English in the Caribbean Variation, Style and Standards in Jamaica and Trinidad Studies in English Language Series

This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. Based on data from the International Corpus of English, it focuses on variation at the morphological and syntactic level between the educated standard and more informal educated spoken usage. Dagmar Deuber combines quantitative analyses across several text categories with qualitative analyses of transcribed text passages that are grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and recent approaches to linguistic style and identity. The discussion is situated in the context of variation in the Caribbean and the wider context of world Englishes, and the sociolinguistic background of Jamaica and Trinidad is also explored. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, world Englishes, and language contact.

1. Introduction; 2. The background and context of English in Jamaica and Trinidad; 3. The sociolinguistics of style and the Creole continuum; 4. Data and methodology; 5. Style in Jamaican English: analysis of conversations; 6. Style and standard in Trinidadian English: analysis of four text categories; 7. The modal verbs can/could and will/would in Caribbean and other varieties of English; 8. Conclusion.

Dagmar Deuber is Professor in the Department of English at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany, where she holds the Chair of Variation Linguistics. She has also taught and conducted research at the University of the West Indies in St Augustine, Trinidad.