Directive use in a migrant agricultural community: A test of Ervin-Tripp's hypotheses

Abstract

The choice of English directive variants has been hypothesized by ErvinTripp (1976, 1977) to be determined by several social and ecological factors: the relative social ranks of the speaker and recipient, their ages, their familiarity, the presence or absence of outsiders, territorial location, and task expectations. The major goal of this investigation is to test ErvinTripp's hypotheses concerning the relationship between these variables and the choice of the identified syntactically based directive variants (imperatives, imbedded imperatives, need statements), using a distinctly different sample: a predominantly black male migratory agricultural labor population in the United States's eastern seaboard region. The data indicate that the imperative form is used almost exclusively in those contexts where the syntactically based directive variants were expected to occur. Thus, most of the predictions derived from Ervin-Tripp's model for these directive variants were contradicted. The preference for imperatives is suggested to be largely a consequence of the antagonistic relationships within the migrant farm-worker community. The results of this study also suggest that the set of decision rules used in choosing among directive variants according to social criteria is a function of the following factors: crosscultural (i.e., social class and ethnic) variation, and social and physical characteristics of the interaction setting. (Directives, migrant farmworkers, cultural differences, environmental influences, ethology)