Discourse and Pragmatic Units in Roots, by Alex Halay

Abstract

This MA thesis is concerned with the discourse and pragmatic unit in Roots written by the African American novelist, Alex Haley. The research focuses the attention on speech acts as the basic units in verbal interaction. It traces the relationship that holds between speech acts and communication. It devotes a special attention to the study of the discourse constructions and grammatical units of African English as a means of achieving effective communication. This study has shown that African English has grammatical distinctions which are different from any grammatical construction of Standard English.