Books by Richard J. (Universitat Bern Watts

Language and music have much in common, such as rhythm, structure, sound and metaphor. Drawing on ideas from linguistics, performance studies and musicology, this monograph proposes a sociolinguistic model for analysing song and performance. It addresses a readership of sociolinguists and scholars and students in musicology and performance studies.

Using a wide range of data from real-life speech situations, this introduction to politeness breaks away from the limitations of current models and argues that the proper object of study in politeness theory must be commonsense notions of what politeness and impoliteness are.