pragmatics theory and Contrastive Pragmatics and corpus linguistic methods to discuss both socio-pragmatic as well as pragmalinguistic aspects.

Keywords: politeness in Uganda and Ugandan English, requests, social letters, speech acts
Published online: 20 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g59.10mei
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