Language and Communication in Sopranos

Introduction

Culture is defined as a particular way of life in given geographic settings which is changed by all forms of routine communication and social interaction. It is developed through a dynamic and interactive process of everyday life which encompasses the differences in social class, race and geographical boundaries and the verbal communication and the nonverbal forms of communication associated with kinesics, proxemics, chronemics, paralinguistics and semiotics.

These genetic and learned behaviours, tastes, habits, attitudes, and common beliefs and the social systems of shared expectations, patterns of emotional relatedness, and modes of social adjustment produce the nonverbal behaviours unique to various cultures and subcultures and through interaction and the transculturation process they are affected and changed and in turn cultures and subcultures are affected and changed. Through theories of various social theorists, examples of transculturation will be given to show how cultural products are believed to be used by people in the transactional process of communication in various cultural domains and territories and not just as a blindly reproduced culture.

The affects of culture and nonverbal behaviours upon one another will be demonstrated by examples of commercialisation and the symbolism of past discrimination of black sportsmen culminating in the possibility of pluralistic subcultures, which can acquire both positive and negative consequences for culture and nonverbal behaviours. The impact on cultures by transmigration of peoples from all corners of the world and global mass media through technology and the resulting pop cultures are discussed and shown to occur through the process of dynamic interaction.

Phonology

Is it still worth investigating the phonology of English? After all, English is probably the best studied of all languages, so we might wonder whether it can still provide data that is worth exploring. We believe - without question - that it can. We think that the articles collected in this volume on 'Issues in English Phonology' show, for many reasons, that English is still well worth investigating, just as it always has been, and we explain how this is so in this piece.

Furthermore, we show here how data from the phonology of English has been crucial in the very development of linguistic theory (in this case, in phonological and, to a lesser extent, sociophonological theory) throughout its recent past. If we had not had English to investigate, we claim, with both its unique and its widely-shared phonological phenomena, linguistic theory might have developed quite differently.

And given this fact - that certain phonological phenomena of English have provided some of the keystones of the theories that are used today - we also think it clear that we must consider these phenomena constantly anew as these theories develop. As they have often been well described, these phenomena can be testing grounds for new theories, and, equally, fresh theories can hope to shed new light on old problems in English phonology, perhaps allowing us to understand them better.

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way ...