The last chapter sums up the main findings of the study and gives an outlook on potential further research at the interface of CA and World Englishes.

This chapter provides a quantitative analysis the strategy clusters Southeast Asian and Caribbean interactants use for claiming or holding a turn at talk. It can be shown that speaker groups essentially use the same strategy combinations, although some differences also become apparent. The second part of the chapter zooms in on the frequency of selected phonetic and syntactic resources and compares their usage across the two speaker groups. Again, both similarities and differences between the speaker groups become apparent; for example, with respect to the usage of tempo downsteps or direct requests. These findings support the notion of a locally inflected conversational infrastructure, which is influenced by both cultural context and variety-specific preferences.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the resources Southeast Asian and Caribbean speakers of English use to claim or hold a turn at talk. Four larger strategy groups are described and compared: latches and overlaps, phonetic resources, lexical resources, and syntactic strategies. The chapter describes how these are realised by the individual speaker groups and compares this to previous research on Inner Circle Englishes. It can be shown that speaker groups essentially have access to the same set of resources but exhibit different preferences with respect to which strategies they prefer for organising turn-taking in conversational interaction.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the different types and scenarios of speaker change in Southeast Asian and Caribbean conversations. The three general types of turn allocation – next speaker selection, self-selection, and current speaker continuation – and their concrete realisations in the data are examined both qualitatively and quantitatively. It can be shown that turn-taking in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English interactions is rule-governed and exhibits patterns similar to those that have been found in Inner Circle English conversations. Nevertheless, some differences between the speaker groups are found; for example, when it comes to how likely conversationalists are to yield the floor to a current speaker.

This chapter describes the theoretical foundations of the study. The study is located at the interface of two scientific areas that had not had much contact before: Conversation Analysis and World Englishes. In the first two sections of the chapter, central theoretical and methodological tenets in both fields are introduced. The last section addresses epistemological differences between the traditions and provides a rationale for why and how Conversation Analysis and World Englishes can still be reconciled in a fruitful way.

This chapter describes the process of choosing and preparing the data investigated in the present study. It starts with a definition of the notion of ‘culture’ and then introduces the data that form the basis for the analysis. The interactions analysed were extracted from two larger corpora, the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and two components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) – ICE-Jamaica and ICE-Trinidad and Tobago. The chapter then describes how a collection of unscripted natural conversations was compiled for the project and briefly comments on the transcription process involved. It illustrates how qualitative analysis can be successfully combined with subsequent quantification and shows why this is essential in comparative conversation analytic research. The last part of the chapter provides a detailed description of the codification procedure and the formal coding system developed for the project, before summarising the steps involved in the quantitative part of the analysis.

The relationship between landscape and place names is very strong. In ancient times, places were named after natural resources and the landscape’s hydro-geo-morphological features. This trend persists today in some contexts. For instance, Abui place names on Alor Island are named after important landscape features, agricultural and horticultural crops, and useful plants. Abui toponyms are compounded with lexemes describing human settlements and highlighting the close relationship between nature and man. This chapters shows how the analysis of the landscape and related disciplines, like landscape archaeology (the study of the past use of the landscape determined by archaeological findings), enable scholars to reconstruct the remote origins of toponyms both in Indo-European and non-Indo-European contexts. While landscape is often considered in association with the physical features of a territory, the authors call for a holistic view of the landscape itself, which blends physical, social, cultural, environmental, and religious dimensions. To this end, toponyms are useful tools providing the researchers with insights into how people use or used the landscape.