ABSTRACT:

Although ways of signalling social status have been studied in some European and Asian communities, and findings reported in their literature (Brown and Gilman (1960), Brown and Levinson (1987), Watt (1992), Held (1992), Sell (1992)), the same cannot be said of the treatment of ways in which status is signalled in African communities. This article, the fourth of a series, argues that the academic staff, administrators, students and workers of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, are conscious of their social status and this is reflected in the kind of syntactic structures that they use in their interactive discourse.