The study of text types and functional texts or genres has been a research topic in linguistics ever since the 1970s (Gülich & Raible 1977, Werlich 1975). Investigations of the specific norms and conventions as well as functions of genres were initially focused on the production of teaching materials for the acquisition and analysis of academic contexts and register (Swales 1971, 1990), but linguistic research soon also picked up everyday life texts such as death notices (Fries 1990), recipes (Görlach 1991, 2004) or letters to the editor (Kim 1996). This chapter expounds the foundations and principles of the linguistic explorations of text types and genres and the conceptual differences between the two notions. Particular emphasis will be placed on the communicative function(s) of texts (Bühler 1934/1990, Jakobson 1960/1987, Swales 1990) as well as on speech acts performed in written and spoken genres. Intertextuality, heteroglossia and dialogicity (Bakhtin 1986), move structure (Bhatia 1993) and narrative structure (Labov & Waletzky 1967) add to the theoretical background on genre analysis.
While the transformation of traditional written genres from their paper format to the digital world has received some attention (e.g. Giltrow & Stein 2009, Brock, Pflaeging & Schildhauer 2019), there has been hardly any research on genre studies in “outer circle” or postcolonial varieties of English. This chapter seeks to incorporate approaches from postcolonial linguistics, linguistic anthropology and politeness theory as well as reflect on the transition from oral to written and digital interactions in order to widen the framework of genre analysis to include World Englishes in general and, for the scope of this volume, Caribbean contexts in particular.
Language and food studies form a rich source for social history and anthropology of the Caribbean (e.g. Mintz 1986, 1996, Goucher 2014). The creative transformation of food in the Caribbean in the formative period of plantation slavery brought together ingredients from four different continents, adapting Old World dishes to New World creolized food. While the written genre “recipe” is younger than the oral transmission of food preparation instructions, it is one of the oldest and most tightly structured ones in English language contexts.
In this chapter, the text-external and text-internal features of Caribbean recipes will be explored first in traditional Trinidadian recipe collections (Hunt 1988, Indar et al. 1988). A particular focus will be placed on the use of lexical items and on ingroup/ outgroup markers which define the intended target readership. These questions will become all the more relevant in a comparison of traditional print recipes to more globally accessible online versions that have appeared in recent years.
Death and bereavement as fundamental human experiences are expressed in culturally diverse verbal and non-verbal acts of mourning. Death notices are public announcements which can be found in newspapers (print and, more recently, also in online versions of newspapers) as part of the classified advertisements. These are distinguished here from obituaries as forms of life narrative of persons of public significance. This chapter will first explore the macro-structural and micro-linguistic features of death announcements from a comparative perspective. A corpus of ca. 250 death notices from the Trinidad Guardian newspaper and other sources will then be analysed in order to explore particular features of the genre in the Caribbean context. Special attention will be given to the use of nicknames (“a.k.a,” “also known as …,” or “better known as …”) and personhood in Trinidadian death notices. Furthermore, a comparative qualitative analysis of obituaries for Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott will also investigate narrative structure and evaluative speech acts in that genre.
Sending a message to another person across space and time is one of the oldest and most fundamental purposes of writing. The letter, which fulfils this distancing function of writing, emerged as one of the earliest written text formats. This chapter will focus on a particular type of argumentative letter and media text, i.e. the “Letter to the Editor”, written by readers – usually in response to an article or another reader’s letter – and published in the opinion section of newspapers. Letters to the editor form an important part of public interaction and, as a genre, are intertextual and dialogic (Bakhtin 1986) in nature.
Opinions about language use and language politics often find a public outlet in letters to the editor (Tardy 2009, Sturiale 2016). The corpus of data analysed in this chapter consists of just over 100 letters to the editor in the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner from the years 1999 to early 2002 and from the years 2010 to early 2020. The letters are part of a long-standing and ongoing language debate on the use of Jamaican Patois/ Creole in various contexts of Jamaican life. In the analysis of these letters, a particular focus will be placed on the language ideologies expressed in them as well as the positioning of the writers by means of speech acts of complaints and pleas. An outlook will be provided on reactions in a social media platform to a petition (“pitishan”) to make Jamaican Creole an official language in Jamaica alongside English.
In any society, advice-giving and -receiving are everyday practices of knowledge transmission between people in private, public and in institutional contexts. Advice is part of a complex speech activity in which the speaker typically gives a directive which they believe to be beneficial to the hearer. Depending on the situation (solicited or unsolicited) and the relationship between hearer and speaker (familiar, hierarchical, expert or user, etc.), this speech act might also be seen as face-threatening. In face-to-face contexts, Sidnell (2005a, 2005b) has shown the complexity of interactional organization of advice-seeking, advice-giving and -receiving.
For many sensitive areas in social life concerning sex, relationship and health matters, advice is sought from experts (doctors, counsellors, etc.) in the anonymity of written exchange. Dear Dolly (Mutongi 2000) or Dear Dr. Springer (Springer 2013) as types of advice columns have existed in many newspapers and magazines around the world, including many postcolonial anglophone countries, ever since the early 1960s. This chapter looks at the construction of expert and user roles in the display of certainty, directness and evaluation in advice-giving in contemporary Jamaican newspaper advice columns (Doctor’s Advice, Tell me Pastor). Particular emphasis will be placed on the advice-seeker’s request as a form of confession and the assertion of moral attitudes and norms in the advice column Tell me Pastor. An outlook to user-user advice in online forums will also be given.
Phone-in radio programmes are a particular type of participatory media genre in which a host and/or a group of experts interact with the wider public according to certain genre-specific norms and conventions. In Caribbean societies, phone-ins are experiencing ever-increasing popularity as a forum of public discourse and have, to some extent, replaced earlier platforms of public communication. They are important for researching socio-cultural change as they constitute a sensitive barometer of ongoing and changing discourses in society. Phone-ins are therefore particularly interesting for the investigation of discourse on particular public issues. but also for examining conversational interaction between the primary interactants of the format (host and caller) in a specific discourse community.
This chapter will take a particular phone-in programme in Trinidad – The Morning Show (Power 102 FM) with notorious host figure “The Gladiator” – as one particular example to investigate the negotiation of power and authority in openings, closings as well as turn-taking and floor-holding between the interactants. For this end, Conversation Analysis as a method of investigating the organization of talk will be introduced and used. A further issue will be the use of greetings and forms of address in creating a sense of identity and membership in this discourse community.
The association between language use and speaker identity/identification has long been recognised in sociolinguistics (cf. Coulmas 2005, Tabouret-Keller 1997). In diaspora communities one can observe the desire to either linguistically signal one’s membership in the group that connects the speaker with the ancestral community or to obscure such a belonging and blend in with the majority community. This membership negotiation is also part of a complex interplay between language maintenance and language shift, which involves a number of dynamic processes of accommodation, code-switching and linguistic acts of self-assertion (Mühleisen 2002, Mühleisen & Schröder 2017). While linguistic performances of multiple forms of identity are made unconsciously in face-to-face conversations and are well researched (cf. Tabouret-Keller 1997), written forms of communication have rarely been investigated with regard to their value as acts of identification. With an increasing use of written communication online, orthographic flexibility and the use of non-standard features in writing have become highly common (cf. Hinrichs 2006, Moll 2017, Honkanen 2020).
This chapter investigates markers of Trinidadian English Creole employed in a particular community of practice, i.e. the internet forum Trinidad & Tobago Possee Livin California (2000–2008) by Trinidadian users who reside in California. The purpose of the internet forum was to connect Trinidadian diaspora members and to exchange information about events, contacts, etc. Due to the mediated form of communication, where physical markers, tone of voice, etc. arguably cannot be employed to establish one’s right to membership in this community of practice, special linguistic features with a high value of marking “Trinidadian-ness” are used extensively. In this chapter I will explore the use of orthographic markers as well as the use of “allyuh” (Trinidadian) versus “y’all” (US Southern) and “you guys” (US general) as 2nd person plural pronouns.
Calypso (or ‘Kaiso’) as a form of artful oral performance has a long history in Trinidad and has been explored from the perspectives of its historical development (Rohlehr 1990), its importance as a political and social commentary (Regis 1999), as well as its significance as a form of oral literature (Warner 1985). Rooted in West African tradition of praise and complaint songs, the format developed in the 19th-century post-emancipation Carnival context. While the genre has undergone many transformations in musical form (from litany to strophic singing), language (from French Creole to English/Creole) and topics (from highly localized issues to more global themes), it is still recognizable and alive.
This chapter looks at Trinidad calypso as a performance genre deeply rooted in the psychodynamics of orality (Abrahams 1983, Ong 2002). Particular emphasis will be placed both on the participatory and the agonistic nature of the genre with an analysis of the speech acts of complaints and boasting in calypsos as well as an investigation of call and response patterns, calypso war rituals and the role of the audience. The performance of gender and masculinity will be in focus in a comparison of the classic calypso in the post-war period with the transformed genre it has been associated with since the 1970s.
The study of text types and functional texts or genres has been a research topic in linguistics ever since the 1970s (Gülich & Raible 1977, Werlich 1975). Investigations of the specific norms and conventions as well as functions of genres were initially focused on the production of teaching materials for the acquisition and analysis of academic contexts and register (Swales 1971, 1990), but linguistic research soon also picked up everyday life texts such as death notices (Fries 1990), recipes (Görlach 1991, 2004) or letters to the editor (Kim 1996). This chapter expounds the foundations and principles of the linguistic explorations of text types and genres and the conceptual differences between the two notions. Particular emphasis will be placed on the communicative function(s) of texts (Bühler 1934/1990, Jakobson 1960/1987, Swales 1990) as well as on speech acts performed in written and spoken genres. Intertextuality, heteroglossia and dialogicity (Bakhtin 1986), move structure (Bhatia 1993) and narrative structure (Labov & Waletzky 1967) add to the theoretical background on genre analysis.
While the transformation of traditional written genres from their paper format to the digital world has received some attention (e.g. Giltrow & Stein 2009, Brock, Pflaeging & Schildhauer 2019), there has been hardly any research on genre studies in “outer circle” or postcolonial varieties of English. This chapter seeks to incorporate approaches from postcolonial linguistics, linguistic anthropology and politeness theory as well as reflect on the transition from oral to written and digital interactions in order to widen the framework of genre analysis to include World Englishes in general and, for the scope of this volume, Caribbean contexts in particular.
Language and food studies form a rich source for social history and anthropology of the Caribbean (e.g. Mintz 1986, 1996, Goucher 2014). The creative transformation of food in the Caribbean in the formative period of plantation slavery brought together ingredients from four different continents, adapting Old World dishes to New World creolized food. While the written genre “recipe” is younger than the oral transmission of food preparation instructions, it is one of the oldest and most tightly structured ones in English language contexts.
In this chapter, the text-external and text-internal features of Caribbean recipes will be explored first in traditional Trinidadian recipe collections (Hunt 1988, Indar et al. 1988). A particular focus will be placed on the use of lexical items and on ingroup/ outgroup markers which define the intended target readership. These questions will become all the more relevant in a comparison of traditional print recipes to more globally accessible online versions that have appeared in recent years.
Death and bereavement as fundamental human experiences are expressed in culturally diverse verbal and non-verbal acts of mourning. Death notices are public announcements which can be found in newspapers (print and, more recently, also in online versions of newspapers) as part of the classified advertisements. These are distinguished here from obituaries as forms of life narrative of persons of public significance. This chapter will first explore the macro-structural and micro-linguistic features of death announcements from a comparative perspective. A corpus of ca. 250 death notices from the Trinidad Guardian newspaper and other sources will then be analysed in order to explore particular features of the genre in the Caribbean context. Special attention will be given to the use of nicknames (“a.k.a,” “also known as …,” or “better known as …”) and personhood in Trinidadian death notices. Furthermore, a comparative qualitative analysis of obituaries for Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott will also investigate narrative structure and evaluative speech acts in that genre.
Sending a message to another person across space and time is one of the oldest and most fundamental purposes of writing. The letter, which fulfils this distancing function of writing, emerged as one of the earliest written text formats. This chapter will focus on a particular type of argumentative letter and media text, i.e. the “Letter to the Editor”, written by readers – usually in response to an article or another reader’s letter – and published in the opinion section of newspapers. Letters to the editor form an important part of public interaction and, as a genre, are intertextual and dialogic (Bakhtin 1986) in nature.
Opinions about language use and language politics often find a public outlet in letters to the editor (Tardy 2009, Sturiale 2016). The corpus of data analysed in this chapter consists of just over 100 letters to the editor in the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner from the years 1999 to early 2002 and from the years 2010 to early 2020. The letters are part of a long-standing and ongoing language debate on the use of Jamaican Patois/ Creole in various contexts of Jamaican life. In the analysis of these letters, a particular focus will be placed on the language ideologies expressed in them as well as the positioning of the writers by means of speech acts of complaints and pleas. An outlook will be provided on reactions in a social media platform to a petition (“pitishan”) to make Jamaican Creole an official language in Jamaica alongside English.
In any society, advice-giving and -receiving are everyday practices of knowledge transmission between people in private, public and in institutional contexts. Advice is part of a complex speech activity in which the speaker typically gives a directive which they believe to be beneficial to the hearer. Depending on the situation (solicited or unsolicited) and the relationship between hearer and speaker (familiar, hierarchical, expert or user, etc.), this speech act might also be seen as face-threatening. In face-to-face contexts, Sidnell (2005a, 2005b) has shown the complexity of interactional organization of advice-seeking, advice-giving and -receiving.
For many sensitive areas in social life concerning sex, relationship and health matters, advice is sought from experts (doctors, counsellors, etc.) in the anonymity of written exchange. Dear Dolly (Mutongi 2000) or Dear Dr. Springer (Springer 2013) as types of advice columns have existed in many newspapers and magazines around the world, including many postcolonial anglophone countries, ever since the early 1960s. This chapter looks at the construction of expert and user roles in the display of certainty, directness and evaluation in advice-giving in contemporary Jamaican newspaper advice columns (Doctor’s Advice, Tell me Pastor). Particular emphasis will be placed on the advice-seeker’s request as a form of confession and the assertion of moral attitudes and norms in the advice column Tell me Pastor. An outlook to user-user advice in online forums will also be given.
Phone-in radio programmes are a particular type of participatory media genre in which a host and/or a group of experts interact with the wider public according to certain genre-specific norms and conventions. In Caribbean societies, phone-ins are experiencing ever-increasing popularity as a forum of public discourse and have, to some extent, replaced earlier platforms of public communication. They are important for researching socio-cultural change as they constitute a sensitive barometer of ongoing and changing discourses in society. Phone-ins are therefore particularly interesting for the investigation of discourse on particular public issues. but also for examining conversational interaction between the primary interactants of the format (host and caller) in a specific discourse community.
This chapter will take a particular phone-in programme in Trinidad – The Morning Show (Power 102 FM) with notorious host figure “The Gladiator” – as one particular example to investigate the negotiation of power and authority in openings, closings as well as turn-taking and floor-holding between the interactants. For this end, Conversation Analysis as a method of investigating the organization of talk will be introduced and used. A further issue will be the use of greetings and forms of address in creating a sense of identity and membership in this discourse community.
The association between language use and speaker identity/identification has long been recognised in sociolinguistics (cf. Coulmas 2005, Tabouret-Keller 1997). In diaspora communities one can observe the desire to either linguistically signal one’s membership in the group that connects the speaker with the ancestral community or to obscure such a belonging and blend in with the majority community. This membership negotiation is also part of a complex interplay between language maintenance and language shift, which involves a number of dynamic processes of accommodation, code-switching and linguistic acts of self-assertion (Mühleisen 2002, Mühleisen & Schröder 2017). While linguistic performances of multiple forms of identity are made unconsciously in face-to-face conversations and are well researched (cf. Tabouret-Keller 1997), written forms of communication have rarely been investigated with regard to their value as acts of identification. With an increasing use of written communication online, orthographic flexibility and the use of non-standard features in writing have become highly common (cf. Hinrichs 2006, Moll 2017, Honkanen 2020).
This chapter investigates markers of Trinidadian English Creole employed in a particular community of practice, i.e. the internet forum Trinidad & Tobago Possee Livin California (2000–2008) by Trinidadian users who reside in California. The purpose of the internet forum was to connect Trinidadian diaspora members and to exchange information about events, contacts, etc. Due to the mediated form of communication, where physical markers, tone of voice, etc. arguably cannot be employed to establish one’s right to membership in this community of practice, special linguistic features with a high value of marking “Trinidadian-ness” are used extensively. In this chapter I will explore the use of orthographic markers as well as the use of “allyuh” (Trinidadian) versus “y’all” (US Southern) and “you guys” (US general) as 2nd person plural pronouns.
Calypso (or ‘Kaiso’) as a form of artful oral performance has a long history in Trinidad and has been explored from the perspectives of its historical development (Rohlehr 1990), its importance as a political and social commentary (Regis 1999), as well as its significance as a form of oral literature (Warner 1985). Rooted in West African tradition of praise and complaint songs, the format developed in the 19th-century post-emancipation Carnival context. While the genre has undergone many transformations in musical form (from litany to strophic singing), language (from French Creole to English/Creole) and topics (from highly localized issues to more global themes), it is still recognizable and alive.
This chapter looks at Trinidad calypso as a performance genre deeply rooted in the psychodynamics of orality (Abrahams 1983, Ong 2002). Particular emphasis will be placed both on the participatory and the agonistic nature of the genre with an analysis of the speech acts of complaints and boasting in calypsos as well as an investigation of call and response patterns, calypso war rituals and the role of the audience. The performance of gender and masculinity will be in focus in a comparison of the classic calypso in the post-war period with the transformed genre it has been associated with since the 1970s.