Abstract
Building not only on scholarship on pragmemes (Mey JL, Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, 2001; Capone A, J Pragmat 37:1355–1371, 2005; Salmani Nodoushan MA, Int J Lang Stud 7(1):79–102, 2013, inter alia) but also on the linguistic research on offering condolences (Rundstrom Williams T, RASK 24:45–62, 2006; Del Campo Martínez N, J English Stud 10:7–24, 2012; See also Stewart S, On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Duke University Press, Durham, 1993), this paper examines expressions of condolence received by members of the grieving family of an elderly man from the American Midwest. Here the pragmeme of offering sympathy serves as an act of identity (Le Page RB, Tabouret-Keller A, Acts of identity: creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985) for doing rural, White, monolingual, Protestant Midwesternness.
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Acknowledgement
I sincerely thank Dr. Jill Hallett for her comments on drafts of this chapter. Any mistakes or misinterpretations of the data are entirely my own.
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Hallett, R.W. (2017). Pragmeme(s) of Sympathy Cards in the Midwestern US. In: Parvaresh, V., Capone, A. (eds) The Pragmeme of Accommodation: The Case of Interaction around the Event of Death. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55759-5_3
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