Socioeconomic pragmatic variation: speech acts and address forms in context

Abstract

“Staley's study provides a substantial and unique contribution to variational pragmatics. It is in fact the only large-scale analysis of socio-economic variation in language use so far, and a systematic examination of several pragmatic phenomena in the same type of speech event. With its innovative methodology – an original adaptation of Labov's famous department store study to pragmatics – and with its insistence on the crucial role of situational context, this study will be an inspiration to all researchers in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, especially those interested in pragmatic variation and the language of service encounters.”

— Klaus P. Schneider, University of Bonn