The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics: Foundations and Interfaces [1° ed.] 1138316466, 9781138316461

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of tables
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics: Foundations and interfaces
PART I Foundations of pragmatics
1 Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning
2 Speech act research in Spanish
3 Deixis in Spanish research
4 Pragmatics and word order
5 Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics
PART II Interfaces of Spanish pragmatics
6 Pragmatics and semantics: A focus on evidentiality
7 The role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structures
8 Pragmatics and prosody in research on Spanish
9 Pragmatics and sociolinguistics
PART III Pragmatics and discourse
10 Discourse markers in Spanish
11 Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics
12 Pragmatics and argumentation
13 Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research
14 Pragmatics and medical discourse in Spanish
PART IV Pragmatic variation; culture and interculture
15 Pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish
16 Pragmatic variation and forms of address
17 Intercultural communication in a globalized world
18 Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics research in Spanish
19 Pragmatics and multilingualism
PART V (Im)politeness in interaction; humor
20 Politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world
21 Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish
22 Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research
23 Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research
PART VI Pragmatics learning contexts and teaching
24 Second language acquisition of Spanish pragmatics
25 Advances in L2 Spanish pragmatics classroom instruction
26 Research on pragmatics learning, teaching, and curricula for heritage speakers
27 Pragmatics and teacher education
28 The impact of study abroad on L2 Spanish pragmatics development
29 Pragmatics instruction and assessment in study abroad research
PART VII Pragmatics, technology, and research methods
30 Eye-tracking applications for Spanish pragmatics research
31 Pragmatics and digital discourse in Spanish research
32 Corpus pragmatics in first- and second-language research
33 Research methods for Spanish pragmatics study
Index

Citation preview

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics is the first volume to offer a comprehensive overview of advances in Spanish pragmatics, addressing different types of interaction and the variables, both social and linguistic, that can affect them. Written by a diverse set of experts in the field, the handbook unifies two major approaches to the study of pragmatics, the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions. Thirtythree chapters cover in detail both pragmatic foundations (e.g. speech act theory, implicature and relevance, deixis) and interfaces with other concepts, including: • • • • •

Discourse Variation; culture and interculture (Im)politeness; humor Learning contexts and teaching Technology

This is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and researchers of Spanish language and linguistics. Dale A. Koike is Professor of Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. J. César Félix-Brasdefer is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics, Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

Routledge Spanish Language Handbooks Series Editors: Manel Lacorte, The University of Maryland, USA, and Javier Muñoz-Basols, The University of Oxford, UK

Routledge Spanish Language Handbooks provide comprehensive and state-of-the-art overviews of topics in Hispanic Linguistics, Hispanic Applied Linguistics and Spanish Language Teaching. Editors are well-known experts in the field. Each volume contains specially-commissioned chapters written by leading international scholars. Each Handbook includes substantial pieces of research that analyse recent developments in the discipline, both from a theoretical and an applied perspective. Their user-friendly format allows the reader to acquire a panoramic perspective of selected topics in the fields of Spanish language and linguistics. Published in English or in Spanish, the Handbooks are an indispensable reference tool for undergraduate and postgraduate students, teachers, university lecturers, professional researchers, and university libraries worldwide. They are also valuable teaching resources to accompany textbooks, research publications, or as self-study material. Proposals for the series will be welcomed by the Series Editors. The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies Edited by Roberto A.Valdeón and África Vidal The Routledge Handbook of Spanish in the Global City Edited by Andrew Lynch The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Phonology Edited by Sonia Colina and Fernando Martínez-Gil The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics Foundations and Interfaces Edited by Dale A. Koike and J. César Félix-Brasdefer For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-SpanishLanguage-Handbooks/book-series/RSLH

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics Foundations and Interfaces

Edited by Dale A. Koike and J. César Félix-Brasdefer

SPANISH LIST ADVISOR: JAVIER MUÑOZ-BASOLS

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Dale Koike and J. César Félix-Brasdefer; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Dale A. Koike and J. César Félix-Brasdefer to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Koike, Dale April, editor. | Félix-Brasdefer, J. César, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of Spanish pragmatics : foundations and interfaces / edited by, Dale A. Koike and Cesar Felix-Brasdefer. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge spanish language handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020007719 (print) | LCCN 2020007720 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138316461 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429455643 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Spanish language—Discourse analysis. | Pragmatics. | Spanish language—Social aspects. Classification: LCC PC4434 .R655 2020 (print) | LCC PC4434 (ebook) | DDC 460.1/45—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007719 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007720 ISBN: 978-1-138-31646-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45564-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of tables List of fgures List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction:The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics: Foundations and interfaces Dale A. Koike and J. César Félix-Brasdefer

ix xi xiii xxi

1

PART I

Foundations of pragmatics

13

1 Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning Sarah E. Blackwell

15

2 Speech act research in Spanish María Elena Placencia and Hebe Powell

37

3 Deixis in Spanish research Ricardo Maldonado

55

4 Pragmatics and word order Pekka Posio and Malte Rosemeyer

73

5 Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics Victoria Escandell-Vidal and Manuel Leonetti

91

PART II

Interfaces of Spanish pragmatics 6 Pragmatics and semantics:A focus on evidentiality Juana I. Marín-Arrese

109 111

v

Contents

7 The role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structures Catherine E.Travis and Rena Torres Cacoullos

129

8 Pragmatics and prosody in research on Spanish Victoria Escandell-Vidal and Pilar Prieto

149

9 Pragmatics and sociolinguistics María José Serrano

167

PART III

Pragmatics and discourse

183

10 Discourse markers in Spanish Ana Belén Llopis Cardona and Salvador Pons Bordería

185

11 Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig and Sabrina Mossman

203

12 Pragmatics and argumentation Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez

219

13 Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research José Portolés Lázaro

237

14 Pragmatics and medical discourse in Spanish Karol Hardin

251

PART IV

Pragmatic variation; culture and interculture

267

15 Pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish J. César Félix-Brasdefer

269

16 Pragmatic variation and forms of address María Irene Moyna and José Luis Blas Arroyo

289

17 Intercultural communication in a globalized world Rosina Márquez Reiter and Raquel Hidalgo Downing

305

18 Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics research in Spanish Gerrard Mugford

321

19 Pragmatics and multilingualism Holly R. Cashman and Amelia Tseng

335

vi

Contents

PART V

(Im)politeness in interaction; humor

351

20 Politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world Gerrard Mugford and J. César Félix-Brasdefer

353

21 Impoliteness and confict in Spanish Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

371

22 Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research Lori Czerwionka

387

23 Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research Francisco Yus

403

PART VI

Pragmatics learning contexts and teaching

421

24 Second language acquisition of Spanish pragmatics Lynn Pearson and Maria Hasler-Barker

423

25 Advances in L2 Spanish pragmatics classroom instruction Cecilia Sessarego

441

26 Research on pragmatics learning, teaching, and curricula for heritage speakers Rachel Elizabeth Showstack and Damián Vergara Wilson

455

27 Pragmatics and teacher education Manel Lacorte

469

28 The impact of study abroad on L2 Spanish pragmatics development Àngels Llanes

485

29 Pragmatics instruction and assessment in study abroad research Rachel L. Shively

501

PART VII

Pragmatics, technology, and research methods

515

30 Eye-tracking applications for Spanish pragmatics research Elisa Gironzetti

517

31 Pragmatics and digital discourse in Spanish research Patricia Bou-Franch

533 vii

Contents

32 Corpus pragmatics in frst- and second-language research Jesús Romero-Trillo and Paula Gozalo

549

33 Research methods for Spanish pragmatics study Dale A. Koike

567

Index

583

viii

Tables

2.1 12.1 15.1 15.2 16.1 16.2 22.1 27.1 28.1 29.1 30.1 32.1

Categories of illocutionary acts Intensification, attenuation, and indirectness strategies Levels of analysis for pragmatic variation Research on regional pragmatic variation in Spanish (2009–2019) Evolution of Peninsular Spanish pronominal address Four systems of subject pronoun address in contemporary Latin American Spanish Tactical strategies related to mitigation with select examples Types of knowledge in L2 teacher development Review of the literature of SA Spanish pragmatics Pragmatic skills by proficiency level based on the Instituto Cervantes curricular plan Eye-tracking metrics: Interpretation, description, and sample references for pragmatic research Spanish learner corpora overview

39 229 273 278 290 290 391 476 487 506 519 552

ix

Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 10.1 12.1 23.1 27.1 27.2 30.1 32.1 32.2

Deixis Anaphora Text deixis Distance (intervening clauses between subject mentions) of preverbal subjects by form Distance (intervening clauses between subject mentions) of subjects by position and form Distribution of tokens and postverbal subject rate according to topic persistence Postverbal subject rate in the presence vs. absence of code-switching (CS) Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the interrogative sentence ¿Ha llegado? ‘Did she/he arrive?’ produced with a fall-rise pitch contour Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the interrogative sentence ¿Ha llegado? ‘Did she/he arrive?’ produced with a rise-fall pitch contour Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the interrogative sentence ¿Ha llegado? ‘Did she/he arrive?’ produced with a high-rise pitch contour Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the statement of the obvious Sí, mujer, de GuiLLERmo! ‘Yes, [obviously], woman, [it’s] Guillermo’s!’ Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the insistent suggestion Llévate el abri::go ‘Take your coat’ Commonly occurring Spanish nuclear pitch configurations Subcategories included in the DM category Extension of the topoi (warrants) The Intersecting Circles Model of humorous communication Treatment of pragmatics in L2 teacher education programs General approach to pragmatics in L2 teacher education Visualization of fixations, saccades, and a sample dynamic area of interest for social eye-tracking data analysis The polyhedric pragmatic model for L1 speakers The polyhedric pragmatic model for L2 speakers

64 64 64 136 138 140 142 152 152 152 155 155 161 189 224 407 470 479 525 554 554

xi

Contributors

José Luis Blas Arroyo  is Professor of Spanish linguistics at the Universitat Jaume I (Castellón,

Spain), where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on sociolinguistics and syntax, and where he leads its sociolinguistic laboratory. His main research areas are devoted to variationist and sociopragmatic topics, as well as to bilingual matters related to Spanish in contact with other languages. He has published nine books (Sociolingüística del español (2005, Cátedra), Sociolingüística histórica del español (2019, Iberoamericana/Vervuert), Políticos en conflicto (2011, Peter Lang), and many articles on these subjects in international journals and monographs. Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig is Provost Professor of Second Language Studies at Indiana University

(USA) where she teaches and conducts research on pragmatics, second language acquisition, and tense-aspect systems. Her work on pragmatics has appeared in Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse Processes, Language Learning, SSLA, Modern Language Journal, and Intercultural Pragmatics and in handbooks including the Handbooks of Pragmatics (de Gruyter Mouton) and Handbook of SLA and Pragmatics (Routledge). She is coeditor of Interlanguage pragmatics: Exploring institutional talk (Erlbaum), Pragmatics and language learning (2006, 2016), and Teaching pragmatics (http://exchanges. state.gov/englishteaching/resforteach/pragmatics.html). Sarah E. Blackwell is Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Romance Languages

and faculty member in the Linguistics Department at the University of Georgia (USA). She is the author of the book Implicatures in discourse:The case of Spanish NP anaphora (2003, John Benjamins). Her research has focused on referring expressions in Spanish discourse, cognitive and interactive frames in discourse, and the pragmatics and semantics of discourse connectives in Spanish and English. She was Special Issues Editor of the Journal of Pragmatics from 2003 to 2008 and is a member of the journal’s editorial board. Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich  is Professor of Linguistics in the English department at the

University of North Carolina-Charlotte (USA). She is interested in aggression and conflict, (im)politeness models, genre theory, identity construction, and traditional and digital media, on which she has published and lectured extensively. She sits on the board of various international journals and is coeditor in chief of the Journal of Language of Aggression and Conflict (John Benjamins). Salvador Pons Bordería is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Valencia (Spain). He is a member of the Val.Es.Co. Research Group. His research interests include spoken language, approximatives, and the synchronic and diachronic studies of discourse markers. He has edited Discourse segmentation in Romance languages (2014, John Benjamins) and coedited Beyond xiii

Contributors

grammaticalization and discourse markers: New issues in the study of language change (2018, Brill). He is also codirector of the Diccionario de partículas discursivas del español (www.dpde.es). Patricia Bou-Franch  is Professor of Linguistics at the Institute of Applied Modern Languages

(IULMA), Universitat de València (Spain). Her research interests include digital discourse analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, gender, and (im)politeness. She has published peer-reviewed papers and book chapters in international venues and was coeditor of a special issue titled The pragmatics of textual participation in the social media (2014, Journal of Pragmatics) and editor of Exploring language aggression against women (2014, Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict). She has recently coedited Analyzing digital discourse (2019, Palgrave Macmillan). She is coeditor of Spanish in Context. Rena Torres Cacoullos blends variationist and usage-based perspectives in quantitative analysis

of natural production data. Her collaboration with Catherine Travis dates from their time at the University of New Mexico and their commitment to analyzing spontaneous bilingual speech in its social context.The resulting New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual corpus continues to produce investigations of a range of linguistic structures. Rena is now Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University (USA) and Editor-in-Chief of Language Variation and Change. Her current National Science Foundation-funded research is on bilingual community preferences for prosodic and syntactic boundaries in code-switching. Ana Belén Llopis Cardona  is Lecturer of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Valencia

(Spain) and a member of the Val.Es.Co. Research Group. Her research focuses on the synchronic and diachronic development of discourse markers in Spanish. She is the author of Aproximación funcional a los marcadores discursivos (2014, Peter Lang) and has actively collaborated in the Diccionario de partículas discursivas del español (www.dpde.es). Holly R. Cashman is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of New Hampshire (USA) and core faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests include multilingualism in individuals, interaction, and communities, and language, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Queer, Latinx, and bilingual: Narrative resources in the negotiation of identities (2018, Routledge). Her research has been published in journals including Language in Society, Gender & Language, Language & Intercultural Communication, Multilingua, and Spanish in Context, and edited volumes such as The Oxford handbook of language & sexuality and The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language. Lori Czerwionka is Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Purdue University (USA).

Her research addresses the pragmatics of mitigation and intensification, cross-cultural speech acts, and second language pragmatic development. Some of her recent work also explores the impact of short-term study abroad on pragmatic learning and intercultural communicative competence. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Hispania, and Frontiers:The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, as well as in other journals and various edited volumes. Raquel Hidalgo Downing  is Profesora Titular de Lingüística at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), where she teaches general and Hispanic linguistics and applied linguistics. Her research interests include pragmatics, discourse analysis, and applied linguistics, and her main publications have focused on the interface between grammar and pragmatics with a discourse approach. xiv

Contributors

Victoria Escandell-Vidal is Professor of Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Her main research area is the interface between grammar and pragmatics, with the aim of disentangling the contribution to meaning and interpretation of the structural aspects of the linguistic system from the cognitive and social factors related to the context of utterance and utterance interpretation. She is the author of several books, book chapters, and journal papers in international journals. She has coedited the volumes Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (2011, Emerald) and Pragmática (2020, Akal). J. César Félix-Brasdefer  is Professor of Linguistics and Spanish at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA). His research interests include pragmatics, discourse analysis, (im)politeness, and intercultural pragmatics. He has published several books, edited volumes, peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and handbook articles. He is the author of The language of service encounters: A pragmatic discursive approach (2015, Cambridge University Press) and Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación (2019, Routledge). He coedited a volume on pragmatic variation and service encounter discourse (2019, Routledge). He serves on the editorial boards of prestigious presses, including the Journal of Pragmatics, Spanish in Context, and Applied Pragmatics. Elisa Gironzetti is Assistant Professor of Spanish Applied Linguistics at the University of Maryland (USA), where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Spanish language, culture, and applied linguistics and coordinates the undergraduate Spanish language program. Her studies and publications focus on pedagogy in the teaching of Spanish second language and heritage learners, teacher education, pragmatics, humor studies, and multimodality. She coedited The Routledge handbook Spanish language teaching (2019) and coauthored the textbook ¡A debate! Estrategias para la interacción oral (2013, Edelsa). She also collaborates as an editor with the Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, E-JournALL, and Boletín ASELE. Paula Gozalo is a teacher of Spanish as a foreign language at the Language Service of the Uni-

versidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). She has wide experience as a teacher trainer, as well as an examiner and administrator of the DELE and SIELE official exams. Her publications include Spanish textbooks, pedagogical materials about Spanish grammar, Spanish placement tests, and corpus-based studies on pragmatics learning. Karol Hardin is Associate Professor of Spanish at Baylor University (USA) where she teaches lin-

guistics and coordinates Spanish for Health Professions. Her research and publications emphasize lying, persuasive discourse, the pragmatics of health communication, and medical Spanish education, and her work can be found in venues such as Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, The Oxford handbook of lying and deception, Hispania, Health Communication, and Teaching and Learning in Medicine. She is the author of Pragmatics of persuasive discourse in Spanish television advertising and coauthor of Español conversacional para profesiones médicas: manual de actividades. Maria Hasler-Barker  is Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville,Texas (USA). Her research and publications have focused on cross-cultural pragmatics and second language acquisition, including bilingual service encounters and language pedagogy. She is currently working on projects in Heritage Spanish and pragmatics pedagogy. Dale Koike is Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Linguistics at the University of Texas at

Austin (USA). Her research interests include discourse analysis and pragmatics, in both native xv

Contributors

Spanish- and Portuguese-speaker contexts, and as applied to second language acquisition. She is the editor or coeditor of several volumes on pragmatics and dialogue, and coauthored a textbook on Spanish applied linguistics. She has published in venues such as the Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals, and Journal of Spanish Language Teaching and is series editor for the Routledge Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics line of research. Manel Lacorte  is Associate Professor of Spanish Applied Linguistics, director of Spanish

Undergraduate Studies, and director of the MA in Hispanic Applied Linguistics at the University of Maryland (USA). He is also associate director at the Spanish School, Middlebury College. His research and publications focus on second language (L2) pedagogy and teacher education, classroom interaction and context(s), applied linguistics, and sociopolitical issues in L2 and heritage language teaching and learning. He is a coeditor of the Routledge Spanish Language Handbooks series (Routledge) and an associate editor of the Journal of Spanish Language Teaching. José Portolés Lázaro is Catedrático de Lengua Española, Departamento de Filología Española,

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). His research interests include discourse markers, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. He is the author of Marcadores del discurso (1998, Ariel), Pragmática para hispanistas (2004, Síntesis) and La censura de la palabra. Estudio de pragmática y análisis del discurso (2016, Universitat de València). He coedited the Diccionario de partículas discursivas del español (www.dpde.es). Manuel Leonetti is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Departamento de Lengua Española y Teoría de la Literatura). He has been President of the Sociedad Española de Lingüística. His main research interest is the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics from a formal, synchronic perspective; he has worked on topics like information structure and word order, tense and mood, coercion, reference, definiteness, and specificity. He has coedited volumes on Procedural meaning (2011, Emerald), 60 problemas de gramática (2011, Akal), and New perspectives on the study of ser and estar (2015, John Benjamins). Àngels Llanes  is Associate Professor at the Universitat de Lleida (Spain). Her research focuses on the impact that age and learning context (mostly study abroad) have on second or foreign language (L2) development. She is also interested in the role that reading in English plays on the development of English, in the impact of CLIL classes on English L2 development, and the effect of translanguaging on L2 outcomes. Ricardo Maldonado is Full Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad

Nacional Autónoma de México where he teaches syntax, semantics, cognitive linguistics, and cognitive grammar. His research and publications focus on syntactic voice, possessives, datives, causatives, deixis, and the use/emergence of discourse markers from lexical sources of Spanish and several Mexican indigenous languages (Huastec, Mayan,Tarascan). He has edited and published several books, as well as numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of A media voz: problemas conceptuales del clítico se en español (1999, UNAM). For publications, please consult: academia.edu or http://ricardomaldonado.weebly.com/ Juana I. Marín-Arrese is Full Professor of English Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Her main research interests involve the fields of discourse, semantics, and pragmatics, with special interest in cognitive linguistics, critical discourse studies, and cross-linguistic xvi

Contributors

studies. Her recent research focuses on stance taking and the expression of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in discourse, and more specifically, on the domains of evidentiality and modality. She has published on these topics in various journals and collective volumes and has coedited a number of volumes (2017, John Benjamins; 2017, Peter Lang; 2015, Belgian Journal of Linguistics; 2013, Mouton de Gruyter). Sabrina Mossman  is Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at El Paso

(USA), has 30 years’ experience in ESL teaching and curriculum development in the United States and Mexico. Her work on corpus-supported pragmatics pedagogy has appeared in Language Teaching Research, TESOL Journal, and edited volumes. María Irene Moyna is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at Texas A&M University (USA). Her

work focuses on word formation and verbal and pronominal paradigms, and their variation and change over time. She has written extensively on compounding, forms of address, and Spanish in the United States. She is the author of Compound words in Spanish:Theory and history (2011), and the coeditor of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic linguistic heritage (2008), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (2016), and It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research (2019). Gerrard Mugford  is a lecturer in pragmatics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics at la Uni-

versidad de Guadalajara (Mexico). His current research interests include (im)politeness, foreign-language interpersonal language use, and critical pedagogy. He has published articles and book chapters on politeness, impoliteness, anticortesía, phatic communion, and lexical studies in Mexico, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, and Colombia. His recent book is Addressing difficult situations in foreign-language learning: Confusion, impoliteness, and hostility (2018, Routledge). Lynn Pearson is Associate Professor of Spanish at Bowling Green State University (USA) where

she teaches courses in Hispanic Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Her research interests include Interlanguage Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis. She has contributed to book collections such as L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to practice (2018). In addition, she has authored or coauthored articles in Hispania, the Modern Language Journal, System, and Pragmatics and Language Learning. María Elena Placencia is Reader in Spanish Linguistics at Birkbeck, University of London (UK). Her main research interests are in sociocultural and variational pragmatics and digital discourse analysis. She has published extensively on speech act realization in the context of face-to-face service encounters in particular. Her recent work looks at complimenting behavior in social media, the pragmatics of e-service encounters, the use of discourse markers across varieties of Spanish, and discursive racism. Her most recent coedited book publications include Guía práctica de pragmática del español (2019, Routledge) and Pragmatic variation in service encounters across the Spanish-speaking world (2020, Routledge). Pekka Posio  is Associate Professor of Ibero-Romance Languages at the University of Helsinki (Finland). His research focuses on the interplay of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and morphosyntactic variation in Spanish and Portuguese, within a comparative perspective. In particular, he has studied the expression and functions of different grammatical persons and personal pronouns in spoken discourse, and the emergence of formulaic sequences and pragmatic markers. xvii

Contributors

Hebe Powell is a researcher in the area of variational pragmatics in Spanish working in association with Birkbeck, University of London (UK). Her particular interests lie in speech act realization and rapport management in online contexts, including social networking and e-commerce sites. Hebe also works as a freelance translator of Spanish literature. Pilar Prieto is ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Translation and Language Sci-

ences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalunya. Her research focuses on the communicative role of prosody and gesture in language, as well as their significance in language development and first- and second-language training. She is the author of several books and papers in international journals and edited books. Currently she is Associate Editor of the journal Language and Speech and coeditor of the book The development of prosody in first language acquisition (2018, John Benjamins). Rosina Márquez Reiter is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the Open University (UK). Her research sits at the interface of pragmatics and sociolinguistics and primarily focuses on (inter)action. She has published research monographs and journal articles dealing with pragmatic phenomena such as indirectness, face, politeness, pragmatic variation, speech acts, conversational interaction, and service encounters, as well as multidialectal practices and issues of (im)mobility among Latin Americans in Madrid and London. Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez  is Catedrática de Lengua Española at the Universidad de Sevilla

(Spain). Her research interests include pragmatics, discourse analysis, (im)politeness, discourse markers, political discourse, media discourse, and macrosyntax. She is the author of Lingüística pragmática y análisis del discurso, and Diccionario de conectores y operadores del español. Her latest works are dedicated to enunciation, modality as well as parentheticals, and argumentative strategies of political discourse. Jesús Romero-Trillo  is Full Professor of English linguistics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). His main research interests concentrate on the interface between prosody and pragmatics, with particular attention to the analysis of pragmatic markers, and also on the application of corpus linguistics and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage to the study of aesthetics and social conflict. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Corpus Pragmatics (Springer). Malte Rosemeyer  is Assistant Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Freiburg

(Germany). His research interests include historical linguistics, pragmatics, syntax, and corpus linguistics, with a focus on the analysis of variation and change in current and historical varieties of Romance languages. He is the author of Auxiliary selection in Spanish (2014, John Benjamins), and coeditor of Auxiliary selection revisited (2015, De Gruyter) and Inferences in interaction and language change (2018, Special issue in Open Linguistics), as well as numerous peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. María José Serrano  is Catedrática de Lingüística General at the Universidad de La Laguna

(Spain). Her areas of expertise are morphosyntactic variation, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. She is the principal researcher of some projects funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades. She is the author of Estudios de variación sintáctica (1999), Gramática del discurso (2006), Sociolingüística (2011), Variación variable (ed. 2011), and the coauthor of Style in syntax: Investigating variation in Spanish pronoun subjects (2013, Peter Lang). She has also xviii

Contributors

published some book chapters in The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics, Enciclopedia de lingüística hispánica, and the Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. Cecilia Sessarego  is Associate Professor of Spanish at Mount Royal University, Calgary (Canada), where she teaches a variety of undergraduate L2 Spanish language and translation courses. Her research interests include second language acquisition (SLA) theory, L2 teaching methodology, the development of pragmatic language ability, curricular design, and teaching translation. Her articles and chapters focus on L2 Spanish pedagogy from a discoursepragmatic perspective. Rachel L. Shively  is Associate Professor of Spanish and Applied Linguistics at Illinois State

University (USA). Shively’s research focuses on second language pragmatics, discourse analysis, and language and culture learning during study abroad. Her work has been published in journals such as Foreign Language Annals, System, and The Modern Language Journal and she recently published a monograph (2018, Mouton de Gruyter) concerning the development of second language humor during study abroad. In 2011, Shively was awarded the prestigious ACTFL-MLJ Pimsleur Award for Research in Foreign Language Education. Rachel Elizabeth Showstack is Associate Professor of Spanish at Wichita State University (USA). Her research addresses the Spanish language in the United States, Spanish heritage language learning, and language in healthcare. Her work has appeared in Spanish in Context, Language and Intercultural Communication, the Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, Hispanic Health Care International, Applied Linguistics, and the Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language. Her first book project, Language ideologies and linguistic identity in heritage language learning, is under contract with Routledge. Catherine E. Travis’s  research explores questions around language variation and change, in

particular in socially diverse communities. She worked for 10 years at the University of New Mexico, during which time the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual project was developed. The project, conducted in collaboration with Rena Torres Cacoullos, has given rise to many publications, including Bilingualism in the community (2018, CUP). Catherine is Professor of Modern European Languages at the Australian National University, and a chief investigator in the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, where she leads the Sydney Speaks project on variation and change in Australian English. Amelia Tseng is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Spanish in World Languages and Cultures

at American University (USA) and holds a research associate appointment at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her work centers on multilingual repertoires and identity in immigrant and diasporic communities. Her recent work has appeared in Text & Talk, Translinguistics: Negotiating innovation and ordinariness, The Routledge handbook of Spanish in the global city, and The Routledge handbook of migration and language (shortlisted for the British Association for Applied Linguistics 2018 Book Prize). Damián Vergara Wilson  is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of New Mexico

(USA), where he also directs the Spanish as a Heritage Language program. His scholarly work focuses on sociolinguistics at the micro and macro levels, especially when applicable to Spanish as a Heritage Language. He has also done extensive work under usage-based approaches to xix

Contributors

language analysis and is author of Categorization and constructional change in Spanish expressions of ‘becoming’ (2014, Brill). Francisco Yus  is Full Professor at the University of Alicante (Spain). He has specialized in the

application of pragmatics (especially relevance theory) to media discourses and conversational phenomena. He has developed a pragmatic approach to internet-mediated communication (Ciberpragmática, 2001, Ariel; Ciberpragmática 2.0, 2010, Ariel; Cyberpragmatics, 2011, John Benjamins). His latest research has focused on the application of relevance theory to misunderstandings, irony, and humorous discourses (Humour and relevance, 2016, John Benjamins). He is currently Head of the Inter-university Institute of Applied Modern Languages of the Valencian Community (IULMA) in Spain.

xx

Acknowledgements

We must thank all those who helped bring this project to fruition. First, we thank Javier MuñozBasols, General Editor of the Routledge handbook series, who first approached us about doing this handbook and who supported us throughout the time we have worked on it, as well as our editors Samantha Vale Noya and Rosie McEwan, who have also lent their valuable advice and support. We are most grateful to all the authors of this volume, without whom we would not have a pragmatics handbook of such high quality, for producing wonderful work and being so cooperative and tolerant of our many requests throughout the reviewing and editing process.We are honored to have your work represented herein.We thank the many excellent reviewers from all over the world who offered such valuable feedback on all the chapters (in alphabetical order): Marta Albelda, Karen Alonzo, Sal Attardo, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, Flavia Belpoliti, María Bernal Linnersand, Sarah Blackwell, Carl Blyth, Patricia Bou-Franch, Melissa Bowles, Diana Boxer, Adrián Cabedo Nebot, Ana María Carvalho, Holly Cashman, Andrew Cohen, Bert Cornillie, Jonathan Culpeper, Lori Czerwionka, Carlos de Pablos-Ortega, Manuel Díaz Campos, Domnita Dumitrescu, Victoria Escandell-Vidal, María Fernández Parra, Nydia Flores-Ferrán, Elizabeth Flores Salgado, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Elisa Gironzetti, Luisa Granato, Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo, Michael Haugh, Susan Herring, Raquel Hidalgo Downing, Chad Howe,Tina Isabelli, Andreas Jucker, Daniel Kádár, Carol Klee, Bobbie Lafford, Manuel Leonetti,Àngels Llanes, Ignacio López-Sako,Andrew Lynch, Ricardo Maldonado, Luisa Martí, Glenn Martínez, Jeff Michno, Sabrina Mossman, Gerrard Mugford, Javier Muñoz-Basols, Mercedes Niño-Murcia, Alejandro Parini, Lynn Pearson, Pekka Posio, Josep Ribera i Condomina, Bill Richardson, Lidia Rodríguez Alfano, Sergio Romero, Nuria Sagarra, Adriadna Sánchez, Klaus Schneider, Scott Schwenter, María José Serrano, Cecilia Sessarego, Rachel Shively, Rena Torres Cacoullos, Catherine Travis, Jorge Valdés Kroff, Rémi van Compernolle, María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop, Begoña Vicente Cruz, and Francisco Yus. We are especially indebted to Sarah Blackwell, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, and Gerrard Mugford for their work in doing multiple reviews for us. Many thanks go to our wonderful editorial assistants:Víctor Garre León, Megan DiBartolomeo, Matthew Pollock, Dylan Jarrett, and Madison Wray who helped us immensely in editing with their eagle eyes. Finally, we thank our families for supporting us throughout our careers and especially during this project. Dale Koike & J. César Félix-Brasdefer  

xxi

Introduction The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics: Foundations and interfaces Dale A. Koike and J. César Félix-Brasdefer

1

Introduction: The field of Spanish pragmatics

Pragmatics is a fundamental area of linguistics study, considered as one of the cornerstones of successful communication in any language (Hymes, 1982). It is a broad area of investigation, addressing the ways in which messages are communicated and interpreted between interlocutors through any number of means, including face-to-face interactions, technologically mediated communication, written texts, and paralinguistic (non-verbal and prosodic) modes of conveying meaning. It is a branch of linguistics that has been shown to be of importance to those who work in areas such as theoretical and applied linguistics, sociology, intercultural and cross-cultural communication, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, discourse analysis, computational linguistics, informatics, language acquisition, and teaching. Spanish, the second most-spoken language in the world with about 400 million speakers (Babbel.com), has assumed a relative importance in academic research. The field of Spanish pragmatics has grown steadily, expanding in all areas, especially in communications and second language learning and teaching. One such example is seen in the 2016 issue of the Journal of Spanish Language and Teaching dedicated to Spanish pragmatics instruction. Edited by Gironzetti and Koike, it includes studies on impoliteness in study abroad contexts and teaching, lessons on how students learn to give advice and criticism in Spanish as based on sociopragmatic surveys with native speakers, a teaching curriculum for medical practitioners on how to give advice, pragmatics for heritage language learners living in the United States, the second language (L2) development of assessments by learners during a study abroad program, and a look at pragmatics in the curricula for teacher-training programs at the masters level.The collection of studies advances the teaching and learning of Spanish pragmatics by raising an awareness of various issues and by offering ideas on how pragmatics can be developed in Spanish language learning and teaching curricula. At the same time, the Spanish pragmatics field has witnessed steady advances in first language (L1) research, spurred especially by an interest in interactional and intercultural pragmatics, as expressed among native speakers in face-to-face and virtual dialogue. Spanish research in pragmatics includes work on speech acts, deixis, implicature, relevance theory, prosody, information structure, discourse analysis, and technology-mediated discourse, to name some of the most 1

Koike and Félix-Brasdefer

basic areas. Research on Spanish pragmatics is published, for example, in the following journals: Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Politeness Research, Spanish in Context, Sociocultural Pragmatics, Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, Spanish in Context, and the Modern Language Journal, among others. In addition, many universities offer graduate degrees with specialization in topics related to Spanish pragmatics and discourse: e.g., Spain (e.g., Universidad Complutense de Madrid; University of Seville; University of Valencia; University of Barcelona; University of Alicante), Mexico (Benemérita Universidad de Puebla; El Colegio de México; Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Costa Rica (Universidad de Costa Rica), Argentina (Universidad de Buenos Aires; Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), and the USA (e.g., University of Texas at Austin; Indiana University-Bloomington; University of Georgia; Illinois State University; University of Southern California; University of Arizona). The field of Spanish pragmatics has developed from a small concentration of studies, based originally in the philosophy of language, to a wide application of pragmatic concepts and notions, creating new areas of related research. Spanish-language pragmatics has grown exponentially in the past two decades in the Spanish-speaking world. Reflecting on these developments, we present herein The Routledge handbook of Spanish pragmatics: Foundations and interfaces. This volume offers a comprehensive, broad overview of advances in Spanish pragmatics, regarding the basic concepts and relevant theories in the field and also the recent interfaces of this field with other fields and concepts. The volume, comprising an introduction and 33 chapters written entirely in English, should impact not only those who are interested in the Spanish language, but also anyone interested in pragmatics and the teaching/learning of pragmatic concepts, which are applicable to many areas.The chapters represent a balance between pragmatic foundations (e.g., speech act theory, implicature, relevance, deixis) and interfaces with other concepts and areas, as well as an extension beyond these notions to address different types of interaction, and the social and linguistic variables that can affect them.Those areas, which we have selected due to their current relevance in recent research, include: pragmatics and discourse, pragmatic variation, (im)politeness, humor, intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics, interculture, second language pragmatics and instruction, heritage language learners, interactional studies, communication, pragmatics and prosody, digital discourse, multilingualism, corpus pragmatics, technological tools, and research methods in Spanish pragmatics.The chapters represent prior work as well as recent perspectives in the pragmatics discipline and seek to balance theory and practical applications for researchers and educators of Spanish language and linguistics. This collection of studies by authors of several different countries explores recent advances in a wide range of themes and topics, to offer ideas that could be pursued in future work, thus moving the field of Spanish pragmatics forward in multidisciplinary explorations of the Spanish language and Hispanic societies, including language teaching.

2

Scope of pragmatics and aims of the volume

Pragmatics was introduced in semiotics (Morris, 1938) and semantics (Carnap, 1942 [1961]), and later within the field of semantics and pragmatics in the field of information status (Ward & Birner, 1998). Pragmatics was initially influenced by philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others. Later perspectives for the analysis of meaning were developed by John Austin, John Searle, and Herbert P. Grice. Pragmatics has been defined from different perspectives (Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, Chapter 1; Levinson, 1983, Chapter 1). In contemporary pragmatics, two schools of thought are identified to examine the scope of pragmatics, the Anglo-American and the European Continental traditions.Within the Anglo-American understanding of linguistics and philosophy, pragmatics 2

Introduction

is defined as “the systematic study of meaning by virtue of, or dependent on, language use” (Huang, 2014, p. 4).This tradition is known as the ‘component view,’ as pragmatics is understood as another core component of language, a modular conception of the human mind. Under this narrow view of pragmatics, central topics of investigation include deixis, reference, speech acts, presupposition, implicature, and neo-Gricean work on meaning (relevance theory). In contrast, the Continental tradition takes a functional perspective to the analysis of meaning in interaction. Following this broad, functional tradition, researchers use empirical data from different sources, corpora, and populations, including native and nonnative speakers. Some fields of study under the Continental view include sociolinguistics, anthropology, and cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics. While some researchers follow the component view (Birner, 2013; Huang, 2014), others have tried to consolidate both traditions, combining empirical work in the analysis of micro-pragmatics such as speech act research. For example, Kecskes (2013) proposed the sociocognitive approach to examine meaning in interaction in intercultural contexts. Like The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (Barron, Gu, & Steen, eds., 2017), our aim is not to show how the two major approaches to the study of pragmatics are different, following the Anglo-American and the Continental European traditions, but rather to unify both in order to give greater latitude to the authors of the studies. In this way, we believe the present handbook can effectively present breadth and depth in the different areas of inquiry in Spanish pragmatics as well as encourage future exploration in the near future to advance the field.

3

Organization and context of the handbook

The present handbook is divided into seven sections by theme for ease of reference and cohesion to guide readers on the topics within each of them, as follows: Section I. Section II. Section III. Section IV. Section V. Section VI. Section VII.

Foundations of pragmatics Interfaces of Spanish pragmatics Pragmatics and discourse Pragmatic variation; Culture and interculture (Im)politeness in interaction; Humor Pragmatics learning contexts and teaching Pragmatics, technology, and research methods

Each of these sections and the work represented therein is described in the following. Section I comprises five chapters that address core areas of pragmatic foundations with application to Spanish study. Four areas that are most central to Spanish pragmatics are included here: implicature, speech acts, deixis, and word order, as well as a chapter on relevance theory. Chapter 1, “Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning” by Sarah Blackwell, focuses on Grice’s (1975, 1989) theory of conversational implicature, as well as revised neo-Gricean versions of the theory, and their application in analyses of speaker meaning in Spanish.This chapter is a grounding piece for this volume, as implicatures lie at the heart of pragmatics.The author discusses significant distinctions that Grice made regarding saying, meaning, and implicating, which laid the basis for his theory, as well as Grice’s framework, including his general Cooperative Principle and its maxims. Blackwell presents the defining features of conversational implicatures and illustrates the ways implicatures can arise. Some weaknesses in Gricean theory, along with common misconceptions about implicature, are discussed, followed by two neo-Gricean pragmatic theories, which constitute attempts to revise and improve on Grice’s model. Finally, Blackwell reviews various areas of research on Spanish using Gricean concepts and frameworks. 3

Koike and Félix-Brasdefer

Chapter 2, “Speech act research in Spanish” by María Elena Placencia and Hebe Powell, reviews the extensive body of work in this area, beginning with a critical discussion of speech act theory as initiated by Austin and Searle.This discussion is followed by an overview of speech acts studies in Spanish over the years, with close attention to work involving the constructs of sociopragmatics, pragmalinguistics, and variational pragmatics. The authors reflect on trends in the research over the years, such as studies in regional variation, interpersonal and public speech acts, digital discourse, and non-verbal communication. They examine studies on particular speech acts in Spanish.This chapter is especially valuable in signaling gaps in the speech act research. Deixis reflects pragmatics for the implicatures that it presents through the different kinds of deixis (e.g., temporal, spatial, pronominal, social).“Deixis in Spanish research” in Chapter 3 by Ricardo Maldonado explores salient issues in the current study of referential deixis and anaphora in Spanish, proposing an innovative examination based on distance, subjectivity, and focality.Text deixis is presented as a way to explore anaphora, focusing on demonstratives and pronouns.After reviewing traditional approaches to deixis, the author draws from recent work in semantics and pragmatics to illustrate some alternative approaches to aspects of deixis in Spanish, such as emotivity and focality.This chapter serves to update an important area of pragmatics that is currently understudied. Chapter 4,“Pragmatics and word order” by Pekka Posio and Malte Rosemeyer, points out that much of the variation in Spanish word order can be traced to pragmatics influences.They argue that the two factors of information structure and managing common ground play an important role in shaping utterances, such as distinguishing old from new information, and backgrounding or foregrounding discourse entities. The authors present studies on topics such as word order in intraphrasal position, largely affecting adjectives, intrasentential word order variation (e.g., the placement of subjects and reordering of constituents such as prepositional complements), intersentential word order variation, seen in topicalization, and the placement of subordinate clauses.They point out problems with word order studies, such as the fact that only some topics have been examined using authentic, spoken data, while the majority rely on written data.Their discussion of these and other word order matters is stimulating and thought-provoking. Because so many pragmatics researchers refer to relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 1995), we requested a special chapter devoted to it from Victoria Escandell-Vidal and Manuel Leonetti, seen in Chapter 5, “Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics.” Defining relevance theory (RT) as a model connecting cognitive processes and abilities in human communication, they deftly illustrate its utility for the field of pragmatics in reviewing its tenets and principles. Commonly addressed research topics in the Spanish literature on RT include explicatures and implicatures, conceptual vs. procedural meaning, lexical pragmatics and figurative language, relevance and humor in dialogue, and digital discourse. RT has been applied more often in Spanish pragmatics studies originating in Europe than, for example, in the U.S. Perhaps this elucidating chapter will provide the impetus for a wider application in other contexts. Section II on “Interfaces of Spanish pragmatics” includes four chapters that intersect with other linguistic fields, including semantics, syntax, prosody, and sociolinguistics. Juana MarínArrese presents Chapter 6 on “Pragmatics and semantics: A focus on evidentiality,” in which some theoretical notions relevant to the fields of both semantics and pragmatics are addressed (e.g., literal/non-literal, salient/non-salient). After carefully distinguishing the concepts of epistemicity and evidentiality, the author explicates epistemicity using epistemic modality, modalized propositions as ‘influence attempts,’ metarepresentation, stance, and ‘epistemic control’ to illustrate her points. This thoroughly researched chapter illustrates clearly the complexities of evidentiality and exemplifies a ‘gradient approach’ to finding the distinction between pragmatics and semantics. 4

Introduction

Chapter 7, by Catherine Travis and Rena Torres Cacoullos, addresses “The role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structures.”They illustrate how one can use certain pragmatic concepts to test sentences in discourse in order to reveal how pragmatics interacts with syntactic structures. They use the notions of ‘referent accessibility’ (distance from previous mention) and ‘topicality’ (referent importance measured by persistence in subsequent mentions) to test their effects on different types of subjects (e.g., lexical, pronominal, unexpressed, pre- and postverbal) in nounphrase realizations and word order in spontaneous, sustained speech. In a careful, step-by-step presentation, they show how one can test these pragmatic notions with corpus data via operationalizing and quantifying pragmatic constructs as countable discourse entities. “Pragmatics and prosody in research on Spanish” is the topic of Chapter 8 by Pilar Prieto and Victoria Escandell-Vidal. This is an area that is relatively new to pragmatic research, yet it has always been recognized as vital to the understanding of intention and meaning interpretation. The chapter reviews the main concepts regarding how researchers describe and analyze prosody in the field, covering topics such as phonological distinctions at the intonational level for prosodic features.Their focus is on the role of prosodic variation (both intonational variation and variation in prosodic cues such as fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and speaking rate) in the interpretation of semantic and pragmatic phenomena (e.g., the marking of speech act information, information structure, epistemic and evidential meanings). Since nearly all the chapters in this volume mention prosody in some way, it is clear that this is a central topic for pragmatics, especially given the technological and statistical advances in the past two decades. María José Serrano, writing on “Pragmatics and sociolinguistics” in Chapter 9, explores the relationship between the two fields based on a framework that views language use as a consequence of social, cultural, and communicative values. The author shows how the analysis of pragmatic meaning has contributed to meanings beyond linguistic structures as well as cultural patterns of communication in societies. The chapter examines the main Spanish phenomena that have been studied through sociolinguistic models, including (im)politeness, forms of address, information structure, cognitive-functional analysis of subject expression, and pragmaticalization of discourse markers. This area of interface between pragmatics and one of the most popular areas of linguistic study today—sociolinguistics—serves to enrich our understanding of pragmatic phenomena. Section III on “Pragmatics and discourse” includes five chapters in this subfield of pragmatics comprising areas such as discourse markers, argumentation, censure, medical discourse, and negation. The section begins with Chapter 10, “Discourse markers in Spanish,” by Ana Llopis Cardona and Salvador Pons-Bordería. Discussing the importance of discourse markers (DMs) in the development of the field of pragmatics, especially given the focus on colloquial speech, the authors thoroughly review historical descriptions that mention DMs and linguistic theories as seen in Spanish grammars that address the DMs.They discuss issues such as DMs as a functional word class, procedural meaning that helps define DMs, the role of prosody in their realizations, and grammaticalization studies. Regarding methodological issues, the authors suggest the consideration of a function-over-form approach and a variationist perspective to help define DMs. And as related future areas of study, they suggest examining DM combinations (e.g., pues bueno) and contrastive investigations (e.g., English ‘anyway’ and Spanish ‘pues nada’). DMs represent a popular area of research in Spanish and this chapter helps enlighten readers on their complexities. Chapter 11, on “Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics” by Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig and Sabrina Mossman, explores research in Spanish on the use of formulaic language as a pragmalinguistic resource and evaluates it in light of research in other languages.There are very few studies on Spanish formulaic language to date, and the chapter aims to motivate researchers to 5

Koike and Félix-Brasdefer

fill that gap, especially considering that formulaic language is used frequently on a daily basis. The chapter discusses some research protocols on how targeted conventional expressions can be identified empirically in pragmatics research. The authors offer suggestions for future research, considering regional variation and other variables, and the L2 learning context. Chapter 12, by Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez, addresses “Pragmatics and argumentation,” the latter referring to the persuasion by a speaker to an interlocutor to carry out an action, share ideas, or promote social relationships. The study of argumentation is fundamental in pragmatics since persuasion is present in areas such as the media, advertising, and political discourse. The author reviews methodological approaches, such as the “new rhetoric” of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, sociopragmatics as in van Eemeren-Grootendorst, critical discourse analysis, and pragmalinguistics and “argumentation in the language” of Anscombre-Ducrot. The author discusses discursive types, such as parliamentary debates, and the components of argumentation (e.g., argument, warrant, orientation and force, rebuttal) are examined, as well as argumentative mechanisms (e.g., intonation, operators, connectors) and strategies (e.g., attenuation, intensification, irony, polyphony).The chapter presents a multi-faceted and rich exploration of pragmatics and argumentation. Chapter 13 by José Portolés Lázaro, on “Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research,” represents a novel analysis of the act of ‘censorship’ in Spanish, a phenomenon that he defines as an interaction among three participants: the censors, who impede communication between the senders, and their addressees. Following speech act theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), the author reviews properties of censorship, such as triadic interaction, ideology, and identity, and characteristics of censurable messages, like power, social distance, and imposition.The author discusses methodological considerations, such as defining scope, other forms of censorship (perhaps unintentional) like text editors who make changes, discursive phenomena related to censure (e.g., recanting), and issues with data collection itself. It is a thought-provoking and original avenue of research. Karol Hardin in Chapter 14 writes of “Pragmatics and medical discourse in Spanish,” a new area of study that refers to language behavior that occurs in a healthcare setting or as written medical language. It reflects institutional discourse that, as an object of study, requires an interdisciplinary approach.The chapter reviews studies centered on three themes: interlocutor roles in consultations; communication strategies, such as rapport management; and more specific devices such as mitigation and turn-taking, looking at genres including therapeutic and clinical discourse, and illness narratives.This innovative and thorough chapter presents a broad overview of pragmatics in medical discourse that illustrates the utility of the field to an area vital to everyday life. Section IV comprises five chapters dedicated to “Pragmatic variation; Culture and interculture,” and presents work on variational pragmatics, variation and forms of address, intercultural communication in a global world, cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics, and pragmatics and multilingualism. Chapter 15 by J. César Félix-Brasdefer addresses “Pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish,” a subfield of variational pragmatics that focuses on intralingual variation (Barron & Schneider, 2009; Schneider & Barron, 2008). Pragmatic variation involves the study of pragmatic features of language use in action and how these features vary according to linguistic, situational, and macrosocial factors (e.g., region, gender, age, socioeconomic status) across languages and across varieties of a language. After defining key concepts of pragmatic meaning and pragmatic variation, the author reviews two predominant frameworks, both for the analysis of linguistic variation (variationist sociolinguistics) and pragmatic variation (variational pragmatics). He offers a selective review of the literature from 2009–2019 to highlight some of the main topics analyzed in pragmatic variation research in Spanish. In Chapter 16, Irene Moyna and José Luis Blas Arroyo present their review of work on “Pragmatic variation and forms of address.” They trace the evolution of the Spanish address 6

Introduction

system, showing aspects that intersect with pragmatics, and find that not only do the social dimensions of power and solidarity account for the distribution of forms, but also whether the community itself values positive or negative politeness in their use. Regarding pragmatic variation, use of forms of address as a discourse strategy signaling emotional shifts during talk is discussed, as well as how the forms can vary according to sociolinguistic factors such as the type of interaction and/or speech act.The authors offer suggestions for data collection and analysis, as well as areas for future study, such as acquisition of the forms and their use in computer-mediated contexts.The discussion is rich and raises many innovative viewpoints. Rosina Márquez Reiter and Raquel Hidalgo Downing write of “Intercultural communication in a globalized world” in Chapter 17, in a broad look at a topic of increasing importance in our interconnected countries.This chapter represents a step toward recognizing pragmatics in its next phase of globalized communication.The authors review research conducted on intercultural communication in Spanish and the construction of interculturality between speakers of Spanish in contemporary contexts resulting from globalization, reflecting a contrastive pragmatics angle. Other constructivist studies of encounters between speakers of different Spanishspeaking backgrounds in transnational settings such as service encounters, voluntary migration contexts, and tourism are reviewed, which raise issues such as participants’ ethnolinguistic identities, the varieties of Spanish they speak, and their access to resources. Complementing the previous chapter,“Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics research in Spanish” is the topic of Chapter 18 by Gerrard Mugford, in which a distinction is made between the two types of pragmatics study.This chapter examines the two constructs in relation to pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics, as well as studies that exemplify them. The author discusses various methods used to investigate the two areas, pointing out their defects and strengths with examples of various studies. Mugford highlights interactant choice, translanguaging, hybridity, and superdiversity as possible avenues of research in this well-researched and stimulating chapter. The final chapter of this section is “Pragmatics and multilingualism” by Holly Cashman and Amelia Tseng, in Chapter 19. The authors discuss multilingual pragmatic phenomena in the Spanish-speaking world in terms of linguistic resources, such as the use of code-switching for pragmatic purposes, and their implications for pragmatics and issues such as identity, politeness, and other interaction. Their discussion on discourse and pragmatic changes in situations of language contact, such as found in Andean Spanish, shows how language has changed to fulfill certain discourse-pragmatic needs.Another example is how function words in Spanish can take on new pragmatic uses in indigenous languages that borrow them.The authors go on to address methodological considerations in multilingual research, and new ways to understand language and multilingual practices, such as translanguaging.These and other contexts are explored in this intriguing work. In Section V on “(Im)politeness in interaction; Humor,” we include four chapters that address topics in conversation and politeness, impoliteness and conflict, mitigation, and humor research. The section begins with “Politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world” in Chapter 20 by Gerrard Mugford and J. César Félix-Brasdefer. Politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world can be understood by examining first-, second-, and third-wave investigative approaches (Culpeper & Terkourafi, 2017; Grainger, 2011; Kádár & Haugh, 2013) that highlight theoretical, discursive, and contextual-discursive understandings. In a selective account of politeness phenomena in the Spanish-speaking world, after describing the fundamental concepts of polite behavior, the authors focus on the three-waves model as applied to Spanish politeness research in different sociocultural contexts.The chapter reviews research that examines intercultural politeness in call centers where politeness reflects institutional practices, followed by some methodological considerations and future directions in politeness research in Spanish. 7

Koike and Félix-Brasdefer

“Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish” by Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich in Chapter 21 represents a comprehensive overview of the field of impoliteness studies in general, and studies focusing on this phenomenon in the Spanish language, in particular.The author focuses on two major strands of studies: (a) those that present theories on impoliteness, and (b) those that examine impoliteness in contexts such as digital media.The actual recent studies on impoliteness in contexts of Spanish language use are reviewed carefully and critically, discussing not only the theoretical approaches used therein but also the interfaces between fields that have been used in recent research, such as prosody. Contexts such as talk shows, interviews, debates, reality shows, and advertisements provide a rich source for impoliteness manifestations. The chapter offers a wealth of information on the study of impoliteness and conflict that will promote much future research. Lori Czerwionka presents “Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research” in Chapter 22, defining mitigation as a communication strategy in which interlocutors use linguistic and nonlinguistic devices to soften or weaken an utterance. It is closely tied to the work on (im)politeness and displays a range of types, functions, and devices used to achieve mitigation. Given the many modes of communication today, and the increased contact between cultures and languages around the world, mitigation assumes a new importance for many fields related to language and communication study. The chapter highlights the relationship of this area of pragmatics that crosses over into several other areas of pragmatics study. Finally, Chapter 23 by Francisco Yus addresses “Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research,” in which some applications of pragmatics to humorous discourses are reviewed, with special emphasis on humor in Spanish. The author discusses how jokes in Spanish are inferred and humorous effects are obtained, with special attention to stand-up comedy monologues, cartoons, advertisements, and translations of humor.The issue of whether or not humorous inferences are obtained universally or are culture-specific is an important one, addressed in this chapter. Section VI,“Pragmatics learning contexts and teaching,” presents six chapters on teaching Spanish conventional expressions, L2 acquisition of pragmatics, advances in teaching Spanish pragmatics, pragmatics teaching and curricula for heritage speakers, pragmatics teacher training, Spanish study abroad and pragmatics research, and pragmatics teaching and assessment in the study abroad context. Chapter 24, on “Second language acquisition of Spanish pragmatics” by Lynn Pearson and María Hasler-Barker, examines recent research on the acquisition of pragmatics in Spanish as a second language (L2). Their review indicates that this area of language is often difficult for learners, and that its acquisition has been relatively understudied until recently, especially for the Spanish language.The chapter presents an overview of the theoretical models of L2 acquisition as applied to interlanguage pragmatics, developmental patterns, the role of L1 transfer, and the interaction between pragmatics and other areas of linguistic competence.The authors also discuss studies of L2 Spanish pragmatic acquisition in instructed and digital contexts. Cecilia Sessarego, in Chapter 25, addresses “Advances in L2 Spanish pragmatics classroom instruction,” focusing on the Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) classroom context and a variety of pragmatic targets. Studies of this area of pragmatics are relatively few, again indicating only recent interest in the area.The author identifies three issues that have impeded the inclusion of pragmatics in Spanish as a Foreign Language curricula and teaching materials, including: (1) the emphasis on grammar in L2 learning; (2) the lack of true communicative activities and goals; and (3) a lack of teacher training in both theory and pragmatics instruction. Sessarego suggests certain changes to the classroom curricula and materials, such as changing the focus to communication, and teaching target sociocultural norms.The information and ideas presented here will be useful for practitioners and L2 Spanish students alike. 8

Introduction

Next, Rachel Showstack and Damián Vergara Wilson in Chapter 26 present “Research on pragmatics learning, teaching, and curricula for heritage speakers,” addressing a student population of increasing importance in Spanish-language classes of countries such as the United States. This chapter reviews studies on pragmatics and Spanish heritage speakers (HS) and proposes new avenues for research in this area. The authors examine fundamental concepts relevant to research on pragmatics and HS, including the role of language contact, the native speaker norm, best practices in heritage language pedagogy, and features of HS Spanish production. Finally, they offer ideas on what types of pragmatic instruction are valuable for HS and how to integrate pragmatics teaching into curricula for HS classes. Manel Lacorte elaborates in Chapter 27 on “Pragmatics and teacher education,” presenting a clear vision of the state-of-the-art in this area. The author clarifies from the beginning that his goal in this chapter is not to discuss how to teach pragmatics in the L2 classroom, but rather how pragmatics should be incorporated into training programs for pre- and in-service Spanish teachers.After reviewing the inclusion of pragmatics in impactful L2 curricular frameworks and current standards for L2 teacher education, including the notion of implicit and explicit instruction, the author proposes an innovative and well-informed approach to the role of pragmatics based on recent work in sociocultural theory, instructional pragmatics, and L2 multicompetence in native and nonnative instructors. “The impact of study abroad on L2 Spanish pragmatics development” by Àngels Llanes in Chapter 28 focuses on pragmatics development in the specific context of the study abroad (SA) experience. This is the context that would be expected to yield the best results for pragmatics learning, given the immersive, intensive nature of such a stay, so the chapter is of particular interest for language program administrators.This chapter offers a comprehensive review of studies that examine such impact of an SA experience on Spanish L2 pragmatics development. The author then highlights some current methodological considerations, such as the type of instrumentation used to elicit data, and the need to capture the long-term effects of SA experiences on L2 pragmatics. Next, in Chapter 29, Rachel Shively addresses “Pragmatics instruction and assessment in study abroad research,” which represents the pedagogical side of the acquisition issues examined in the previous chapter. She discusses research that supports the potential of explicit instruction to accelerate pragmatics learning and enhance metapragmatic awareness during a stay abroad. The author examines which pragmatic features can be targeted at different levels of L2 proficiency, how pragmatics instruction can be effectively incorporated into foreign language programming prior to and during a study abroad experience, and what assessment methods have been implemented successfully.The chapter also complements Chapters 25, 26, and 27, which also focus on ways to teach pragmatics. Finally, Section VII,“Pragmatics, technology, and research methods,” includes four chapters that address topics related to pragmatics and eye-tracking, pragmatics and digital discourse, corpus pragmatics, and research methods.The section opens with Chapter 30 by Elisa Gironzetti, who presents research on “Eye-tracking applications for Spanish pragmatics research.” Given that eye movements could not be claimed to be culture-specific, the goal of the chapter is to introduce the reader to the characteristics, results, and applications of eye tracking to motivate research of pragmatics in Spanish contexts. Due to the limited number of studies especially on Spanish pragmatic features, the author adopts a broad view that could set the stage for further language-specific research. Specifically, she emphasizes recent applications of eye tracking to the study of social interaction and multimodality (e.g., the integration of gestures, body posture, and facial expressions), underscoring the central role of non-verbal behavior in the negotiation of meaning. Eye-tracking for Spanish research is a promising new area for pragmatics. 9

Koike and Félix-Brasdefer

“Pragmatics and digital discourse in Spanish research,” by Patricia Bou-Franch in Chapter 31, aims to introduce readers to this rapidly expanding field of research. It traces the evolution of the field in terms of three waves of technology-mediated communication studies: (1) a focus on formal, linguistic descriptions of internet language; (2) socially oriented approaches that focus on diversity and variability, community, and identity; and (3) critical, multimodal perspectives.The author reviews research on Spanish digital discourse involving text, context, action and interaction, and ideology and power. It is clear that pragmatics in digital contexts has proven to be a fruitful area for investigation in Spanish and other languages. Chapter 32,“Corpus pragmatics in first- and second-language research” by Jesús RomeroTrillo and Paula Gozalo, describes the increasingly important role of corpus pragmatics in current linguistic research as an invaluable tool to test theoretical constructs with real data. The chapter examines L1 and L2 Spanish corpus pragmatics research, covering corpus typology and pragmatic phenomena. The authors focus on L2 pragmatic development, emphasizing recent applications to Spanish L2 instruction, such as the use of multimodal pragmatically annotated learner corpora. Corpora research for pragmatics for the future should help researchers to test their hypotheses more efficiently and quickly. Finally, Chapter 33,“Research methods for Spanish pragmatics study” by Dale Koike, closes the last section with an important contribution to research methods in pragmatics research. Since the field of pragmatics can be studied in so many contexts and in many different ways, researchers must make principled choices regarding design of projects; choices that foster a critical understanding of the data and interpretations.This chapter discusses issues of native speaker, cross-cultural, and language learner pragmatics, in studies based on quantitative and qualitative research methods, using naturally occurring or elicited data.This review indicates that pragmatics study is still rooted in the same elicited methods (e.g., Discourse Completion Tasks), which have been criticized for their artificiality, yet researchers have not found many other methods for their investigations.

4

Future directions in Spanish pragmatics

In gathering together the chapters of this volume on Spanish pragmatics, we have become aware of areas in which there are changes taking place in the field, as well as areas of gaps in the research. For example, more research is needed in other areas of conventional and conversational implicature (see Chapter 1) to examine pragmatic meaning, as well as to explore further both the illocutionary and perlocutionary effect of speech acts at the discourse level (see Chapter 2). Deixis research in Spanish is another area that is wide open for new study, and looking at deixis in relation to other linguistic areas, like language learning and change, could shed new insights. In particular, following Maldonado’s contribution (see Chapter 3), more research is needed in the areas of spatial and temporal deixis across varieties of Spanish. Newer areas of inquiry, such as pragmatics in conjunction with prosody to express pragmatic meaning (e.g., time, duration, pitch), medical discourse, heritage Spanish speakers, and corpus linguistics are areas that are beginning to present a body of Spanish research. And pragmatics connected to conventional expressions, censure, intercultural communication, multilingualism, or eye-tracking, among many other topics in the Spanish context, represent open avenues of study. We hope that researchers in the future will address these and other new areas. Of these, more experimental research is needed in Spanish pragmatics to address issues on eye-tracking and interpretation of conventional and nonconventional meaning. What these areas of crossdisciplinary endeavors reflect is that the field of pragmatics is moving in many directions, expanding to change the very nature of what people understand pragmatics to be.That is, by moving the 10

Introduction

study of pragmatics, for example, into technology-mediated activities, researchers have tapped a set of contexts that add new dimensions to pragmatic communication. Instead of face-toface interaction, which traditionally was the cornerstone of pragmatics study, the technological contexts create, in many instances, asynchronous interaction, which challenges the nature of the very concept of ‘interaction.’ Multimodal discourse is a preferred option for graduate students and scholars who want to analyze pragmatic meaning using different data sources, as noted in Chapter 33. As this chapter rightly notes, the selection of the method to examine pragmatic meaning in an L1 or L2 depends on the research question and on the nature of the data: qualitative or quantitative, or both. Further, this situation can then involve another layer of analysis: that of a given conversation between two people in, say, a video posted on a website; the perspective of the participants in, for example, a comment feed reacting to the conversation; and the analyst looking at all of this, reflecting what Kádár and Haugh (2013) refer to as ‘first- and second-order’ analysis (in their study, referring to politeness phenomena). First order refers to how a phenomenon is perceived by its users, and second order is a more abstract, scientific approach to the same phenomenon (see Chapters 20 and 21). Such a layering of analyses can add more insight to pragmatics study, and more research is needed of a combination of orders (‘third order’) across varieties of Spanish. What this handbook also reinforces is that pragmatics has proven to be definitively useful in application to the areas of language pedagogy and acquisition.There are many researchers working in these last two areas in the last decade, which is also reflected in the numerous chapters in this volume dedicated to related themes. Pragmatics could help bring to the areas of language teaching and learning the dimension of interaction, co-constructing meaning with others, a deeper cultural awareness, and contextualized approaches to language. There are many unexplored areas of Spanish pragmatics that await future study.

References Barron,A., & Schneider, K. (2009).Variational pragmatics: Studying the impact of social factors on language use in interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6, 425–442. Barron, A., Gu,Y., & Steen, G. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge handbook of pragmatics. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Birner, B. (2013). Introduction to pragmatics. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987 [1978]). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Carnap, R. (1961). Introduction to semantics and formalization of logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1942). Culpeper, J., & Terkourafi, M. (2017). Pragmatic approaches (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 11–39). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Grainger, K. (2011). “First order” and “second order” politeness: Institutional and intercultural contexts. In Linguistic Politeness Research Group (Ed.), Discursive approaches to politeness (pp. 167–188). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In C. Peter & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. III, pp. 41–58). Speech acts. New York:Academic Press. Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huang,Y. (2014). Pragmatics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hymes, D. (1982). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics (pp. 35–71). New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Kádár, D., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kecskes, I. (2013). Intercultural pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, C.W. (1938). Foundations of the theory of signs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 11

Koike and Félix-Brasdefer

Schneider, K., & Barron, A. (Eds.). (2008). Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995 [1986]). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Ward, G., & Birner, B. (1998). Information status and noncanonical word order in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  

12

Part I

Foundations of pragmatics

1 Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning Sarah E. Blackwell

1

Introduction

An ‘implicature’ is any meaning a speaker can convey beyond the meaning of what is explicitly said.This meaning can be more than, or different from, the conventional, semantic meaning of the words uttered, as illustrated by Levinson’s classic example (1989, p. 89): (1) A: ¿Puede decirme la hora? ‘Can you tell me the time?’ B: Bueno, el lechero ya ha pasado. ‘Well, the milkman has come.’ Assuming B’s response is relevant, he conveys (i.e., ‘implicates’) not knowing the precise time, but that it is approximately the time the milkman comes. Bach (2012) notes that the distinction between the meaning of the words used and what a speaker means in uttering them “is perhaps the distinction most basic to pragmatics” (p. 47).The philosopher H. Paul Grice, who coined the term implicature, proposed his theory of conversational implicature (1975, 1989) to explain how speakers can mean more than what they explicitly state. In the following section, key distinctions underlying Grice’s theory are outlined. Subsequently, I describe the theory, the defining features and types of conversational implicature, and how conversational implicatures can arise. Next, I discuss the class of implicated meaning Grice called ‘conventional implicature’ and debates it spurred, before identifying some criticisms and misconceptions about Grice’s model. I then outline Horn’s (1984) and Levinson’s (2000) neo-Gricean theories, which constitute revisions of Grice’s original proposal. Afterward, I review various studies on Spanish, which apply classical or revised Gricean frameworks and heuristics, and then discuss some methodological issues associated with Gricean pragmatics. Finally, I offer suggestions for future research utilizing constructs from Gricean and neoGricean models.

15

Blackwell

2 2.1

Review of existing research Saying, meaning, and implicating

Grice’s theory of conversational implicature is rooted in his distinction between saying, meaning, and implicating. Grice (1975) associated what someone has ‘said’ with the conventional meaning of the words uttered, and any enriched or inferred content that was not part of the propositional (semantic) content of an utterance could not be, according to Grice, part of what was said. Grice (1957) also distinguished between ‘natural meaning,’ or meaning-N, and ‘non-natural meaning,’ or meaning-NN. Meaning-N emphasizes the relationship between observable elements and what they signify,as illustrated by Grice’s classic example in (2) (1957,p. 377, my Spanish translation): (2) Esos granos significan (significaban) sarampión. ‘Those spots mean (meant) measles.’ By contrast, meaning-NN refers to one’s intentional communication expressed via an utterance. Thus, if a speaker utters (3) Huele a humo. ‘It smells like smoke.’ she might intend to communicate (i.e., ‘mean-NN’) any number of things, from conveying the olfactory sensing of smoke, to suggesting checking the oven. In distinguishing this type of meaning, Grice elucidated the fact that speakers’ intentional meanings depend not only on the words used, but also on contextual information and the assumption that we generally aim to make our intentions recognized by our addressees.To capture these ideas, Grice (1975, 1989) proposed a system of conversational logic for the effective, efficient, and rational use of language in conversational interactions known as the theory of conversational implicature.

2.2

Grice’s theory of conversational implicature

Grice’s theory of conversational implicature is based on the recognition that general principles of language use guide speakers in everyday conversation.The originality of his theory rests on his account of how conversational implicatures arise, their features, and the role of his overarching Cooperative Principle (1975, p. 45): (4) Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. The Cooperative Principle (henceforward, the CP) captures the idea that speakers generally try to make their utterances appropriate to the conversational context, since otherwise, successful conversations would be impossible. In other words, felicitous conversations rely on the assumption that interlocutors intend to be cooperative and, according to Grice, speakers implicate messages by exploiting this assumption. He instantiates the CP via four categories of conversational maxims, three of which have sub-maxims (1975, pp. 45–46): (5) Quantity: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. 16

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

Quality:Try to make your contribution one that is true. 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack evidence. Relation: Be relevant. Manner: Be perspicuous. 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief. 4. Be orderly. Grice’s maxims are principles speakers generally follow and expect others to follow, which together, spell out the CP. The Quantity sub-maxims account for our assumption that speakers should be no more or less informative than necessary.The Quality sub-maxims capture our expectation that speakers will not make specious or unfounded statements, while Relation (also called the ‘Relevance maxim’) captures the assumption that speakers will contribute relevantly to conversations, just as we would offer ibuprofen for a headache and not a band-aid. Finally, the Manner maxim does not concern how much information is conveyed, but rather how speakers express intended meanings via more usual, simpler, clearer, and oftentimes shorter expressions (e.g., casa ‘house’), versus less usual, prolix or obscure, and thus marked expressions (e.g., residencia ‘residence’). Finally, the Manner sub-maxim of ‘be orderly’ captures our tendency to relate events in chronological order, and explains differences in meaning between (6a) and (6b), which express the same truth-conditional meaning (i.e., if (a) is true, (b) is true, and vice versa) (from Reyes, 1994, p. 66): (6) a. Pepa se casó y tuvo dos hijos. ‘Pepa got married and had two children.’ b. Pepa tuvo dos hijos y se casó. ‘Pepa had two children and got married.’ In uttering (6a) or (6b), one conversationally implicates that the events described happened in the order reported.Therefore, saying (6b) implicates that Pepa’s children are, in Reyes’s words, “extramatrimoniales” ‘illegitimate’ (1994, p.  66). This distinction in meaning is one that truthconditional semantics could not account for, but which speakers can cancel by adding a phrase like pero no en ese orden ‘but not in that order,’ cancelability being one defining characteristic of conversational implicatures. In other contexts, however, no such implicature arises from using y ‘and’ (e.g., Ayer comí un montón y no hice ejercicio ‘Yesterday I ate a lot and didn’t exercise’), or a cause-consequence interpretation could be generated (Cogí la gripe y no pude ir ‘I caught the flu and couldn’t go’). Grice maintained that such inferable meanings were not part of ‘what was said’ but rather what was ‘conversationally implicated.’The following describes the features and types of conversational implicature comprising Grice’s model.

2.3 Features and types of conversational implicature Unlike other types of implicational meaning (e.g., presuppositions, semantic entailments), conversational implicatures are derived from Grice’s CP and maxims.Additionally, they do not contribute to the truth conditions of the utterances that produced them.Thus, (6a) and (6b) share the same truth conditions but generate different implicatures. Conversational implicatures are also 17

Blackwell

nonconventional meanings. For instance, my use of un millón (‘a million’) in (7) conversationally implicates muchísimo ‘a lot,’ instead of, literally, 1,000,000: (7) Tengo un millón de cosas que hacer hoy. ‘I have a million things to do today.’ Conversational implicatures are calculable based on the utterance, the maxims, and contextual knowledge. Furthermore, they are cancelable or defeasible by adding a phrase that nullifies the implicature in certain linguistic or non-linguistic contexts. Cancelability characterizes the two types of conversational implicature identified by Grice (1975): ‘particularized conversational implicatures’ (PCIs) and ‘generalized conversational implicatures’ (GCIs). PCIs depend on the context for their generation, while GCIs arise regardless of the context, as (8) illustrates (+> indicates ‘implicates’): (8) a. Este café está templado. ‘This coffee is lukewarm.’ b. PCI: +> ¿Puedes calentarme el café? ‘Can you heat up my coffee?’ c. PCI: +> ¿Me trae un café más caliente? ‘Will you bring me some hotter coffee?’ d. PCI: +>¿Tiro este café y hago más? ‘Should I throw this coffee out and make more?’ e. GCI: +> Este café no está caliente. ‘This coffee is not hot.’ The PCIs (8b–d) generated by (8a) depend on the conversational context (e.g., at home, in a restaurant, in the ofce, and participants’ shared background knowledge); however, following Gricean theory, the same GCI (8e) arises regardless of context due to the speaker’s use of templado ‘warm/lukewarm.’1 Yet, each implicature can be canceled. For instance, after saying (8a), one could add pero me lo tomo igual ‘but I’ll drink it anyway,’ canceling the potential particularized implicatures in (8b–d); and, one could say, having sipped the cofee, de hecho está bastante caliente ‘actually it’s quite hot’ to nullify the GCI in (8e). The implicature no está caliente ‘it’s not hot’ arising from saying the cofee is templado ‘warm/lukewarm’ is a type of GCI known as a ‘scalar generalized Quantity implicature.’ Scalar GCIs are based on Grice’s Quantity 1 maxim and arise from sets of linguistic alternates of the same grammatical category, which can be ordered by degree of informativeness or semantic strength (e.g., , ). By asserting a stronger item to the left on the scale, the weaker item is entailed. However, using a weaker expression in the set implicates the negation of any stronger members to its left.Thus, Es un buen alumno ‘He’s a good student’ generates the GCI No es un excelente alumno ‘He’s not an excellent student,’ which is cancelable by adding, for instance, de hecho es excepcional ‘actually he’s outstanding.’ Another feature of conversational implicatures Grice identified was non-detachability, meaning “implicatures cannot be detached from an utterance simply by changing the words of an utterance for synonyms” (Levinson, 1983, p. 116).Thus, speakers could produce the same implicature with the following utterances: (9) a. Tengo mucho frío. ‘I’m really cold.’

18

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

b. Estoy helada. ‘I’m freezing.’ c. Tengo un frío de mil pares de narices. ‘I’m freezing my ass off.’ Context A:The heat is turned down. PCI: +> Sube la calefacción. ‘Turn up the heat.’ Context B:The windows are open. PCI: +> Cierra las ventanas. ‘Close the windows.’ The examples in (9) illustrate another feature of implicatures, namely, their indeterminacy, meaning implicatures may be difficult to determine, as utterances can generate various possible readings. Finally, Huang (2014) observes that conversational implicatures are also reinforceable, meaning they can be made explicit without producing excessive redundancy; also, they tend to be universal, though this feature has been debated (see, e.g., Keenan, 1976;Wierzbicka, 2003).We now turn to how the maxims intervene to generate implicatures.

2.4 Operationalization of Grice’s maxims Grice (1975) viewed implicatures as arising from the varying symbiosis and tension between speakers’ observing the maxims, or violating or blatantly flouting (that is, openly and obviously breaching) one or more of them. Speakers follow the maxims by providing the information required, while being truthful, relevant, clear, brief, and orderly, as in (10), which generates a scalar GCI based on adherence to Grice’s Quantity 1 maxim: (10) A: ¿Cuánto tiempo llevas en Madrid? ‘How long have you been in Madrid?’ B: Cinco años. ‘Five years.’+> Llevo cinco, y no más de cinco años viviendo en Madrid. +> ‘I have been [living] in Madrid for five, and no more than five years.’ One can violate one or more maxims “quietly and unostentatiously” (Grice, 1975, p.  49) without the addressee realizing it. For instance, making a statement the speaker knows to be false is a clear breach of Grice’s Quality maxim. A speaker can also ‘opt out’ of the maxims and the CP by, for example, by refusing to cooperate and not responding.Additionally, Huang cites the following hedges as evidence of opting out and speakers’ awareness of the maxims (2014, p. 31, Spanish equivalents mine): (11) a. Quality As far as I know, Que yo sepa/Por lo que (yo) sé I may be wrong, but . . . Tal vez me equivoque, pero . . . b. Quantity As you probably already know, Como Uds. bien sabrán/Como seguramente ya sabéis,

19

Blackwell

c. Relation I’m not sure if this is relevant, but . . . No estoy seguro si esto es relevante, pero . . . /Igual no tiene nada que ver, pero . . . d. Manner I’m not sure if this is clear, but . . . Tal vez lo que voy a decir no quede claro, pero . . . Hedging by Peninsular Spanish speakers while retelling a film provides evidence of their concern about relating its details correctly, revealing their metapragmatic awareness of Grice’s Quality maxims (see Blackwell, 2009 for data description; some transcription symbols from the original have been omitted for simplification): (12) a. . . . Y y y así lo he comprendido yo. No lo sé. ‘. . .And that’s how I understood it. I don’t know.’ b. . . . Me parece a mí no lo sé no lo sé. ‘. . . It seems to me I don’t know I don’t know.’ Implicatures can arise when maxims clash and speakers violate one maxim in order to adhere to another. In (13), B cannot give more informative, factual information about Erica’s flight, and thus avoids disobeying the Quality maxim, while contravening the Quantity maxim: (13) A: ¿A qué hora llega el vuelo de Érica mañana? ‘What time does Erica’s flight arrive tomorrow?’ B: Por la tarde. ‘In the afternoon.’ Speakers also generate implicatures by blatantly flouting one or more maxims. Grice offers tautological utterances as examples, which, based on their logical forms,“have no communicative import” (Levinson, 1983, p. 110), thus constituting patent floutings of the Quantity maxim. The Spanish tautologies in (14a) and (14b) generate similar implicatures regardless of context, whereas others might produce varying implicatures depending on contextual factors, as (14c) illustrates: (14) a. El que manda, manda. Lit.:‘He who commands, commands.’ +> He’s the boss so he’s the one in charge. b. El que puede, puede. Lit.:‘He who can, can.’ +> They’ve got the money, so they may as well spend/flaunt it. c. Un hijo es un hijo. Lit.:‘A son is a son.’ +> A child is loved by his/her parents just because he/she’s their child. +> I will do whatever is necessary for the well-being of my child. However, in recent work on tautological constructions of the type a is a, and b is b in Spanish and Russian, Escandell-Vidal and Vilinbakhova (2018) show that they are not fxed idioms with constant form/meaning associations. Instead, coordination provides a “semantic schema” which must be “pragmatically enriched” in light of “representations accessible in the context” (p. 335). 20

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

These observations suggest such tautologies generate implicatures based on their encoded contents and contextual information. Grice (1975) proposed that figurative speech (metaphor, irony, hyperbole) constituted floutings of the Quality 1 maxim. For instance, the following examples express false propositions when interpreted literally (from Rosales Sequeiros, 2011, p. 1029): (15) a. Metaphor Este dinero es un salvavidas. ‘This money is a lifeline.’ b. Hyperbole Ese fallo es un desastre. ‘That mistake is a disaster.’ Following Grice, to satisfy the Quality maxim and the CP, one would assume that the speaker, upon using a metaphor or hyperbole, intended to communicate an alternative, true message related somehow to the expression used, which could be calculated based on the context. However, this account seems to thwart the CP, as it assumes fgurative language involves speakers’ saying something believed to be false, to communicate messages they believe to be true. Speakers flout the Relation maxim when they abruptly change the topic of conversation, as occurs in (16) (from Calvo Pérez, 1994, p. 159, my translation): (16) —Hija, no comas tanto, ¿no tienes miedo a engordar? ‘Honey, don’t eat so much.Aren’t you afraid of gaining weight?’ —Abuela, ¿no le gusta la telenovela? ‘Grandma, don’t you like the soap opera?’ By asking about the unrelated soap opera, the granddaughter conveys indirectly not wanting to discuss her weight. Example (17) involves apparent floutings of the Quantity and Manner maxims, as L’s response to C’s question is scarcely informative, yet lengthy (from Briz, 2001, p. 46, my translation): (17) C: ¿Cómo es que no viniste el sábado? ‘How is it that you didn’t come on Saturday?’ L: No sé/ es que como tú dijiste que a lo mejor que a lo mejor no salíais/ entonces yo pensé que podía ser/ que podía ser que fuera yo solo y no haber nadie, ¿entiendes? ‘I don’t know/ it’s just that since you said that maybe that maybe you weren’t going out/ then I thought that maybe/ that maybe I’d go alone and nobody’d be there, y’ know?’ L’s rambling explanation could implicate not having a good reason, or not wanting to give the real reason for not attending, so as to save face and not ofend C (see Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness issues, and Chapter 22 on mitigation, this volume). By contrast, B’s response in (18) reveals a breach of Grice’s Relation maxim (from Briz, 2001, p. 46, my translation): (18) A: ¿Me das un cigarro? ‘Can you give me a cigarette?’ B: Eres un gorra/ahí tienes un estanco. ‘You’re a moocher/you’ve got a tobacco-stand over there.’ 21

Blackwell

By calling A un gorra ‘a moocher,’ B’s utterance may seem irrelevant; however, assuming his general adherence to the CP, B’s reference to a nearby tobacco stand (un estanco) implicates, albeit somewhat impolitely, that A should buy his own cigarettes. One criticism of Grice’s theory is that it does not account for speakers’ communication of (im)politeness and the infuence of social relations and mores in conversational interaction. Before discussing other criticisms of Gricean theory, we shall examine another class of non-truth-conditional meaning Grice distinguished, namely, conventional implicature, and how it contrasts with conversational implicature.

2.5

Conventional implicature

Grice (1975, 1989) identified a second class of implicated meaning, dubbed conventional implicatures, which are attached arbitrarily (i.e., by convention) to particular linguistic expressions. Unlike conversational implicatures, conventional implicatures are not calculated in light of contextual factors or via the intervention of the CP and the maxims, nor are they cancelable; yet, like conversational implicatures, they do not contribute to the truth conditions of an utterance. For instance, Grice maintained that in (19), therefore conventionally implicated that “his being brave is a consequence of (follows from) his being an Englishman” (1975, p. 44) (an explanation applicable to Spanish por tanto): (19) Es inglés; es, por tanto, valiente. ‘He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave.’ Earlier, Grice (1961) observed that (20a) and (20b) shared the same truth conditions (if (a) is true, (b) is true, and vice versa), but maintained that but conventionally implicated a contrast, here, between honesty and poverty (p. 129, my translation): (20) a. Es pobre pero es honesta. ‘She is poor but she is honest.’ b. Es pobre y es honesta. ‘She is poor and she is honest.’ Huang (2017b, p. 176) cites other conventional-implicature-licensing expressions in English, for which I provide Spanish equivalents: de hecho/en realidad ‘actually,’ también ‘also,’ apenas ‘barely,’ además ‘besides,’ sin embargo/no obstante ‘however,’ solamente ‘only,’ and todavía/aún ‘still.’ Grice’s notion of conventional implicature spawned criticism and debate. Blakemore (1987), following relevance theory (RT) (Sperber & Wilson, 1986), viewed conventional implicature as falling “within the domain of (linguistic) semantics” (p. 35), noting that all Grice said about expressions like therefore and but was that they did not contribute to truth conditions (p. 73). Later, Blakemore (2002) argued that discourse connectives like but and therefore have “procedural meaning” instead of “conceptual meaning,” as they encode “information about the inferential route the hearer should take in order to arrive at the intended conceptual representation” (p. 92).Thus, from the RT standpoint, connectives like but, rather than implicating conventional meanings, encode procedural messages that orient the hearer toward an inferential interpretation. Notwithstanding, Grice’s idea that but conventionally implicated a contrast was not wrong; he simply did not detail the nature of the inferential contrasts it triggered. For instance, in both Spanish and English, the first conjunct in (21) creates expectations (e.g., that the speaker can walk here) such that the segment following the adversative conjunctions must 22

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

introduce information that contrasts by running counter to those expectations, thus explaining why (21b) is inappropriate: (21) a. Vivo cerca de aquí, pero siempre vengo en autobús. ‘I live nearby here, but I always come by bus.’ b. #Vivo cerca de aquí, pero siempre vengo andando. #‘I live nearby here, but I always come on foot.’ Bach (1999) argued that Grice’s conventional implicatures are not implicated meanings at all, but rather part of what is said, or else “vehicles for the performance of second-order speech acts” (p. 328). Later Potts (2005) proposed a theory to account for conventional implicatures, considering them to be semantic meanings arising via “a combination of two narrowly semantic aspects of the grammar: lexical meanings and novel ways of combining them with other meanings in the grammar” (p. 1). For Potts, a defining feature of conventional implicatures is that they are ‘not at-issue’ entailments, meaning they are not the main, asserted content of the utterance, but rather secondary entailments “speakers use to guide the discourse in a particular direction or to help the hearer to better understand why the at-issue content is important at that stage” (p. 7). As Horn (2012) observes, conventional implicature “poses a complication for the distinction between what is said and what is meant,” since Grice was “concerned with delineating what is said and what is conversationally, and hence calculably, implicated” (p. 83). Horn concludes that conventional implicatures are indeed implicatures, but that they depend on the semantic content of expressions (i.e., on the conventional meaning of what is said). More recently, Fernández Ruiz (2018) adopts Grice’s notion of conventional implicature and attempts to debunk previous objections and possible misunderstandings regarding it. She identifies and analyzes Spanish expressions, showing how they generate conventional implicatures while seeking support for Grice’s view. Unsurprisingly, Grice’s notion of conventional implicature, which straddles semantics and pragmatics, served as the impetus for subsequent research on various types of linguistic expressions, including discourse connectives, adverbs, epithets, slurs and other “loaded words,” and the T/V pronouns (Huang, 2017a, p. 176; Horn, 2012).

2.6 Criticisms and misconceptions about Gricean theory Grice’s theory has greatly influenced pragmatics but has also garnered criticisms. Sadock (1978) observed Grice’s failure to differentiate clearly between the Manner sub-maxim ‘be brief,’ and the Quantity 2 maxim,‘do not make your contribution more informative than required.’ Kiefer (1979) noted that utterances could produce numerous possible implicatures and, therefore, Grice’s theory was not sufficiently restrictive; furthermore, Grice never explained how background assumptions and mutual knowledge could influence the calculation of implicatures. Levinson (1983, 1989) recognized Grice’s theory presented problems because speakers’ adherence to the maxims is conditioned socially and culturally. Bach (2012) also criticizes Gricean theory for not being “adequately predictive,” adding,“different social situations or cultural norms call for different formulations” (p. 57). Birner (2013) identifies overlaps among the maxims, noting Grice’s second Quantity maxim, ‘say no more than is necessary,’ oftentimes amounts to saying only what is relevant (cf. the Relation maxim), thus coinciding with Grice’s Manner sub-maxim, ‘be brief,’ since being relevant should result in brevity. Birner also argues that saying implicatures are calculable does not mean they will be calculated. For instance, if metaphors are viewed as floutings of Quality, they must 23

Blackwell

be calculated; however, one need not “reconstruct the path from literal to intended meaning each time [a] metaphor is used” (Birner, 2013, p. 53). Wilson and Sperber (2012) take issue with Grice’s Quality maxim, maintaining that “language is not governed by any convention or maxim of truthfulness in what is said” (p. 47).They identify counterexamples to the notion that speakers try to tell the truth (e.g., lies, jokes, fictions, metaphors), which Grice considered covert or overt violations of the Quality maxim.Wilson and Sperber argue against treating all figurative language as having a literal meaning capable of being true or false, and then deriving implicature from literally false metaphorical utterances. Instead, they maintain that such interpretations are context dependent and do not involve flouting any truthfulness maxim, and propose that figurative language be explained by assuming communication “is governed by a principle of relevance” (p. 47). Bach (2006) identified 10 common misconceptions about implicature, including the idea that sentences have implicatures, as conversational implicatures are speakers’ intentional meanings, whereas sentence meaning depends on semantic content. Another misconception is that implicatures are inferences, when implicatures are intentional speaker meanings. Horn (2012) explains that this distinction is important because interpreters may recover unintended implicational meanings, and speakers may implicate meanings their hearers do not grasp.

2.7

Reformulations of Grice’s theory

The neo-Gricean models proposed by Horn (1984) and Levinson (2000) represent two significant attempts to revise and improve Grice’s theory.Additionally, Sperber and Wilson (1986) developed relevance theory (RT) as an alternative to Gricean approaches. RT emphasizes the role of explicit communication instead of implicit speaker meaning and is not based on principles and maxims from which implicatures may be derived and explained. Instead, it is a cognitive approach to pragmatics that posits two claims: the Cognitive Principle of Relevance, which assumes that human cognition is geared toward the maximization of relevance; and the Communicative Principle of Relevance, which maintains that “[e]very act of communication conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance” (Wilson & Sperber, 2012, p.  6). This theory has been influential in research on Spanish, particularly in studies on discourse markers and figurative speech (see Chapter 5 on relevance theory, this volume). However, because this chapter focuses on implicature, what follows centers on the neo-Gricean frameworks of Horn and Levinson.

2.7.1

Horn’s model

Horn (1984), motivated by Zipf ’s (1949) Principle of Least Effort, observed two competing forces in language use: a speaker’s economy, promoting simplification and the use of unmarked (simpler, less effortful) linguistic forms; and an auditor’s economy, positing the need for as many different linguistic forms as there are messages to communicate (p. 11). Based on these two forces, he proposed collapsing Grice’s maxims into two, the Q[uantity] and R[elation] Principles (p. 13): (22) Horn’s Q- and R-principles The Q-principle (Hearer-based): Make your contribution sufficient (cf. Quantity 1); Say as much as you can (given R) The R-principle (Speaker-based): Make your contribution necessary (cf. Relation, Quantity 2, Manner); Say no more than you must (given Q) 24

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

Quintessential examples of Horn’s Q-based implicatures are his classic scalar Quantity implicatures (scalar GCIs), whereby in making a weaker statement, the speaker implicates the negation of a more informative one.The following classic Horn scales help illustrate this type of implicatures (Levinson, 1989, p. 125): (23)

< y, o >



< frío, fresco>

< encantar/amar, gustar >

For example, saying algunos . . .‘some . . . ’ implicates no muchos ‘not many,’ no la mayoría ‘not the majority,’ and no todos ‘not all’ (see also examples (8) and (10)). Because Horn’s opposing principles (Q- and R-) have no predictive or explanatory value alone, he proposed the notion of markedness as a resolution scheme, articulated in his Division of Pragmatic Labor (1984, p. 22): (24) Horn’s Division of Pragmatic Labor The use of a marked (relatively complex and/or prolix) expression when a corresponding unmarked (simpler, less ‘effortful’) alternate expression is available tends to be interpreted as conveying a marked message (one which the unmarked alternative would not or could not have conveyed). A significant contribution of Horn’s model is its incorporation of markedness and inference to stereotype, whereby relatively unmarked forms (e.g., briefer, simpler, more usual expressions) will be “R-associated” with unmarked, stereotypical meanings, while more marked (more complex or prolix) expressions will be “Q-restricted” to non-stereotypical situations for which unmarked alternatives would not be appropriate (Horn, 2005, p.  196). Furthermore, Horn’s framework streamlines Grice’s maxims into two opposing principles: the R-principle,‘say as little as possible,’ economizes the speaker’s effort, inducing hearers to infer more than what is said; however, the Q-principle, ‘say as much as possible,’ economizes hearers’ efforts, urging them to assume speakers meant no more than what they said.

2.7.2

Levinson’s model

Levinson’s neo-Gricean framework (2000) draws from Grice’s theory and Horn’s model, but focuses on not only what speakers implicate, but also the inferential implications of the utterances themselves.Two main themes of Levinson’s proposal are speaker minimization of linguistic expression and its inferential implications, which may be summarized as ‘the less you say, the more you allow to be inferred.’ By emphasizing inferences, Levinson broke with classic Gricean theory’s characterization of implicatures as strictly involving speaker meaning by treating 25

Blackwell

implicatures as utterance interpretations or ‘default inferences’ drawn by hearers. Levinson also attempts to improve on Horn’s proposal in two ways: (1) by distinguishing between semantic minimization (semantically general terms are preferred to specific ones) and expression minimization (briefer expressions require less effort, and thus are preferred to longer ones); and (2), by replacing Grice’s model (excluding Quality) with two revised Gricean maxims of Quantity and a maxim of Manner, dubbed the Q[uantity], I[nformativeness], and M[anner] Principles, respectively (2000, pp. 76, 114–115, 136–137): (25) Levinson’s Q-Principle Speaker’s Maxim: Do not say informationally less than your knowledge of the world allows. Recipient’s Corollary: Assume the speaker made the strongest statement consistent with what he knows and that what is not said is not the case. Levinson’s I-Principle Speaker’s Maxim of Minimization: Say as little as necessary; provide the minimal linguistic information needed. Recipient’s Corollary:The Enrichment Rule Amplify the informational content of an utterance assuming stereotypical relations obtain. Levinson’s M-principle Speaker’s Maxim: Do not use a prolix, obscure (marked) expression without reason. Recipient’s Corollary: If the speakers used a marked expression, they meant to convey a marked message and avoid the stereotypical associations of I-implicatures. Levinson’s Q-principle largely mirrors Horn’s Q-principle, while his I- and M-principles address the need to distinguish between the informational content of a form (less informative, simpler, more usual expressions produce stereotypical meanings) and linguistic markedness (more morphologically complex, less lexicalized, more prolix, and less frequent or usual forms engender non-stereotypical, marked meanings) (Levinson, 2000, p. 137).Also, for each principle, Levinson incorporates a speaker’s maxim and corresponding recipient’s corollary, thus emphasizing the role hearers’ inferencing plays in communication. Furthermore, instead of distinguishing only two levels of meaning, ‘sentence-meaning’ (explained by grammatical theories) and ‘speakermeaning’ or ‘utterance-token meaning’ (accounted for by pragmatic theory), Levinson proposes a third level, ‘utterance-type-meaning,’ involving “systematic pragmatic inference based not on direct computations about speaker-intentions but rather on general expectations about how language is normally used.These expectations give rise to presumptions, default inferences, about both content and force.” (2000, p. 22). Both Horn’s and Levinson’s neo-Gricean frameworks emphasize the role of inference to stereotype and economy of linguistic expression. However, Levinson’s model highlights the notion of default interpretations based on interlocutors’ expectations about language use. Notwithstanding, both models have been applied fruitfully in studies on Spanish, some of which are reviewed in the following section.

2.8

Related research on Spanish

Research on Spanish has employed both classical and revised Gricean theories in attempts to explain various aspects of speaker meaning, including use and interpretation of discourse connectives; meanings conveyed by speakers’ choice of tense, aspect, and mood; use and interpretation 26

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

of anaphoric expressions; functions and meanings of the deictic pronouns tú and usted (see Chapter 3 on deixis, this volume); verbal irony; and implicatures generated in doctor-patient communication.

2.8.1

Discourse connectives

Schwenter (2002) shows how the contrast between the connectives pero and si (‘but’) in dialogical Peninsular Spanish instantiates the operation of Horn’s Q- and R-principles. He maintains that L’s utterance in (26) gives rise to a stereotypically enriched interpretation (that Ana swept . . . and cleaned . . . in that order), following Horn’s R-principle, ‘say no more than you must to convey stereotypical/usual meanings’ (a dictum also captured by Levinson’s I-principle) (p. 63, his bold): (26) L: Ana barrió el patio y limpió la cocina. (R+> ‘in that order’) ‘Ana swept the patio and cleaned the kitchen.’ A: Pero/#Si limpió la cocina primero. ‘But she cleaned the kitchen first.’ This R-implicature is confrmed by A’s rejection (i.e., cancellation) of the stereotypical interpretation, which can only be introduced by pero, but not si. By contrast, Schwenter proposes that M’s utterance in (27) refects Horn’s Q-principle (corresponding to Levinson’s Q-principle): say as much as you can, using the semantically strongest expression possible (Schwenter, p. 63): (27) M: Creo que te han tintado mal el pelo. (Q+> ‘no worse than mal’) ‘I think they dyed your hair poorly.’ B: ¡Si/#Pero me lo han tintado fatal! ‘SI they dyed it horribly!’ The resultant Q-implicature is that mal (the lexically strongest expression the speaker could choose) Q-implicates ‘no worse than bad.’ Evidence of this Q-based scalar implicature is confirmed by B’s response introduced by si, which cancels the implicature. Schwenter also illustrates how pero and si can occur utterance-initially, arguing that pero “signals acceptance of a prior viewpoint, but introduces another which is stronger in argumentative terms” (2002, p. 52), as in (28a). However, si is incompatible with overt acceptance of a prior viewpoint (with sí ‘yes’) and denies its relevance, while marking “the viewpoint it introduces as the exclusively relevant viewpoint” (p. 53): (28) a. [Context:A and B talking about María’s chances of passing an exam.] A: María es inteligente. ‘María is intelligent.’ B: Sí, pero no sabe estudiar. ‘Yes, but she doesn’t know how to study.’ b. [Context:A and B talking about María’s chances of passing and exam.] A: María es inteligente. ‘María is intelligent.’ B: #Sí, si no sabe estudiar. ‘Yes, SI she doesn’t know how to study.’ 27

Blackwell

Schwenter concludes that pero is used to introduce a cancellation of stereotypically generated R-implicatures, as in (29), whereas si introduces an objection to utterances producing (scalar) Q-implicatures (e.g.,‘five’ +> ‘no more than five’) as in (30) (p. 64): (29) U: Patricia comió la pizza. (R +> ‘she ate all the (remaining) pizza’) ‘Patricia ate the pizza.’ L: Pero/#Si no se la comió toda. ‘But she didn’t eat it all.’ (30) A: Su hermano tiene como cinco perros. (Q +> ‘no more than five’) ‘Her brother has like five dogs.’ L: Si/#Pero tiene por lo menos ocho. ‘SI he has at least eight.’ This study highlights the usefulness of neo-Gricean principles in accounting for nuanced meanings associated with Spanish discourse connectives, as well as the importance of examining both monological and dialogical contexts to uncover discourse-pragmatic constraints on connectives and the implicatures they produce. Additionally, it suggests the need to examine how intonation contributes to differences in meaning, as Spanish adversative si (‘but’) is necessarily unstressed.

2.8.2

Verb tense, aspect, and mood

Reyes (2002) links neo-Gricean theory to speakers’ linguistic choices, arguing that they generate implicatures reminiscent of classic scalar GCIs and involve implicit negative communication reflecting Levinson’s (2000) neo-Gricean Q(uantity) Principle, ‘say all that you can,’ and M(anner) Principle, ‘mark formally abnormal situations’ (p. 37). Reyes uses these heuristics to explain Spanish speakers’ selection of definite versus indefinite articles, preterit versus imperfect verb aspectual forms, and indicative versus subjunctive mood.These choices, she argues, may be considered stronger and weaker items on informativity scales (, , ), whereby using the informationally weaker form on the right implicates, following the Q-principle, that the speaker was not in a position to select the stronger form. For example, using the imperfect (e.g., Paco llegaba anoche de Bruselas ‘Paco was arriving last night from Brussels’) conversationally implicates that the speaker cannot claim the action (Paco llegó . . . ‘Paco arrived . . .’) was actually accomplished (p.  41). Reyes’s approach emphasizes how selection of one linguistic form conveys more than just the meaning of the form, by implicating that meanings associated with alternative choices do not apply. Gennari (2002) proposes accounting for interpretations for the Spanish simple future and preterit by combining Aktsionsart (i.e., lexical aspect, including states, activities, and achievements or accomplishments) and Gricean implicature. For instance, the Spanish preterit encodes a temporal reading and an aspectual component, which can, but need not, indicate completion of the action or state. Gennari proposes that using preterit estuvo ‘was’ in (31), (31) Juan estuvo enfermo. ‘Juan was sick.’ (p. 32) implicates that the state (being sick) ended in the past, because, if continuation were intended, the speaker would have used the imperfect, estaba ‘was.’ Thus, choice of the stative verb in the preterit 28

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

triggers a completion reading prior to speaking time due to a Gricean Quantity implicature (i.e., in using estuvo, the speaker implicates the negation of the continuative reading associated with estaba). However, like all conversational implicatures, a cancellation is possible by adding a continuation, as in (32): (32) Juan estuvo enfermo ayer.Y todavía lo está. ‘Juan was sick yesterday.And he still is.’ (p. 22) Gennari (2002) notes that the Spanish future can receive a temporal (future) or modal (nonfuture) probability reading (e.g., Acabo de ver las luces. Juan ya estará en casa ‘I just saw the lights on. Juan will be [is probably] at home already’) (p. 21) and proposes that probability readings for future verbs are implicated based on the context. She concludes that her semantic-pragmatic, implicature-based approach can better account for readings for the Spanish simple future and preterit. Gennari’s analysis illustrates how defining features of implicature, such as cancelability, may be applied to test for the presence of implicatures arising from contextualized uses of verb tense and aspect. Amaral (2013) applies neo-Gricean theory in the analysis of the verbal construction vivir ‘to live’ + V[Gerund] (‘to keep V-ing’), characterizing some American Spanish varieties, including Bogotá Spanish, as in (33): (33) Al Pato Torres le viven diciendo que la radio es mía. ‘(People) keep telling Pato Torres that the radio is mine.’ (p. 106) Amaral shows that vivir + V[Gerund] cannot be used with adverbial siempre ‘always,’ but instead conveys the idea of ‘over and over.’ She demonstrates that this use of the gerund emphasizes the frequency of the event and proposes that its evaluative meaning results from pragmatic enrichment often associated with expressions denoting a high number, inducing an implicature of “a quantity that is unexpectedly high” (p. 117). To account for this pragmatic enrichment, she proposes using Horn’s (1984) Division of Pragmatic Labor and Qand R-principles, arguing that the lengthier, marked vivir + V[Gerund] construction conveys “a large unspecifiable quantity,” which “deviates from a normal or sufficient quantity,” thus implicating a meaning that a simpler construction with a specifiable quantity would not have implicated. Amaral’s analysis illustrates how a neo-Gricean approach can account for event pluralities expressed by complex constructions that do not denote specifiable amounts or frequencies.The study also exemplifies how neo-Gricean principles can afford a more nuanced understanding of meanings communicated by constructions characterizing different Spanish varieties. Rubio Vallejo (2017) examined how uses of the Spanish modal poder (‘can, be able’) with past perfective morphology (e.g., pudo ‘could’) convey additional meanings beyond purely asserted ones. He observes that past perfective uses of poder can trigger either an actual or a counterfactual reading of the proposition expressed and argues that these readings are best characterized as arising pragmatically from the interaction between the ‘Question Under Discussion’ and Levinson’s neo-Gricean Q[uantity] and I[nformativeness] Principles. He concludes that constructions with preterit forms of poder can be potentially ambiguous between the two readings, whereas morphologically imperfective forms of this verb (e.g., podía) are simply vague. Importantly, the author implements the notions of default readings and default enrichments to explain subtle distinctions in meaning between the perfective and imperfective past forms of poder. 29

Blackwell

2.8.3

Anaphora and deixis

Blackwell (2000, 2001) tested the viability of Levinson’s neo-Gricean principles for predicting preferred anaphora interpretations in Spanish via an oral comprehension test for anaphora interpretations in Spanish utterances, administered to 105 native Peninsular Spanish speakers.The first study tested Levinson’s Q-principle-based prediction that use of semantically stronger, non-clitic reflexives (e.g., para sí mismo ‘for himself ’) in place of pronouns (e.g., para él ‘for him’) in the same context would result in a contrast between anaphoric and non-anaphoric readings, respectively. Results from the multiple-choice test showed that the prediction of non-coreferential readings from use of semantically weaker non-reflexive pronouns instead of stronger coreferential reflexives was often overridden by contextual constraints including lexical semantics, background and world knowledge, and topic saliency. Blackwell (2001) tested Levinson’s prediction of non-coreference from the use of marked referring expressions (NPs, names) in contexts where unmarked, more minimal forms (clitic pronouns, null subjects) would have encoded coreference by default. Results revealed that Levinson’s prediction of non-coreferential readings for marked NP expressions was often canceled by semantic and pragmatic constraints like those reported in the earlier study. Levinson’s neo-Gricean principles are also applied in Blackwell (2003) to analyze patterns of anaphora in Spanish conversations and film narratives and seek evidence of their operation. Analyses of third-person expressions (e.g., zeros, pronouns, names, NPs) revealed speakers’ tendency to use minimally informative expressions for anaphoric references to entities, in keeping with Levinson’s I-principle. The study implements the neo-Gricean I[nformativeness] and M[anner] Principles as default mechanisms, whereby failure of one principle to explain choice of anaphoric expressions results in the implementation of the alternative principle as an explanatory heuristic. More significantly, analysis of patterns of anaphora in two genres of Spanish discourse sheds light on how background assumptions, mutual knowledge, semantic entailments, and antecedent saliency interact with neo-Gricean pragmatic principles to influence encoding of anaphoric relations in Spanish. Stewart (2003) examined second-person, singular, familiar subject references (overt and implicit tú) in spoken Spanish in primarily workplace settings where there was a potential for threat to the face of speakers and hearers. She couched her study within Gricean pragmatics and politeness theory, arguing that speakers’ overt use of tú constitutes a violation of Grice’s maxim of Quantity, which invites the hearer to draw an implicature, and that speakers’ referential choices serve to negotiate face. Stewart shows how Spanish speakers’ use of tú to refer implicitly to themselves, to the hearer, or to people in general, serves as a multifunctional Gricean hedge that allows them to establish common ground, appeal to solidarity, and construct a social identity while negotiating both their face and that of their interlocutor. Sinnott (2013) proposes that the second-person singular address forms tú (T) and usted (V) in Castilian Spanish contribute to utterance meaning by generating conventional and conversational implicatures. Analysis of native speaker data of two types, oral interviews and self-report written questionnaires, led her to conclude that V conventionally implicated social distance between speaker and hearer regardless of context, whereas no meaning was conventionally implicated by T, as all cases were context dependent. Sinnott reports that motivations for distance marking via V included respect and anger, and that the T form relies on its opposition with V, along with the context, to conversationally implicate meanings including intimacy or disrespect. Noteworthy is Sinnott’s implementation of both conversational and conventional implicature (following Potts, 2005) to explain the social meanings encoded by the address forms, a step beyond seeking sociolinguistic factors to account for T/V usage. 30

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

2.8.4

Irony and doctor-patient interactions

Rodríguez Rosique and Provencio Garrigos (2012) propose that ironic language produces particularized conversational implicatures resulting from the outward flouting of Grice’s Quality maxim, ‘do not say what you believe to be false.’ However, they argue that the Quality maxim has greater explanatory power by considering the contrastive nature of irony and humor, which not only affects the interpretation of what is said but also ‘inverts’ the inferences that would normally be necessary for calculating meaning in ordinary conversation.The authors illustrate how infraction of Quality affects other pragmatic principles, including Levinson’s I[nformativeness] and M[anner] Principles.They offer an alternative account for irony, whereby a Quality flouting triggers an inference, which is the opposite of what is inferred from the utterance.This occurs in the following example, where the second speaker violates Quality in describing his job, but also Levinson’s M-principle, as a stereotypical situation is depicted in a marked (prolix, unusual) manner (p. 257, my translation): (34) —No te había visto desde que acabamos el Máster. ¿A qué te dedicas ahora? ‘I hadn’t seen you since we finished our master’s.What are you doing now?’ —Soy especialista en gestión domiciliaria de servicios alimenticios con vehículo de tracción motora.Trabajo en Telepizza. ‘I’m a specialist in domiciliary management of food services with a traction motor vehicle. I work at Telepizza.’ Similarly, these authors view humoristic language as a flouting of the Quality maxim, but additionally as involving the substitution of activated semantic frames with new frames that contrast with addressees’ expectations.This study illustrates how Gricean and neo-Gricean principles along with frame-based knowledge can account for non-literal meaning (see also Ruiz Gurillo, 2010). Hardin (2013) analyzed patient complaints and expressions of conventional folk wisdom in advice giving in doctor-patient interactions in a hospital in Eastern Ecuador. She shows how implied information in patients’ complaints to physicians often meant something different from their literal meaning. Oftentimes patients’ implicatures arose from following or violating Grice’s Relation maxim for complaints, and his Quantity maxim for folk wisdom. While doctors initially misunderstood patients, they managed to work out their implicatures and diagnose their diseases appropriately.This study shows how medical complaints may be realized and interpreted differently due to disparate cultural beliefs, while highlighting the importance of inferences and awareness of dialectal variation for understanding speakers’ intended messages in Spanishspeaking communities.

3

Methodological considerations

One significant methodological issue involves how we recognize and calculate implicatures given the fact that much of language use may be considered indirect (e.g., politeness strategies), and any indirectness in speech could be viewed as generating implicatures. Furthermore, recall that one of the defining features of conversational implicatures is their indeterminacy (i.e., utterances can generate a number of possible readings). Additionally, the underdeterminacy of linguistic expressions, or the gap between the linguistic content of an utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate, requires a process of enrichment. For instance, Hall (2014) explains that, in uttering “Everyone’s ready,” the hearer must determine what everyone is ready 31

Blackwell

for, and also what the restricted domain of people the expression everyone refers to, “since the speaker does not mean everyone in the world” (p. 2). (Whereas relevance theorists refer to such enriched pragmatic meanings as explicature—or the development of logical form, neo-Gricean theorists consider them generalized conversational implicatures or GCIs). Herein lies the problem: utterances can potentially have a number of intentional meanings, which (especially for particularized conversational implicatures or PCIs), could depend on any number of contextual factors for enrichment, some more relevant than others. Grice (1975) briefly addresses this issue, maintaining that “a conversational implicature must be capable of being worked out” by relying on the following “data”: (1) the conventional meaning of the words used, together with the identity of any references that may be involved; (2) the CP and its maxims; (3) the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance; (4) other items of background knowledge; and (5) the fact (or supposed fact) that all relevant items falling under the previous headings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume this to be the case. (Grice, 1975, p. 50) Grice’s brief sketch suggests that the calculation of implicatures requires access to and consideration of the entire context in which the utterances were produced. Thus, ideally, analysts carrying out research on implicatures (particularly PCIs) should base their analyses on not only transcribed data, but also on the actual recordings of the speech to be analyzed with all of its component features. Working out implicatures also requires understanding references made in discourse, which oftentimes necessitates familiarity with the speakers, their relationships with their interlocutors, their common ground and shared assumptions (or lack thereof), and knowledge of their sociocultural background.Additionally, felicitous recognition and interpretation of implicated meanings can often be confirmed via analysis of interlocutors’ sequential utterances (i.e. turns) in conversational interaction. Valid and reliable interpretation of implicatures also requires that hearers and analysts possess native-like competence of the language variety used. This methodological observation is supported by the fact that, for instance, native speakers of Spanish do not understand all varieties of Spanish with equal efficiency and accuracy, and particularly non-literal, innovative uses of Spanish in different dialects and sociolects. Furthermore, with regard to contextual factors and speaker-competence, Kecskes (2019) points to evidence that non-native-speaking interlocutors in intercultural interactions rely more on the semantic meanings of words than on contextually supported pragmatic meanings, noting that the actual situational context does not always aid non-native speakers in the calculation of implicatures, as it does in native-speaker interactions. Thus, the competence of native and non-native language users alike must be considered in analyses of implicatures and their interpretations. Finally, because of the indeterminacy and underdeterminacy of implicatures, achieving valid and reliable analyses often requires dual or even three-way confirmation by analysts who are equally competent in the language and privy to the entire, full-fledged context of use. Grice envisioned his theory as accounting for implicatures arising in conversational discourse. As a result, one might assume that implicatures are only produced in naturally occurring conversations. However, if implicatures are implied meanings that are additional to, or other than the conventional meaning of the words uttered, we can expect to find implicatures in potentially all genres of language use, including both spontaneous and elicited speech, interviews, legal and political discourse, spoken and written narratives, and social media. This observation suggests simultaneously that implicatures are not (or at least should not be) calculated from constructed 32

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

examples, and that fabricated and experimentally controlled data may not lend themselves to analyses employing a Gricean framework. Notwithstanding, generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs), which purportedly do not require specific contexts to be generated, lend themselves to experimental testing providing significant insights. Recent experimental work on the GCIs, particularly on scalar implicatures, has shed light on the comprehension of such implicatures as well as the question of whether there is evidence for GCI theory versus relevance theory (see, e.g., Meibauer & Steinbach, 2011; Bezuidenhout, 2017). A final methodological issue lies in what Mazzone (2014) calls “the continuum problem,” referring to the difficulty in drawing a line between fixed lexical meanings (i.e., semantics) and pragmatic meanings calculated via pragmatic inference (i.e, implicatures). Simply stated, the problem is how to account for word uses whose meanings are partially conventionalized (often due to frequent repetition by speakers), and thus how to distinguish between conventionalized meanings and implicatures. Mazzone suggests that in cases of uncertainty between “conventionalisation” and implicatures, we should “recognize that there are intermediate cases between pure lexicalised meanings and pure implicature-like cases” (p. 55). As a solution, he offers an account whereby implicature-like effects can be explained as resulting from our schemata and associative cognitive processes, an approach that offers a convincing cognitively-based solution to this ongoing debate.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Frequent criticisms of Gricean pragmatics are the impressionistic nature of Gricean-based analyses and the framework’s lack of predictive ability. However, both classic Gricean and neo-Gricean models provide general heuristics for better understanding speakers’ messages, explaining contrasts in meaning arising from their choice of alternate forms, and examining the role of context in calculating intentional meaning. The fact that Gricean-based approaches attempt to address aspects of language use that other subfields of linguistics and pragmatics do not directly tackle suggests the need for more research integrating Gricean models with other analytical frameworks (e.g., speech acts, politeness theory, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics) and implementing a variety of methodologies for gathering and analyzing linguistic data. Next, I outline some possible directions future studies could take. Research on Spanish based on Gricean pragmatics has primarily focused on what speakers intend to communicate, suggesting that more work needs to be done on native Spanish speakers’ (as well as Spanish L2 learners’) interpretations of implicit meanings in discourse, involving both speakers’ adherence and non-adherence to Gricean maxims. Such studies could incorporate matched-guise-style methods and multimedia comprehension tests to determine how hearers interpret implied meanings from uses of, for instance, figurative language, or in political discourse, debates, courtroom interactions, and advertising and social media language use. For example, a study on innovative versus more widely used and familiar Spanish metaphors could shed light on how easily they are interpreted and the extent to which hearers perceive certain figures of speech as being lexicalized, as opposed to having meanings that must be inferred from the context.Additionally, experimental studies on the language of political interviews and courtroom trials could reveal individual and group differences with regard to hearers’ perceptions and interpretations of evaluative, persuasive, and frame-inducing language, as well as linguistic evidence of speech participants’ underlying cultural biases and stereotypical assumptions (see, e.g., Félix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 2017, on elicited data for pragmatic language comprehension; and Taverniers, 2017, on interpreting metaphor). Future research in pragmatics could benefit from adopting more integrative frameworks combining the notions of Gricean implicature in studies on the realization of different speech acts 33

Blackwell

in Spanish (e.g., how conversational principles are exploited in direct and indirect speech acts; see Chapter 2 on speech acts, this volume), in the expression of (im)politeness, and in the use of Spanish for social purposes, such as constructing and maintaining social bonds. For example, more studies could be carried out like that of Hardin (2013), which demonstrated that the patients’ complaints to doctors were often initially misinterpreted due to their use of non-literal language to refer to ailments. Her study illustrates both the usefulness of an implicature-based framework for the analysis of specific speech acts and the need to focus on the inferences drawn by interlocutors in service-related, medical, and workplace interactions where misunderstandings could occur. Studies focusing on speakers’ use of alternate forms (e.g., expression and omission of Spanish subject pronouns, tú versus usted) are often studied from the perspective of generative syntax, variationist sociolinguistics, or cognitive linguistics, without considering discourse-pragmatic approaches to language, including approaches based on Gricean theories. More work is needed on Spanish combining other linguistic subfields and approaches with Gricean pragmatics, since considering the roles of implicature and inferential processes can provide a more complete account of the linguistic choices Spanish speakers make when communicating and their associated meanings. Finally, more work should be done combining cognitive linguistics with Gricean pragmatics. For instance, Blackwell (2018) shows how the activation of cognitive frames, evoking mental representations of stereotypical situations and entities, influences speakers’ informativeness, and thus their adherence to the neo-Gricean I[nformativeness] principle in their use of referring expressions in discourse.The flip side of this issue is how and to what extent interlocutors draw inferences based on what is said on the one hand, and stereotypical assumptions and expectations on the other. Because stereotypical assumptions and underlying cognitive and cultural frames vary both cross-dialectally and cross-linguistically, more research on how such knowledge structures affect Spanish speakers’ generation of implicatures and their interpretation by hearers is needed.

Note 1 Notwithstanding, theorists have argued and experimental research has shown that GCIs can be dependent on the context of use (e.g., Bezuidenhout, 2017; Huang, 2017b).

Further reading Breheny, R., Katsos, N., & Williams, J. (2006). Are generalized scalar implicatures generated by default? An on-line investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition, 100, 434–463. Three on-line studies of prototypical cases of generalized scalar implicatures were designed to test the context-dependence and autonomy of the implicatures. Results suggest generalized implicatures depend on conversational context and show none of the autonomy predicted by the default view. Cap, P., & Dynel, M. (Eds.). (2017). Implicitness: From lexis to discourse.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. This volume focuses on defining implicitness and exploring its communicative manifestations. Contributions examine expressions of implicitness (including implicatures) using various analytical approaches to investigate, for instance, pronouns, null subjects, lexical narrowing, untruthfulness in figures of speech, impoliteness, and silence, oftentimes integrating Gricean pragmatics.The studies identify theoretical and methodological issues that are applicable cross-linguistically. Mayol, L., & Castroviejo, E. (2013). How to cancel and implicature. Journal of Pragmatics, 50(1), 84–104. This study examines when cancellation of scalar implicatures is an acceptable discourse move and provides experimental evidence supporting the claim that the felicity of a scalar implicature cancellation depends on the discourse structure. The authors demonstrate that cancellation is acceptable only if it addresses a Question Under Discussion that differs from the previous one and how their approach distinguishes cancellations from self-repairs. 34

Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

References Amaral, P. (2013). The pragmatics of number: The evaluative properties of vivir +V[Gerund]. Journal of Pragmatics, 51, 105–121. Bach, K. (1999).The myth of conversational implicature. Linguistics and Philosophy, 22(4), 327–366. Bach, K. (2006).The top 10 misconceptions about implicature. In B. J. Birner & G. L.Ward (Eds.), Drawing the boundaries of meaning: Neo-Gricean studies in pragmatics and semantics in honor of Laurence R. Horn (pp. 21–30).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bach, K. (2012). Saying, meaning, and implicating. In K.Allan & K. M. Jaszczolt (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 47–67). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bezuidenhout,A. (2017). Contextualism and semantic minimalism. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 21–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Birner, B. J. (2013). Introduction to pragmatics. Malden, MA:Wiley-Blackwell. Blackwell, S. E. (2000). Anaphora interpretations in Spanish utterances and the neo-Gricean pragmatic theory. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 389–424. Blackwell, S. E. (2001).Testing the neo-Gricean pragmatic theory:The influence of consistency constraints on implicatures of coreference. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 901–941. Blackwell, S. E. (2003). Implicatures in discourse:The case of Spanish NP anaphora.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Blackwell, S. E. (2009).What’s in a pear film narrative? Framing and the power of expectation in Spanish. Spanish in Context, 6(2), 249–299. Blackwell, S. E. (2018). Frames of reference and antecedentless anaphora in Spanish conversation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 42(2), 283–305. Blakemore, D. (1987). Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, D. (2002). Relevance and linguistic meaning:The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Briz, A. (2001). El español coloquial en la conversación: Esbozo de pragmagramática. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel. Calvo Pérez, J. (1994). Introducción a la pragmática del español. Madrid: Cátedra. Escandell-Vidal,V., & Vilinbakhova, E. (2018). Coordinated tautologies in Spanish and Russian. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(3), 315–348. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2017). Elicited data. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 27–40). London: Routledge. Fernández Ruiz, G. (2018). Decir sin decir: Implicatura convencional y expresiones que la generan en español. Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México. Gennari, S. (2002). Spanish past and future tenses: Less (semantics) is more. In J. Gutiérrez-Rexach (Ed.), From words to discourse:Trends in Spanish semantics and pragmatics (pp. 21–36).Amsterdam: Elsevier. Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review, 66(3), 377–388. Grice, H. P. (1961).The causal theory of perception. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 35, 121–152. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York:Academic Press. Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, A. (2014). ‘Free’ enrichment and the nature of pragmatic constraints. International Review of Pragmatics, 6(1), 1–28. Hardin, K. J. (2013).What goes unsaid: Expression of complaints and advice about health in Eastern Ecuador. Intercultural Pragmatics, 10(4), 569–591. Horn, L. R. (1984).Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicatures. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic applications (pp. 11–42).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Horn, L. R. (2005). Current issues in neo-Gricean pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics, 2(2), 191–204. Horn, L. R. (2012). Implying and inferring. In K.Allan & K. M. Jaszczolt (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 69–86). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huang,Y. (2014). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huang,Y. (2017a). Neo-Gricean pragmatics. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 47–78). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huang,Y. (2017b). Conversational implicature. InY. Huang (Ed.),The Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 156–179). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kecskes, I. (2019). Impoverished pragmatics? The semantics-pragmatics interface from an intercultural perspective. Intercultural Pragmatics, 16(5), 489–515. Keenan, E. O. (1976).The universality of conversational postulates. Language in Society, 5(1), 67–80. 35

Blackwell

Kiefer, F. (1979).What do conversational maxims explain. Linguisticae Investigationes, 3, 57–74. Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S. C. (1989). Pragmática (A. Rubiés Mirabet, Trans.). Barcelona: Teide. (Original work published 1983). Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mazzone, M. (2014). The continuum problem: Modified Occam’s razor and the conventionalisation of meaning. International Review of Pragmatics, 6, 29–58. Meibauer, J., & Steinbach, M. (2011).  Introduction: Experimental research at the pragmatics/semantics interface. In J. Meibauer & M. Steinbach (Eds.), Experimental pragmatics/semantics (pp. 1–18). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Potts, C. (2005). The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reyes, G. (1994). La pragmática lingüística: El estudio del uso del lenguaje (2nd ed.). Barcelona: Montesinos. Reyes, G. (2002). Metapragmática: Lenguaje sobre lenguaje, ficciones, figuras.Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, Secretariado de Publicaciones e Intercambio Editorial. Rodríguez Rosique, S., & Provencio Garrigos, H. (2012). Gigantes contra molinos: Una explicación pragmática de la ironía y el humor en publicidad. Revista de Investigación Lingüística, 15, 1139–1146. Rosales Sequeiros, X. (2011). On metaphor, relevance, and pragmatic interpretation in Spanish. The Modern Language Review, 106(4), 1028–1053. Rubio Vallejo, D. (2017).Actuality effects as conversational implicatures. Journal of Pragmatics, 112, 44–67. Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2010). Para una aproximación neogriceana a la ironía en español. Revista Española de Lingüística, 40(2), 95–124. Sadock, J. M. (1978). On testing for conversational implicature. In P. Cole (Ed.), Syntax and semantics 9: Pragmatics (pp. 281–298). New York:Academic Press. Schwenter, S.A. (2002). Discourse markers and the PA/SN distinction. Journal of Linguistics, 38, 43–69. Sinnott, S. (2013). The role of implicature in Castilian pronominal address forms. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 6(2), 301–324. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Stewart, M. (2003). ‘Pragmatic weight’ and face: Pronominal presence and the case of the Spanish second person singular subject pronoun tú. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(2), 191–206. Taverniers, M. (2017). Metaphor in pragmatics. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 323–340). London: Routledge. Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics:The semantics of human interaction (2nd ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zipf, G. K. (1949). Human behavior and the principle of least effort. Cambridge, MA:Addison-Wesley.

36

2 Speech act research in Spanish María Elena Placencia and Hebe Powell

1

Introduction

The study of speech acts is a vibrant area in pragmatics research. As a unit of analysis, the speech act has proven to be very fruitful for Hispanists and other scholars. It derives from speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), which, together with Grice’s (1975) theory of implicature, is linked to the origins of pragmatics as a discipline.The notion of speech acts foregrounds the performative nature of language in use: when we say something, we are also performing an action. In daily life, these actions include greeting, thanking, requesting, and apologizing, among many others.We may ask: how do we perform these different actions? What (non)verbal strategies do we employ and what factors influence our choices? Further, what do these choices tell us about how we manage relationships? These are all important research questions addressed in pragmatics research. In this chapter we aim to provide an overview of work on speech acts among Hispanists (Section 2). We first look at key notions within speech act theory, as formulated by Austin (1962) (Section 2.1) and Searle (1969, 1975, 1976) (Section 2.2).This is followed by a consideration of some limitations of the theory (Section 2.3). Methodological trends in the study of speech acts are briefly outlined in Section 3, and, finally, future directions are discussed in the last section (Section 4).

2

Review of existing research

2.1 Speech act theory: Austin 2.1.1

Language as action

Austin’s (1962) view that words have the power to transform the world—that saying is doing—is at the heart of speech act theory. He based it on his observation of ritualized activities such as officiating a wedding. For these actions to be performed successfully, specific words need to be pronounced by people who have the relevant authority, at the right time, etc. The transformative power of words is more obvious in institutional contexts where speech acts are highly conventionalized. Notwithstanding, it can also be seen in everyday life. For instance, if we make a request of a friend and he/she complies with it, our words have, at least partially, brought about the behavior we were seeking. 37

Placencia and Powell

2.1.2

Components of the speech act

Austin’s (1962) theory of speech acts involves a distinction between three types of acts: the ‘locutionary’ (the act of saying something; the words we utter with a certain meaning), the ‘illocutionary’ (the use we make of speech on a particular occasion, or the function it fulfils on that occasion) and the ‘perlocutionary’ (the effect that our words have on the hearer).The act of saying is a ‘locution,’ the performed act is an ‘illocution,’ and Austin refers to the functions of speech as illocutionary ‘forces’ (p. 100).At present, the terms ‘speech act’ and ‘illocutionary force’ tend to be used interchangeably.The notion of perlocution, on the other hand, has to do with “what we achieve by saying something” (p. 109, his italics). For example, if you request a pay raise and you receive it, the perlocutionary act would be that of persuading your boss to give you a pay raise. The locutionary-illocutionary distinction has been central in pragmatics to describe the fact that we can use the same words in different contexts with different functions, and to describe indirect speech acts (Section 2.2.). For example, the utterance ¡Hace mucho frío! ‘It’s so cold,’ can simply be an instance of whining if uttered to a friend while walking in the park, but it can also constitute an indirect request for the heat to be turned up in a different context.

2.1.3

Felicity conditions

Another novel concept within Austin’s theory is that a speech act can only be judged as being ‘(in)felicitous’ or (un)happy (rather than true or false). If, for example, a compliment is issued, but it is not interpreted as such by the recipient, it is deemed infelicitous. For a speech act to be successful or happy then, certain ‘felicity conditions’ must be met: A.1 There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect. A.2 The particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. B.1 The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and B.2 Completely. (Abridged from Austin, 1962, pp. 14–15) ‘Misfires’ occur when the speech act is carried out, but “without effect” (p. 26); for example, if the person officiating a wedding ceremony does not have the authority to do so (Condition A.2), or, if the ceremony is not conducted correctly or completely (Conditions B.1/B.2). Austin also introduced the notion of ‘uptake’ when considering speech acts like betting (e.g., Te apuesto $20 que . . .‘I bet you $20 that . . .’), which require the hearer to accept the bet for it to be a successful speech act.This notion is important as it highlights the role of the hearer in the construction of speech actions.

2.2

Speech act theory: Searle

Searle (1969, 1975, 1976) is credited with having developed Austin’s speech act theory into a more general theory of human communication by expanding its scope beyond Austin’s original focus on mainly ritualistic acts.Within this general theory, the illocutionary act constitutes the “basic unit of human communication” (Searle, 1976, p. 1) and Austin’s locutionary act becomes the ‘propositional content.’ In other words, the basic notions that Searle works with are the propositional content and the illocutionary act or force. 38

Speech act research in Spanish

Building on Austin (1962), Searle (1969) aimed first to identify the conditions that are “necessary and sufficient” (p. 54) for the successful performance of different illocutionary acts; this allowed him to move from conditions to speech act rules and to propose criteria for a principled taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Another of his contributions is his characterization of ‘indirect speech acts’ (Searle, 1975), a category of speech acts that has had a prominent place in research within this area of (Spanish) pragmatics.

2.2.1

Illocutionary act conditions

Taking promises as a case study, Searle (1969) first clarifies his aim to look only at clear-cut, explicit cases (p. 55). He goes on to outline the following conditions, which constitute the basis of his speech act rules: Propositional content conditions 1 S expresses the proposition that p in the utterance of T (where T is sentence ‘x’). 2 In expressing that p, S predicates a future act A of S. Preparatory conditions 1 H would prefer S’s doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H would prefer his doing A to his not doing A. 2 It is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events. Sincerity condition 1 S intends to do A (this entails that S is able to do A). Essential condition 2 S intends that the utterance of T will place him under an obligation to do A (i.e., S undertakes an obligation to carry out the promised action). (Adapted from Searle, 1969, pp. 57–61)

2.2.2

Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts

In comparing illocutionary acts, Searle (1976) identified various dimensions of differences on the basis of which he proposed five categories of illocutionary acts (Table 2.1). Principal among these is the ‘illocutionary point,’ an aspect of the illocutionary force.

Table 2.1 Categories of illocutionary acts Categories

Examples

Illocutionary point

Representatives/ Assertives Directives Commissives Expressives Declarations

Assert

S commits himself/herself to something being the case

Request Promise Apologize Declare (a session open)

S attempts to get H to do something S commits himself/herself to a future course of action S expresses an attitude toward a certain state of affairs S brings about a state of affairs into existence by declaring it to exist

Source: Adapted from Searle, 1976, pp.10–13

39

Placencia and Powell

While Searle’s classification is not the only one (see, e.g., Bach & Harnish, 1979), within pragmatics it has been highly influential, serving as the point of departure for multiple empirical studies.1

2.2.3

Indirect speech acts

Searle (1975) observes that there are speech acts where a speaker “utters a sentence and means exactly and literally what he says” (1975, p. 3).These are cases where there is a clear correspondence between the (literal) meaning of the sentence uttered and the speaker’s intended meaning (e.g., Te prometo venir mañana ‘I promise to come tomorrow’ in the right context, and if not uttered in a sarcastic way, can be regarded as an instance of a clear-cut promise). However, there are other cases when there is no such correspondence. For instance, concerning requests, such as Mañana tengo que trabajar ‘I have to work tomorrow,’ uttered by a woman to her partner who is reading a book in bed and who responds by switching off the light, is an assertive. In practice, nonetheless, it constitutes a request for the person to switch off the light. Searle refers to instances like the latter as ‘indirect speech acts’: “cases in which one illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way of performing another” (p. 31). How hearers arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning is something Searle discusses in relation to mutually shared knowledge, in conjunction with the hearer’s “general powers of rationality and inference” (p. 32). As to the motivations behind the use of indirect forms, he suggests that chief among them is politeness (p. 51). Searle’s analysis and key notions provided the basis for Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper’s (1989) well-known coding scheme for requests, which distinguishes three main categories: direct, conventionally indirect, and non-conventionally indirect, the first two with a number of subtypes.

2.3

Limitations of speech act theory

Numerous criticisms have been levelled at speech act theory—particularly Searle’s conception of the theory. From the perspective of the study of language use as a social phenomenon, the problem with focusing on individual speech acts is that it engenders a theory of action rather than interaction (see, e.g., Bickhard & Campbell, 1992), offering only “an individualistic . . . view of human sociality and communication” (Rosaldo, 1982, p. 228). Searle’s (1969, 1976) suggestion that the illocutionary act is the basic unit of linguistic communication can, therefore, be contested. Indeed, reflecting the view of language as interaction, the work of conversation analysts demonstrates the importance of other units of analysis such as the ‘adjacency pair.’ Thomas (1995) highlights a key issue with Searle’s (1976) conditions and speech act rules; namely, they were developed using idealized cases that rarely appear in real-world interactions. Therefore, his conditions and rules are of limited value, as Thomas demonstrates with respect to apologies. Additionally, the label ‘speech act’ reflects Austin and Searle’s main interest in spoken speech; however, we also do things via the written medium, which, at present, is the main medium of interaction in multiple genres of digital communication. It is a relatively easy step to accommodate text within Austin and Searle’s theories; however, it is less clear how to deal with the multimodality that characterizes a great deal of online communication. Emojis, for example, are sometimes used in lieu of verbal means to congratulate 👏, compliment 👌, etc. Grundlingh (2017) suggests that even some types of memes can be regarded as speech acts (p. 159).We ask: can Searle’s speech act conditions account for these and other digital speech acts (Ambroise, 2016)? Concerning Searle’s (1976) taxonomy, a particular criticism is that certain speech acts, such as offers, contain elements from more than one category (Hancher, 1979). Indeed, attempting to establish non-overlapping categories seems to be problematic and a more flexible approach, 40

Speech act research in Spanish

recognizing that speech acts share a pragmatic space (Jucker & Taavitsainen, 2000) may be preferable. Also, the distinction between interpersonal/private and public speech acts, not considered in standard classifications, seems to be a useful and relevant one (Section 2.4.1). Finally, in relation to indirect speech acts, in suggesting that politeness is the chief motivation for their use (Section 2.2.3), Searle (1975) appears to imply that this is a universal phenomenon. This has been contested with respect to different languages, including Spanish (e.g., Fitch, 1998). Furthermore, authors like Culpeper and Haugh (2014) find the concept of (in)directness problematic and prefer instead the notion of pragmatic explicitness to refer to degrees of transparency of the illocutionary force of a given act.

2.4 Speech act studies among Hispanists In this section, we aim to show the wealth of research that has been carried out among Hispanists within the past 15 years. For a detailed overview of earlier work, the reader is referred to Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2005). It should be clarified that speech act research among Hispanists is a vast area that has been conducted within different subfields of pragmatics (Placencia & García, 2012). Here, we mainly draw on works from sociopragmatics; pragmalinguistics; cross-cultural, sociocultural, and variational pragmatics perspectives; and, to a lesser extent, from critical discourse analysis. We start with a description of some general trends in speech act research by Hispanists (Section 2.4.1).We then consider some of the work available according to speech act categories in (Section 2.4.2).

2.4.1

General trends

Speech act research can be classified according to different dimensions. In this section we aim to give a bird’s eye view of the area, highlighting general trends according to the following dimensions: the regional varieties examined; the focus of the study (single-language, cross-linguistic/ cultural variation or regional variation); the distinction between interpersonal and public speech acts; the medium of interaction; nonverbal features and multimodality; and methodology. 2.4.1.1 REGIONAL VARIETIES OF SPANISH

From an initial focus on Peninsular Spanish and a relatively small number of Latin American varieties of Spanish (e.g., Chilean, Ecuadorian, Mexican, and Peruvian) (Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005), we can see that researchers are turning their attention to an ever-increasing range of different Spanishes and their subvarieties.These include, for example, Colombian (e.g., Velásquez Upegui, 2016), Cuban (e.g., Ruzickova, 2007), Dominican (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2008a, 2011), and U.S. Spanish (e.g., Michno, 2017).The latter variety, in fact, represents a growing area in speech act research (see Pinto, 2012, for an overview and Moreno-Fernández and Dumitrescu’s (2016, eds.) Bibliografía lingüística del español en los Estados Unidos, available at: http:// observatoriocervantes.org/bsus/bsus.php). 2.4.1.2 SINGLE-LANGUAGE, CROSS-LINGUISTIC AND INTRALINGUAL STUDIES ON REGIONAL VARIATION

Single-language studies on speech acts in Spanish abound. A prolific researcher in this area is Carmen García, whose pioneering work since the late 1980s covers almost the whole gamut of speech acts (see examples in Section 2.4.2).There are multiple cross-linguistic and 41

Placencia and Powell

intralingual studies, too.The former, often also referred to as cross-cultural, are studies that focus on variation between (a variety of) a language—Spanish in this case—and one or more different languages, whereas the latter look at variation across (sub)national varieties of a single language (see Chapter 15 on pragmatic variation, this volume). Concerning cross-linguistic studies, the main focus of attention in the early years was the comparison of varieties of Spanish, particularly Peninsular Spanish, with (varieties of) English (Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005).Within the past 15 years, however, it has widened to several other languages. Peninsular Spanish retains a strong interest, but now in contrast with, among others: German in Siebold (2007) on apologies; Korean in Choi (2008) on complimenting; Romanian in Dumitrescu (2010) on well-wishing; Brazilian Portuguese in Gallardo (2014) on email requests; and (mainland) Chinese in Querol Bataller (2016) also on requests (Section 2.4.2.1). In relation to other varieties of Spanish, contrastive studies include, for example, refusals in Mexican Spanish and American English (Félix-Brasdefer, 2008b), and delayed refusals in Colombian Spanish and Italian (Cortés Velásquez, 2017). With respect to regional variation, initial studies among Hispanists in the 1990s focused on variation between Peninsular Spanish and a few Latin American varieties of Spanish (Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005). Since then, increasing attention has been given to variation across Latin American varieties, as well as regional variation at the subnational level.The studies available since 2005 include, among several others, Placencia (2005) on requests in Ecuadorian (Quito) and Peninsular (Madrid) Spanish; Félix-Brasdefer (2008a) on refusals in Mexican (Tlaxcala) and Dominican (Santiago) Spanish; Placencia and Fuentes Rodríguez (2013) on compliments in Ecuadorian (Quito) and Peninsular (Seville) Spanish; and Félix-Brasdefer and Yates (2019) on requests in Argentinean (Buenos Aires), Mexican (Mexico City), and Peninsular (Seville) Spanish (see overview in Schneider & Placencia, 2017). There is also an increasing interest in variation within national boundaries as explored by a number of studies comparing, for example, requests in service encounters in Quito and Manta (Placencia, 2008); Mexico City and Guanajuato (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015); and Valencia and Granada (Bataller, 2015). 2.4.1.3 (INTER)PERSONAL VS. PUBLIC SPEECH ACTS

The interpersonal and public speech acts distinction (see, e.g., Medina López, 2014) relates to the realization of speech acts among friends, colleagues at work, etc. in everyday contexts vs. those taking place in the public arena, enacted by politicians, celebrities, etc.While the interpersonal has been the default domain of analysis in speech act research since the 1990s, increasing attention has been paid to public speech acts facilitated by the media, and by social media more recently. Categories of public speech acts that have received attention include political (e.g., Bolívar, 2008, 2010; Medina López, 2014) and corporate (e.g., Fernández-Vallejo, 2017) acts.Among these, studies on apologies and insults appear to predominate (Sections 2.4.2.2.3 and 2.4.2.2.4 respectively). 2.4.1.4 MEDIUM OF INTERACTION

From an early focus on spoken speech acts in face-to-face interaction, increased attention is being paid to written speech, particularly in digital discourse. Examples of the latter include works on advice-giving in YahooRespuestas (Placencia, 2012); requests in email exchanges (Gallardo, 2014; Lorenzo-Dus & Bou-Franch, 2013); compliments on Facebook (Maíz-Arévalo & García-Gómez, 2013); directives in digital tourism (Hernández Toribio & Mariottini, 2018); greetings in SMS exchanges (Cantamutto, 2019); and refusals to invitations on Facebook 42

Speech act research in Spanish

(González García & García Ramón, 2017).There are also some studies on telephone interaction, such as Márquez Reiter (2008) on apologies. 2.4.1.5 NONVERBAL FEATURES AND MULTIMODALITY

Most studies available on face-to-face interaction look only at verbal strategies. A few, like Bolívar (2010) on public apologies, take into account nonverbal behavior such as hand shaking (Section 2.4.2). However, the greatest area of innovation in recent years, relating to spoken interaction, appears to be in the analysis of prosody in speech act realization, particularly requests. Technological advances in the software available to examine this aspect of speech are undoubtedly behind this trend. Among the first is Félix-Brasdefer’s (2011) study on prosodic features in the production of requests in Mexican (Oaxaca) and Dominican (Santiago) Spanish (Section 2.4.2). Méndez Vallejo (2013) (Section 2.4.2) and Velásquez Upegui (2016) also look at prosodic features of requests in varieties of Colombian Spanish, whereas Martín Butragueño (2016) focuses on expressives in Mexican Spanish (Mexico City). Nonverbal aspects of written speech acts, such as the use of prosodic spelling (e.g., vowel prolongation;Androutsopoulos, 2000) have started to be examined in digital communication, particularly in social media.Also, social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram provide users with reactions such as likes and hearts that can be used, for example, to signal compliment acceptance. Among Hispanists, some of these features appear in Maíz-Arévalo and García-Gómez’s (2013) study on Facebook, and Placencia’s (2019) on Instagram, for example.The latter study also shows the use of emojis and hashtags as compliments and supportive moves. Sampietro (2017), on the other hand, looks specifically at mitigation and other functions of emojis with different speech acts on WhatsApp.

2.4.2

Works according to speech act categories

With reference to Searle’s (1976) classification (Section 2.2), the categories that have been given the most attention among Hispanists are directives and expressives, as well as commissives, to a lesser extent. In the following, we offer a selection of examples from these three categories. In each category we provide a brief overview of the work available but, due to space constraints, we shall focus only on speech acts that have received the most attention within each category. We do not aim to provide an exhaustive list of studies, but rather seek to give the reader a flavor of the breadth of work available. 2.4.2.1 DIRECTIVES

Research in this area is dominated by studies examining requests and, in line with BlumKulka et al. (1989), the most common foci of analysis are levels of (in)directness and the use of mitigation devices.These two aspects are often studied in relation to micro-social factors (e.g., social distance and power), situational factors (e.g., type of request), and sometimes also in relation to macrosocial factors (e.g., gender). It should be noted, nonetheless, that in the study of mitigation (atenuación) and intensification among Hispanists, the work of the Spanish research group Val.Es.Co (www.uv.es/corpusvalesco/), in particular, has been highly influential.2 Like Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), many authors have examined cross-cultural variation. Querol Bataller’s (2016) work exemplifies this type of study. Using DCTs, the author offers a comparison of requests among speakers of Peninsular Spanish (Valencia) and Chinese (mainland China). Her 43

Placencia and Powell

results show that there are certain similarities across groups, such as the preference for conventionally indirect request strategies.What is perhaps more surprising is that both groups used more direct strategies in situations of equal power, suggesting that, in this context, the two groups view imposition in a similar way. Concerning mitigation, Spanish speakers were observed to use supportive moves far less frequently than the Chinese speakers. With respect to gender, García (2007), for example, examined the realization of requests among Argentinean (Buenos Aires) men and women using role plays. Her study showed that, overall, there were more similarities than differences between the two groups. Some differences identified were that men preferred more direct request strategies while women tended to use more mitigation strategies. Regarding regional variation, one such study is Félix-Brasdefer (2011), mentioned earlier, that looks at prosodic features in the production of direct and conventionally indirect requests among men in Oaxaca (Mexico) and Santiago (Dominican Republic). The author found, for example, that the Mexican participants made use of terminal rising intonation with a mitigating function.The Dominican participants, on the other hand, used falling intonation, which suggests that they were confident their request would be fulfilled. Studies based on naturally occurring data have proved particularly fruitful as a means to study relational work.This approach allows for both the examination of speech acts within the sequences in which they occur and the overall organization of an interaction. It has been especially useful, for example, in examining requests in service encounters (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer & Yates, 2019; Placencia, 2008) where relational work is not carried out during the request for a product or service alone, but can start with the initial exchanges of greetings and how-are-you inquiries, etc. 2.4.2.2 EXPRESSIVES

A wide range of expressive speech acts have been examined. Here, we consider compliments3 and piropos; expressions of thanks, good wishes, greetings (and farewells), apologies, and insults. 2.4.2.2.1 COMPLIMENTS AND PIROPOS

Building on Manes and Wolfson’s (1981) seminal work on complimenting behavior in American English, a number of studies have looked at the realization of compliments in Spanish. A key finding in Manes and Wolfson’s research was that the majority of compliments in their corpus were formulaic, both semantically and syntactically. Most studies among Hispanists have found roughly equivalent compliment formulae and also report on the wide range of intensifiers employed. Recent work includes, among others, Hernández Toribio (2011) on compliments in advertising in women’s magazines, using data from Argentina and Spain; Barros García (2012) on compliments in Peninsular Spanish, based on the Val.Es.Co corpus of colloquial Spanish; Placencia and Fuentes Rodríguez (2013) on compliments among female university students in Quito and Seville, using a DCT; Maíz-Arévalo and García-Gómez (2013) concerning Facebook compliments in Peninsular Spanish and British English; and Placencia (2019) on complimenting behavior on Instagram (Ecuadorian Spanish). Considering the two studies concerning regional pragmatic variation (i.e., Hernández Toribio, 2011; Placencia & Fuentes Rodríguez, 2013), what is striking is that neither study revealed significant differences between groups of speakers. Placencia and Fuentes Rodríguez (2013) noted that although speakers in Quito and Seville exhibited some differences with respect to their use 44

Speech act research in Spanish

of supportive moves, both groups used a very similar set of syntactic structures, albeit some with a different incidence in each group.Also, both used a wide range of intensification mechanisms. Hernández Toribio (2011), similarly, did not find any significant regional differences, noting that globalization of consumerism might be a key factor in this result. In the literature,compliments are normally discussed as constituting the first part of a two-part adjacency pair (compliment-response). However, Rodríguez Alfano and Jiménez Martín (2010), for example, when examining complimenting behaviour among interviewers and informants in the Habla de Monterrey-PRESEEA corpora found that, prototypically, compliments in these corpora occurred over four turns: compliment nonacceptance or downgrading, followed by insistence. A particular type of compliment, the piropo, has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Piropos are “compliments with an amorous or sexual expressive tone usually said by men to women” (Achugar, 2001, p. 127). However, whether or not piropos can be considered as compliments is a matter for debate since, although “poetic” formulations are employed (Níkleva, 2016, p. 338), they more often contain vulgar terms and obscenity and hence, can hardly be considered as reinforcing solidarity, a key function attributed to compliments (Manes & Wolfson, 1981). Giving piropos, nonetheless, is still a common practice in many parts of the Spanish-speaking world and offers a particular insight into gender relations and social expectations. To explore this, Schreier (2005) used a questionnaire to uncover social attitudes toward piropos among men and women in Mérida (Venezuela); particularly, how piropos versus compliments were perceived. Overall, her results showed that while compliments were generally considered polite, piropos normally fell into the realm of impoliteness.4 The work of Fernández del Campo (2011) takes these ideas further by suggesting that the piropo is, in fact, an act of aggression toward women. 2.4.2.2.2 THANKS, GOOD WISHES, AND GREETINGS

This group of expressives has received some attention among Hispanists.Together with apologies (see ahead), they form part of what might be termed ritual politeness (e.g., Bernal, 2007; Dumitrescu, 2010) in that they are often highly formulaic and appear at predictable points during an interaction, usually requiring expected responses. The case of thanking is considered, for example, by de Pablos-Ortega (2010). Specifically, this author asks whether an explicit thanking formula is required to express gratitude. Using a questionnaire consisting of several situations where an opportunity for “thanks” was present but had been omitted, he compared attitudes among speakers of British and American English and Peninsular Spanish. All participants recognized the lack of “thanks” as being impolite but Spanish speakers gave it least the importance.This may be explained by results such as those in a study by García (2016) which used role play to explore how Peruvians express gratitude. Her study showed that effusiveness and enthusiasm were more important to these speakers than the use of gracias ‘thanks.’ Well-wishing is studied by Dumitrescu (2010) among Spanish and Romanian speakers living in Los Angeles.The author found that while both groups considered well-wishing to be required in certain situations, there were more such situations for Romanians. Also, Romanians tended to compose their expressions of good wishes around the themes of longevity and health while Spaniards focused more on immediate happiness and enjoyment (see also Dumitrescu, 2011). Studies concerning greetings are growing in number. Pinto (2008), for example, examines passing greetings in Peninsular Spanish (Valladolid) with reference to usage in American English. Passing greetings are those that occur in brief encounters, through which the speaker “intends to acknowledge H’s presence without initiating a conversation” (p. 376). Pinto found that Spaniards, intriguingly, used farewell expressions such as hasta luego ‘see you later’ as passing greetings, 45

Placencia and Powell

as opposed to hellos or how-are-yous in American English. Pinto observed that American greetings signaled the possibility of access, whereas Spaniards’ farewells did not; rather, they alluded to possible future encounters. Greetings (and leave-takings) have also been studied as constituents of openings (and closings) in different activities (e.g., Bou-Franch, 2011; Gallardo, 2014), particularly service encounters (e.g., Powell & Placencia, 2019). 2.4.2.2.3 APOLOGIES

In common with thanking, apologizing has the function of restoring the balance between the speaker and the addressee; yet, Brown and Levinson (1987 [1978]) considered apologies to be face-threatening acts.This may be so in some contexts; however, apologies are socio-culturally defined and different societies emphasize the face needs of speakers and hearers differently. As a result, this speech act offers a particularly rich area for cross-cultural studies and, among Hispanists, apologies constitute one of the most well-studied speech acts, with several works appearing within the last 15 years. One of these is Márquez Reiter (2008) which analyzes apologies given during non-emergency service calls received by two companies in Montevideo, Uruguay.All the calls concerned a service that had failed to materialize.The author found that the two companies each had characteristic communication styles. Call-takers from one company gave rather bureaucratic responses, formulated in impersonal language that tended to transfer responsibility to a third party, whereas call-takers at the other tended to give longer explanations containing useful information. Most interestingly, the results showed trends that are at odds with those observed in face-to-face studies of apologizing in the same region; e.g., in the lack of overt apologies (Márquez Reiter, 2000). Gómez’s (2009) study of Colombian Spanish (central region) was based on role plays in a variety of contexts. The strategy preferences of Gómez’s subjects were found to be different from those seen among other Spanish-speaking communities. For example, explicit expressions (‘illocutionary force-indicating devices’; IFIDs) of apology such as disculpe ‘I’m sorry’ were rare in contrast to Márquez Reiter (2000) mentioned previously, where this was the most common strategy. Instead, accepting responsibility, explanations, and offering reparation were found to be the most used strategies. Further, more recent studies include those of Wagner and Roebuck (2010) comparing the realization of apologies by speakers of Mexican (Cuernavaca) and Panamanian (Panama City) Spanish, and González-Cruz (2012) among Spaniards (the Canary Islands). This body of work shows that these different groups of speakers, like Uruguayans (Márquez Reiter, 2000), overall prefer the use of IFIDs to make their apologies, although some regional variation was found (e.g., Panamanians used IFIDs significantly less frequently than the Mexicans in Wagner and Roebuck’s (2010) study). One interesting finding arising from González-Cruz’s (2012) work concerns gender: the author found that while women preferred to give explanations, men used humor most frequently. The examples provided so far illustrate interpersonal apologies. Bolívar (2010) takes up the study of public apologies examining this speech act among Latin American heads of state, using their reactions to conflictive episodes in international relations during a selected period of time. Bolívar found that apologies tended not to be offered but demanded, and that they were often not realized explicitly. Rather, they involved a dialogic process over a period of time that could take different forms. The resolution of the conflict was marked by public declarations, with handshakes and other gestures displaying acceptance of the apology. More recently, Medina López (2014), looked at the well-publicized royal apology carried out by King Juan Carlos, in 2012, when his safari trip in Africa was reported in the press at a time of 46

Speech act research in Spanish

crisis in Spain.The king’s apology for his misjudgment served as a tool to restore his public image and that of the monarchy more widely. Nonetheless, the use of public apologies is not limited to institutional public figures; corporations perform them as well, as part of their customer service strategy (e.g., Fernández-Vallejo, 2017), and they are not uncommon among celebrities either—a topic in need of exploration. 2.4.2.2.4 INSULTS

While the expressives considered so far convey a positive psychological state toward the hearer, insults convey a negative attitude in relation to the hearer’s performance, looks, political affiliation, religion, etc. Insults are often carried out indirectly, although there are also many conventionalized forms that would fall under Culpeper’s (2010) conventionalized impoliteness formulae, such as “personalized negative vocatives” (p. 3242). In the realm of public speech acts, Bolívar (e.g., Bolívar, 2008) has led in this area with her analysis of insults in political discourse in Latin America.The extensive work of Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez and her colleagues on verbal aggression and violence must be mentioned, too, where insults figure in a range of genres such as group mailing lists (e.g., Fuentes Rodríguez, 2009), talk shows (e.g., Brenes Peña, 2011), televised political debates (González Sánz, 2010), etc. Insults are also found in several contexts including digital newspapers’ opinion forums (e.g., Mancera Rueda, 2009). Finally, it is important to mention the work of Kaul de Marlangeon (e.g., 2017) who has contributed greatly to the characterization of impolite acts, including insults (see also Bernal, 2007). 2.4.2.2.5 COMMISSIVES

Commissives usually involve speech acts committing a speaker to a future action as in the case of promises and offers, but they can also refer to not doing something as in refusals.Among Hispanists, offers and refusals have received most attention. Concerning offers, two main types have been examined: hospitality and bargaining offers. Barros García (2012) looks at the former (ofrecimientos) among family and friends on the basis of the Val.Es.Co corpus of colloquial Spanish, examining them as instances of face-enhancement politeness (cortesía valorizante/valorizadora) (e.g., Bernal, 2007). Placencia (2016), on the other hand, examines bargaining offers on Mercado Libre Ecuador, which include both reduced-price and bartering offers, and highlights the use of supportive moves as persuasion strategies. Regarding refusals and in relation to face-to-face interactions, we look to the work of FélixBrasdefer (2008a, 2008b, among others) and more recently, Kaiser (2018). On social media, González García and García Ramón (2017) examine refusals of invitations on Facebook.‘Delayed refusals,’ a subtype of refusals, are explored by Cortés Velásquez (2017). Félix-Brasdefer’s (2008a) aforementioned study compared refusals in various contexts among male university students from Mexico and the Dominican Republic, using role plays.The data showed strong variation in refusal strategy according to the context and identified several trends that distinguished speakers of the two varieties of Spanish. For instance, Mexicans used mainly indirect and mitigated strategies, while respondents from the Dominican Republic tended to use direct, unmitigated ones. Kaiser’s (2018) study provides an illuminating examination of refusals to requests, offers, and suggestions among Uruguayan (Rosario) couples.The subjects were women who collected the data themselves using lapel microphones.The author found that the participants in this study did not avoid conflict: they favored direct strategies for refusals, with more aggravating supportive 47

Placencia and Powell

moves and upgraders, as compared to refusals observed in business and other social contexts. These results appear to conform to the expectations of Wolfson’s (1988) ‘bulge theory’ that contends that speakers engage in least relational work with intimates (and distant strangers).

3

Methodological considerations

Considering early work, in broad terms, two main strands of research can be identified from a methodological perspective: studies based either on elicited (e.g., production questionnaires, role plays) or naturally occurring interactions (including recordings and notes from observation). Among these studies, the former strand predominates (Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005) and has experienced continuous development, with the last 15 years witnessing improvements in data collection tools such as spoken/e-Discourse Completion Tests (e-DCTs; Mack & Sykes, 2009). Parallel to this, there is an increasing trend toward the use of naturally occurring data for the analysis of speech acts within specific genres (e.g., service encounters). One key driver has been the appearance of Web 2.0 technologies (Yus, 2011), which gave rise to social media; that, in turn, has provided a wealth of data for analysis (see Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse in Spanish research, this volume). The use of questionnaires (e.g., rating scales) and interviews to reveal attitudes and perceptions of appropriateness is also on the rise (e.g., de Pablos-Ortega, 2010), often used to complement other data collection methods. When making comparisons between studies, it is important to take into account methodological aspects. Several of the authors cited in this chapter mention the possible effects of method on results.We know, for example, that DCTs give access to perceptions of appropriate use rather than actual uses of language (see Chapter 33 on research methods, this volume).5

4

Future directions and conclusion

As we have seen, speech act research continues to be an exciting area of Spanish pragmatics.The range of speech acts and (sub)varieties of Spanish being studied is ever broadening, giving us an understanding of previously neglected or unexplored speech acts, such as passing greetings (Pinto, 2008) and public speech acts (e.g., Bolívar, 2008). New insight has also been gained into how particular speech acts, such as compliments or bargaining offers, translate into the virtual environment, shaped by the opportunities and limitations of different platforms, as well as how emojis and other technological affordances are transforming the way we do things with (non) verbal language. Some of the research has also addressed societal and political issues. The study of hostile actions, like public insults, is leading to new understanding in several areas such as the construction of conflict talk, the social functions of insults, and societal power asymmetries. In addition, work on piropos, for example, has uncovered the ways in which verbal aggression toward women is normalized through cultural practice. We are also gaining an increasingly detailed picture of (sub)national regional variation in the realization of different speech acts. Continuing research into cross-linguistic/cultural and intralingual variation and work in different media is providing further material with which to improve our current models of (im)politeness (see Chapters 20 and 21 on (im)politeness, this volume); and technological advancement is enabling researchers to look at more aspects of speech act production such as prosodic features (see Chapter 8 on prosody and pragmatics, this volume). Along with the developments outlined here, there have been methodological improvements and developments as well: e.g., going from the use of DCTs to dialogue completion tasks or 48

Speech act research in Spanish

e-DCTs (Mack & Sykes, 2009), or moving away from experimental methods, largely shaped by Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) work, to a greater use of naturally occurring data from face-to-face and mediated contexts. This is not to say that there is no room for the use of DCTs or other experimental methods. Researchers have a wide range of tools at their disposal and the suitability of their choices can only be judged vis-à-vis the research aims pursued, along with ethical, practical, and other considerations (see, e.g., Shively, 2019). Looking to the future, we anticipate that the work outlined in this chapter will continue expanding.Widening the range of speech acts and (sub)varieties of Spanish examined is a trend that will undoubtedly continue. At the same time, we expect to see speech acts studied within a greater variety of contexts, particularly in the ever-multiplying genres of digital media. Other new areas of research are likely to include more work on speech acts in conflict talk, as well as the interaction between verbal speech acts and corporal actions (Kärkkäinen & Keisanen, 2012). Additionally, the development of large-scale corpora such as the Corpus Ameresco (www.corpusameresco.com) will, like the corpus Val.Es.Co (www.uv.es/corpusvalesco/), facilitate the study of different speech acts across different (sub)varieties of Spanish. As we know, every new study reveals both new insights and further areas requiring investigation and we hope that this illustrative overview of the current state of speech act research in Spanish provides food for thought and inspiration for future work.

Notes 1 Among Hispanists, readers are referred to Haverkate’s (1994) classification of speech acts from a(n) (im) politeness perspective. 2 The reader is also referred to Es.Vag.Atenuación (http://esvaratenuacion.es/), a research project focusing on mitigation, coordinated by Marta Albelda Marco and María Estellés Arguedas. 3 Given space constraints, we have left out compliment responses which constitute another area of increasing interest.Among recent studies, see, for example, Lower (in press) and Placencia and Powell (in press). 4 Age, however, is a factor that may influence the perception of piropos, as Achugar (2002) shows. 5 For a detailed consideration of different methodologies in pragmatics research, readers are referred to Jucker, Schneider, and Bublitz (2018).

Further reading Escandell Vidal,V.,Amenós Pons, J., & Ahern,A. (Eds.). (in press). Panorama de pragmática. Madrid: Akal. This handbook offers a state-of-the-art appraisal of a range of topics in Spanish pragmatics. Each chapter focuses on phenomena and issues that have been addressed, and perspectives adopted in the study of a given topic. Of particular interest are Mark Jary’s chapter on speech acts and his take on speech act theory, and María Elena Placencia’s chapter on regional pragmatic variation where the reader will find a detailed consideration of speech acts studies in Spanish from this perspective. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español. Contexto, uso y variación. London: Routledge. This textbook introduces key topics in Spanish pragmatics from a sociolinguistics perspective. Of particular relevance for the study of speech acts are his chapters on speech acts, politeness and impoliteness, and variation in speech act realization. Additionally, the book contains a chapter on the teaching and learning of pragmatics, including speech acts, and on research methods in pragmatics. Placencia, M. E., & Padilla, X.A. (Eds.). (2019). Guía práctica de pragmática del español. London: Routledge. This textbook introduces readers to a range of topics in Spanish Pragmatics, written by specialists in each of the topics. One of the sections of the book focuses on specific speech acts such as requests, refusals, compliments, and apologies, offering the reader an introduction to their study, with recommended readings. Equally relevant is the section on (im)politeness, with, among others, chapters on resources employed for the mitigation and intensification of speech acts, including the use of emojis.The book also contains a chapter on research methods in pragmatics. 49

Placencia and Powell

References Achugar, M. (2001). Piropos as metaphors for gender roles in Spanish-speaking cultures. Pragmatics, 11, 127–137. Achugar, M. (2002). Piropos: cambios en la valoración del grado de cortesía de una práctica discursiva. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 175–192). Munich: Lincom Europa. Ambroise, B. (2016). Speech acts and the Internet:Austin to Bourdieu and Fraenkel. In J. Floyd & J. E. Katz (Eds.), Philosophy of emerging media: Understanding, appreciation, application. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190260743.001.0001 Androutsopoulos, J. K. (2000). Non-standard spellings in media texts:The case of German fanzines. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(4), 514–533. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bach, K., & Harnish, R. M. (1979). Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Barros García, M. J. (2012). Cumplidos y ofrecimientos: actividades de cortesía valorizadora en la conversación coloquial española. In J. Escamillas Morales & G. Henry Vega (Eds.), Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 108–143). Barranquilla: Universidad del Atlántico-Programa EDICE. Bataller, R. (2015). Pragmatic variation in the performance of requests: A comparative study of service encounters in Valencia and Granada (Spain). In M. Hernández-López & L. Fernández-Amaya (Eds.), A multidisciplinary approach to service encounters (pp. 113–137). Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Bernal, M. (2007). Categorización sociopragmática de la cortesía y de la descortesía. Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University. Bickhard, M. H., & Campbell, R. L. (1992). Some foundational questions concerning language studies: With a focus on categorial grammars and model-theoretic possible worlds semantics. Journal of Pragmatics, 17(5/6), 401–433. Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.) (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bolívar, A. (2008).“Cachorro del imperio” vs.“cachorro de Fidel”: Los insultos en la política latinoamericana. Discurso & Sociedad, 2(1), 1–38. Bolívar,A. (2010). Las disculpas en el discurso político latinoamericano. In F. Orletti & L. Mariottini (Eds.), (Des)cortesía en español. Espacios teóricos y metodológicos para su estudio (pp. 491–519). Roma and Estocolmo: Università degli Studi Roma Tre and Programa EDICE. Bou-Franch, P. (2011). Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1772–1785. Brenes Peña, E. (2011). Tertulia televisiva y descortesía verbal.Análisis pragmalingüístico. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987 [1978]). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cantamutto, L. (2019). Aperturas y cierres en la interacción digital escrita: fórmulas de saludo en español bonaerense. Tonos Digital, 37, 1–33. Retrieved June 20, 2019, from www.tonosdigital.com/ojs/index. php/tonos/article/view/2246 Choi, H. J. (2008). Pragmática intercultural: el acto de habla del cumplido en las culturas española y coreana (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid. Retrieved from http:// eprints.ucm.es/8311/1/T30689.pdf Cortés Velásquez, D. (2017). Cancelar una cita como estrategia de rechazo postergado: resultados e implicaciones didácticas de un estudio transcultural. EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages, 4(2), 115–134. Culpeper, J. (2010). Conventionalized impoliteness formulae. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 3232–3245. Culpeper, J., & Haugh, M. (2014). Pragmatics and the English language. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. de Pablos-Ortega, C. (2010). Attitudes of English speakers towards thanking in Spanish. Pragmatics, 20(2), 149–170. Dumitrescu, D. (2010). Cortesía ritual en español y rumano: el caso de los buenos deseos. Español Actual, 94, 91–140. Dumitrescu, D. (2011). Aspects of Spanish pragmatics. New York: Peter Lang. Escandell Vidal,V.,Amenós Pons, J., & Ahern,A. (Eds.). (in press). Panorama de pragmática. Madrid: Akal. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008a). Sociopragmatic variation: Dispreferred responses in Mexican and Dominican Spanish. Journal of Politeness Research, 4(1), 81–110. 50

Speech act research in Spanish

Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008b). Politeness in Mexico and the United States:A contrastive study of the realization and perception of refusals.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2011). Cortesía, prosodia y variación pragmática en las peticiones de estudiantes universitarios mexicanos y dominicanos. In C. García & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Estudios de variación pragmática en español (pp. 57–86). Buenos Aires: Dunken. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). The language of service encounters: A pragmatic-discursive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español. Contexto, uso y variación. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Yates, A. B. (2019). Regional pragmatic variation in small shops in Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Seville. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 15–34). London: Routledge. Fernández del Campo, G. (2011). El piropo como forma de agresión hacia la mujer. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez, E. Alcaide Lara, & E. Brenes Peña (Eds.), Aproximaciones a la (des)cortesía verbal en español (pp. 345–363). Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Fernández-Vallejo, A. M. (2017). La disculpa corporativa a través de Twitter en Iberia y Banco Santander. Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante, 31, 151–170. Fitch, K. L. (1998). Speaking relationally: Culture, communication, and interpersonal connection. New York: Guilford Press. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2009). Cuando la descortesía se convierte en agresividad. Las listas de debate en el correo electrónico. In D. Bravo, N. Hernández, & A. Cordisco (Eds.), Aportes pragmáticos, sociopragmáticos y socioculturales a los estudios de la cortesía en español (pp. 321–359). Buenos Aires: EDICE/Dunken. Gallardo, I. (2014). A manifestação da cortesia em pedidos de e-mails empresariais: português do Brasil e espanhol peninsular—semelhanças e contrastes. Abehache, 6, 130–156. García, C. (2007). Y bueno pienso que vos podrías dársela: estrategias de cortesía utilizadas por participantes argentinos en la solicitud de un servicio profesional. In P. Bou Franch, A. E. Sopeña Balordi, & A. Briz Gómez (Eds.), Pragmática, discurso y sociedad (pp. 153–173).Valencia: Universitat de València. García, C. (2016). Peruvian Spanish speakers’ cultural preferences in expressing gratitude. Pragmatics, 26(1), 21–49. Gómez,T. (2009).Análisis sociopragmático del acto de habla de la disculpa colombiana. Segundas Lenguas e Inmigración en Red, 2, 38–59. González-Cruz, M.-I. (2012). Apologizing in Spanish: A study of the strategies used by university students in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Pragmatics, 22(4), 543–565. González García,V., & García Ramón, A. (2017). Atenuación e intensificación: estrategias pragmáticas del rechazo en respuestas a invitaciones en redes sociales en línea. In M. Albelda Marco & W. Mihatsch (Eds.), Atenuación e intensificación en diferentes géneros discursivos (pp.  187–203). Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. González Sánz, M. (2010). Las funciones del insulto en debates políticos televisados. Discurso & Sociedad, 4(4), 828–852. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics,Vol. 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York:Academic Press. Grundlingh, L. (2017). Memes as speech acts. Social Semiotics, 28(2), 147–168. Hancher, M. (1979).The classification of cooperative illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 8, 1–14. Haverkate, H. (1994). La cortesía verbal: estudio pragmalingüístico. Madrid: Gredos. Hernández Toribio, M. I. (2011). Los ‘cumplidos’ como estrategias de persuasión emocional en la publicidad española y argentina. In C. García & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Estudios de variación pragmática en español (pp. 113–140). Buenos Aires: Dunken. Hernández Toribio, M. I., & Mariottini, L. (2018).Actos de habla y atenuación 2.0. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 73, 15–32. Retrieved from https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/CLAC/article/ viewFile/59057/4564456546492 Jucker,A. H., Schneider, K. P., & Bublitz,W. (Eds.). (2018). Methods in pragmatics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Jucker,A. H., & Taavitsainen, I. (2000). Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 1, 67–95. Kaiser, H. (2018). Intimacy matters: Uruguayan women’s refusal behavior in couples talk. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 6(2), 272–299. Kärkkäinen, E., & Keisanen,T. (2012). Linguistic and embodied formats for making (concrete) offers. Discourse Studies, 14(5), 587–611. Kaul de Marlangeon, S. (2017).Tipos de descortesía verbal y emociones en contextos de cultura hispanohablante. Pragmática Sociocultural, 5(1), 1–23. 51

Placencia and Powell

Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Bou-Franch, P. (2013).A cross-cultural investigation of email communication in Peninsular Spanish and British English. The role of (in)formality and (in)directness. Pragmatics and Society, 4(1), 1–25. Lower, A. (in press). Gracias pana: A glimpse into Ecuadorian male compliment responses on Facebook. In M. E. Placencia & Z. R. Eslami (Eds.), Complimenting behaviour and (self-)praise across social media: New contexts and new insights.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mack, S., & Sykes, J. M. (2009). ¡Qué feíto estás tú también, cariño!:A comparison of the response to the use of ‘positive’ irony for complimenting in Peninsular and Mexican Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2, 305–345. Maíz-Arévalo, C., & García-Gómez,A. (2013). You look terrific! Social evaluation and relationships in online compliments. Discourse Studies, 16(6), 735–760. Mancera Rueda, A. (2009). Manifestaciones de descortesía y violencia verbal en los foros de opinión digitales de los diarios españoles. Discurso & Sociedad, 3(3), 437–466. Manes, J., & Wolfson, N. (1981). The compliment formula. In F. Coulmas (Ed.), Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech (pp. 115–132).The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton. Márquez Reiter, R. (2000). Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay:A contrastive study of requests and apologies.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Márquez Reiter, R. (2008). Intra-cultural variation: Explanations in service calls to two Montevidean service providers. Journal of Politeness Research, 4, 1–30. Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish pragmatics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Martín Butragueño, P. (2016). A veces lloro mis lágrimas.Acercamiento multivariable a la prosodia de los actos de habla expresivos en el español de México. Estudios de Lingüística Aplicada, 63, 59–102. Medina López, J. (2014). Disculpas, cortesía ideológica y restauración de la imagen: a propósito de un real ejemplo a través de la prensa. Pragmática Sociocultural, 2(1), 35–75. Méndez Vallejo, C. (2013). Conversational and prosodic patterns in Spanish requests. International Journal of Language Studies, 7(2), 109–142. Michno, J. (2017). Greeting and leave-taking in Texas. Perception of politeness norms by Mexican-Americans across sociolinguistic divides. Spanish in Context, 14, 1–27. Moreno-Fernández, F., & Dumitrescu, D. (Eds.). (2016). Bibliografía lingüística del español en los Estados Unidos. Cambridge, MA: Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University-ANLE. Retrieved September 5, 2019, from http://observatoriocervantes.org/bsus/bsus.php Níkleva, D. G. (2016).Tendencias actuales en los piropos españoles. Onomázein, 34, 322–350. Pinto, D. (2008). Passing greetings and interactional style: A cross-cultural study of American English and Peninsular Spanish. Multilingua, 27(4), 371–388. Pinto, D. (2012). Pragmatics and discourse. Doing things with words in Spanish as a heritage language. In S. M. Beaudrie & M. Fairclough (Eds.), Spanish as a heritage language in the United States:The state of the field (pp. 121–138).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Placencia, M. E. (2005). Pragmatic variation in corner store interactions in Quito and Madrid. Hispania, 88, 583–598. Placencia, M. E. (2008). Pragmatic variation in corner shop transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and Coastal Spanish. In K. P. Schneider & A. Barron (Eds.), Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages (pp. 307–332).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Placencia, M. E. (2012). Online peer-to-peer advice in Spanish Yahoo! Respuestas. In H. Limberg & M. Locher (Eds.), Advice in discourse (pp. 281–305).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Placencia, M. E. (2016). Las ofertas en el regateo en MercadoLibre-Ecuador. In A. M. Bañón Hernández, M. M. Espejo Muriel, B. Herrero, & J. L. López Cruces (Eds.), Oralidad y análisis del discurso. Homenaje a Luis Cortés Rodríguez (pp. 521–544).Almería, Spain: EDUAL. Placencia, M. E. (2019). Qué perfección: Complimenting behaviour among Ecuadorian teenage girls on Instagram. In E. Ogiermann & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), From speech acts to lay concepts of politeness. A multilingual and multicultural perspective (pp. 93–116). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Placencia, M. E., & Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2013). Cumplidos de mujeres universitarias en Quito y Sevilla: un estudio de variación pragmática regional. Pragmática Sociocultural, 1, 100–134. Placencia, M. E., & García, C. (2012). Speech acts research. In C.A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1–7). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Placencia, M. E., & Padilla, X.A. (Eds.). (2019). Guía práctica de pragmática del español. London: Routledge. Placencia, M. E., & Powell, H. (in press). In M. E. Placencia & Z. R. Eslami (Eds.), Complimenting behavior and (self-)praise across social media: New contexts and new insights.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 52

Speech act research in Spanish

Powell, H., & Placencia, M. E. (2019). Interpersonal work in service encounters in Mercado Libre Argentina: A comparison between buyer and vendor patterns across two market domains. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 209–229). London: Routledge. Querol Bataller, M. (2016). Estrategias, alertadores y movimientos de apoyo en las peticiones en chino y español: esbozo de una comparación. Pragmalingüística, 24, 208–229. Rodríguez Alfano, L., & Jiménez Martín, E. (2010). El halago en boca propia es vituperio. Usos del halago y ‘ándale’ como estrategias de cortesía. In F. Orletti & L. Mariottini (Eds.), (Des)cortesía en español. Espacios teóricos y metodológicos para su estudio (pp. 131–150). Roma and Estocolmo: Università degli Studi Roma Tre/Programa EDICE. Rosaldo, M. Z. (1982).The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory. Language in Society, 11, 203–237. Ruzickova, E. (2007). Customer requests in Cuban Spanish: Realization patterns and politeness strategies in service encounters. In M. E. Placencia & C. García (Eds.), Research on politeness in the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 213–241). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sampietro, A. (2017). Emoticonos y cortesía en los mensajes de Whatsapp en España. In M. Giammatteo, P. Gubitosi, & A. Parini (Eds.), El español en la red (pp.  279–301). Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Schneider, K. P., & Placencia, M. E. (2017). (Im)politeness and regional variation. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 539–570). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Schreier, J. (2005). Quién fuera mecánico . . . Un estudio sociopragmático sobre la aceptación social del piropo. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 5, 65–78. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts:An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. R. (1975). Indirect speech acts. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts (pp. 59–82). New York:Academic Press. Searle, J. R. (1976).A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5, 1–23. Shively, R. (2019). Pautas para la elaboración de un proyecto de investigación en pragmática. In M. E. Placencia & X.A. Padilla (Eds.), Guía práctica de pragmática del español (pp. 245–257). London: Routledge. Siebold, K. (2007). La cortesía verbal: estudio contrastivo de la disculpa en español y alemán. In L. Cortés Rodríguez, A. M. Bañón Hernández, M. M. Espejo Muriel, & J. L. Muñío Valverde (Eds.), Discurso y oralidad: homenaje al profesor José Jesús de Bustos Tovar (pp. 759–768). Madrid:Arco/Libros. Thomas, J. (1995). Meaning in interaction:An introduction to pragmatics. London: Longman. Velásquez Upegui, E. P. (2016). Entonación de mandatos y ruegos en cuatro dialectos colombianos. Lingüística y Literatura, 69, 31–49. Wagner, L., & Roebuck, R. (2010).Apologizing in Cuernavaca, Mexico and Panama City, Panama:A crosscultural comparison of positive- and negative-politeness strategies. Spanish in Context, 7(2), 254–278. Wolfson, N. (1988). The bulge: A theory of speech behavior and social distance. In J. Fine (Ed.), Second language discourse:A textbook of current research (pp. 21–38). Norwood, NJ:Ablex. Yus, F. (2011). Cyberpragmatics. Internet-mediated communication in context.Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

53

3 Deixis in Spanish research Ricardo Maldonado

1

Introduction

Deixis involves a somewhat restricted class of linguistic expressions that are used to identify and locate entities and events being talked about by speech participants in the situational and/or discourse context of the speech event (Bühler, 1950 [1934]; Fillmore, 1997; Levinson, 2004; Lyons, 1977). It involves a set of expressions and gestures relative to the deictic center, the origo, which are commonly accompanied by a pointing gesture. Deictic expressions encode a viewpoint that departs from the deictic center in such a way that at least the speaker and hearer establish joint attention toward some entity in a viewing field either in the extralinguistic context or in discourse. A specific meaning is determined locally by interlocutors whose shared understanding is established interactionally in terms of a common “indexical ground” (Hanks, 1992).This provides the basis by which interlocutors develop a shared understanding of the referred object/ event. In the classical view, there are three types of deictic modalities: (a) deixis ad oculos, which refers to tangible and observable things in the world; (b) anaphor, which relates elements in the linguistic context; and (c) deixis am phantasma, which depicts abstract or imaginary entities that belong to mental or fictional representations (Bühler, 1950 [1934]). Besides the core property of signaling toward different elements in some linguistic or nonlinguistic domain, deictic markers also designate non-deictic properties specifying person, space, motion, and time. In a broader view, deictic forms also operate as indices of time, discourse, and social interaction. This chapter identifies the most significant factors determining the expression of deictic forms both in extralinguistic reference as well as in text deixis (anaphora). Most of the evidence corresponds to data from Latin American Spanish, predominantly México, yet also considers data from Spain. Section 2 introduces six levels in which deixis is found. It questions the assumptions of traditional approaches to deixis that sustain a perfect correlation between personal pronouns and deictic forms in a triadic system, to offer alternative interpretations of deixis in terms of subjectivity (2.3.2) and focality (2.3.3). Section 2.4. identifies the most outstanding functions for demonstratives and pronouns in text deixis. Section 3 offers some methodological considerations, and Section 4 concludes and provides further directions of research and some conceptual considerations of deixis in general. 55

Maldonado

2

Review of existing research

2.1

Types of deixis

Six deictic categories can be identified. The three most basic deictic forms operate as indices of person or entities (demonstratives, pronouns, and other deictic adjectives), indices of location (adverbs), and indices of motion (verbs) (Anderson & Keenan, 1985; Richardson, 1996; Tanz, 1980). Extensions of these may also operate as indices of temporal and social distance as well as indices of reference relations among elements in discourse.

2.1.1

Person deixis

‘Person deixis’ pertains to personal pronouns (yo ‘I,’ tú ‘you”; e.g., yo no soy como tú ‘I am not like you’). It responds to interpersonal interaction among interlocutors in face-to-face communication. In a quite broad sense, deixis also applies to social interactions among discourse participants. It encodes the degree of proximity established among participants in discourse. Pronominal forms are used to encode such relations (e.g., Spanish tú ‘you’ versus usted ‘you formal, respectful, kind’ (Diessel, 2012; Fillmore, 1997; Levinson, 2004; Lyons, 1977; see also Chapter 16 on forms of address in Spanish, this volume). These pronominal uses further extend to abstract situations resembling different types of interaction, as in political slogans, advertisements, and so forth (Ciudadano.Vota. Tú eres la respuesta ‘Fellow citizen.Vote. You are the answer’).

2.1.2

Spatial deixis

Among the indices of person or entities there are forms that also designate physical or social distance from the speaker (Bühler’s origo, 1950 [1934]). These correspond to demonstratives (e.g., este/a ‘this,’ ese/a ‘that, aquel/la ‘that distant, inaccessible’). Spanish spatial deictic markers have been characterized in terms of three somewhat discrete regions: proximal este ‘this,’ medial ese ‘that,’ and distal aquel ‘that one over there.’While these uses exist, the system has undergone important changes to be discussed ahead. Indices of location pertain to locative adverbs, which have been characterized in terms of distance to the speaker, much in parallel form to demonstratives: proximal aquí/acá ‘here,’ medial ahí and allí ‘there’ and distal allá ‘over there.’ As we shall see in Section 2.2, distance is but one factor interacting with more subjective representations of the way speakers relate to the referred object. Motion deixis is encoded by verbs where the subject follows some trajectory which is calculated from origo (ir ‘go,’ venir ‘come,’ regresar ‘return,’ dirigirse a ‘go to,’ volver ‘return’). Languages vary with respect to the requirement for the speaker to actually be at the place where the utterance is expressed.While English allows mental displacement, Spanish does so in a restricted manner. In English, the speaker need not be at the referenced location at the time of speech event (Are you coming to the party?), whereas in Spanish s/he does.Therefore, venir ‘come’ is generally in conflict with deictic distal adverbs like allí or ahí (Richardson, 1996). In contexts like (1) the speaker is supposed to be at the house as s/he speaks. Otherwise, ir ‘go’ must be used, as in (2):

56

(1)

¿Vas a venir a la fiesta? ‘Are you coming to the party?’

(2)

¿Vas a ir a la fiesta? ‘Are you going to the party?’

Deixis in Spanish research

This requirement is not totally inflexible for Spanish. In contexts where the hearer joins the mental path of the speaker, venir ‘come’ can be accepted: Si voy a la fiesta, vendrás conmigo? ‘If I go to the party will you come with me?’ (Richardson, 1996). Moreover, the requirement is becoming less strict in some Spanish dialects (see Chapter 15 on pragmatic variation, this volume).Younger generations in Mexican Spanish tend to accept vas a venir a la fiesta even if the speaker is not present at the referred location (Ellie, espera. ¿Quieres venir mañana a la fiesta? Twitter 21.9 2019). By using venir ‘come’ instead of ir ‘go,’ the speaker incorporates the hearer in the mental representation of the trajectory reaching a goal.This is also true for other verbs of motion, like regresar ‘return’ and the transitive use of traer ‘bring.’ In Mañana me voy a traer mi botella de mezcal a la fiesta patria del trabajo ‘Tomorrow I’m going to bring a bottle of mezcal to the independence day party at work’ (Twitter 12.09 2019) the speaker is not at the referred location at the time of speech. The mental displacement of the speaker to the goal implies some emotional consideration.The higher degree of mental/emotional involvement of venir comprises a desire to reach some goal, as in Example (3) from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA): (3)

Ya estoy aquí, vida, ya vengo a arrebatarte. (CREA, Prensa, España, 2003) ‘I’m finally here, my love, I have come to snatch you’

This is probably associated with the use of venir ‘come’ which implies going to some place yet planning to return: Déjame tomar agua, ya vengo ‘Let me drink some water, I’ll come back’ (CREA, Oral,Venezuela, around 1990).The use of vengo implies a demand for the hearer to wait for the speaker to return.

2.1.3

Time deixis

Time deixis involves temporal expressions depicting moments that are traced from the time of speech: entonces ‘then,’ ahora ‘now,’ mañana ‘tomorrow,’ hoy ‘today,’ ayer ‘yesterday.’ The conceptual relationship between space and time is reflected in the frequent development of temporal expressions from spatial terms. The spatial interpretation of time is unidimensional (Diessel, 2012). Time is commonly conceptualized as a straight line providing the conceptual ground for a fictive observer (Boroditsky, 2002; Lakoff, 1993; Langacker, 1987). Temporal adpositions, such as English before and Spanish frente ‘forehead/front,’ commonly derived from body part terms, and temporal adverbs, such as después ‘then,’ are often based on spatial deictics (Diessel, 2012; Heine, Claudi, & Hünnemeyer, 1993).

2.2 Approaches to deixis Person deixis locates the deictic center in reference to the speech participants. It has been claimed that Spanish has a system based on person with a three-way organization depending, like Japanese, on whether the relation is to the speaker, the hearer, or some other referent (Kuno, 1973). Spanish demonstratives and adverbs are claimed to be in perfect correspondence with personal pronouns (Alcina Franch & Blecua, 1975; Lamiquis, 1967), such that este ‘this’ aquí and acá, roughly ‘here,’ pertain to the space of the speaker; ese ‘that,’ as well as ahí, and allí, roughly ‘there,’ involve the space of the hearer, while aquel ‘that distal’ and allá, roughly ‘over there,’ designate a space for a third person, which would exclude both speaker and hearer (Alarcos Llorach, 2001; Alonso, 1968; Bello, 1972; Matte Bon, 1995; Real Academia Española, 2009). Distance is an alternative parameter where what matters is the amount of space of the location of the referent with respect to that of the speaker.The most common pattern contrasts elements 57

Maldonado

that are close or far from the deictic center. But there are languages where there is an intermediate distance; e.g., Abelam (Papua New Guinea) and Irish (Diessel, 1999). For some authors (Alcina Franch, 1975; Carbonero Cano, 1979; Lamiquis, 1967), Spanish deixis is organized in terms of three regions, again in correspondence with the pronominal system. Aquí and acá (roughly ‘here’) designate proximal distance to the speaker, aquí being less proximal than acá; ahí, roughly ‘there,’ allegedly marks intermediate distance, while allí, allá, roughly ‘there, over there,’ are distal, with allá being somewhat further away than allí. This, as the classical view, is not free of problems.

2.2.1

Problems for the person-deixis parameter

From different perspectives, the three-way division for demonstratives and adverbs has been challenged. It has been suggested that a binary system may be a better representation of the Spanish deictic system (Eguren, 1999; Maldonado, 2013; Real Academia Española, 2009; Stradioto & Maldonado, 2018;Strauss,2002).According to this view,there is a proximal and distal contrast and these two poles overlap in different ways with a neutral area.Thus este/a‘this’and aquí,acá,roughly ‘here,’are proximal and contrast with aquel, roughly ‘that,’ and allá,‘over there,’ which are distal. On the other hand, ese/a and ahí are generic forms belonging to an indeterminate region (Eguren,1999;Stradioto,2012;Stradioto & Maldonado, 2018) that covers a wide variety of functions.The proximal and distal contrast can be seen in (4) and (5), coming from the Corpus Sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de México (CSCM): (4)

mi hermano lo teníamos aquí internado/ exactamente en este cuarto (CSCM) ‘we had my brother here hospitalized/ in exactly this very room’

(5)

la otra [hija] vive hasta allá (*allí) adentro atrás de la capilla (CSCM) ‘the other daughter lives over there inside behind the chapel’

The distal aquel/la ‘that one over there’ seems to be restricted to particular uses, mostly to written discourse with very specific functions, such as evocative (en aquellos tiempos . . .‘in those days . . . ’).This is particularly the case for Latin American Spanish (Eguren, 1999). Shortcomings for the three-way contrast may be seen in a variety of ways. For instance, the notion of proximity for aquí is more flexible than one would expect in (6).The referent of aquí ‘here’ is located 20 minutes away from the speaker. In contrast, in (7), the location being referred to with ahí ‘there’ is right next to the speaker: (6)

Mi estudio está aquí en la Zona Rosa, a sólo 20 minutos ‘My studio is just here in the Zona Rosa, only 20 minutes away’

(7)

Quietecito. No te me acerques más.Ahí te quedas ‘Don’t move. Don’t get any closer. Stay right there’

Ahí may refer to spaces that are somewhat near the speaker and the hearer, as in (8). But as can be attested in (9), ahí may also refer to objects located far away from the speaker and the hearer:

58

(8)

Podría haber ido [sí/ sí/ sí]/ a la secundaria Tlalpan que está ahí en contraesquina ‘He could have gone [yes, yes yes], to the Tlalpan High school that is just there across the street’

(9)

I: . . . vete a un pueblito ahí lejos por ahí / digamos por/ las costas . . . ‘ . . . go to a little town there far, there about,/ let’s say by/ the coasts’

Deixis in Spanish research

Since ahí may refer to close (7), medial (8), and distant (9) locations, it has been identified as an indeterminate deictic marker covering a wide range of configurations, which may overlap with aquí and allí (Eguren, 1999; Stradioto & Maldonado, 2018). Analysis of written texts confirms the lack of adequacy between adverbs and demonstratives and the three personal pronouns.According to Richardson (1996), the area of reference for aquí is predominantly ‘inclusive,’ first-person plural (67% 33/49) (see also Brzozowska-Zburzynska, 2005). Moreover, Richardson (1996) finds that the area of reference of ahí is predominantly one that excludes the hearer’s location; i.e., a singular or plural ‘third person’ (69%, 9/13). In fact, the use of ahí to indicate exclusively the space of tú (‘you’) is restricted to 15% (2/13). Likewise, regarding demonstratives, the area of reference of spatial este/esto is interpreted as inclusive ‘we’ in 58% (32/99) of the deictic uses. Ese/eso have a ‘third person’ area of reference (58%), while 42% (11/26) correspond to ‘second person.’ Deictic expressions not only serve to establish a shared viewpoint (Diessel, 2006), they also impose adjustments to different perspectives. Seminal work by Hottenroth (1982) suggests a subjective kind of organization. Since deictic forms signal the relationship that the speaker establishes with some referred object, there are different types of subjective associations in terms of degrees of involvement and epistemic commitment (Delbecque, 2013).The grounding imposed by deictic forms is not reduced to space, person, or time. It also involves ‘subjectivity’ and ‘focality’ (Kirsner, 1990; Maldonado, 2013; Stradioto & Maldonado, 2018; Strauss, 2002), as discussed in the following sections.

2.2.2

Alternative views: Subjectivity

Traditional approaches identify two series of spatial markers: those ending in -i (aquí, ahí, and allí) and those ending in -a (acá and allá). The -i group has been analyzed as static and specific, while the -a group is characterized as indeterminate, dynamic, and diffuse (Bello, 1972; Carbonero Cano, 1979; González García, 1997; Matte Bon, 1995; Nilsson, 1983; Real Academia Española, 2009; Ramsey, 1966; Salvá, 1988). This corresponds to the Latin deictic system where -ic (hic and illic) designated static situations and -ac (hac and illac) marked dynamic events involving a path.The static/ dynamic contrast was lost in the evolution from Latin to Spanish. It cannot be found in Caracas, Buenos Aires, or even in the most conservative dialect, that of Madrid (Sedano, 1994, 2003). In Madrid, aquí has basically displaced acá. Buenos Aires is the mirror image, since acá is overwhelmingly dominant. Bogotá and México show functional competition among forms, where the diffuse/punctual—but not the dynamic/static—contrast can still be observed (Maldonado, 2013). Most studies observe that objective distance is secondary in comparison with a subjective representation (Hottenroth, 1982; Klein, 1983; Maldonado, 2013; Schmidely, 1975; Terrado Pablo, 1990). In dialects that have both forms, acá ‘here’ involves more proximity than aquí (ven acá ‘come to this very place’ vs. ven aquí ‘approximate, come closer”; Brzozowska-Zburzynska, 2005).The relationship with the referent is more intimate with acá than with aquí. Acá refers to the actual space occupied by the speaker, one where other participants are integrated as members of the speaker’s inner group (Stradioto & Maldonado, 2018), as in (10): (10) Me llena de orgullo, como nos llena a todos por acá (??aquí), saber que tu francés progresa (CREA, Novela, México, 1996) ‘It makes me proud like everybody else here to know that your French is improving’ Acá has developed an array of emotional/evaluative extensions manifesting the speaker involvement in the event. Being acá is being of high quality: e.g., ropa muy acá ‘fancy clothes,’ 59

Maldonado

restaurante muy acá ‘very fine restaurant.’ Acá can also be used with derogatory overtones.Addressing an important person (the president, a teacher) with acá in formal contexts may signal excessive proximity/familiarity (11): (11) . . . ahí no gana nadie, dice Madrazo mientras él esté en el poder, y él sabe cómo le hace.Y acá (??aquí) el señor Zedillo [el presidente] dice que hay apertura democrática en el país (CREA, Periodismo, México, 1996) ‘. . . there nobody wins, says Madrazo while [Zedillo] is in power, and he knows how he does it. And here mister Zedillo [instead of President Zedillo] says that there is democratic openness in the country’ By contrast, aquí, although proximal, involves enough distance to have more objective representations, such as presenting entities (De Cock, 2018) that can actually be pointed out (e.g., aquí tiene el teléfono ‘here you have the telephone’).A sign at a public library will use aquí, not acá, to indicate where books are to be dropped: (12) Favor de depositar los libros aquí (*acá) [Biblioteca José Martí, México] ‘Leave your books here, please’ Moreover, aquí can even be used to impose distance and (abstract) limits. In (13), hasta aquí ‘up to here’ goes together with a sign meaning “stop” to impose an important barrier: (13) Porque los ciudadanos le dicen al político hasta aquí (*acá) estamos dispuestos a que esto se practique (CREA, Prensa, México, 1996). ‘Because the citizens tell the politicians: it is up to here that we allow for this to happen’ This emotional distance also takes place when deictic forms in text highlight textual distance (Ribera, 2007). Este normally implies involvement, as in (14): (14) ¿Sería práctico y justo obligar el retiro de personas que están perfectamente saludables . . . ? Esta situación ya es grave ahora, pero . . . (CREA, Ciencia, México, 2001) ‘Would it be practical and fair to force the retirement of perfectly healthy and experienced people . . . ? This situation is bad now, but . . .’ More interesting is (15) since the event belongs to the past but the narrator presents it as still relevant to the time of speech: (15) Una gran cantidad de trabajadores resultaban mutilados o perecían ante . . . el desinterés de los patrones . . . ; ante esta situación, algunos gobiernos tomaron la iniciativa de promulgar leyes. (CREA, Industria, México, 1992) ‘A great number of workers were mutilated or would die facing a lack of interest by their bosses . . .; in the face of this situation, some governments took the initiative of enacting laws. ’ In contrast, esa, in (16), depicts some emotional distance.The events belong to a different time and space from the current reality/concerns: (16) Se ordenó el ataque, mas los indios aliados no se movían por lo difícil del terreno y la lluvia de piedras. . . .Ante esa situación Sandoval puso el ejemplo. (CREA, Historia, México, 2001) 60

Deixis in Spanish research

‘The attack was ordered, however the indians didn’t move since the terrain was too hard to cross and the storm of stones hitting. . . . Given that situation Sandoval set the example. ’ Esa signals events from an optimal view arrangement (Langacker, 2000), an optimal distance where speaker and hearer have equal access to the object/information (Maldonado, 2013; Stradioto & Maldonado, 2018). It appeals to shared knowledge where the speech act participants coincide (see Chapter 2 on speech acts, this volume), as in (17): (17) Una tarde uno de ellos llegó a mi casa con un joven polaco. Alto, sólido, con esa cara noble y ancha de muchos eslavos. (CREA,Arte, México, 1983) ‘One afternoon one of them arrived to my place with a young Polish guy.Tall, solid, with that noble and wide face of many Slavs’ The unmarked demonstrative ese/a covers a wide range of meanings.Yet it mostly depicts a well-identified situation that is not free of emotive evaluation (Delbecque, 2013), involving a lower degree of familiarity than este/a, as in (18): (18) Por una de esas extrañas conjugaciones que trama el azar, resulté, en los años finales de los sesenta, pasando muchas temporadas en Inglaterra (Vargas Llosa, 2006, p. 94) (Apud Delbecque, 2013) ‘For one of those strange conjugations that fate plans, I ended up, at the end of the sixties, spending many seasons in England’ Familiarity implies an intersubjective view leading to feelings of shared empathy and complicity that can be established between the narrator and either the reader or some character in the story (Cuenca & Ribera, 2013). In (19), the image evoked pertains to collective shared memories: (19) Parecía uno de esos cadáveres vivientes que muestran las fotografías de los campos de concentración (Vargas Llosa, 2006, p. 372) (Apud Delbecque, 2013) ‘He looked like one of those living corpses shown in pictures of concentration camps’ In (20), the reader shares the negative evaluation imposed by the narrator: (20) me lo dijo con esa brusquedad que tanto me chocaba (Vargas Llosa, 2006, p. 55) (Apud Delbecque, 2013) ‘he said that to me with that sudden roughness that I always hated’ The physical/mental proximity of este/a and the relative distance of ese/a may explain the tendency of este to impose positive implications, while ese suggests negative ones, as in (21) and (22): (21) Acabo de escucharlo. Esto promete [positive] ‘I just listened to it. This is promising [to be good]’ (22) No me digas eso [Negative] ‘Don’t tell me that’ In contrast, distal markers, like allá (allí for some dialects of Spain) designate not only distance but also exclusion.The speaker has no access to the referred object either because there is a barrier or because the referred object is in an alternative space, as in (23): 61

Maldonado

(23) Veo la sonrisa del presidente del bloque radical allá, detrás de las cortinas. (CREA, Oral, Argentina, 1998). ‘I can see the smile of the president of the radical group over there behind the curtains.’ Likewise, aquel/la is used to reclassify referents (Ribera, 2007) with which the speaker has no particular attachment. Since the referent is out of the speaker’s domain (Stradioto & Maldonado, 2018), the speaker is emotionally and conceptually detached from the referent. Aquel/la is commonly reinforced by adjectives, which may imply some pejorative evaluation, as in (24): (24) le regresara de golpe las imágenes en apariencia olvidadas: un grito con aquella cara febril del hombre que subía por la escalera con un cuchillo ensangrentado en la mano (CREA, Novela, México, 1997) ‘the images apparently forgotten would all come back suddenly: a scream with that feverish face of the man coming up the stairs with a bloody knife in his hand’ The use of aquel/lo in texts also imposes temporal and mental distance to the event. In (25), the narrator reports some difficulty in remembering the details of the event. More drastically, the distance depicted by aquella, in (26), is such that the speaker uses an attenuating expression (según entiendo ‘as I understand’) to avoid responsibility of the veracity of the assessment: (25) Abrumado, preferí cerrar de nuevo los ojos, tal vez reunir fuerzas para levantarme; . . . No sé cuánto tiempo estuve en aquella situación, temeroso de mirar o de moverme (CREA, Novela, México 1994) ‘Overwhelmed, I chose to close my eyes again, maybe to get my strength again to get on my feet; . . . I don’t know how long I was in that situation, fearful of watching and moving’ (26) La providencial joven y su madre adoptaron, de común acuerdo, al futuro pintor. . . . Según entiendo, aquella situación duró años. (CREA, Novela, México, 1986) ‘The providential young girl and her mother adopted, as agreed, the future painter. . . .As I understand, that situation lasted for years’ Both in text and extralinguistic environments, deictic forms signal the speaker’s subjective (perceptual, mental, emotional) relationship with some referent. Focality is undoubtedly another crucial dimension for deictic reference.

2.2.3

Alternative views: Focality

Deictic markers constitute instructions for the hearer to see an object/event according to the speaker’s view. Focus is a gradual notion involving degree of attention. It pertains to the relative amount of information that the speaker presumes the hearer to have with respect to the referent (Kirsner, 1990; Strauss, 2002). New information is more focal than information already shared among discourse participants. Deictic markers contrast in degree of focality. Este, contrasts with ese, in the same way that the locative allí contrasts with ahí: in most Latin American dialects (Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico, etc.), este and allí designate high focus while ese and ahí represent medium focus.The proximal forms aquí (and for some dialects acá), as well as the distal allá, are also of high focus; however, as seen in Section 2.2.2, they involve further specifications regarding degrees of subjectivity and accessibility. 62

Deixis in Spanish research

Medium focus pertains to shared elements in discourse or to things that need not be highlighted as the definite articles do (lo vi en la oficina ‘I saw him in the office’). Ahí and ese refer to the unmarked situation pertaining to things already shared in the context; thus, they require no major attention. These forms contrast with the high focality of este and allí as the speaker instructs the hearer to identify an object in the surroundings. In (27), allí is of high deixis and may involve pointing; in (28), the high focality of este is reinforced by another high focus deictic marker, the locative aquí: (27) I: mm el/ que está allí que está allí arrumbado/ donde está la pala I:‘mm the one/ that is right there that is right there thrown away where the shovel is’ (28) “Mira este coche que lleva unos días aquí,” le sugiere el conductor al operador. (CREA, España, 1986) “Look at this car that has been here for a few days,” suggests the driver to the operator.’ Aquel(la) designates high deixis, too; however, it refers to distal elements in space or time that are highly significant (29): (29) Esa tarde jugamos sobre el pasto como si fuéramos niños . . . hasta llegué a pensar que hubiera sido bueno no desear más que aquel gusto fácil por la vida. (CREA, Novela, México, 1990) ‘That afternoon we played on the grass like kids . . . I even got to think that it would have been enough not to wish for more than that easy joy for life.’ It also covers cases of stress and disambiguation (see Section 2.4). In terms of focus, the Spanish deictic system exhibits a binary system where high and medium focus are in contrast.

2.3 Discourse deixis We may now observe the behavior of deictic markers in discourse. Bühler (1950 [1934]) used the term ‘anaphora’ or ‘anaphoric pointing’ to describe the phenomenon of making deictic (pointing) reference to parts of discourse. According to that view, anaphora is thus a type of deixis. While deixis refers in some way to the communicative situation, anaphora helps in tracking back to previous text (García Salido, 2011, p. 66). Deixis in texts is unidimensional (Diessel, 2012). It is a reinterpretation of the objective spatial dimensions of the demonstrative system being transposed to the temporal dimension of communicative context. It is based on the metaphorical structuring of time as space (Cuenca & Ribera, 2009; Delbecque, 2013; Diessel, 2012; Eguren, 1999).The sequential ordering of discourse elements is commonly conceptualized as a string of linguistic entities in the timeline. Since the interpretation of the referent comes from extralinguistic context, prototypical deixis is said to be exophoric (mira ese árbol ‘look at that tree’). By contrast, anaphor is endophoric. It requires that the deictic element be interpreted in direct relationship to the linguistic co-text. In (30), the demonstrative ese is exophoric, while the pronoun lo is anaphoric: (30) la mujer llora, se entristece y tiene miedo de no ser capaz de querer a ese niño ni de cuidarlo eficazmente. (CREA, Ensayo, España, 1989) ‘The woman cries, she gets sad and fears that she may not to be able to love that (ese) child and to take care of him (lo) efficiently’ Figures 3.1 and 3.2 illustrate the exophoric/endophoric contrast. They follow Cuenca and Ribera’s (2009, p. 107) proposal: 63

Maldonado

Text deic˜c form

Ground Figure 3.1 Deixis

Figure 3.1 corresponds to este ‘this’ in Example (30). The referent is outside the domain of the text and is calculated from the Ground, the location of the speaker, as indicated by the arrow pointing from the deictic form to the ground. Figure 3.2 represents the use of lo. The anaphor refers to an antecedent within the domain of the Text. Now, deictic forms may have both anaphoric and exophoric functions.The demonstrative esto ‘this’, in (31), refers back to su existencia ‘its existence’ at the same time that signals conceptual proximity to the speaker: (31) El delincuente debe conocer su existencia, para que esto se convierta en una protección, en un arma disuasiva (CREA, Prensa, México, 1997) ‘The offender must acknowledge his existence, so that this turns into a protection, into a dissuasive weapon’ As proposed by Cuenca and Ribera (2009, p. 108), text deictic expressions refer to an antecedent but also incorporate the speaker (ground G) viewpoint, as in Figure 3.3:  Text antecedent

anaphor

Ground Figure 3.2 Anaphora

Text

antecedent

text deic˜c expression

Ground Figure 3.3 Text deixis

Yet, from Bühler’s (1950 [1934]) ample notion of anaphora, the notion of text deixis is specialized to identify the use of forms referring to elements in the co-text. In text deixis, reference is made to an intra-textual entity (Conte, 1999), like esto referring cataphorically to the utterance eres lo más parecido . . . in (32): (32) . . . lo está siendo -rehusó Lucas.—Ni puede ser. Quiero que entiendas esto. Tú eres lo más parecido a Mariana (CREA, Novela, México, 1995). ‘“He is being that way,” denied Lucas. “It cannot be. I want you to understand this. You are the one who better resembles Mariana.”’ 64

Deixis in Spanish research

In text deixis (cf. Himmelman, 1996; Lenz, 2015, regarding discourse deixis), the speaker provides instructions to the hearer to locate the referent in the text (Conte, 1999). It implies the use of a deictic that refers to the text but, unlike anaphora, it does not refer to an extralinguistic entity that has been referred to in the text; rather, it refers to entities that appeared in the text itself, an intra-textual entity (Conte, 1999). Discourse organizers such as lo antes dicho ‘what was said before,’ lo dicho arriba ‘what was said above,’ lo susodicho ‘the aforementioned’ (suso ‘above’) (Enríquez, Maldonado, & Melis, 2012), temporal markers (e.g., antes ‘before,’ después ‘after’), as well as deictic spatial pronominal forms (e.g., dicho esto ‘this said,’ lo aquí dicho ‘what has been said here’) are included in this function as well as lexical forms, commonly accompanied by deictic markers with metalinguistic content (Maaβ, 2010, cited in Lenz, 2015).Thus, nouns derived from verbs denoting a communicative activity (e.g., argumento ‘argument,’ descripción ‘description,’ explicación ‘explanation’) as well as verbs of speech, can be used as text deictic markers as long as they contain both lexical content and deictic value (Maaβ, 2010, cited in Lenz, 2015); e.g., Continuando con la descripción del proceso de germinación . . .‘Continuing with the description of the germination process. . . . ’ Text deixis contrasts with anaphor in that it focuses on a part of the discourse in a metalinguistic, reflexive manner. Text deixis is meta-communicative since the participants talk about their own discourse. It does not refer back to the co-text itself, as anaphor does, but to the linguistic value of a deictic expression. Text deictic phrases must contain meta-communicative elements as well as deictic elements (Lenz, 2015). In (33), for instance, the demonstrative eso refers to the content of the illocutionary act rather than the nominal antecedent (Ribera, 2007). Similarly, (34) refers to the assertive value of the declarative sentence of the verb hablar ‘speak’: (33) Te veo cada vez más delgada.Y eso no es broma. ‘I find you skinnier each time.And that is not a joke.’ (34) Pues no es justo y de eso estoy hablando. ‘Well it is not fair and that is what I’m talking about.’

2.4 Functions for demonstratives and pronouns in text deixis Further properties can be provided to tease apart deixis from anaphora. According to Cornish (1999), the contrast does not depend solely on the situational or textual origin of reference, but rather on the fact that text deixis profiles entities that were not in focus (anadeixis), while anaphor depicts already topicalized discourse units. Pronouns are better anaphor markers than demonstratives. Demonstratives are used for tracking referents of lower topicality (Brown, 1983) and accessibility (Ariel, 1990).They signal a shift in focus of attention (Sidner, 1983) and involve contrast with another similar referent (Himmelman, 1996; Sidner, 1983). Only contrastive or emphatic uses are commonly found.When two nominal antecedents coexist, aquel/la selects the most distal referent and the proximal este, the closest one, as in (35): (35) Se realizaron obras de nueva construcción y reformas diversas. Aquellas recibieron subvenciones estatales; estas, no (as cited in Cuenca & Ribera, 2013). ‘Jobs of new construction and assorted reforms were done. Those got government support; these did not.’ Likewise, in the presence of two NPs, este selects the closest referent, as in (36), unless the deictic from is the subject, a position in which only the pronoun is accepted, as in (37), (Eguren, 1999): 65

Maldonado

(36) Ana felicitó a María; porque {ella/esta} había jugado mejor. ‘Ana congratulated Maria because she/this one had played better’ (37) Ana ganó porque {ella/*esta;} había jugado mejor. ‘Ana won because she/*this one had played better’ Even in contrastive contexts, there are more restrictions for demonstratives.A high degree of dependence in the clause works only for personal pronouns; not for demonstratives. A demonstrative can be used only if it appears in a subordinate (38–39) or a coordinate clause (40–41). Otherwise, only the pronoun is allowed (37–38) (Eguren, 1999): (38) Ana le dijo a Lourdes que ella/*esta no tenía razón. ‘Ana told Lourdes that she/*this one was not right.’ (39) Ana le dijo a Lourdes que ella/*esta no recibiría la beca. ‘Ana told Lourdes that she/*this one would not get the scholarship.’ (40) María abandonó a su marido porque él/este no la quería. ‘Maria abandoned her husband because he/this one didn’t love her.’ (41) María quiere a su marido y él/este la quiere a ella. ‘María loves her husband and he/this one loves her.’ Moreover, personal pronouns are better for human referents than demonstratives in many languages.This is generally true for Spanish (42–43), with the exception of obliques where only pronouns are accepted (44) (examples adapted from Eguren, 1999): (42) Antes de que yo viera a Juan, él/?este ya me había visto ‘Before I saw Juan, he/*this one had already seen me’ (43) Cuando íbamos a forzar el armario, *él/este se abrió ‘When we were about to force the cupboard door, *he/ this one opened’ (44) Mi coche ya no funciona y no sé qué hacer con él/*este ‘My car doesn’t work anymore and I don’t know what to do with it/*this’ Neuter demonstratives, such as esto normally do not take human antecedents.They take first-, second-, and third-order referents; i.e., things (45), events, and propositions (46) (Eguren, 1999): (45) Esto no es una pipa (Magritte, 1928–1929) ‘This is not a pipe’ (46) En todo caso, cuando se entrevista con el reloj en la mano, no se puede andar por las ramas, tienes que ir al grano y, eso se entiende como ser agresivo (CREA, Prensa, España, 1990). ‘At any rate, when an interview is under time pressure, one cannot beat around the bushes, you have to get to the point and that is seen as aggressive behavior.’ As compared to adjectival demonstratives (este coche ‘this car’), pronominal demonstratives (este llegó primero ‘this one arrived first’) are seldom used in text deixis. They occur predominantly in dialogue with an exophoric-identifying function (Himmelman, 1996). Cuenca and Ribera (2013) show that situational uses of deictic forms making direct reference to the communicative 66

Deixis in Spanish research

context (¿Tocó usted alguna cosa de este dormitorio? ‘Did you touch anything in this dormitory?’) in narrative are rather low, as opposed to non-situational anaphoric or cataphoric ones (Creeme esto, Guido. Ella es una perra ‘Believe me about this, Guido. She’s a bitch’).Yet, in oral discourse, pronouns (mostly esto) are frequently used anaphorically to retrieve proximal preceding discourse (84.5%) and rarely for human antecedents (6%) (González, 1994). (47) Pero hacen estadísticas. Esto sirve para cuántos trabajos del . . . del gobierno, no? (as cited in González, 1994, Habla Culta, Ciudad de México) ‘But they do calculations. This serves for so many jobs of . . . of the government, right?’ Adjectival demonstratives are dominantly used in written genres, fulfilling anaphoric functions: (48) Los indígenas estaban lejos de las explicaciones científicas que se daban en el mundo occidental. La llegada de los españoles cambió esta situación cultural (CREA, Ciencia, México, 2000). ‘Indigenous people were far from the scientific explanation of the occidental world. The arrival of the Spaniards changed this situation.’ However, they tend to be used for one mention only.While pronouns may occur more than once, recovering a focused antecedent along the text, adjectival demonstratives tend to appear in only one mention, as they either select, introduce, or highlight a specific property of their referent: (49) Una vez que conseguí este coche, lo cuidé, lo consentí y lo mantuve conmigo hasta que, por viejo, lo tuve que vender. ‘Once I got this car, I cared for it, I pampered it, and I maintained it until it was too old and I had to sell it.’ This goes along with the idea that demonstratives involve a change in topic. If the speaker assumes that the hearer is familiar with the referred element, a pronoun is to be used. Otherwise a demonstrative may introduce a new topic (Cornish, 1999, 2018). Consequently, demonstratives are not particularly frequent in anaphoric use. Pronouns and adjectival demonstratives also contrast in scope. In text, it is difficult to determine the size of the segment of discourse being indexed. It may range from a single clause to a whole story. Pronouns tend to refer to a proximate antecedent within the clause. On the other hand, for demonstratives in non-contrastive or emphatic situations, the scope of demonstratives is open and unlimited. Himmelman (1996) hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that the referent is first created at the very moment the demonstrative is used.This is particularly the case for presentational demonstratives. Esto, in (50), refers to a whole discourse chunk previously uttered: (50) Tome -al decir esto entregó a la viuda la bolsa que contenía los donativos-, estoy segura que le servirá de algo (CREA, Novela, México, 1992). ‘“Take it,” as she said this she gave the widow a bag that contained the donations,“I’m sure it will do you some good.”’ Finally, differences exist depending on the semantic content of the deictic form.While esto may serve cataphoric presentational functions (51), eso and aquello take care of anaphoric ones (52–53): (51) Quiero que entiendas esto.Tú eres lo más parecido a Mariana (CREA, Novela México, 1995). ‘I want you to understand this.You are the one who better resembles Mariana.’ 67

Maldonado

(52) Tus imprudencias no pueden solucionarse con pedir perdón. ¡Lo que cuenta son los hechos! Es hora de que entiendas eso y de que cambies (CREA, Novela México, 1994). ‘Your reckless actions cannot be solved by saying you are sorry.Actions are what count. It is about time that you understand that and that you change.’ (53) No. Era imposible entender aquello (CREA, Novela España, 1975). ‘No. It was impossible to understand that.’ Unlike English, Spanish cataphoric uses are quite sporadic, in contrast with anaphoric ones (Cuenca & Ribera, 2013). To sum up, in text deixis, personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, and adjectival demonstratives serve the purpose of keeping track of entities along the discourse chain.Yet each one represents different aspects. Predominantly, personal pronouns help keep track of elements well established in the text. Pronouns are better anaphor markers than demonstratives. Demonstratives are used for tracking referents of lower topicality. Adjectival demonstratives introduce topics or topic shifts. As compared to adjectival demonstratives, pronominal demonstratives are seldom used in text deixis.They can be used for proximate anaphors as well as for cataphoric purposes. Pronouns tend to refer to a proximate antecedent within the clause, while the scope of demonstratives is open and unlimited.Yet, distance not only works along discourse lines, but also in the realm of emotions. Demonstratives and adverbial forms help establish an ample set of views with which the speaker relates to some referent.

3

Methodological considerations

Data considered for this chapter come from two basic types of sources, experimental and textual. Given the extralinguistic nature of locative deixis, different types of research methods are created to detect the value of deictic expressions. Speaker and hearer initially share the location with respect to the object, which varies in distance from the deictic center.Then, participants are located in different places varying for distance (close, medial, distal) with respect to the referential object. Speaker and hearer may either share the deictic center or they may occupy different locations (side-to-side close, side-to-side distal, face-to-face, face-to-face lateral, etc.) to check if the deictic markers adjust to the local relationship between the deictic center and the referential object. Either speaker or hearer may be seen as potential reference points to calculate the distance between origo and the referenced object; thus, different deictic forms may be used (Holst, 2019; Stradioto, 2012; Stradioto & Maldonado, 2018). Non-experimental ways to obtain data for extralinguistic deixis are also seen in the use of corpora for written and oral Spanish (CREA, CSCM, social media), where deictic forms in the text are used to refer to objects in a variety of contexts in the world. For text deixis, data normally come from a wide variety of written sources.Well-known corpora of written Spanish have been used to compare different genres (journalistic, scientific, and creative writing from CREA), as well as specific novels (as in Delbecque, 2013; García Salido, 2011; Richardson, 1996, and many others).An important analytic strategy is to focus on specific genres such as narrative, testimonial, or parliamentary discourse (Cuenca & Ribera, 2009, 2013; Ribera, 2007), either selectively or comparatively. Moreover, the behavior of deictic forms has been compared among oral and written forms of discourse, particularly dialogue and expository discourse (Cuenca & Ribera, 2013; Marcovecchio, 2015).

4

Future directions and conclusion

The referential value of demonstratives still requires further research. Medial demonstratives ese/ eso are defined either as high focus (Delbecque, 2013) or as low focus (Kirsner, 1990; Stradioto & 68

Deixis in Spanish research

Maldonado, 2018; Strauss, 2002).The discourse functions of shared knowledge and focality could be applied to obtain a deeper analysis. Further research is necessary to define if distance in abstract representations always determines a lack of involvement. For example, the evocative function of distal markers may imply higher degrees of speaker involvement than traditionally acknowledged (Lo hice con aquel gusto ‘I did it with such a (that) pleasure’). Another area of further research pertains to the use of medial deictic markers ahí ‘there’ and ese ‘that’ whose lack of specificity may be exploited in discourse evidential and epistemic marking.Vague evidential ‘hearsay’ uses of por ahí (Por ahí se dice que no tendría que haber ido ‘They say (there) she shouldn’t have had to go’), as identified by Marcovecchio (2015, in press) may extend to diminish assertiveness, in attenuative and probabilistic uses: Nunca sabremos qué pasó, por ahí tenía problemas (see Chapter 6 on evidentiality, this volume) ‘we will never know what happened, thereabouts she may have had problems.’ Also, verbs of perception, such as mira ‘look’ that have deictic uses (¡mira, un avión! ‘look, there’s an airplane’) may be used in discourse to signal situations where the hearer is prompted to share the speaker’s view: Mira, si hacemos esto nos iría mejor ‘Look, if we do this things will go better for us’ (Maldonado & De la Mora, in press). A major topic of study are the functions of deictic forms in different discourse genres: oral and written narratives, political discourse, news reports, journal articles, and scientific writing are but a few topics to be considered (Cuenca, 2010; Gelabert, 2004; Ribera, 2007).Verbs of motion show crucial subtleties in concrete or abstract displacement (Richardson, 1996).The relationship between the deictic center and some reference point may vary depending on lexical specifications: ir ‘go’ seems to be less flexible than regresar ‘return’ and volver ‘come back’ (Adrián regresó/ llegó a la casa y ahí lo veré ‘Adrian returned/arrived home. I’ll see him there’; Por fin Vale regresó de la oficina. La estábamos esperando ‘Finally Vale returned from the office.We were waiting for her’). Another avenue of research is the cognitive status of deixis and anaphor (Ariel, 1990; Cornish, 1999, 2018; García Salido, 2011; Kleiber, 1992). It has been questioned whether the referent of an anaphoric expression needs to be the previous text, implying its extralinguistic reference, or it may respond to the mental representation that the speaker and hearer may already share in some context (Ariel, 1990).The contrast between anaphor and deixis may also be observed in terms of discourse functions. Rather than having a contrast between extralinguistic and textual reference, it may respond to focus of attention and topic continuity (Cornish, 1999; Givón, 1983; Kleiber, 1992). Under scrutiny are issues involving anadeixis (Ehlich, 1982), which are indexicalreferring procedures determining content and discourse-functional structures. Anadeictic and discourse-deictic references may signal content structures and discourse-functional structures, which may help in introducing discourse units or predicting transitions between them (Cornish, 1999, 2018). I have highlighted the more salient features of exophoric and endophoric realms. Involving joint attention (Diessel, 2012) on shared indexical ground (Hanks, 1992), deixis involves a category that normally constitutes the diachronic basis for pronouns in many languages (Diessel, 2006; Langacker, 2000) and appears early in language acquisition processes (Diessel, 2012).This basic quality explains its functional diversity. Deixis signals objects and events, as referred to in person, distance, time, and even social representation. Given the ample array of linguistic forms (verbs of motion, pronouns, demonstratives, or adverbials), deictic forms impose different types of conceptualizations. Spanish departed from the three-way system of Latin and developed a more complex system that involves space in binary contrast and degrees of subjectivity and focality. Ese/a, like the locative ahí, represents a flexible area of common access for speaker and hearer, which overlaps with distal and proximate forms.With important differences regarding subjectivity, aquí and acá relate to referents proximal to the speaker. Distal demonstratives (e.g., aquel/la) 69

Maldonado

and adverbs (e.g., allá) may be far not only in space, but in mental/emotional access with important subtleties. In text, deictic forms serve the purpose of referring to entities along the discourse chain. Each form imposes different profiles. Typically, personal pronouns help track elements well established in the shared context and adjectival demonstratives introduce new topics, while pronominal demonstratives can be used both for proximal anaphoric and cataphoric purposes. All these uses are further subject to project mental and emotional overtones with which speakers impose their view about the world in specific contexts.

Further reading Cornish, F. (1999). Anaphora, discourse and understanding. Evidence from English and French. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This book introduces a new theory of anaphora and deixis. It treats anaphoric reference in discourse from both psychological and linguistic perspectives.Anaphora and deixis are seen as parts of integrative discourse procedures that facilitate the linking of representations held in working memory.The analysis is based on experimental work on a variety of corpora of different genres in French and English. Cuenca, M. J. (2000). Comentario de textos: los mecanismos referenciales. Madrid: Arco/Libros. This book introduces basic notions of text structuring and cohesion based on grammatical cues (deixis, anaphor, cataphor, ellipsis) and lexical cohesion mechanisms (repetition, iteration, association), as applied to three literary texts and three newspaper articles in order to identify mechanisms that provide coherence and adequacy in text structuring. Diessel, H. (1999). Demonstratives. Form, function, and grammaticalization.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. This book presents the analyses of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective (85 languages). Demonstratives are analyzed from a synchronic point of view (morphological, semantics, syntactic functions, and pragmatic uses in spoken and written discourse), as well as the diachronic development of demonstratives into grammatical markers.The book describes the different mechanisms by which demonstratives grammaticalize and argues that the evolution of grammatical markers from demonstratives is crucially distinct from other cases of grammaticalization.

Corpora Martín Butragueño, P., & Lastra,Y. (Coords.). (2011–2015). Corpus sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de México. CSCM. México: El Colegio de México. Real Academia Española. (1997). Corpus de referencia del español actual.  CREA. Madrid: Real Academia Español. Retrieved from www.rae.es/recursos/banco-de-datos/crea

References Alarcos Llorach, E. (2001). Gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Alcina Franch, J., & Blecua, J. M. (1975). Gramática española. Barcelona: Ariel. Alonso, M. (1968). Gramática del español contemporáneo. Madrid: Guadarrama. Anderson, S., & Keenan, E. (1985). Deixis. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (Vol. 3, pp. 259–308). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ariel, M. (1990). Accessing noun-phrase antecedents. London: Routledge. Bello, A. (1972). Gramática. Caracas: Ministerio de Educación. Boroditsky, L. (2002). Metaphorical structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition, 75, 1–28. Brown, C. (1983).Topic continuity in written English narrative. In T. Givón (Ed.), Topic continuity in discourse. A quantitative cross-language study (pp. 313–341).Amsterdam: Benjamins. Brzozowska-Zburzynska, B. (2005). Los marcadores de la deixis espacial en español y en francés. ELUA, 19, 65–84. Bühler, K. (1950 [1934]). Teoría del lenguaje (Biblioteca Conocimiento del Hombre). Madrid: Revista de Occidente. 70

Deixis in Spanish research

Carbonero Cano, P. (1979). Deixis espacial y temporal en el sistema lingüístico. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Conte, M. E. (1999). Condizioni di coerenza. Ricerche di linguistica testuale.Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso. Cornish, F. (1999). Anaphora, discourse and understanding. Evidence from English and French. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cornish, F. (2018).Anadeixis and the signaling of discourse structure. Quaderns de Filologia: Estudis Lingüístics, XXIII, 33–57. Cuenca, M. J. (2010). Díctics espacials i gramàtica en narracions orals. Estudis Romànics, 32, 101–123. Cuenca, M. J., & Ribera, J. (2009). Metafore metatestuali. Paradigmi. Rivista di Critica Filosofica, 1, 101–117. Cuenca, M. J., & Ribera, J. (2013). Usos y estrategias de traducción inglés-español de los demostrativos. Anuario de Letras. Lingüística y Filología, 1(2), 37–84. De Cock, B. (2018). Spanish spatial deictic adverbs: Interpretation and discourse functioning with depersonalizing constructions. Quaderns de Filologia: Estudis Lingüístics, XXIII, 59–79. Delbecque, N. (2013). Anclaje experiencial y epistémico de los demostrativos no situacionales en español. Anuario de Letras. Lingüística y Filología, 1(2), 87–169. Diessel, H. (1999). Demonstratives. Form, function, and grammaticalization.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Diessel, H. (2006). Demonstratives, joint attention, and the emergence of grammar. Cognitive Linguistics, 17(4), 463–489. Diessel, H. (2012). Deixis and demonstratives. In C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger, & P. Portner (Eds.), Semantics:An international handbook of natural language meaning (Vol. 3) (pp. 2407–2431). Berlin: de Gruyter. Eguren, L. (1999). Pronombres y adverbios demostrativos: las relaciones deíctivas. In V. Demonte & I. Bosque (Coords.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 929–972). Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Ehlich, K. (1982).Anaphora and deixis: Same, similar, or different? In R. Jarvella & K.William (Eds.), Speech, place and action. Studies in deixis and related topics (pp. 315–338). Chichester, UK: John Wiley. Enríquez,A., Maldonado, R., & Melis, C. (2012). De yuso a baxo. La imposición del cuerpo en la verticalidad. Revista de Historia de la Lengua Española, 7, 121–151. Fillmore, C. (1997). Lectures on deixis. Stanford, CA: CSLI. García Salido, M. (2011). La distinción deixis/anáfora y su aplicación a las formas de persona del español. Revista de Filología Española, 91(1), 65–88. Gelabert, J. (2004). Pronominal and spatio-temporal deixis in contemporary Spanish political discourse:A corpus-based pragmatic analysis (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA (USA). Givón,T. (1983).Topic continuity in discourse.An introduction. In T. Givón (Ed.), Topic continuity in discourse. A quantitative cross-language study (pp. 5–41).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. González, E. (1994). Usos de los demostrativos en el habla de la ciudad de México (B.A. thesis). Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. González García, L. (1997). El adverbio en español. La Coruña: Universidade da Coruña. Hanks, W. F. (1992). The indexical ground of deictic reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heine, B., Claudi, U., & Hünnemeyer, F. (1993). Grammaticalization:A conceptual framework. Chicago, IL:The University of Chicago Press. Himmelman, N. (1996). Demonstratives in narrative discourse. A taxonomy of universal uses. In B. Fox (Ed.), Studies in anaphora (pp. 205–254).Amsterdam: Benjamins. Holst, J. (2019). La deixis espacial en niños con Trastorno del Espectro Autista (PhD dissertation). Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. Hottenroth, P. (1982).The system of local deixis in Spanish. In J.Weissenborn & W. Klein (Eds.), Here and there: Cross-linguistic studies on deixis and demonstration (pp. 133–153).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kirsner, R. S. (1990). From meaning to message in two theories: Cognitive and Saussurian views of the modern Dutch demonstratives. In R. A. Geiger & B. Rudzuka-Ostyn (Eds.), Conceptualizations and mental processing in language (pp. 81–114). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kleiber, G. (1992). L’anaphore: d’un problème à l’autre. Le français moderne, LX(1), 1–22. Klein,W. (1983). Deixis and espacial orientation in route directions. In H. Pick & L.Acredolo (Eds.), Spatial orientation (pp. 283–320). New York and London: Plenum Press. Kuno, S. (1973). The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press. Lakoff, G. (1993).The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 202– 251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamiquis,V. (1967). El demostrativo en español y en francés. Estudio comparativo y estructuración. Revista de filología española, 50(1/4), 163–202. Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar:Theoretical prerequisites (Vol. 1). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 71

Maldonado

Langacker, R. (2000). Grammar and conceptualization. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Lenz, F. (2015). Discourse deixis. In K. Jungbluth & F. Da Milano (Eds.), Manual of deixis in Romance languages (pp. 729–740). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Levinson, S. (2004). Deixis and pragmatics. In L. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics (pp. 97–121). Oxford: Blackwell. Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics, II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maaβ, C. (2010). Diskursdeixis im Französischen. Eine korpusbasierte Studie zu Semantik und Pragmatik diskursdeiktischer Verweise. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Maldonado, R. (2013). Niveles de subjetividad en la deixis. Anuario de Letras. Lingüística y Filología, I(2), 285–326. Maldonado, R., & De la Mora, J. (in press). Mira. Percepción, evidencialidad y validación subjetiva. In R. Maldonado & J. De la Mora (Eds.), Evidencialidad. Determinaciones léxicas y construccionales. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. Marcovecchio, A. M. (2015). Por ahí/ni ahí, desde la localización a la modalidad, Spanish in Context, 12(1), 102–120. Marcovecchio, A. M. (in press). Contenido evidencial convencionalizado en locuciones adverbiales: el caso de por ahí, en principio y de momento. In R. Maldonado & J. de la Mora (Eds.), Evidencialidad. Determinaciones léxicas y cosntruccionales. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. Matte Bon, F. (1995). Gramática comunicativa del español. Madrid: Edelsa. Nilsson, K. (1983). En torno a los adverbios de lugar aquí, acá, etc. en castellano y sus formas correspondientes en catalán y portugués. Actes du VIIIème Congrès des Romanistes Scandinaves (pp. 257–268). Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press. Ramsey, M. M. (1966). A textbook of modern Spanish. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Real Academia Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa. Ribera, J. (2007).Text deixis in narrative sequences. International Journal of English Studies, 7(1), 149–168. Richardson, B. (1996). Spanish spatial deictic features: Indices of entities, location and movement. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 34(3), 215–231. Salvá,V. (1988 [1830]). Gramática de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Schmidely, J. (1975). Déictiques spatiaux de l´espagnol. Mélanges offerts à Charles Vincent Aubrun (pp. 239– 251). Paris: Editions Hispaniques. Sedano, M. (1994). Evaluation of two hypotheses about the alternation between aquí and acá in a corpus of present-day Spanish. Language Variation and Change, 6(2), 223–237. Sedano, M. (2003). Los adverbios demostrativos en Madrid, Caracas y Buenos Aires. ¿Influencia de la direccionalidad? In P. Carbonero Cano (Ed.), Sociolingüística andaluza, 12 (pp. 49–62). Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Sidner, C. (1983). Focusing on the comprehension of definite anaphora. In M. Brady & R. Berwick (Eds.), Computational models of discourse (pp. 267–330). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stradioto, S. (2012). Dêixis na România Nova: O lugar dos demonstrativos no português de Belo Horizonte e no español da Cidade do México. Dissertação de Mestrado. Faculdade de Letras and UFMG, Belo Horizonte (Brasil). Stradioto, S., & Maldonado, R. (2018).Variables en un sistema deíctico binario: aquí, acá, ahí, allí y allá en el español de Mëxico. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 66(2), 395–423. Strauss, S. (2002). This, that, and it in spoken American English: A demonstrative system of gradient focus. Language Sciences, 24, 131–152. Tanz, C. (1980). Studies in the acquisition of deictic terms. New York: Cambridge University Press. Terrado Pablo, X. (1990). Sobre el valor de la alternancia /í/-/á/ en los adverbios de lugar del español. Sintagma, 2, 45–54. Vargas Llosa, M. (2006). Travesuras de la niña mala. Madrid: Alfaguara.

72

4 Pragmatics and word order Pekka Posio and Malte Rosemeyer

1

Introduction

While ‘word order’ may refer to the placement of words within a phrase (e.g., un pobre chico vs. un chico pobre ‘a poor boy’), most of the literature on Spanish word order focuses on the placement of clausal constituents; i.e., subjects (S), objects (O), and adverbials (Adv), relative to the verb (V), or the placement of constituents outside the core clause (dislocation and topicalization). In transitive clauses, the most frequent and unmarked constituent order in Spanish is (Si)ViO. The subject person is expressed morphologically on the V (marked by the subscript i) and often there is no independent noun phrase (NP) or pronoun expressing the subject referent in the clause. Other constituent orders can be triggered by syntactic, semantic, or lexical factors. For instance, the postverbal placement of subjects is the norm in interrogative sentences headed by question words (¿Qué quiere usted? ‘What do you want?’), with verbs requiring dative experiencers like gustar (Me gustan los tomates ‘I like tomatoes’), and with some preverbal adverbials and prepositions (Según dice Marta ‘As Marta says’). In addition to such contexts requiring a specific constituent order, the placement of clausal constituents is affected by pragmatic factors, in particular information structure (IS); e.g., to what extent the speaker considers the discourse referents to be accessible to the hearer (see Section 2.2.1). Spanish, like other SVO languages, tends to place accessible referents before the verb and new referents after the verb (e.g., Ashby & Bentivoglio, 1993; Du Bois, 2003). In general, subjects of transitive verbs tend to be accessible and are thus placed before the verb, whereas non-accessible referents are introduced into discourse in the postverbal position, either as objects of transitive verbs or subjects of intransitive verbs; a tendency known as preferred argument structure (Du Bois, 2003). Speakers can also use different constituent orders to contrast, background, or foreground entities in discourse.These factors affect the placement of S, O, and other constituents.Thus, while (1a) conveys only the meaning ‘María bought the car,’ (1b) and (1c) do the same, but either topicalize the preverbal element (‘[As for] the car, María bought it’) or focalize the postverbal element (‘The car was bought by María’ or ‘María bought the car’ [instead of renting it]). Other constituent orders, while theoretically possible, are restricted to archaic literary styles or verse and rarely surface in ordinary language (Butt & Benjamin, 2004). 73

Posio and Rosemeyer

(1)

a. María compró el coche. b. El coche lo compró María. c. El coche María lo compró. ‘María bought the car.’

SVO OVS OSV

In relation to pronominal constituents, studies have also examined the role of constituent order in mitigation and politeness (e.g., Serrano & Aijón Oliva, 2010; see Section 2.2.2), as well as the development of frequent verb-pronoun combinations into formulaic sequences with regular pragmatic meanings (e.g., Posio, 2015). The goal of this chapter is to review the most relevant research of the aforementioned types of word order variation in present-day Spanish (Section 2) and discuss the methodological issues of these studies (Section 3), as well as propose directions for future research (Section 4) (for related work, see Chapter 7 on pragmatics and shaping linguistic structures, this volume).

2 2.1

Review of existing research Intraphrasal word order variation

Within phrases, word order variation primarily affects the position of adjectives, which can be placed either before (2a) or after (2b) the noun. Several authors (e.g., Bosque, 2001; Demonte, 1999; Jacob, 2005) have pointed out that NPs with prenominal adjectives typically have a specific reading, whereas NPs with postnominal adjectives can have either a specific or a non-specific reading. In (2a), the speaker presumably has a specific teacher in mind, which is not necessarily the case in (2b). Consequently, in the postnominal position, adjectives restrict the set of referents of the noun; in (2b), out of all the teachers that are possible referents, only the famous ones are considered. (2)

a. Los estudiantes conocieron a un famoso profesor. b. Los estudiantes conocieron a un profesor famoso. ‘The students got to know a famous teacher.’

Due to the condition that prenominal adjectives express specific referents, this position is better suited for the expression of scalar and, consequently, evaluative meanings than the postnominal position (Jacob, 2005, p. 74). As noted by Jacob (2005), even a non-scalar adjective such as extraordinario ‘extraordinary’ can obtain such a degree reading when placed in the prenominal position. In Example (3a), extraordinario might thus also express the evaluative meaning ‘great,’ whereas in (3b) only the literal meaning ‘extraordinary or ‘exceptional’ applies. (3)

a. Galindo y Rivera realizaron un extraordinario trabajo en el duelo frente a las estadounidenses. ‘Galindo and Rivera did a great/extraordinary job dueling the Americans.’ b. Así, el triunfo se ha terminado decidiendo al esprint, donde la selección polaca realizó un trabajo extraordinario para que Bartos Rudyk impusiese su punta de velocidad con una tremenda autoridad. ‘Thus, the race was finally decided in the sprint, where the Polish team made an exceptional effort so that Bartos Rudyk was able to impose his top speed with a definitive victory.’ (Corpus NOW; Davies, 2018)

74

Pragmatics and word order

A similar mechanism seems to affect the position and status of possessive adjectives and determiners in Central American Spanish (Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Southern Mexico), where there exists variation between the two possessive adjectives su (4a) and suyo ‘his/her/their’ (4b), respectively representing a weak and a strong form, in indefinite NPs (see e.g., Nieuwenhuijsen, 2007; Palacios Alcaine, 2004). In standard European Spanish, only the construction in (4b) is possible (see Picallo & Rigau, 1999). (4) a.

una det.indef.f.sg

su poss.sg

carta letter

b.

una det.indef.f.sg

carta letter

suya poss.f.sg

It has been claimed that the construction in (4a) has a ‘subjective’ or ‘affectionate’ interpretation when compared to (4b) (Nieuwenhuijsen, 2007; Pato, 2002).This might be due to the fact that the preposed possessive is typically associated with contexts of inalienable possession; it is, for instance, frequently used when the possessed referent is an object from the possessor’s personal sphere (Nieuwenhuijsen, 2007, pp. 337–340). In contrast, like other postposed adjectives, the postposed possessive modifies the reference of the noun, restricting the set of possible referents (Nieuwenhuijsen, 2007, pp. 329–330). It consequently does not lead to the same ‘affectionate’ interpretation.

2.2 Intrasentential word order variation 2.2.1

Position of lexical subjects in main clauses

Considering that canonical transitive subjects (i.e., subjects whose referents are agents and instigate actions that impinge on the patient; Keenan, 1976) show a strong tendency to appear before the verb, the postverbal placement can be interpreted as a consequence of deviations from the ‘canonical subjecthood’ or as a strategy to reduce the agentivity of the subject. For instance, the subjects of reflexive passive and medial constructions are postverbal by default and can be characterized as non-prototypical subjects (see Gutiérrez-Bravo, 2007).Thus, although they trigger subject agreement on the verb, they lack semantic characteristics of subjects (in particular, they are low in agentivity).The same is true of the subjects of psychological verbs like gustar ‘like’ (i.e., the preverbal experiencer argument tends to be semantically more subjectlike than the stimulus, which is the syntactic subject), subjects of existential and presentative verbs, and indefinite plural subjects. In semantic terms, Spanish constituent order could therefore be described as agent— verb—patient/stimulus, rather than SVO (Cuartero Sánchez, 2007). Another factor affecting subject placement is the expression of the information-structural relations ‘topic’ and ‘focus.’The notion of topic refers, simply put, to what a sentence is about, and is usually accessible to the participants of the communicative situation, i.e. they already know what is being talked about. Focus, on the other hand, refers to the part of a sentence that contains new information, normally representing a choice among a set of alternatives (for a more technical definition and discussion of the notions of topic and focus, see, e.g., Krifka, 2007). Subjects that are focal and express new information in the discourse context are usually postverbal (see Domínguez, 2018). Thus, postverbal subjects of declarative sentences express narrow focus when they are the only element in the sentence containing new information and when they are contrasted with other elements that could occupy the same position, as in (5a). However, if 75

Posio and Rosemeyer

the whole sentence represents new information, as in (5b), the subject is part of a broad focus (all-new) sentence and occurs in the preverbal position. (5)

a. ¿Quién compró el coche? ‘Who bought the car?’ Lo compró María. ‘María bought it.’ b. ¿Qué pasó? ‘What happened?’ María compró el coche. ‘María bought the car.’

Information-structural relations can also be conceptualized in terms of ‘accessibility’ of the different entities in the discourse. The Accessibility Hierarchy (Ariel, 1990) predicts that the more accessible an entity is to the addressee (i.e., the easier it is to identify it and distinguish it from other, potentially relevant referents), the less information must be encoded in the referring expression. Highly accessible entities can be omitted altogether: if the language allows for null subjects or objects, these are more likely to occur when the referent is highly accessible. Similarly, entities that represent new information and are thus less accessible to the addressee tend to be introduced into the discourse in the postverbal position either as direct objects or as subjects of presentational or existential verbs (Bentivoglio & Weber, 1986; Du Bois, 2003). Particularly in the generative framework, there is a body of research attributing the postverbal placement of the subject to lexical properties of certain intransitive verbs (Mendikoetxea, 1999; Perlmutter, 1978). So-called ‘unaccusative verbs’ (i.e., verbs whose subject argument is not a semantic agent, such as nacer ‘be born’ or aparecer ‘appear,’ favor postverbal subjects, whereas unergative verbs, such as intransitive verbs whose only argument is an agent like saltar ‘jump’ or gritar ‘shout,’ favor preverbal subjects, if no other factors such as topicality oblige the subject to be in another position. In the case of unaccusative verbs, the postverbal placement of the subject can also be conceptualized as a consequence of a deviation from canonical subjecthood, as discussed in the beginning of this section. However, as López Meirama (2006) remarks, the same verbs can be used with both agentive subjects placed in the preverbal position and non-agentive subjects placed in the postverbal position, as can be observed in (6a) and (6b). (6)

a. El hijo sale y vuelve pronto con dos hermosas peras y un cuchillo, sobre un plato que deja en la mesilla. ‘The son leaves and comes back with two beautiful pears and a knife, on a plate that he leaves on the table.’ (SONRISA, 26, 13) b. Abrí los grifos y salió el agua tibia y parduzca. ‘I opened the faucets and the water flowed out tepid and brownish.’ (LABERINTO, 92, 23) (López Meirama, 2006, p. 12)

Consequently, as López Meirama (2006) argues, it would be more appropriate to speak of unaccusative constructions instead of unaccusative verbs (see also Mendikoetxea, 1999). It is also worth noticing that many verbs classified as unaccusative, such as aparecer ‘appear’ and llegar ‘arrive,’ seem to be particularly prone to occur in presentational constructions, used to introduce new referents into discourse.Thus, it is often difficult to single out whether the postverbal 76

Pragmatics and word order

placement of a subject is due to information structure, reduced agentivity of the subject referent or verb/construction type, as all these factors may coincide. However, in (6) the only difference seems to be the agentivity of the subject, as both variants have the same verb and the subjects are accessible (in 6a due to previous mentions in the text, in 6b due to the cognitive frame projected by los grifos ‘the faucets’). Finally, in addition to semantic factors, IS and verb or construction type, postverbal subject placement can be triggered by ‘cognitive’ or ‘structural factors.’ Subjects tend to be postverbal when another constituent occupies the preverbal position or if the subject is particularly long; e.g., a whole sentence (Cuartero Sánchez, 2007; Silva-Corvalán, 1982).To give an example of a purely structural factor, Leonetti (2018, p. 12) mentions that in sentences with focus fronting, such as (7), the subject is always postverbal (see Section 2.3.2 for more information on focus fronting). (7)

CEVICHE ha comido Maite. ‘Ceviche (is what) Maite ate.’

Whatever the reasons for postverbal placement, the rate of postverbal subjects in Spanish discourse seems to fluctuate between 20% and 40% of all subjects, depending on the medium (spoken vs. written language) and the dialect (e.g., Bentivoglio, 2003; Meyer-Hermann, 1990).

2.2.2

Position of pronominal subjects in main clauses

Most of the research on Spanish word order focuses on lexical constituents, while the placement of pronominal subjects has received less attention. Since the referents of pronouns must be accessible (if they were not, speakers would resort to referring expressions that contain more information instead), information structure should be less relevant for pronominal subjects than for NP subjects. Posio (2012) studied the distribution of postverbal pronominal subjects in a corpus of 1.2 million words of spoken Peninsular Spanish and found 1,360 sentences with a postverbal pronominal subject. In Posio’s (2012) sample, 75% (i.e., 1,020/1,360) of the postverbal pronominal subjects in the sample occurred with transitive verbs, in particular with mental verbs (16%; i.e., 218/1,360) and speech verbs (18%; i.e., 245/1,360). Unaccusative verbs were particularly scarce, representing only 3% (i.e., 40/1,360) of the sample. As for the functions of subject placement, in 14% (i.e., 190/1,360) of the clauses, the postverbal placement of the subject was attributed to contrastive focus. In previous literature, it has been suggested that alongside the expression of contrastive focus, another main function of postverbal pronominal subjects is to disambiguate between possible referents of a syncretic verb form (e.g., tenía yo ‘I had’ vs. tenía ella ‘she had;’ Fernández Soriano, 1999, p.  1237). However, this was identified as the main function of the postverbal subject in only 1% of the clauses (i.e., 14/1,360). Interestingly, the most frequent construction types in Posio’s (2012) sample are characterized by the subject being backgrounded with regard to other elements of the clause.This is the case in Example (8), where the preverbal adverb entonces ‘then, in that case’ refers to a situation that has been discussed previously and that constitutes the topic of the sentence: (8)

Y entonces ya cojo yo vacaciones o eso después de . . . ‘And in that case I will take my vacation or whatever after . . . ’ —Claro. Después de Semana Santa, ¿eh? ‘Sure.After Easter, ok?’ (España Oral) (Posio, 2012, p. 176) 77

Posio and Rosemeyer

Postverbal pronominal subjects are also found in routinized, formulaic sequences with frequently occurring lowly transitive verbs like creer ‘think’and decir‘say.’ For example, the formulaic sequence digo yo ‘I say’ can express the speaker’s subjective or epistemic stance toward something they have uttered previously, as in Example (9). Note that the sequence yo digo would not receive a similar interpretation. (9)

Será que ahora colecciona bastones. Digo yo, no, no tengo ni idea, vamos. ‘Maybe he’s collecting walking sticks now. I say, no, I haven’t got a clue, actually.’ (España Oral, PNOT001B) (Posio, 2012, p. 173)

In some dialects, both pronominal and NP subjects are frequently placed postverbally in discourse formulae like sentence-final creo yo ‘I think’ or quotative sequences used to introduce reported speech (e.g., y dice mi madre ‘and my mother says’), in particular, in European Spanish (Posio & Pešková, forthcoming). The subject pronouns most frequently found in the postverbal position in the data analyzed by Posio (2012) are yo (‘I’) (32%; i.e., 430/1,360), usted (‘you-singular formal’) (31%; i.e., 421/1,360), and ustedes (‘you-plural’) (12%; i.e., 157/1,360), followed by tú (10%; i.e., 137/1,360). In other words, in addition to the first-person singular, this position is particularly frequent with address pronouns.The postverbal placement of address pronouns has also been studied in the framework of (im)politeness. Serrano and Aijón Oliva (2010, p. 193) consider that the postverbal placement of a pronominal subject may reduce the agentivity and augment the affectedness of the subject, thus functioning as an impoliteness strategy. Posio (2012, p. 162), on the other hand, suggests that the frequent expression of the address pronoun usted in the postverbal position reflects a tendency to express the pronoun for politeness reasons in contexts where other pronouns would be omitted.

2.2.3

Particularities of subordinate clauses and infinitival constructions

So far, we have been examining constituent order in main (matrix) clauses.While subordinate content clauses are expected to follow the same tendencies as corresponding declarative and interrogative main clauses, relative and adverbial subordinate clauses display opposite patterns with regard to corresponding main clauses. Since the unmarked constituent order is expected to be produced in broad focus contexts (triggered by the question ‘What happened?’), Examples (10) and (11) show that SV order is more felicitous in a main clause (10a), while the VS order is more felicitous in a relative subordinate clause (11a; Gutiérrez-Bravo, 2005). (10) ¿Qué pasó? ‘What happened?’ a. La maestra escribió un libro. b. ?Escribió un libro la maestra. ‘The teacher wrote a book.’ (Gutiérrez-Bravo, 2005, p. 153) (11) ¿Qué pasó? ‘What happened?’ a. Pedro no leyó el libro que escribió la maestra. b. ?Pedro no leyó el libro que la maestra escribió. ‘Pedro didn’t read the book that the teacher wrote.’ (Gutiérrez-Bravo, 2005, p. 153) 78

Pragmatics and word order

Gutiérrez-Bravo (2005) proposes an account of the word order illustrated in (11b) on the basis of intonational considerations related to the prosodic weight of the constituents.The eventual pragmatic differences between sentences like (11a) and (11b) have received less attention. Another construction type where subjects are regularly postverbal are infinitival constructions with expressed subjects (Fábregas & Varela, 2006; Fernández Lagunilla, 1987; Rosemeyer, 2012). Preverbal subjects are rarely found with infinitives and they tend to occur in fixed constructions, in particular with the verb saber ‘to know’ (12; see Vanderschueren, 2013, p. 232). (12) Sin tú saberlo, Julián te observaba y te estudiaba. ‘Without you knowing it, Julián was observing and studying you.’ (C. Ruiz Zafón; cited from Vanderschueren, 2013, p. 285) On the basis of a corpus analysis,Vanderschueren (2013) argues that the infinitival constructions tend to be thetic (i.e., lacking a topic) and their subjects are most often noncanonical, non-topical, and discourse-new or focalized. For example, in (13), the subject la guerra ‘the war’ occurs in an adverbial construction providing background information for the main topic but is not topical in itself. (13) Al terminar la guerra, Irak producía 700.000 barriles diarios de crudo. ‘When the war ended, Iraq was producing 700,000 barrels of crude oil daily.’ (CREA, El País; cited from Vanderschueren, 2013, p. 288) Thus, according to the analysis in Vanderschueren (2013), infinitival constructions are functionally similar to other contexts favoring postverbal subjects.

2.2.4

Reordering of other constituents

Constituents such as objects, prepositional complements, and adjuncts can be moved more freely in Spanish than, for example, in English (see 14).As summarized in Zubizarreta (1999, pp. 124– 126) and Leonetti (2017, pp. 915–918), such ‘scrambling’ is frequently due to information structure: the neutral word order in (14a) is changed in (14b) to ensure that the moved constituent un bocadillo receives a narrow focus reading. Thus, (14b) would answer the question ‘What did Juan eat in the park?,’ whereas (14a) answers ‘What did Juan do?,’ receiving a broad focus reading. (14) a. Juan se comió un bocadillo en el parque. b. Juan se comió en el parque un bocadillo. ‘Juan ate a sandwich in the park.’ Other factors at play are the prosodic weight of the constituents, givenness, the need to mark contrast between the constituents, and the routinization of the syntagmatic order of frequent collocates (Leonetti, 2017, p. 917). For instance, placing un bocadillo in a sentence-final position after the heavy locative constituent in (15) leads to doubtful acceptability. (15) ? Juan se comió en el bonito y tranquilo parque un bocadillo. ‘Juan ate in the beautiful and peaceful park a sandwich.’ Likewise, Gabriel (2007) demonstrates that prefinal constituents can receive a narrow focus interpretation, a finding that has been corroborated experimentally in Heidinger (2014). In 79

Posio and Rosemeyer

Example (16), el diario would receive a prosodic focus accent if it is understood as answering the implicit question ‘What does María give to her brother?’ (16) María le da EL DIARIO a su hermano. ‘María gives THE DIARY to her brother.’ (Gabriel, 2007, p. 67) Consequently, the link between the reordering of non-subject constituents and focus expression is not absolute and more studies are necessary in order to understand the relative importance of elements such as information structure, prosodic weight, and frequency for this syntactic process.

2.3

Intersentential word order variation

As for intersentential word order variation, we understand the order of clauses or constituents within complex sentences to be related to elements such as topicalizing constructions (2.3.1), fronting (2.3.2), and subordinate clauses (2.3.3).

2.3.1

Topicalizing constructions

Zubizarreta (1999, pp. 4221–4224) distinguishes between two construction types that topicalize constituents: the ‘binding/hanging topic (tema vinculante) construction’ (13a) and ‘left dislocation’ (13b).These constructions differ in that only left dislocations display a grammatical dependence relation between the left periphery and the rest of the clause.Thus, in left-dislocation constructions, the constituent in the periphery needs to be marked by prepositions selected by the verb in the main clause (17b; here a ‘to’), which is not the case in binding topic constructions (17a). (17) a. Respecto de Juani, dice que no lei dieron dinero. ‘As regards Juan, s/he says that they didn’t give him money.’ b. A Juani, dice que no lei dieron dinero. ‘Juan, s/he says that they didn’t give him money.’ Although binding topic constructions typically involve the use of an explicit connective discourse marker such as respecto de, this is not always the case (see 18). (18) Juani, dice que no lei dieron dinero. ‘As regards Juan, s/he says they didn’t give him money.’ While formally dissimilar, both binding topic and left dislocation may be used as ‘frame-setters’ (e.g., Chafe, 1976; Frascarelli, 2017; Krifka, 2007). In a context such as (19), both constructions can have “the function of limiting the truth-conditional validity of the sentence” (Frascarelli, 2017, p. 474, italics in the original), thus creating the implicature that the subject referent is not so fond of her other siblings. Sentences such as (20), in which the topicalizing constructions can receive a conditional interpretation (e.g., Gutiérrez-Ordoñez, 2015, p. 290), can be described along the same lines. (19) ¿Cómo es la relación de María con sus hermanos? ‘How is María’s relationship with her siblings?’ 80

Pragmatics and word order

a. En cuanto a Juan, dice que lo ama, pero a los demás no. ‘Regarding Juan, s/he says that s/he loves him, but not the others.’ b. A Juan dice que lo ama, pero a los demás no. lit.‘Juan, s/he says that s/he loves him, but not the others.’ (20) Con su madre, la niña comía. ‘With her mother, the girl ate (but not with anyone else).’ (Gutiérrez Ordoñez, 2015, p. 290) However, non-contrastive readings are also possible, as in (21), where the topicalizing constructions may simply express a shift to a new (sub)topic; i.e., the relationship of María to one of her brothers, where the question asked for her relationship to all of her brothers.Topicalizing constructions can also receive a causal interpretation (22). (21) ¿Cómo es la relación de María con sus hermanos? ‘How is María’s relationship to her siblings?’ a. En cuanto a Juan, dice que lo ama, y a los demás también. ‘Regarding Juan, s/he says that s/he loves him, and also the others.’ b. A Juan dice que lo ama, y a los demás también. lit.‘Juan, s/he says that s/he loves him, and also the others.’ (22) Lesionado, Ronaldo no jugó. ‘(Because he was) injured, Ronaldo didn’t play.’ (Gutiérrez Ordoñez, 2015, p. 290) ‘Right dislocation’ constructions (see 23), in which the dislocated constituent is coreferential with the direct object clitic, do not fulfill similar topicalizing functions like left dislocation. Frascarelli (2017) claims that right dislocations typically mark topic continuity or highlight an already topical referent. For instance, the sentence in (23) might be uttered in a context in which the speaker has been talking about the subject referent’s relationship to Juan. (23) Dice que loi ama, a Juani. ‘S/he says that she loves him, Juan.’ In terms of their pragmatics, the examples given in this section thus appear to support a functional division between leftward and rightward placement of constituents, with a purely formal difference between binding topic and left dislocation constructions.

2.3.2

Fronting

Leonetti (2017) distinguishes among three types of fronting operations: resumptive preposing, quantifier preposing, and focus fronting. In resumptive preposing (24), the fronted element is discourse-old, whereas the rest of the sentence adds new information about the fronted element.This ‘argument reversal’ (Leonetti, 2017, p. 910) can lead to justificational (24a) or presentational (24b) readings. (24) a. Esto quería el jefe. ‘That’s what the boss wanted.’ b. Aquí vivo yo. ‘Here is where I live.’ 81

Posio and Rosemeyer

In contrast, quantifier preposing gives rise to a “typical emphatic flavor” (Leonetti, 2017, p. 903).The construction is typically used at the beginning of discourse segments summarizing an argument from the previous text. For instance, in (25), preposing mucho signals that there is much to learn from the ‘simple people’ as opposed to the people who do not actually contribute to the church. It thus serves to settle the implicit question of the text (‘Is there something to learn from people?’), which is why it may be interpreted as expressing ‘verum focus’; i.e., focus on the truth value of the entire sentence (see Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal, 2009). (25) (At the end of an article in a Catholic blog discussing whether it is necessary for the Church to learn from the people on the street) Mucho he aprendido de esta gente, de la gente corrientita . . . ‘I have learned much from these people, the simple people . . . ’ (Corpus NOW; Davies, 2018, boldface in original; www.infocatolica.com/blog/cura. php/1903291036-el-mito-de-preguntar-a-la-gen) Focus fronting typically leads to a contrastive reading (26). In such uses, the focus has to be marked prosodically, as indicated by the upper case in the example (Zubizarreta, 1999, p. 4239). Cleft sentences can fulfill the same function (27).As summarized in Cruschina and Remberger (2017, p. 516), focus fronting is impossible with an information focus reading in Spanish; i.e., it cannot be used to answer (implicit) questions without a direct contrast with explicit alternatives (28). In contrast, it is judged as grammatical in closely related languages such as Asturian and Catalan. However, focus fronting can be used to create mirative effects such as the expression of unexpectedness, as in (29) (see also Cruschina, 2019). Likewise, the use of focus fronting can lead to ironic readings (Escandell-Vidal & Leonetti, 2014; Haverkate, 1985; Hernánz, 2001). For instance, in (30), the fronting reverses the interpretation of bonita ‘nice,’ implicating that the subject referent has caused the speaker a lot of extra work. (26) Invitaron a Luca a la fiesta. ‘They invited Luca to the party.’ No, a EsTEban invitaron. ‘No, they invited Esteban!’ (Cruschina & Remberger, 2017, p. 514, upper case added) (27) Fue a EsTEban a quien invitaron. ‘It was Esteban that they invited.’ (28) ¿A quién invitaron? ‘Whom did they invite?’ a. ?A EsTEban invitaron. b. Invitaron a EsTEban. ‘They invited Esteban.’ (29) ¡Por dios, dos boTEllas se han bebido! ‘My god! They have drunk two bottles!’ (Jiménez-Fernández, 2015, p. 50, cited in Cruschina & Remberger, 2017, p. 519, upper case added) (30) ¡Bonita faena me has hecho! ‘A nice chore you’ve created for me!’ (Escandell-Vidal & Leonetti, 2014, p. 310) 82

Pragmatics and word order

Example (30) also illustrates that such ironic fronting may be accompanied by prenominal placement of the adjective. Due to the scalar interpretation typical for the prenominal position (see Section 2.1), preposed adjectives can be interpreted as exaggerated, which supports the ironic interpretation.

2.3.3

Position of subordinate clauses

Conditional, concessive, final, or causal subordinate clauses can be placed in sentence-initial or sentence-final position (López García, 1999, pp. 3535–3537), as illustrated in (31). (31) a. Si llueve, no saldremos. b. No saldremos si llueve. ‘We won’t go out if it rains.’ (López García, 1999, p. 3536) The variation can once again be attributed to information structure, although we would expect other factors, such as the phonetic weight of the subordinate clause, to also be relevant. When discussing the word order of conditional clauses, Montolío (1999, pp. 3651–3657) points out that the protasis-apodosis (i.e., condition-consequence) order typically assigns a topical value to the protasis, whereas the apodosis adds new information.Thus, protasis expresses information that was already presented in the preceding context, sometimes contrasting different suppositions or possibilities. Frequently, the protasis makes explicit a possible state of affairs derived from the preceding context, as in (32). (32) ¿Ves las nubes ahí? Si llueve, no saldremos. ‘Do you see the clouds over there? If it rains, we won’t go out.’ In contrast, when the protasis appears postposed it serves as a specification or restriction of the proposition expressed by the apodosis (Montolío, 1999, pp. 3654–3657), just like postposed adjectives (see Section 2.1). For instance, it may suspend a presupposition from the apodosis, as in (33), or produce a scalar interpretation, as in (34). (33) Seguro que los hijos de Sebastián son rubísimos, si es que tiene hijos. ‘Sebastián’s children are surely very blonde, if he does have children.’ (Montolío, 1999, p. 3654) (34) Produje once películas en cinco años.Y esto es una barbaridad sobre todo si lo haces sobre tus espaldas. ‘I produced eleven movies in five years. And that’s a lot of work, especially if you’re the one who carries the responsibility.’ (Montolío, 1999, p. 3656) The placement of subordinate clauses thus appears to be determined at least partially by the degree of topicality of the information expressed in the clause.

3

Methodological considerations

The literature reviewed so far presents two different approaches to data. On the one hand, there is a tradition of analyzing example sentences, either constructed or drawn from corpora, in studies on phenomena of relatively low frequency, such as different types of foci. On the other 83

Posio and Rosemeyer

hand, quantitative analyses of corpus data from spoken language have been employed to study high-frequency phenomena like the effect of accessibility (e.g., for subject pronoun expression, Cameron & Flores-Ferrán, 2004;Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2012) or the pragmatic functions of subject pronoun placement (e.g., Padilla García, 2005; Rosemeyer, 2018). Crucially, however, only some topics—most prominently subject expression and placement— have been investigated thoroughly in authentic spoken data.This is problematic because gauging the pragmatic effects of word order variation might be difficult on the basis of constructed examples without a naturalistic context (see also Ocampo, 2010). Similarly, many quantitative corpus-based analyses use data from written language, which is merely indirect evidence for the pragmatics of spoken Spanish.An example of a particularly understudied phenomenon are cleft sentences.With few exceptions (Di Tullio, 2006; Sedano, 1996; Rosemeyer, forthcoming), neither of the syntactic or pragmatic aspects of the use of Spanish cleft sentences have been studied in detail, no authentic spoken data has been analyzed, and the considerable dialectal variation has not been addressed (see Chapter 15 on regional pragmatic variation). It seems to us that employing methods from interactional linguistics or conversation analysis could help greatly to refine current descriptions of the impact that certain word orders have on the negotiation of meaning in discourse. Consider, for instance, right dislocation, whose main function was identified as the expression of topic continuity (see Section 2.3.1). Examples from authentic spoken discourse suggest that the use of right dislocation is more complex than that. In (35), the interlocutors have been discussing the ‘energy hunger’ of Spanish society. One interlocutor has suggested that renewable energy sources might solve this problem. JAV’s turn problematizes this assumption; although we want to expend more electric energy, there are always protests against new power plants. By way of a summary, JAV then says no lo sé ‘I don’t know (it),’ adding the referent of lo after a brief pause.While, in a sense, the right dislocation indeed signals topic continuity (JAV binds what he has said before to the interlocutor’s question), from an interactional perspective it is a self-repair; JAV realizes that the reference of the pronoun lo is not explicit enough for the interlocutor to understand, which is why he makes the reference explicit afterwards (see also Padilla García, 2005, pp. 239–240). The self-repair function is indicated by the brief pause between the verb and the right-dislocated constituent. (35) JAV: . . . por una parte nosotros queremos . . . eh . . . tener . . . estar en casa mucho más cómodos, gastar más . . . tener más aparatos eléctricos, muchas más comodidades, pero claro, en cuanto van a poner . . . pues . . . eh . . . las centrales que ahora se están poniendo más . . . las de o más proyectos hay, las de ciclo . . . ciclo combinado de gas, pues surgen siempre voces, voces contrarias. Entonces . . . hm . . . yo no loi sé (brief pause) [hasta dónde vamos a poder llegar en ese aspecto]i ‘on the one hand we want to . . . eh . . . have . . . be comfortable at home, spend more . . . have more electric appliances, many more commodities, but of course, whenever they want to build . . . eh . . . now they are building more of these power plants, the ones that combine the cycle with gas, then there are always voices raised against this. So . . . hm . . . I don’t know (brief pause) how far we will be able to go in that regard’ (epubdl03, C-ORAL ROM ESPAÑA, Cresti & Moneglia, 2005). On a related note, few studies have tried to validate their analyses using experimental approaches in paradigms such as surveys or reading-time experiments (e.g., Feldhausen & Vanrell, 2015; Heidinger, 2014; Hoot, 2016; Sánchez Alvarado, 2018), although there has been a steady increase of such approaches over the recent years (see García García & Uth, 2018). Given the low frequency of many of the phenomena described in Section 2 in naturalistic data, experimental 84

Pragmatics and word order

approaches may well turn out to be indispensable for the task of establishing a complete picture on the role of word order in Spanish grammar. With the exception of some prominently dialectal phenomena like the possessive constructions discussed in Section 2.1, as well as the variable frequency of subject expression, another recurrent problem in the literature is that there is little research on potential variation between dialects, sociolects, genres, and ways of communication. For example, there are few comparative studies on word order in spoken vs. written Spanish. Bentivoglio (2003) provides a comparison of subject placement between spoken data from Caracas,Venezuela, and the corpus of literary texts analyzed by Delbecque (1991), showing that subject postposition is more common in the literary data (39%) than in the spoken data (23%), but to a great extent this difference is due to the more frequent use of preverbal pronominal subjects in speech. However, it is unclear whether this difference also reflects a dialectal preference, given that Delbecque’s (1991) literary data come from Hispanic authors from several countries. Dialectal phenomena that have received attention in the literature include the preference for SV(O) word order in Caribbean Spanish, even in contexts where it would be ungrammatical in other varieties, such as partial interrogatives (e.g., ¿Qué tú piensas? instead of ¿Qué piensas tú? ‘What do you think?;’ Toribio, 2000). There is also evidence to the effect that some varieties show a stronger preference for the SV(O) word order in declarative sentences than others (e.g., Argentinian Spanish as opposed to European Spanish; Gabriel, 2010; Posio & Pešková, forthcoming).Varieties of Spanish in contact with Quechua are known to display a high proportion of preposed objects.While the high frequency of the OV order in bilingual speech is clearly an influence of Quechua, a verb-final language with flexible constituent order, it is used in the same contexts where it occurs in non-contact varieties (such as focus fronting and topicalization) and thus does not constitute a grammatical change, but rather, a change in usage frequency (Ocampo & Klee, 1997). However, to what extent the frequency of a given word order phenomenon affects the pragmatic value it receives in a given variety is an empirical question to be addressed in future studies (but see Rosemeyer, 2018, for such a comparative approach regarding the pragmatic interpretation of word order in Caribbean Spanish partial interrogatives). Finally, a field of study that has received little attention so far is word order in Spanish as a second or heritage language (but see Hoot, 2012), in particular from the viewpoint of pragmatics. This is particularly striking considering the large body of research dedicated to subject expression in learner varieties of Spanish (Domínguez, 2013, p. 123). In general, studies have shown that while early stage learners use mainly SV order, sensitivity to factors affecting word order variation, such as verb type and informational focus, increases with the general level of proficiency (Domínguez, 2013; Hertel, 2003; Lozano, 2006).

4

Future directions and conclusion

We started the present chapter by observing that word order in Spanish is affected by syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic factors. Just how important a role is attributable to pragmatics depends on the phenomenon to be explained, but also on how the boundaries between pragmatics and syntax or semantics are defined. For instance, we have considered information structure as a part of pragmatics, while other authors (like Leonetti, 2014) include it in grammar.There are arguments in favor of both views. On the one hand, IS is directly related to the management of the common ground between the speakers, and how the status of entities as ‘new’ or ‘old’ information is negotiated in interaction between the speakers: hence, it can be described and accounted for as a pragmatic phenomenon. On the other hand, if pragmatics is defined as concerning optional rules (as Leonetti, 2014, does; e.g., placement of the subject pronoun usted 85

Posio and Rosemeyer

in declarative clauses) and grammar as concerning obligatory rules (e.g., word order in partial interrogative clauses), word order becomes primarily a grammatical and only secondarily a pragmatic phenomenon. The problem of establishing a strict boundary between grammar and pragmatics can be tackled by adopting a usage-based view of language. In such a framework, grammar is considered as emerging from usage, and regularly used pragmatic strategies naturally evolve into grammaticalized constructions that possess a structural meaning. For example, even though the word order of partial interrogatives (e.g., ¿Cuándo viene María? ‘When does María come?’) is governed by ‘strict’ (i.e., grammatical) rules, these rules are not arbitrary but rather follow the same tendency as that found in ‘optional’ rules (i.e., pragmatic strategies like focus fronting, where the focused element is placed in the more prominent preverbal position, which causes the subject to be placed in the postverbal position). Both focus-fronting constructions and partial interrogatives use word order alternation for pragmatic purposes, even if it is obligatory only in the latter construction. In addition, the concept of obligation has to be taken with a grain of salt: there is nothing that obliges a speaker to use a partial interrogative clause in a given context, and even if they do, they can alter the word order by recurring to another strategy, such as topicalization (e.g., María, ¿cuándo viene? ‘María, when does she come?’) or avoiding the interrogative construction altogether and using another pragmatic strategy instead (e.g., No sé qué le pasa a María. Normalmente viene a estas horas.‘I don’t know what’s happening with María. Normally she comes at this time’). As a general conclusion, we would like to point out some interesting parallels between the intraphrasal, intrasentential, and intersentential level. Our survey of the pragmatics of word order has demonstrated that a position at the left periphery of the phrase, simple sentence, or complex sentence frequently involves an interpretation of the referent (which can be an object or an event/fact, in the case of complex sentences) or attribute (in the case of adjectives) as easily identifiable to the hearer.This property of leftward placement can give rise to pragmatic effects that are frequently described as ‘emphatic’. For instance, in European Spanish partial questions, the placement of a subject pronoun before the interrogative pronoun or adverb (cf. ¿y tú qué haces? ‘and you, what do you do?’) makes the subject pronoun topical, signaling that an already identifiable element is established as a new discourse topic (Gutiérrez-Bravo, 2008; Rosemeyer, 2018). In contrast, rightward placement typically serves a discriminating function; i.e., it restricts the interpretation of the phrase, simple sentence, or complex sentence (recall, for instance, the difference between un famoso profesor and un profesor famoso discussed in Section 2.1). In broad lines, the pragmatics of word order in Spanish thus clearly follows the basic information-structural principle that speakers tend to express known information before new information (e.g., Gundel, 1988). This overview has also demonstrated that factors related to the cognitive processing of syntax also appear to influence Spanish word order. In particular, heavier constituents are more likely to be positioned at the end of the constituent, clause, or complex clause.This implies some sort of trade-off between pragmatic and cognitive factors during the parsing of syntactic structure, which, to our knowledge, has not yet been investigated exhaustively in Spanish. In summary, there is still much work to be done in the study of Spanish word order. Many hypotheses that have been established in the literature using introspection and/or isolated examples should be tested on the basis of empirical analyses over corpus data and psycholinguistic experiments. In addition, most existing research focuses on European Spanish, disregarding word order phenomena in spoken Latin American Spanish.An especially interesting area might be the study of varieties of Spanish in contact with American indigenous languages such as Quechua or Tzeltzal, but also with other colonial European languages. 86

Pragmatics and word order

Further reading Leonetti, M. (2017). Basic constituent orders. In A. Dufter & E. Stark (Eds.), Manual of Romance morphosyntax and syntax (pp. 887–932). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Leonetti’s chapter offers a highly readable and comprehensive introduction to word order in Romance. Analyzing the most prominent types of word order variation (subject placement, fronting, reordering of verbal constituents), he defends the hypothesis that, in comparison to ‘restrictive’ Romance languages such as French, Spanish is a ‘permissive’ Romance language with respect to word order. In particular, subject inversion and fronting strategies are more productive in Spanish than in French. López Meirama, B. (2006). Semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors in Spanish word order. In J. C. Clements & J.Yoon (Eds.), Functional approaches to Spanish syntax: Lexical semantics, discourse and transitivity (pp. 7–52). London: Palgrave Macmillan. This article is recommended for readers interested in the role of semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors in accounting for word order variation in Spanish. In addition to providing an overview of the influence of semantic features, such as agentivity and definiteness, and pragmatic features such as information structure, the work illustrates different word orders with authentic text examples. Padilla García, X. A. (2005). Pragmática del orden de palabras. Alicante: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante. This book offers a comprehensive, monographic study of the pragmatic functions of word order in European Spanish. Using a cognitive linguistics framework, the book examines the different syntactic and pragmatic word order patterns (including topicalizations and dislocations) in a corpus of spoken interactions.

References Ariel, M. (1990). Accessing noun-phrase antecedents. London: Routledge. Ashby,W. J., & Bentivoglio, P. (1993). Preferred argument structure in spoken French and Spanish. Language Variation and Change, 5, 61–76. Bentivoglio, P. (2003). Orden de palabras en español: un análisis sintáctico-semántico-pragmático del sujeto. Lexis, XXVII(1–2), 235–260. Bentivoglio, P., & Weber, E. G. (1986). A functional approach to subject word order in spoken Spanish. In J. Osvaldo & C. Silva-Corvalán (Eds.), Studies in Romance linguistics (pp. 23–40). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Foris. Bosque, I. (2001).Adjective position and the interpretation of indefinites. In J. Gutiérrez-Rexach & L. SilvaVillar (Eds.), Current issues in Spanish syntax and semantics (pp. 17–38). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Butt, J., & Benjamin, C. (2004). A new reference grammar of Modern Spanish. London: Arnold. Cameron, R., & Flores-Ferrán, N. (2004). Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish. Spanish in Context, 1(1), 41–65. Chafe,W. L. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view. In C. N. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 27–55). New York:Academic Press. Cresti, E., & Moneglia, M. (2005). C-ORAL-ROM. Integrated reference corpora for spoken Romance languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cruschina, S. (2019). Focus fronting in Spanish: Mirative implicature and information structure. Probus, 31(1), 119–146. Cruschina, S., & Remberger, E.-M. (2017). Focus fronting. In A. Dufter & E. Stark (Eds.), Manual of Romance morphosyntax and syntax (pp. 502–535). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Cuartero Sánchez, J. M. (2007). Sobre la naturaleza y el alcance de los factores que influyen en el orden de palabras (con referencia a las oraciones declarativas en español actual). Lingüística española actual, 29, 101–118. Davies, M. (2018). Corpus news on the web (NOW). Retrieved March 26, 2019, from www.corpusdelespanol. org Delbecque, N. (1991). El orden de los sintagmas. La posición del regente. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Demonte,V. (1999). A minimal account of Spanish adjective position and interpretation. In J. A. Franco, A. Landa, & J. Martín (Eds.), Grammatical analyses in Basque and Romance linguistics. Papers in honor of Mario Saltarelli (pp. 45–76).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 87

Posio and Rosemeyer

Di Tullio, Á. (2006). Clefting in spoken discourse. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (Vol. II, pp. 483–491).Amsterdam: Elsevier. Domínguez, L. (2013). Understanding interfaces: Second language acquisition and first language attrition of Spanish subject realization and word order variation.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Domínguez, L. (2018). Information structure. In K. L. Geeslin (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of Spanish linguistics (pp. 372–391). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Du Bois, J.W. (2003).Argument structure: Grammar in use. In J. Du Bois, L. E. Kumpf, & W. J.Ashby (Eds.). Preferred argument structure: Grammar as architecture for function (pp. 11–60).Amsterdam: Benjamins. Escandell-Vidal, V., & Leonetti, M. (2014). Fronting and irony in Spanish. In A. Dufter & Á. S. Octavio de Toledo (Eds.), Left sentence peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, variationist, and comparative perspectives (pp. 309–342).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fábregas,A., & Varela, S. (2006).Verb classes with eventive infinitives in Spanish. In N. Sagarra & A. J.Toribio (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 24–33). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Feldhausen, I., & Vanrell, M. d. M. (2015). Oraciones hendidas y marcación del foco estrecho en español: una aproximación desde la teoría de la optimidad estocástica. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 13(2), 39–59. Fernández Lagunilla, M. (1987). Los infinitivos con sujetos léxicos en español. InV. Demonte & M. Fernández Lagunilla (Eds.), Sintaxis de las lenguas románicas (pp. 125–147). Madrid: El Arquero. Fernández Soriano, O. (1999). El pronombre personal. Formas y distribuciones. Pronombres átonos y tónicos. In V. Demonte & I. Bosque (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. 1, pp. 1209–1273). Madrid: Espasa. Frascarelli, M. (2017). Dislocations and framings. In A. Dufter & E. Stark (Eds.), Manual of Romance morphosyntax and syntax (pp. 472–501). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Gabriel, C. (2007). Fokus im Spannungsfeld von Phonologie und Syntax: Eine Studie zum Spanischen. Frankfurt am Main:Vervuert. Gabriel, C. (2010). On focus, prosody, and word order in Argentinian Spanish: A minimalist OT account. Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem, 4, 183–222. García García, M., & Uth, M. (Eds.). (2018). Focus realization in Romance and beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gundel, J. K. (1988). Universals of topic-comment structure. In M. Hammond, E.A. Moravcsik, & J.Wirth (Eds.), Studies in syntactic typology (pp. 209–242).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gutiérrez-Bravo, R. (2005). Subject inversion in Spanish relative clauses. In T. Geerts, I. van Ginneken, & H. Jacobs (Eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2003 (pp. 150–166). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gutiérrez-Bravo, R. (2007). Prominence scales and unmarked word order in Spanish. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 25, 235–721. Gutiérrez-Bravo, R. (2008).Topicalization and preverbal subjects in Spanish wh-interrogatives. In J. Bruhn de Garavito & E.Valenzuela (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 10th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 225– 236). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla. Gutiérrez Ordoñez, S. (2015). Topicalización y génesis de estructuras. In E. Hernández Sánchez & M. I. López Martínez (Eds.), Sodalicia dona. Homenaje a Ricardo Escavy Zamora (pp. 290–300). Murcia: Departamento de Lengua Española y Lingüística General de la Universidad de Murcia. Haverkate, H. (1985). La ironía verbal: un análisis pragmalingüístico. Revista Española de Lingüística, XV, 343–389. Heidinger, S. (2014). El foco informativo y la posición sintáctica de los depictivos orientados al sujeto en español. Verba, 41, 51–74. Hernánz, M. L. (2001). ‘¡En bonito lío me he metido!’: Notas sobre la afectividad en español. Moenia, 7, 93–109. Hertel,T. (2003). Lexical and discourse factors in the second language acquisition of Spanish word order. Second Language Research, 19(4), 273–304. Hoot, B. (2012). Presentational focus in heritage and monolingual Spanish (Unpublished PhD dissertation). University of Illinois, Chicago. Hoot, B. (2016). Narrow presentational focus in Mexican Spanish: Experimental evidence. Probus, 28(2), 335–365. Jacob, D. (2005). Adjective position, specificity, and information structure in Spanish. In K. von Heusinger, G. Kaiser, & E. Stark (Eds.), Proceedings of the workshop “Specificity and the evolution/emergence of nominal determination systems in Romance” (pp. 71–79). Konstanz, Germany: University of Konstanz. 88

Pragmatics and word order

Jiménez-Fernández, Á. L. (2015). Towards a typology of focus: Subject position and microvariation at the discourse-syntax interface. Ampersand, 2, 49–60. Keenan, E. (1976).Towards a universal definition of ‘subject.’ In C. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 303–333). New York:Academic Press. Krifka, M. (2007). Basic notions of information structure. In C. Féry, G. Fanselow, & M. Krifka (Eds.), Working papers of the SFB632, interdisciplinary studies on information structure (ISIS) 6 (pp. 13–56). Potsdam, Germany: Universitätsverlag Potsdam. Leonetti, M. (2014–2015). Gramática y pragmática en el orden de palabras. Linred: Lingüística en la Red (12). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10017/23258 Leonetti, M. (2017). Basic constituent orders. In A. Dufter & E. Stark (Eds.), Manual of Romance morphosyntax and syntax (pp. 887–932). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Leonetti, M. (2018).Two types of postverbal subject. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 30(2), 11–36. Leonetti, M., & Escandell-Vidal,V. (2009). Fronting and verum focus in Spanish. In A. Dufter & D. Jacob (Eds.), Focus and background in Romance languages (pp.  155–204). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. López García,Á. (1999). Relaciones paratácticas e hipotácticas. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. 3, pp. 3507–3548). Madrid: Espasa. López Meirama, B. (2006). Semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors in Spanish word order. In J. C. Clements & J.Yoon (Eds.), Functional approaches to Spanish syntax: Lexical semantics, discourse and transitivity (pp. 7–52). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lozano, C. (2006). Focus and split intransitivity:The acquisition of word order alternations in non-native Spanish. Second Language Research, 16, 103–133. Mendikoetxea,A. (1999). Construcciones inacusativas y pasivas. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. 2, pp. 1575–1630). Madrid: Espasa. Meyer-Hermann, R. (1990). Sobre algunas condiciones pragmáticas de la posición del sujeto en español. ELUA Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante, 6, 73–88. Montolío, E. (1999). Las construcciones condicionales. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. 3, pp. 3643–3738). Madrid: Espasa. Nieuwenhuijsen, D. (2007). Un amigo suyo se enfrenta con un su amigo. El uso de dos construcciones posesivas en dos periódicos de Guatemala y México. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 2, 231–350. Ocampo, F.A. (2010).The place of conversational data in Spanish syntax:Topic, focus, and word order. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 3(2), 533–543. Ocampo, F. A., & Klee, C. A. (1997). Spanish OV/VO word order variation in Spanish-Quechua bilingual speakers. In C. Silva-Corvalan (Ed.), Spanish in four continents: Studies in language contact and bilingualism (pp. 71–82).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Padilla García, X. A. (2005). Pragmática del orden de palabras. Alicante: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante. Palacios Alcaine,A. (2004).Artículo indefinido + posesivo + nombre con valor discursivo en Centroamérica, Signo y Seña, 13, 185–214. Pato, E. (2002). La estructura posesiva una mi amiga en el español de Guatemala. In A. Palacios & A. I. García (Eds.), El indigenismo americano III.Actas de las Terceras Jornadas sobre Indigenismo Americano (pp. 121–154). València: Universitat de València. Perlmutter, D. M. (1978). Impersonal passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis. In J. J. Jaeger, C. Chiarello, H.Thompson, & F. Ackerman (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th annual meeting of the Berkeley linguistics society (pp. 157–189). Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley. Picallo, M. C., & Rigau, G. (1999). El posesivo y las relaciones posesivas. In V. Demonte & I. Bosque (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. 1, pp. 973–1024). Madrid: Espasa. Posio, P. (2012).The functions of postverbal pronominal subjects in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 5(1), 149–190. Posio, P. (2015). Subject pronoun usage in formulaic sequences. Evidence from Peninsular Spanish. In R. Orozco,A. M. Carvalho, & N. Shin (Eds.), Subject pronoun expression in Spanish:A cross-dialectal perspective (pp. 59–74).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Posio, P., & Pešková, A. (2020, forthcoming). Le dije yo, digo: Construccionalización de los introductores cuotativos con el verbo decir en español peninsular y argentino. Spanish in Context. Rosemeyer, M. (2012). On the interplay between transitivity, factivity, and information structure: Spanish nominal and verbal infinitives. In M. García García & V. Bellosta von Colbe (Eds.), Aspectualidad— transitividad—referencialidad: las lenguas románicas en contraste (pp. 181–209). Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang. 89

Posio and Rosemeyer

Rosemeyer, M. (2018). El orden de palabras en las interrogativas-Q. Un análisis contrastivo del español caribeño y portugués brasileño. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 16(2), 135–148. Rosemeyer, M. (2020, forthcoming). Two types of constructionalization processes in Spanish and Portuguese clefted wh-interrogatives. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. Sánchez Alvarado, C. (2018). The realization of focus in Asturian Spanish. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 17, 1–28. Sedano, M. (1996). Estructura y forma de las hendidas en cinco lenguas románicas. Hispanic Linguistics, 8(1), 123–152. Serrano, M. J., & Aijón Oliva, M. Á. (2010). La posición variable del sujeto pronominal en relación con la cortesía interactiva. Pragmalingüística, 18, 170–204. Silva-Corvalán, C. (1982). Subject expression and placement in Mexican American Spanish. In J. Amastae & L. Elías-Olivares (Eds.), Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic aspects (pp. 93–120). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Toribio,A. J. (2000). Setting parametric limits on dialectal variation in Spanish. Lingua, 10, 315–341. Travis, C. E., & Torres Cacoullos, R. (2012).What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive Linguistics, 23(4), 711–748. Vanderschueren, C. (2013). Infinitivo y sujeto en portugués y español: un estudio empírico de los infinitivos adverbiales con sujeto explícito. Berlin: De Gruyter. Zubizarreta, M. L. (1999). Las funciones informativas: tema y foco. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. 3, pp. 4215–4244). Madrid: Espasa.

90

5 Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics Victoria Escandell-Vidal and Manuel Leonetti

1

Introduction (1)

[At the restaurant] A: A second glass? B: I have to drive.

In Example (1), we all understand that A’s question counts as an offer of a second glass of wine and that B’s reply is a refusal to that offer based on the fact that drinking alcohol is not compatible with safe driving. However, none of those meanings is directly encoded in the linguistic forms uttered by the speakers. If we accept the idea that the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by the meanings of its constituents and the way in which they are put together, this simple example poses a big challenge. How can it be that we understand more than is actually said? Pragmatic theories offer particular answers to this fundamental question and relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995;Wilson & Sperber, 2012) is one of such answers. Relevance theory (hereinafter, RT) is a model of how cognitive processes and abilities are brought to bear in human communication. It was originally proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their foundational 1986 book, Relevance. Communication and Cognition (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995; for a general overview, see Allot, 2013; Carston & Powell, 2006; Clark, 2013; Sperber & Wilson, 1987; Wilson & Sperber, 2004) (for Spanish research, see Escandell-Vidal, 1993, 2013; Escandell-Vidal, Ahern, & Amenós-Pons, 2020; Padilla Cruz, 2016a, 2016b; Pons Bordería, 2004; Portolés, 1994; Rosales Sequeiros, 2010, 2014; Sánchez de Zavala, 1990; Santibáñez, 2012a, 2012b; Vicente, 1999;Yus, 2003a). Since then, it has been applied to a large number of topics in a wide range of languages (seeYus, n.d. for a comprehensive bibliography). In this chapter, we briefly introduce the basic tenets of RT and then discuss how it has been applied to various topics in Spanish pragmatics.

2

Review of existing research

2.1 Relevance theory: An outline Following the path forged by Grice (1975; see Chapter 1 on implicature, this volume), RT assumes that human communication is not merely a matter of encoding and decoding linguistic 91

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti

messages; rather, encoded messages are only “one of the inputs to a non-demonstrative inference process which yields an interpretation of the speaker’s meaning” (Wilson & Sperber, 2004, p. 607). Understanding how this inferential process works and establishing what the other inputs are that can feed it are two major goals of the theory.To this end, RT adopts a psychologically realistic view of human cognition as a supporting foundation for its view on communication. On the cognitive side, RT assumes an evolutionary perspective: our cognitive resources are limited and hence our minds have evolved to allocate these resources precisely to the facts and stimuli from which we may expect the most relevant results and also to process them in the most efficient way. In RT this generalization is enounced as follows: First, or cognitive, principle of relevance Human cognition tends to be geared towards the maximization of relevance. (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995, p. 260) The word ‘relevance’ is to be understood in a technical sense. Relevance is a potential property of any kind of stimulus; not only linguistic expressions.The relevance of an input is a function of processing efort and cognitive efects. The maximization of relevance is the result of an adaptation to pursue a balance between cognitive costs and benefts. Humans tend to obtain the maximum efects, investing a minimum efort. This is not, however, just a sensible goal; it is a general feature of how human cognition works in all areas: we have no choice in the matter, so we cannot decide if we want to maximize relevance or to opt out.The assessment of relevance does not use any external metrics, nor does it compare all possible options; rather, it uses a simple heuristic that stops processing when a satisfactory threshold is reached (in the sense of Simon, 1956, 1982; see Escandell-Vidal, 2016a). On the side of communication, as Wilson and Sperber (2004, p. 609) state,“the search for relevance is a basic feature of human cognition, which communicators may exploit.” Starting from the assumption that individuals will maximize the relevance of an input, speakers can safely build their messages with the expectation that these will be processed in the most efficient way, given the hearer’s abilities and preferences. Similarly, hearers can rely on the expectation that the stimulus received will be worth their while.These ideas are captured under the following principle: Second, or communicative, principle of relevance Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995, p. 260) Again, this principle is not a sensible recommendation, but a generalization about how communicative stimuli will be processed. The hearer’s task is to construct a hypothesis about the speaker’s meaning that satisfies the presumption of relevance.Taken together, the two principles set the basis for an answer to the questions raised at the beginning of this section.They provide a criterion to decide which inputs should be attended to, where they can be found, and when to stop processing.The generalization reads as follows: Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure a. b. 92

Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects:Test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied. (Wilson & Sperber, 2004, p. 613)

Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics

This general task can be further analyzed in other subtasks: Subtasks in the overall comprehension process a. b. c.

Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about explicit content (explicatures) via decoding, disambiguation, reference resolution, and other pragmatic enrichment processes. Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual assumptions (implicated premises). Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual implications (implicated conclusions). (Wilson & Sperber, 2004, p. 615)

The procedure establishes, then, that contextual assumptions are allowed into the inferential process in order of accessibility.The system stops as soon as a satisfactory interpretation has been found. This yields, of course, a tentative hypothesis about the communicative intention of the speaker, but is not a fail-safe procedure.The accessible assumptions may be insufficient and our expectations may be misguided. However, the preceding criterion does not aim at guaranteeing a successful interpretation, but at describing how the interpretive process will develop. After all, miscommunication occurs and the theory has to provide an explanation for it. These are the basic ideas that underlie the cognitive approach to human communication advocated for by relevance-theorists. RT is a research program rooted in Grice’s central proposal that human communication crucially involves the expression and attribution of intentions, thus bringing cognitive and psychological issues to the foreground (see Gil, 2011, 2015, 2018, for discussion). There are, however, a number of aspects in which RT diverges from Grice and from other neoGricean approaches, such as those of Levinson (2000) and Horn (1984). First, Grice suggested that the gap between ‘what is said’ and what the speaker meant can be explained by assuming that there is a cooperative principle and a set of maxims that make it possible to calculate every step in the derivation of the intended meaning, no matter if the speaker is following the maxims or violating them. Horn and Levinson tried to reduce the maxims to two or three principles inspired by economy and functional pressure. RT, in contrast, postulates generalizations about human cognition that are not limited to explaining how communication works, but how human minds work. Second, Grice equates pragmatics with implicit meaning and leaves “what is said” on the side of coding; for RT, in contrast, inferential processes are not limited to the derivation of implicatures: inference is also required to explain how the explicitly communicated content is pragmatically modulated (disambiguation, reference assignment, concept adjustment, and free enrichment). After this brief overview in which the principles driving the relevance-theoretic program have been introduced, the next section is devoted to discussing the contributions to RT in the area of Hispanic pragmatics. The section is organized around research topics. Each subsection presents, first, some conceptual tools from RT that have been useful to account for specific phenomena in the analysis of Spanish data.The general and theoretical contributions made by researchers from Spanish-speaking countries to the development of the theory as such are also discussed.

2.2 Research topics 2.2.1

Explicatures and implicatures

RT has its roots in Gricean pragmatics. However, it departs from the standard view in several significant respects.The most salient difference concerns the status and nature of ‘what is said.’ In most previous approaches, there was an identification of explicit content with what was 93

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti

linguistically encoded (leaving aside reference assignment and, to some extent, disambiguation), while most pragmatically derived aspects of utterance meaning were considered as part of the implicit meaning. RT challenges these correlations (what-is-said/ encoded/ semantics and what-is-implicated/ inferred/ pragmatics).The criterion to distinguish between semantics and pragmatics relates to the kind of cognitive process involved, not to the level of representation to which these processes contribute. So, in this more restrictive framework, semantics deals with encoding/decoding processes, whereas the area of pragmatics corresponds to inferential processes.This distinction is crucial, since, as relevance-theorists have extensively argued, there are many aspects of the derivation of explicit content that are not uniquely based on decoding, but also require inference.This is, therefore, a significant departure from the Gricean picture. There is no exact correspondence between cognitive processes and levels of representation; rather, the two kinds of processes are involved in determining both explicit and implicit content. On the one hand, there are many inferential processes that are needed in order to develop the meaning that the speaker intended to convey in an explicit way; on the other hand, there are linguistic items whose encoded meaning contains indications to guide the hearer along the inferential process. Two different sets of assumptions can then be distinguished: Explicatures:“An assumption communicated by an utterance U is explicit if and only if it is a development of a logical form encoded by U.” Implicatures:“An assumption communicated by U which is not explicit is implicit.” (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, p. 182) Explicatures have two diferent sources: the content encoded by the linguistic expressions used in the utterance, and the context.Therefore, explicatures are obtained as a result of inferential processes integrating contextual assumptions that develop the coded content into a contextualized proposition (see Teso, 2003, for an overview in Spanish).This twofold origin is far from being an exception; rather, virtually all utterances need their logical forms to be inferentially developed. The representation resulting from decoding is, in fact, only a blueprint, a propositional schema.A number of inferential processes need to be carried out, such as the disambiguation of potentially ambiguous expressions, the resolution of indexicals and other referential expressions, and the enrichment of vague and underspecifed items. Consider the example in (1).The word glass can, in principle, have a variety of meanings.The fact that it is construed as a countable noun makes it easy to discard the mass noun interpretation (‘hard, brittle, translucent substance’), but this does not solve the problem, since there are still various senses compatible with the linguistic form (‘optical lens,’‘drinking container,’ and ‘mirror’). Being at a restaurant makes the definition of ‘drinking container’ more accessible. In some situations, this interpretation could be felicitous (for instance, if the glass is broken or a fly has fallen inside it). But if this is not the case, then a different interpretation has to be found; here, the sense ‘contents of a drinking glass’ (a metonymic shift) is activated. If the glass contained wine, then a second glass is interpreted as ‘another glass of wine.’ Reaching this interpretation is not a matter of decoding, but of inferential enrichment; an operation that requires accessing knowledge of the world and the situation.All these steps are necessary in the development of the logical form into the full-fledged set of assumptions that the speaker intended to communicate explicitly (Carston, 2002, 2009; Carston & Hall, 2012). Inference is also involved in the derivation of implicatures; in our example, the explicit premise I have to drive combines with the common assumption Don’t drink and drive, to obtain the implicit conclusion of I cannot accept a second glass of wine. 94

Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics

The way in which the explicit/implicit distinction is drawn is thus one of the hallmarks of RT. Linguists from other traditions (cf. Bach, 1994, 2010; Levinson, 2000) have contested it, and Spanish relevance-theorists have presented new arguments to provide additional support to the distinction by showing that the functional independence criterion makes the right predictions (see Vicente, 1998, 2002, 2005). In Example (1), the implicit premise Don’t drink and drive cannot be logically derived from the explicit utterance I have to drive. The existence of so-called “unarticulated constituents” (i.e., those that seem to be communicated by the speakers, but are not linguistically expressed in their utterance) is a central testing ground for pragmatic theories. There are various possibilities, from the idea that these constituents are indeed represented in the syntax by means of silent categories and projections, to the idea that they are better explained in terms of pre-semantic implicatures (as advocated in some neo-Gricean approaches).Vicente and Groefsema (2013) have argued for the classical relevance-theoretic approach, in which inferential processes, together with the principles of relevance, are sufficient to explain how some content can be inferentially added in the course of the development of the explicit content, while maintaining the independence between explicit and implicit assumptions. Scalar implicatures are also a case in point to determine how grammar and pragmatics interact in the derivation of the intended meaning (Vicente, 2015).The interpretive routes leading to the understanding of implicit meaning are also analyzed in Escandell-Vidal (2016a), where RT is compared to other neo-Gricean approaches.

2.2.2

The conceptual/procedural distinction

One of the distinctions postulated in the framework of RT that has been most successful in the area of Spanish studies is that between conceptual and procedural meaning. Blakemore (1987) and Wilson and Sperber (1993) showed that not all linguistic items make the same kind of contribution to utterance interpretation: Linguistic decoding provides input to the inferential phase of comprehension; inferential comprehension involves the construction and manipulation of conceptual representations. An utterance can thus be expected to encode two basic types of information: representational and computational, or conceptual and procedural—that is, information about the representations to be manipulated, and information about how to manipulate them. (Wilson & Sperber, 1993, p. 2) Conceptual items include major word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, some adverbs) and build the representational basis of the communicated content. Linguistic items with procedural meaning, such as determiners, tense/ mood/ aspect morphemes, discourse connectives and intonation, among others, do not contribute conceptual representations; rather, they specify computational operations to be performed during the interpretation process. These instructions operate on conceptual representations (both encoded and contextual) and place constraints on the inferential phase of interpretation by guiding the hearer toward the most appropriate contextual assumptions needed to recover the speaker’s meaning.

2.2.2.1 Procedural meaning: Discourse connectives, nominal reference and verbal inflection The notion of procedural meaning first developed in the area of discourse connectives. Blakemore (1987, 1992) showed that linguistic items such as ‘after all’ and ‘moreover’ introduce premises, 95

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti

while ‘therefore’ introduces conclusions;‘but’ and ‘however’ instruct the hearer to abandon some previous assumptions, and ‘so’ introduces an implication. The contribution of discourse connectives, then, is not to provide new conceptual material, but to guide the hearers toward the intended interpretation by indicating how the conceptual representations have to be understood and combined together.The notion soon extended to include focus-sensitive particles, such as ‘also,’ ‘too,’ and ‘either’ (Blakemore, 1987, 2002). Cleft constructions and prosodic marking were also good candidates to be accounted for in procedural terms. Similarly, mood indicators can be conceived of as instructions to develop the interpretation by adding further assumptions about the speaker’s propositional attitude and illocutionary intention (Wilson & Sperber, 1988a; see Ahern, 2010, for an overview). The notion of procedural meaning also offered a more satisfactory explanation of referential expressions (in both the nominal and the verbal area) than an approach in conceptual terms. Following Kaplan (1989),Wilson and Sperber (1993) showed that the contribution of ‘I’ as encoding a concept like ‘the speaker’ would yield wrong results, while the right predictions are obtained if conceived as encoding the instructions to identify its referent by first identifying the speaker.A similar approach has been suggested to account for the relationship between temporal morphemes in the verbal area and time reference (Wilson & Sperber, 1998b; see Leonetti, 2004, for a view of the parallelism between nominal and temporal reference). The conceptual/procedural distinction had an enormous impact on Hispanic pragmatics, starting from its application to the analysis of discourse connectives (Montolío Durán, 1997). Connectives indicating contrast have been one of the favorite topics in the research on Spanish. Olmos and Ahern (2009) and Olmos, Innocenti, and Saeed (2011) have argued that discourse connectives not only determine the derivation of implicatures, but also can guide the processes yielding the construction of higher-level explicatures. The examination of linguistic phenomena has also favored the improvement of the theoretical notions used.A case in point is the proposal by Curcó (2004) in her analysis of siempre ‘always,’ not as a temporal adverb, but as a discourse marker in Mexican Spanish (with an interpretation similar to ‘after all’). (2)

Siempre no me voy. Always not I.obl go.prs.1sg ‘I am not leaving after all’

The example in (2) is felicitous in a context where both possibilities (leaving or not leaving) are active in the situation, so siempre indicates that this tension is finally resolved. To account for this use, Curcó argues that the notion of procedural meaning must be extended, so it can indicate the kind of relationship between two propositions but also place specific constraints on context selection. The contribution of aspectual adverbs can be explained along similar lines. The notion of procedural meaning can produce very sophisticated explanations. Recently, Erdely and Curcó (2016) and Curcó and Erdely (2018) have suggested an account of the adverbs todavía ‘still’ and ya ‘already,’ invoking the role of abstract aspectual features like ‘dynamicity’ and ‘durativity.’ For example, ya can be described as encoding two different instructions at the same time: on the one hand, the instructions to incorporate the assumption that a transition has taken place from a dynamic state of affairs; on the other, the instructions to incorporate an assumption about the previous continuity of that state of affairs. The notion of procedural meaning and the testability of the predictions made by RT have recently inspired a wealth of experimental studies. Focal particles, such as también ‘also’ and incluso 96

Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics

‘even’ have been analyzed, concentrating on their procedural meaning and the predictions about processing effort in online interpretation by using eye-tracking measures.The results suggest that fixations indicate a higher processing effort, while regressions indicate that the stimulus was not optimally processed, so it needs more extended consideration; a result fully compatible with the predictions of RT (Loureda, Cruz, & Grupo Diskurspartikeln und Kognition, 2013; Loureda et al., 2015). The procedural approach to nominal reference has been particularly fruitful in two aspects. One is the characterization of ‘definiteness,’ building on the classical notion of ‘uniqueness’ (or unique identifiability) to take it as an encoded instruction, as in Leonetti (1996).The procedural view of the definiteness feature in determiners and pronouns leads us to establish a neat distinction between semantic and pragmatic aspects of the interpretation of definite noun phrases, and also to account for cases in which the existential and uniqueness requirements encoded in the definite article seem not to be satisfied by the context, so an accommodation process is triggered to satisfy them (this is essentially the problem of ‘weak definites,’ discussed in Leonetti, 2019).The second aspect in which a procedural approach has had an impact on Hispanic linguistics is the connection between theories of definiteness and accounts of reference and anaphora based on the notions of ‘accessibility’ and ‘givenness’: according to these views, determiners and pronouns provide instructions to the hearer concerning the accessibility and the cognitive status of the intended referent (Figueras, 2002; Leonetti, 1996). Temporal reference can be also explained along similar lines. In the relevance-theoretic perspective, verbal tenses provide instructions to access the representation of the eventuality in its temporal dimension by relating it to the time of speech and/or to a different reference time, in a complex geometry of temporal points and intervals.The procedural indications interact with Aktionsart and sentential constituents in various ways and also recruit contextual assumptions to create a relevant interpretation (see Escandell-Vidal, 2014, for the future; Amenós-Pons, 2015, for the past).This has also made possible a more detailed comparison among verbal tenses in different languages by examining whether they encode different processing instructions or if there are conventions of use that favor pragmatic specializations and preferences (Amenós-Pons, 2011). The procedural view has eventually provided the foundation for new approaches in the area of second language teaching and learning by considering to what extent procedural features differ across languages and examining what the best way to deal with these differences in SLA may be. Both theoretical and experimental approaches have been developed in relation with the acquisition of verbal tenses (Ahern, Amenós-Pons, & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2015; Amenós-Pons, Ahern, & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2017, 2019). Subjunctive mood, a central topic in the Spanish grammar, has also benefited from an account in procedural terms.Ahern and Leonetti (2004) and Ahern (2006, 2008) have shown that mood is better understood as a procedural element, so the classical problem of the indicative/subjunctive alternation can be explained as a result of satisfying the procedural instructions encoded by each mood. More specifically, the cases in which the subjunctive cannot be licensed by a governing superordinate predicate trigger a process of accommodation to supply the assumptions needed to satisfy the encoded procedure. Consider the contrast in (3): (3)

a. Dice que pones Say.prs.3sg that put.prs.3sg ‘S/he says you put in lots of salt.’ b. Dice que pongas Say.prs.3sg that put.prs.sbjv.3sg ‘S/he tells you to put in lots of salt.’

mucha sal. much salt mucha sal. much salt

97

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti

The verb decir (‘say’) is assumed to select indicative mood, as in (3a).When it occurs with the subjunctive, as in (3b), the semantic instructions expressed by the subjunctive (basically, take the proposition as non-asserted) encourage the addressee to infer that decir cannot introduce an assertion, but rather a description of a state of affairs regarded as potential and desirable, and therefore as introducing an order or a suggestion. Other modalities have also been explored along similar lines (Rosales Sequeiros, 2002). Thus, the notion of procedural meaning has been revealed as a useful tool to account for a great number of phenomena that seemingly did not fit well with the way in which the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics was previously cast (for a general overview, see Escandell-Vidal & Leonetti, 2000, 2004; Escandell-Vidal, Leonetti, & Ahern, 2011; Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal, 2012; Llopis Cardona, 2016; Pons Bordería, 2008; Portolés, 1993). In recent years, some theoretical refinements have been suggested.A considerable amount of work has been devoted to make more explicit the status, role, and internal structure of processing instructions (Curcó, 2011; Saussure, 2011; Unger, 2011; Wilson, 2011). In Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti (2011) and Escandell-Vidal (2017), a proposal was advanced to characterize procedural meaning as rigid, in the sense that it has to be obligatorily satisfied in the interpretive process and cannot be adjusted or modified (for an overview of recent developments, see Escandell-Vidal et al., 2011; Sasamoto & Wilson, eds., 2016).

2.2.2.2

Conceptual content, lexical pragmatics, and “figurative language”

Linguistic items with lexical content contribute conceptual representations to utterance interpretation. One might think that pragmatic processes, which operate on the inferential phase of the interpretation process, have nothing to do with conceptual representations. However, this is not the picture that emerges from the perspective of RT. Linguistically encoded concepts normally undergo some kind of inferential adjustment; if I say I am too tired, the exact source or degree of tiredness that I want to communicate (tired from what? too tired for what?) is highly dependent on various contextual and discursive factors.As Carston (2002) puts it, the lexically encoded concept in the logical form of the utterance is replaced by an ad hoc concept, pragmatically derived from the lexical one, and that this new non-lexicalized concept is a constituent of the proposition expressed by the speaker of the utterance. . . . [This is] a pragmatic process whose result is not necessary in order to secure full propositionality, but seems to be required if we are interested in fnding that proposition which it is rational to assume the speaker intended to express. (p. 28) Thus, hearers can also readjust conceptual content by either strengthening or loosening it (or even by a combination of the two). The modulation of lexical content is a process of mutual adaptation, whereby both encoded meaning and contextual assumptions are mutually adjusted according to expectations of relevance (Carston, 2002; Wilson, 2003; Wilson & Carston, 2006, 2007; see Escandell-Vidal, 2012; Rosales Sequeiros, 2012, 2018;Vicente, 2005). ‘Loose’ uses can be the source of metaphors (Sperber & Wilson, 1985/1986). If people say Robert is a computer (example from Wilson, 2008), presumably they intend to communicate a concept broader than the encoded lexical meaning: Robert is not a machine, but has some (not fully specified) set of properties we tend to associate with computers, such as processing information very quickly and lacking human feelings.The exact import of the ad hoc concept on every particular occasion depends on general considerations of relevance. 98

Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics

The fact that the concept expressed can be subject to inferential modulation led to the idea that lexical items do not properly encode concepts, but rather instructions to build them (on the basis of other contextual assumptions; e.g., Espinal, 1996;Wilson, 2003, 2011, 2016).This, in turn, dissolves the conceptual/procedural distinction in some sense, since the contribution of all linguistic expressions could be accounted for in procedural terms.This is still a controversial issue on which the theory will need to advance in the coming years (see Carston, 2016). Metaphor, metonymy, figurative language, and idioms have been favorite topics for Hispanic linguistics of a relevance-theoretic orientation (Romero & Soria, 2005, 2012, 2013, 2014; Rosales Sequeiros, 2011a; Rubio Fernández, 2007, 2012; Vega Moreno, 2007; Vicente, 1992, 1996).While in traditional accounts figurative language had been considered as purely ornamental, RT has favored a different approach, in which so-called ‘figures of speech’ are not a decorative resource, but have a cognitive import; in fact, it is difficult to paraphrase a metaphor without losing its communicative effect.This indicates that both the cognitive processes needed to build the interpretation and the results of such processes are part of what the speaker wanted to convey. In this sense, RT claims that there is no significant intrinsic difference in the processing of “literal uses,” hyperbole, and metaphor. The predictions of RT have been recently tested with contributions of Spanish researchers. Taking support from the results of experimental work (self-paced reading, paraphrase elicitation), Rubio-Fernández, Wearing, and Carston (2015) and Rubio-Fernández, Cummins, and Tian (2016) have suggested that, despite the fact that they can be considered as two different varieties of ‘loose use,’ hyperbole and metaphor have some significant differences, in that hyperbole entails a shift along a single, unidimensional magnitude, whereas metaphor involves changes along several different dimensions.

2.3. Descriptive use vs. attributive use The distinction between descriptive and interpretive (‘attributive’ or ‘echoic’) use is central to RT.The main idea underlying this distinction is the following. Utterances can achieve relevance as descriptions of states-of-affairs in the world; in this case, the proposition expressed by the utterance is presented (and understood) by virtue of its resemblance to the situation it is meant to represent.Therefore, the speakers can be held responsible for the truth of their assertion. But an utterance can also be used to represent the thoughts and utterances of another individual; in this case, the speakers are not asserting the content of their utterance, but merely attributing it to someone else (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, pp. 224–231). The notion of attributive use has provided a new way to look at various phenomena. In fact, it lies at the very basis of one of the relevance-theoretic proposals that has attracted more attention in Hispanic linguistics: accounting for irony.Whereas in most traditional approaches, including Grice’s, irony communicates the opposite of what is said, in RT irony is a case of echoic use: the speakers do not assert the propositional content of their utterance and intend to describe a state of affairs. Rather, they echo a previous utterance or a thought they attribute to someone else, with the purpose of making manifest a dissociative attitude toward it (for a general overview and more arguments, see Sperber & Wilson, 1981;Wilson & Sperber, 1992; Curcó, 2000; Rosales Sequeiros, 2011b; Ruiz Moneva, 2001; Yus, 2000. For a critical assessment of the relevancetheoretic account of irony, see Garmendia, 2010, 2015, 2018; Ruiz Gurillo, 2006, 2008; Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez& Lozano-Palacio, 2019).The cognitive stance taken by RT makes it possible to deal with irony, also in terms of cognitive processing. Curcó (2000) examines the status of the cognitive abilities involved in understanding ironic utterances and shows that these require higher-order metarepresentational abilities.  Yus (2000) suggests that the identification of the 99

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti

dissociative attitude involved in the interpretation of irony is largely favored by the number and quality of the incompatibilities detected between the expressed content and the context. Experimental studies have been also carried out to examine the multimodal nature of ironic stimuli, in which gestures, tone of voice, and word order can guide the hearer toward the intended (ironic) interpretation (see Escandell-Vidal & Leonetti, 2014, in press; González-Fuente, Escandell-Vidal, & Prieto, 2015). And, as Yus (2016b) has argued, affective, non-propositional attitudes also seem to play a role in the interpretation of ironic utterances. The cognitive ability to attribute a thought to another individual is not only useful to explain irony.There are many occasions in which utterances are used to attribute representations to others; e.g., reports, summaries, and translations being additional cases in point.When the speaker represents the point of view of a different speaker, this can also give rise to effects of perspectivization or subjectivization (Escandell-Vidal, 2002, 2019). This ability also lies at the very heart of a crucial aspect of human communication: the defense against deception and misinformation.As Sperber et al. (2010) have shown, humans are endowed with a set of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance to this end. Padilla Cruz (2012, 2014) has extensively discussed this issue, considering the abilities required to determine the quality of the information and the reliability of its source.The expectations of relevance are thus fine-tuned to the abilities and preferences of the interlocutor and shifted accordingly from the most naïve to the most sophisticated setting.

2.3.1

RT and the interactional perspective

The issues considered so far represent central topics in the architecture of RT, as part of its basic set of theoretical notions.All of them are oriented to different aspects of the informational content transmitted and all have represented a center of interest in Hispanic linguistics. But the theory is not limited to dealing with the exchange of information. Other phenomena related to more interactional or social aspects of communication have also benefited from the insights deriving from the theory. In this section, three of them are briefly considered: humor, politeness, and new forms of communication. Humor has been indeed a favorite topic in modern pragmatics and Spanish pragmatics is no exception.This interest is related to the fact that humor involves many different aspects of communication, with implications for cognitive processes and abilities, identity, social interaction, translation, and literary studies, among others (see Chapter 23 on humor, this volume). The first developments of a relevance-theoretic account of verbal humor came from the work of Curcó (1995, 1996, 1997, 1998). Her contributions represented a shift from the thendominant view of humor as a property of texts—a view in which a theory of humor was a theory of the formal and structural properties of humorous texts—to an approach rooted in human cognition and the mind, where the main goal is to explain and understand the mental processes by which hearers derive humorous interpretations.The perception and manipulation of the incongruous and the search for relevance, Curcó argues, are the leading forces in those processes. Yus has also devoted a considerable amount of work to account for humor and humorous effects (Yus, 2003b, 2008, 2016a, 2017c, 2018b). He examines different genres of humorous discourse, including new multimodal types, such as stand-up comedies, cartoons, advertisements, and also the implications of humor for translations. Humor is seen as exploiting the same processes as other instances of (non-humorous) communication, the difference being that for humorous speakers, humor is an intended effect, so they must be aware of how the inferential processes work in order to manipulate them in an adequate direction. 100

Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics

Humor has been considered as well for its relationship to the construction of identity and the creation of social bonds. Padilla Cruz (2015, 2019, in press) has analyzed the way in which humor influences social perception, such as group affiliation or customer satisfaction in service encounters, showing that non-propositional effects are also a relevant aspect in communication. The social side of human communication has received remarkable attention from a relevancetheoretic perspective. Far from being a theory focused on information and propositional effects only, RT has shown that its basic assumptions can provide useful insights to understand how social aspects enter the picture (see Sperber’s, 2001 approach to culture in terms of epidemiology of representations).The general bases were set in Escandell-Vidal (1996, 1998, 2004, 2016b), where it is argued that cultural norms determine the accessibility of contextual assumptions, creating expectations about the course of the interaction, making some interpretations more salient and attributing specific intentions to some forms of linguistic behavior. Padilla Cruz (2005, 2007) has developed an account of phatic communication in which he goes beyond the cultural routines and adjacency pairs to focus on how the phatic effect is recognized and achieved in order to create solidarity bonds between interlocutors. One of the areas in which RT has most fruitfully contributed to enlarging the existing approaches is that of media discourse and internet-mediated communication (see Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse, this volume).These are two varieties of communication with very specific properties, which distinguish them from ordinary face-to-face communication. Mass-media targets larger audiences with no direct possibility to reply and combine visual and auditory channels (see Yus, 2017a, for an overview).The use of language in advertising and the way in which ads are interpreted have been addressed by several Spanish scholars. Díaz Pérez (2000) compared advertising strategies in Spanish and British media. Central notions of RT have been successfully applied to the analysis of advertising strategies, including metaphor, gardenpath effects, echo, and metarepresentation (Díez Arroyo, 2018; Figueras, 2018; Garcés Conejos, 2003; Pinar Sanz, 2013; Ruiz Gurillo, 2000). Digital communication modifies some of the emission and reception parameters to allow distant communication and also allows for some multimodal integration. Yus (2011) considers how principles of communication and intention recognition apply to new internet textual types and genres, such as web pages, e-mail messaging, and social networks.Though the medium itself imposes specific constraints on the communication process, the way in which the interpretation proceeds follows general cognitive principles, as stated by relevance-theorists. Internet communication and interactions in the virtual world affect not only the way in which content is presented, but also the strategies that users resort to in shaping and constructing their selfpresentation and their online identity (Yus, 2014, 2017b, 2018a): here, non-propositional effects play a crucial role in ostensive internet-mediated communication.

3

Methodological considerations

Following the tradition of modern philosophy of language and, in particular, Gricean pragmatics, most research in RT has adopted the predominant methodological approach in theoretical linguistics: a thorough observation of communicative phenomena, combining data obtained from introspection, attested discourse situations and evidence from psycholinguistic research, which leads to establishing generalizations and principles grounded on human cognition. In the last 25 years, joint experimental work by linguists and psychologists has developed as a consequence of the need to test the predictions made by the theory.This has opened new paths for research that give a strong empirical flavor to advances in RT. Work by Spanish-speaking 101

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti

linguists is representative of both methodological lines; i.e., the more theoretically oriented and the more experimental.

4

Future directions and conclusion

This overview has tried to show that RT not only has had a considerable impact on Hispanic linguistics in the last three decades by stimulating both theoretical debate and descriptive/experimental research, but also by regularly motivating significant contributions by researchers from Spanish-speaking countries. Perhaps the most popular notion is the conceptual/procedural distinction, but the overall view of human communication advocated by RT has been influential in all domains of pragmatics. Academic syllabi on pragmatics always contain a section on RT, and there are resources for university courses with a relevance-theoretic orientation (Escandell-Vidal, 1993, 2014; Núñez & Teso, 1996;Teso, 2002, 2007). RT combines nicely with the tradition of formal linguistics and has gained ground with respect to other theoretical frameworks with a strong implementation in pragmatics.All in all, although it must share the field with other scientific paradigms, RT today has a salient, well-established place in Hispanic linguistics.

Further reading Escandell-Vidal,V. (2014). La comunicación. Lengua, cognición y sociedad. Madrid: Akal. An introduction to pragmatics inspired by relevance-theoretic proposals. It reviews the main topics in pragmatics and considers the relationship between social and cognitive aspects of human communication. Escandell-Vidal,V.,Ahern,A., & Amenós-Pons, J. (Eds.). (2020). Panorama de pragmática. Madrid: Akal. The most recent handbook of pragmatics to date written in Spanish. It covers the whole range of key topics in pragmatics from a Spanish perspective. Many of the chapters offer a relevance-theoretic approach, though other theoretical models are also featured. Escandell-Vidal, V., Leonetti, M., & Ahern, A. (Eds.). (2011).  Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives. Bingley, UK: Emerald/Brill. A collection of papers on one of the most attractive and fruitful notions in the RT framework: the notion of procedural meaning. It contains various contributions by researchers from the Spanish-speaking world and offers some recent developments of the theory. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986/1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. (The second edition includes a postface) (Spanish version: La relevancia. Madrid:Visor, 1994) The original and most comprehensive presentation of the theory.All the ideas are introduced in a very detailed way, focusing on the inadequacies of other alternative models (the code model of communication, Grice’s pragmatics).This is an advanced text and requires some previous knowledge of the basic notions in pragmatics and philosophy of language. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2004). Relevance theory. In L. R. Horn & G. L. Ward (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics (pp. 607–632). Malden, MA: Blackwell. A brief introduction to the theory written by its proponents. It covers all main topics and includes various refinements with respect to the original presentation in their 1986/1995 book.

References Ahern, A. (2006). Spanish mood, propositional attitudes and metarepresentation. In K. von Heusinger & K.Turner (Eds.), Where semantics meets pragmatics (pp. 445–470). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Ahern, A. (2008). El subjuntivo: contextos y efectos. Madrid:Arco Libros. Ahern, A. (2010). Speaker attitude in relevance theory: An overview. In E. Wałaszewska, M. KisielewskaKrysiuk, & A. Piskorska (Eds.), In the mind and across minds:A relevance-theoretic perspective on communication and translation (pp. 147–166). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. 102

Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics

Ahern,A.,Amenós-Pons, J., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2015). Metarepresentation and evidentiality in Spanish tense and mood:A cognitive pragmatic perspective. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 29, 61–81. Ahern, A., & Leonetti, M. (2004).The Spanish subjunctive: Procedural semantics and pragmatic inference. In R. Márquez-Reiter & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish  (pp. 35–56). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Allott, N. (2013). Relevance theory. In A. Capone, F. Lo Piparo, & M. Carapezza (Eds.), Perspectives on linguistic pragmatics (pp. 57–98). Berlin and New York: Springer. Amenós-Pons, J. (2011). Cross-linguistic variation in procedural expressions: Semantics and pragmatics. In V. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti, & A.Ahern (Eds.), Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (pp. 235– 266). Bingley, UK: Emerald/Brill. Amenós-Pons, J. (2015). Spanish ‘Imperfecto’ vs. French ‘Imparfait’ in hypothetical clauses: A procedural account. Cahiers Chronos, 27, 243–271. Amenós-Pons, J.,Ahern,A., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2017). L1 French learning of L2 Spanish past tenses: L1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 7(3), 489–515. Amenós-Pons, J., Ahern, A., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2019). Feature reassembly across closely related languages: L1 French vs. L1 Portuguese learning of L2 Spanish Past Tenses.  Language Acquisition,  26(2), 183–209. Bach, K. (1994). Conversational impliciture. Mind & Language, 9, 124–162. Bach, K. (2010). Impliciture vs. explicature:What’s the difference? In B. Soria & E. Romero (Eds.), Explicit communication (pp. 126–137). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blakemore, D. (1987). Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, D. (1992). Understanding utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, D. (2002). Relevance and linguistic meaning:The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carston, R. (2002). Thoughts and utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. Carston, R. (2009).The explicit/implicit distinction in pragmatics and the limits of explicit communication. International Review of Pragmatics, 1(1), 35–62. Carston, R. (2016).The heterogeneity of procedural meaning. Lingua, 175–176, 154–166. Carston, R., & Hall, A. (2012). Implicature and explicature. In H-J. Schmid (Ed.), Cognitive pragmatics (pp. 47–84). Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Carston, R., & Powell, G. (2006). Relevance theory: New directions and developments. In E. Lepore & B. C. Smith (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the philosophy of language (pp. 341–360). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, B. (2013). Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curcó, C. (1995). Some observations on the pragmatics of humorous interpretations:A relevance-theoretic approach. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 7, 27–47. Curcó, C. (1996).The implicit expression of attitudes, mutual manifestness and verbal humour. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 89–99. Curcó, C. (1997). Relevance and the manipulation of the incongruous: Some explorations of verbal humour. In M. Groefsema (Ed.), Proceedings of the University of Hertfordshire relevance theory workshop (pp. 68–72). Chelmsford, UK: Peter Thomas and Associates. Curcó, C. (1998). Indirect echoes and verbal humour. In V. Rouchota & A. Jucker (Eds.), Current issues in relevance theory (pp. 305–326).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Curcó, C. (2000). Irony: Negation, echo and metarepresentation. Lingua, 110, 257–280. Curcó, C. (2004). Procedural constraints on context selection: Siempre as discourse marker. In R. MárquezReiter & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish  (pp. 179–201). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Curcó, C. (2011). On the status of procedural meaning in natural language. In V. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti & A.Ahern (Eds.), Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (pp. 33–54). Bingley, UK: Emerald/Brill. Curcó, C., & Erdely, E. (2018). Procedural dynamicity and focus on transition:The case of Spanish ‘ya.’ Lingua, 213, 20–42. Díaz Pérez, F. J. (2000). Las implicaturas conversacionales en anuncios publicitarios en la prensa británica y en la española. In F. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (Coord.), Panorama actual de la lingüística aplicada: conocimiento, procesamiento y uso del lenguaje (Vol. I, pp. 71–78). Logroño, Spain: Universidad de La Rioja. Díez Arroyo, M. (2018). Metarepresentation and echo in online automobile advertising. Lingua, 201, 1–17. Erdely, E., & Curcó, C. (2016). Spanish “todavía”: Continuity and transition. Journal of Pragmatics, 91, 1–15. Escandell-Vidal,V. (1993). Introducción a la pragmática. Barcelona:Anthropos (2nd ed., 1996. Barcelona:Ariel; 3rd ed., 2006. Barcelona:Ariel). 103

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti

Escandell-Vidal,V. (1996). Towards a cognitive approach to politeness. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Turner (Eds.), Contrastive semantics and pragmatics (Vol. II: Discourse strategies) (pp. 621–650). Oxford: Pergamon. Also available in Language Sciences, 18, 629–650. Escandell-Vidal, V. (1998). Politeness: A relevant issue for relevance theory.  Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 11, 45–57. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2002). Echo-syntax and metarepresentations. Lingua, 112, 871–900. Escandell-Vidal, V. (2004). Norms and principles. Putting social and cognitive pragmatics together. In R. Márquez-Reiter & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish (pp. 347–371). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2012). Modulación conceptual y reajuste de rasgos. In M. Casas Gómez & M. García Antuña (Eds.), XII Jornadas de Lingüística (pp. 99–113). Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz. Escandell-Vidal, V. (2013). Pragmatics and cognition. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2014). La comunicación. Lengua, cognición y sociedad. Madrid: Akal. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2016a). Understanding implicit meaning understanding. In L. de Saussure & A. Rocci (Eds.), Verbal communication (pp. 97–121). Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2016b). Expectations in interaction. In K. Allan, A. Capone, & I. Kecskes (Eds.), Pragmemes and theories of language use (pp. 493–503). Berlin: Springer. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2017). Notes for a restrictive theory of procedural meaning. In R. Giora & M. Haugh (Eds.), Doing pragmatics interculturally (pp. 79–95). Berlin:Walter de Gruyter. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2019). Evidential explicatures and mismatch resolution. In K. Scott, R. Carston, & B. Clark (Eds.), Relevance: Pragmatics and interpretation (pp. 66–79). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Escandell-Vidal,V.,Ahern,A., & Amenós-Pons, J. (Eds.). (2020). Panorama de pragmática. Madrid: Akal. Escandell-Vidal,V., & Leonetti, M. (2000). Categorías funcionales y semántica procedimental. In M. Martínez Hernández et al. (Eds.), Cien años de investigación semántica: de Michel Bréal a la actualidad (pp. 363–378). Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas. Escandell-Vidal,V., & Leonetti, M. (2004). Semántica conceptual/Semántica procedimental. In Actas del V Congreso de Lingüística General (pp. 1727–1738). Madrid:Arco Libros. Escandell-Vidal,V., & Leonetti, M. (2011). On the rigidity of procedural meaning. In V. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti, & A. Ahern (Eds.), Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (pp. 81–102). Bingley, UK: Emerald/Brill. Escandell-Vidal,V., & Leonetti, M. (2014). Fronting and irony in Spanish. In A. Dufter & Á. Octavio de Toledo (Eds.), Left sentence peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, variationist and typological perspectives (pp.  309–342). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Escandell-Vidal,V., & Leonetti, M. (in press). Grammatical emphasis and irony in Spanish. In H. Colston & A.Athanasiadou (Eds.), The diversity of irony. Special issue of Cognitive Linguistic Studies. Escandell-Vidal, V., Leonetti, M., & Ahern, A. (Eds.). (2011).  Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives. Bingley, UK: Emerald/Brill. Espinal, M. T. (1996). On the semantic content of lexical items within linguistic theory.  Linguistics,  34, 109–131. Figueras, C. (2002). La jerarquía de la accesibilidad de las expresiones referenciales en español. Revista Española de Lingüística, 32(1), 53–96. Figueras, C. (2018).Vaguedad y relevancia: Metáforas en los titulares de prensa sobre las enfermedades poco frecuentes. Rilce, 34(3), 1215–1242. Garcés Conejos, P. (2003). Production, interpretation and garden path utterances in advertising. In C. Inchaurralde & C. Florén (Eds.), Interaction and cognition in linguistics (pp. 135–144). Hamburg, Germany: Peter Lang. Garmendia, J. (2010). Irony is critical. Pragmatics & Cognition, 18(2), 397–421. Garmendia, J. (2015).A (neo)Gricean account of irony:An answer to Relevance Theory. International Review of Pragmatics, 7(1), 40–79. Garmendia, J. (2018). Irony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gil, J. M. (2011). Relevance theory and unintended transmission of information. Intercultural Pragmatics, 8(1), 1–40. Gil, J. M. (2015). On weak communication. Intercultural Pragmatics, 12(3), 387–404. Gil, J. M. (2018). Sobre la comunicación no intencional. Praxis Filosófica, 47, 113–135. González-Fuente, S., Escandell-Vidal,V., & Prieto, P. (2015). Gestural codas pave the way to the understanding of verbal irony. Journal of Pragmatics, 90, 26–47. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In J. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York:Academic Press. 104

Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics

Horn, L. (1984).Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicatures. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, form and use in context: Linguistic applications (pp. 11–42). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Kaplan, D. (1989). Demonstratives. In J.Almog, J. Perry, & H.Weinstein (Eds.), Themes from Kaplan (pp. 481– 563). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leonetti, M. (1996). El artículo definido y la construcción del contexto. Signo y Seña, 5, 103–138. Leonetti, M. (2004). Sobre tiempos y determinantes. In M.Villayandre Llamazares (Ed.), Actas del V Congreso de Lingüística General (Vol. 2) (pp. 1715–1725). Madrid:Arco Libros. Leonetti, M. (2019). On weak readings of definite DPs. In N. Pomino (Ed.), Proceedings of the IX Nereus International Workshop “Morphosyntactic and semantic aspects of the DP in Romance and beyond.” Arbeitspapier 131. Fachbereich Linguistik, Universität Konstanz. Leonetti, M., & Escandell-Vidal, V. (2012). El significado procedimental: Rutas hacia una idea. In J. L. Mendívil Giró & M. C. Horno Chéliz (Eds.), La sabiduría de Mnemósine: ensayos de historia de la lingüística (pp. 157–167). Zaragoza, Spain: Prensas Universitarias. Levinson, S. (2000). Presumptive meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Llopis Cardona,A. (2016). Significado y funciones en los marcadores discursivos. Verba, 43, 231–268. Loureda, Ó., Cruz,A., & Grupo Diskurspartikeln und Kognition. (2013).Aproximación experimental sobre los costes de procesamiento de las partículas focales del español también e incluso. Cuadernos AISPI, 2, 75–98. Loureda, Ó., Cruz, A., Rudka, M., Nadal, L., Recio, I., & Borreguero Zuloaga, M. (2015). Focus particles in information processing: An experimental study on pragmatic scales with Spanish incluso. Linguistik Online, 71(2). Retrieved from https://bop.unibe.ch/linguistik-online/article/view/1781/3015 Olmos, S., & Ahern,A. (2009). Contrast and propositional attitude:A relevance theoretic analysis of contrast connectives in Spanish and English. Lingua, 119(1), 51–66. Olmos, S., Innocenti, L., & Saeed, J. (2011). The procedure of marking contrast with alternatives: A constraint in the derivation of higher-level explicatures. In V. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti, & A. Ahern (Eds.), Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (pp. 293–315). Bingley, UK: Emerald/Brill. Montolío Durán, E. (1997). La teoría de la relevancia y el estudio de los conectores discursivos. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez (Ed.), Introducción a la pragmática lingüística (pp. 27–40). Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Núñez, R., & Teso, E. del. (1996). Semántica y pragmática del texto común: producción y comentario de textos. Madrid: Cátedra. Padilla Cruz, M. (2005). On the phatic interpretation of utterances: A complementary relevance-theoretic proposal. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 18, 227–246. Padilla Cruz, M. (2007). Phatic utterances and the communication of social information: A relevancetheoretic approach. In P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, M. Padilla Cruz, R. Gómez Morón, & L. Fernández Amaya (Eds.), Studies in intercultural, cognitive and social pragmatics (pp. 114–131). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Padilla Cruz, M. (2012). Epistemic vigilance, cautious optimism and sophisticated understanding. Research in Language, 10(4), 365–386. Padilla Cruz, M. (2014). Pragmatic failure, epistemic injustice and epistemic vigilance. Language & Communication, 39, 34–50. Padilla Cruz, M. (2015). On the role of vigilance in the interpretation of puns. Humor, 28(3), 469–490. Padilla Cruz, M. (2016a).Three decades of relevance theory. In M. Padilla Cruz (Ed.), Relevance theory: Recent developments, current challenges and future directions (pp. 1–29).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Padilla Cruz, M. (2016b). Some directions for future research in relevance-theoretic pragmatics. In M. Padilla Cruz (Ed.), Relevance theory: Recent developments, current challenges and future directions (pp. 307–320). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Padilla Cruz, M. (2019).Verbal humor and age in cafes and bars in Seville. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 169–188). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Padilla Cruz, M. (in press).The role of humorous elements in Cádiz chirigotas in creating/reinforcing a local identity:A relevance-theoretic approach. Spanish in Context, 18(2). Pinar Sanz, M. J. (2013). Relevance theory and political advertising: A case study. The European Journal of Humour Research, 1(2), 10–23. Pons Bordería, S. (2004). Conceptos y aplicaciones de la teoría de la relevancia. Madrid:Arco Libros. Pons Bordería, S. (2008). Do discourse markers exist? On the treatment of discourse markers in Relevance theory. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 1411–1434. Portolés, J. (1993). La distinción entre los conectores y otros marcadores del discurso en español. Verba, 20,141–170. 105

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti

Portolés, J. (1994).Algunos comentarios sobre la teoría de la pertinencia. Pragmalingüística, 2, 407–425. Romero, E., & Soria, B. (2005). Metaphoric concepts and language. In J. J.Acero & P. Leonardi (Eds.), Facets of concepts (pp. 177–200). Padova, Italy: Il Poligrafo. Romero, E., & Soria, B. (2012). Construcción conceptual ad hoc e interpretación metafórica. Forma y Función, 25(2), 217–245. Romero, E., & Soria, B. (2013). Anomaly in novel metaphor and experimental tests.  Journal of Literary Semantics, 42(1), 31–57. Romero, E., & Soria, B. (2014). Relevance theory and metaphor. Linguagem em (Dis)curso, 14(3), 489–509. Rosales Sequeiros, X. (2002). Non-declarative sentences in Spanish:The case of the infinitive. In J. GutiérrezRexach (Ed.),From words to discourse:Trends in Spanish semantics and pragmatics (pp. 95–118).Amsterdam: Elsevier. Rosales Sequeiros, X. (2010). Pragmatics and relevance in Spanish: Utterance interpretation and communication. Munich: Lincom. Rosales Sequeiros, X. (2011a). On metaphor, relevance, and pragmatic interpretation in Spanish. The Modern Language Review, 106(4), 1028–1053. Rosales Sequeiros, X. (2011b). Irony, relevance and pragmatic interpretation in Spanish.  Language Sciences, 33, 369–385. Rosales Sequeiros, X. (2012). Linguistic meaning and non-truth-conditionality. Berlin: Peter Lang. Rosales Sequeiros, X. (2014). Pragmatics, relevance and cognition. Munich: Lincom. Rosales Sequeiros, X. (2018). Semantics and non-truth-conditional meaning. Munich: Lincom. Rubio Fernández, P. (2007). Suppression in metaphor interpretation: Differences between meaning selection and meaning construction. Journal of Semantics, 24, 345–371. Rubio Fernandez, P. (2012). Associative and inferential processes in pragmatic enrichment: The case of emergent properties. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(6), 723–745. Rubio-Fernández, P., Cummins, C., & Tian,Y. (2016).Are single and extended metaphors processed differently? A test of two relevance-theoretic accounts. Journal of Pragmatics, 94, 15–28. Rubio-Fernández, P.,Wearing, C., & Carston, R. (2015). Metaphor and hyperbole:Testing the continuity hypothesis. Metaphor and Symbol, 30, 24–40. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, F. J., & Lozano-Palacio, I. (2019). A cognitive-linguistic approach to complexity in irony: Dissecting the ironic echo. Metaphor and Symbol, 34(2), 127–138. Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2000). Las metáforas de un día en los medios de comunicación españoles.  Estudios de Lingüística, 14, 199–215. Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2008). Las metarrepresentaciones en el español hablado. Spanish in Context, 5(1), 40–63. Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2006). Fraseología para la ironía en español. In E. de Miguel, A. Palacios, & A. Serradilla (Eds.), Estructuras léxicas y estructura del léxico (pp. 129–148). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Ruiz Moneva, M. Á. (2001). Irony in relevance theory: Recurrent features, critical stances and possible research trends. The Atlantic Literary Review, 2(1), 161–189. Sánchez de Zavala,V. (1990). Sobre la nueva teoría de la pertinencia. In V. Demonte & B. Garza Cuarón (Eds.), Estudios de lingüística de España y México (pp.  273–299). México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Santibáñez, C. (2012a).The principle of relevance in the light of cooperation and trust: Discussing Sperber and Wilson’s theory. Pragmatics & Cognition, 20(3), 483–504. Santibáñez, C. (2012b). Relevancia, cooperación e intención: Contrapunto a la perspectiva lingüística y comunicativa de Sperber y Wilson. Onomázein, 25, 181–204. Sasamoto, R., & Wilson, D. (Eds.). (2016). Little words: Communication and procedural meaning. Lingua, 175–176 (special issue). Saussure, L. de. (2011). On some methodological issues in the conceptual/procedural distinction. InV. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti, & A.Ahern (Eds.),Procedural meaning:Problems and perspectives (pp. 55–79). Bingley, UK: Emerald/Brill. Simon, H. (1956). Rational choice and the structure of the environment.Psychological Review,63(2), 129–138. Simon, H. (1982). Models of bounded rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sperber, D. (2001). Conceptual tools for a natural science of society and culture. Proceedings of the British Academy, 111, 297–317. Sperber, D., Clément, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H., Origgi, G., & Wilson, D. (2010). Epistemic vigilance. Mind & Language, 25, 359–393. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1981). Irony and the use—mention distinction. In P. Cole (Ed.), Radical pragmatics (pp. 295–318). New York:Academic Press. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1985/1986). Loose talk. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LXXXVI, 153–171. 106

Relevance theory in Spanish pragmatics

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986/1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. (The second edition includes a postface) (Spanish version: La relevancia. Madrid:Visor, 1994). Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1987). Précis of relevance. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 10(4), 697–710. Teso, E. del. (2002). Compendio y ejercicios de semántica I. Madrid:Arco Libros. Teso, E. del. (2003). Contexto, variación contextual y valores semánticos. Moenia, 9, 75–103. Teso, E. del. (2007). Compendio y ejercicios de semántica II. Madrid:Arco Libros. Unger, C. (2011). Exploring the borderline between procedural encoding and pragmatic interface. In V. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti, & A.Ahern (Eds.),Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (pp. 103–127). Bingley, UK: Emerald/Brill. Vega Moreno, R. E. (2007). Creativity and convention:The pragmatics of everyday figurative speech. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vicente, B. (1992). Metaphor, meaning and comprehension. Pragmatics, 2, 49–62. Vicente, B. (1996). On the semantics and pragmatics of metaphor: Coming full circle. Language and Literature, 5, 195–208. Vicente, B. (1998). Against blurring the explicit/implicit distinction. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 11, 241–258. Vicente, B. (1999). La teoría de la pertinencia. In M. Dascal (Ed.), Filosofía del lenguaje I: Pragmática (pp. 115–136). Madrid: Trotta. Vicente, B. (2002).What pragmatics can tell us about (literal) meaning:A critical note on Kent Bach’s theory of implicature. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(4), 403–421. Vicente, B. (2005). Meaning in relevance theory and the semantics/pragmatics distinction. In S. Coulson & B.Tomaszczyk (Eds.), The literal and non-literal in language and thought (pp. 179–200). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Vicente, B. (2015). Pragmática, gramática e inferencias escalares.  Revista Española de Lingüística,  45(2), 189–222. Vicente, B., & Groefsema, M. (2013). Something out of nothing? Rethinking unarticulated constituents. Journal of Pragmatics, 47(1), 108–127. Wilson, D. (2003). Relevance and lexical pragmatics. Italian Journal of Linguistics/Rivista di Linguistica, 15, 273–291. Wilson, D. (2008). Relevance theory and lexical pragmatics. In L. Mora (Ed.), Cognición y lenguaje. Estudios en homenaje a José Luis Guijarro Morales (pp. 233–247). Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz. Wilson, D. (2011). The conceptual-procedural distinction: Past, present and future. In V. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti, & A. Ahern (Eds.), Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (pp.  3–31). Bingley, UK: Emerald/Brill. Wilson, D. (2016). Reassessing the conceptual-procedural distinction. Lingua, 175–176, 5–19. Wilson, D., & Carston, R. (2006). Metaphor, relevance and the ‘emergent property’ issue. Mind & Language, 21(3), 404–433. Wilson, D., & Carston, R. (2007).A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In N. Burton-Roberts (Ed.), Pragmatics (pp. 230–260). Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1988a). Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences. In J. Dancy, J. M. E. Moravcsik, & C. C.W.Taylor (Eds.), Human agency: Language, duty, and value. Philosophical essays in honor of J. O. Urmson (pp. 77–101). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1998b). Pragmatics and time. In R. Carston & S. Uchida (Eds.), Relevance theory: Applications and implications (pp. 1–22).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1992). On verbal irony. Lingua, 87, 53–76. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1993). Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua, 90, 1–25. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2004). Relevance theory. In L. R. Horn & G. L. Ward (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics (pp. 607–632). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yus, F. (2000). On reaching the intended ironic interpretation. International Journal of Communication, 10(1–2), 27–78. Yus, F. (2003a). Cooperación y relevancia. Dos aproximaciones pragmáticas a la interpretación. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Yus, F. (2003b). Humor and the search for relevance. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(9), 1295–1331. Yus, F. (2008).A relevance-theoretic classification of jokes. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 4(1), 131–157. Yus, F. (2011). Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yus, F. (2014). El discurso de las identidades en línea: el caso de Facebook. Discurso & Sociedad, 8(3), 398–426. 107

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti

Yus, F. (2016a). Humour and relevance.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yus, F. (2016b). Propositional attitude, affective attitude and irony comprehension.  Pragmatics & Cognition, 23(1), 92–116. Yus, F. (2017a). Social media. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 550–562).Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Yus, F. (2017b). Contextual constraints and non-propositional effects in WhatsApp communication. Journal of Pragmatics, 114, 66–86. Yus, F. (2017c). Incongruity-resolution cases in jokes. Lingua, 197, 103–122. Yus, F. (2018a). Relevance from and beyond propositions:The case of online identity. In H. Nasu & J. Strassheim (Eds.), Relevance and irrelevance:Theories, factors and challenges (pp. 119–140). Berlin: De Gruyter. Yus, F. (2018b). Identity-related issues in meme communication. Internet Pragmatics, 1(1), 113–133. Yus, F. (n.d.). Relevance theory online bibliographic service. Retrieved from https://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/ rt.html

108

Part II

Interfaces of Spanish pragmatics

6 Pragmatics and semantics A focus on evidentiality Juana I. Marín-Arrese

1

Introduction

This chapter addresses the expression of evidentiality in Spanish, and its semantic-pragmatic meanings and discourse functions (Albelda Marco & Estellés, 2018; Cornillie & Izquierdo Alegría, 2017; Cornillie, Marín-Arrese, & Wiemer, 2015; González Ruiz, Loureda Lamas, & Izquierdo Alegría, 2016).The basic semantic meaning of evidentials have been characterized as primarily indicating the source of evidence or knowledge on which the speaker’s communicated proposition is based (Aikhenvald, 2004, 2018; Anderson, 1986; Willett, 1988, inter alia). From a functional-cognitive view, evidentiality is conceived as a conceptual domain (Boye & Harder, 2009) as part of the larger domain of epistemicity, which is defined as justificatory support for the proposition, and which comprises the categories of evidentiality (epistemic justification) and epistemic modality (epistemic support) (cf. Boye, 2012).Within epistemicity, the chapter reflects on the related subdomain of epistemic modality in Spanish (Cornillie, 2007; Hennemann, 2012, 2013).The chapter also discusses the issue of multifunctionality of some evidential expressions, and the meaning extensions of some tense-aspect markers as expressions of evidentiality (Laca, 2005; Marín-Arrese, 2017, 2018). Spanish lacks an obligatory category of grammatical evidentiality and does not possess a system of fully grammaticalized evidentials. But we find a continuum of lexico-grammatical expressions, some of which are highly conventionalized, and may thus be considered core evidential expressions, and some others that are polyfunctional expressions with stable evidential values. Hence, we will be using the neutral term ‘evidential expressions’ to refer to the various forms of evidentiality in Spanish.Among the most common core evidential expressions, we find the following, with examples: • • • •

lexical verbs: ver (se ve), oír (se oye, oigo), parecer (parece), calcular (calculo), decir (se dice, se diría) ‘see, hear, seem, calculate, say’ closed subclass of modal verbs: deber (de) ‘must’ sentence adverbs: aparentemente, claramente, evidentemente, obviamente, presuntamente, supuestamente, visiblemente ‘apparently, clearly, evidently, obviously, presumably, supposedly, visibly’ predicative adjectives: claro, evidente, obvio ‘clear, evident, obvious’ 111

Marín-Arrese

• •

adverbial locutions: al parecer, por lo visto, por lo que se ve ‘apparently, (Lit.) from what is seen, from what can be seen’ constructions with specific evidential values: da la impresión (de) que, parece ser que, según dicen ‘it gives the impression that, seems that, according to what they say’

The following example illustrates the function of inferential evidentiality: (1)

A juzgar por sus declaraciones, parece que Obama, prudente y comprometido con un sentido ético de la política, está dispuesto a gobernar desde el estricto respeto a la Constitución, las leyes y los derechos ciudadanos (CESJD-SLP).1 ‘Judging by his declarations, it seems that Obama, prudent and committed to an ethical sense of justice, is ready to govern with a strict respect for the Constitution, the law, and civil rights’ (Marín-Arrese, 2017, pp. 199–200).

The semantics-pragmatics interface of evidentiality addresses issues such as the reliability and the pragmatic strength of evidential utterances in relation to the evidential hierarchy, and the role of contextual dependency (Davis, Potts, & Speas, 2007), and the nature of commitment, or absence of it, incurred by reportative utterances in comparison to standard assertions (Faller, 2019). Some recent developments in the study of evidentiality look at socio-cultural and interactional aspects in diverse languages, as well as the recurring issues of varying degrees of grammaticalization in languages with evidential systems and also so-called ‘evidential strategies’ found in languages without grammaticalized evidential systems (Nuckolls & Michael, 2012). Epistemic stance resources are also forms of indexing speakers’ positioning with respect to the communicated information (Clift, 2006). Recent research in the critical discourse perspective explores the use of evidential stance resources as strategies of epistemic legitimization (Chilton, 2004; Marín-Arrese, 2011a). Similarly, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the use of these resources is viewed as a means of ‘epistemic control’ in the discourse (Langacker, 2013; MarínArrese, 2015). This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a general review of the literature on evidentiality. Section 3 discusses methodological issues and gives a description of the evidential system in Spanish. Section 4 presents recent developments in discourse-pragmatic and critical discourse studies on evidentiality.The data for this chapter are authentic, naturally occurring, discourse examples drawn from the following corpora: CESJD, CORLEC, CORPES, and CREA. Examples have also been drawn from specialized literature on evidentiality in Spanish.

2 2.1

Review of research The conceptual domain of evidentiality

The first reference to the notion of evidentiality as a source of information is found in the works of American linguistic anthropologists Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, in their studies on American Indian languages. Boas (1938, p. 133) observes the obligatory nature of evidential markers: “we find in another language location near the speaker or somewhere else, source of information—whether seen, heard, or inferred—as obligatory aspects” (see Aikhenvald, 2004, p. 1).The term ‘evidentiality’ as a grammatical category, on a par with other verbal categories such as tense, aspect, mood, or voice, was first introduced by Jakobson (1957), where he defines the notion in deictic terms as a general, three-way event structure as applied to direct and indirect narration. 112

Pragmatics and semantics: Evidentiality

Since the publication of the seminal work on evidentiality by Chafe and Nichols (1986), for the most part, studies have centered on those systems of languages where the grammatical marking of the information source is obligatory. Anderson (1986) provides the following definition of evidentials: Evidentials show the kind of justifcation for a factual claim which is available to the person making that claim, whether direct evidence plus observation (no inference needed), evidence plus inference, inference (evidence unspecifed), reasoned expectation from logic and other facts, and whether the evidence is auditory, or visual, etc. (Anderson, 1986, pp. 274–275) Aikhenvald (2007) argues that “[T]he term ‘evidential’ primarily relates to information source as a closed grammatical system whose use is obligatory” (p. 1). Aikhenvald (2014) notes that the expression of information source in languages lacking a grammatical evidential system is more versatile, and typically includes both “closed classes of particles and modal verbs, and a potentially open-ended array of verbs of opinion and belief ” (p. 3). According to Aikhenvald (2004), these ‘evidential strategies’ are merely extensions of non-evidential expressions into the domain of evidentiality, involving some kind of cancellable implicature (see Chapter 1 on implicature, this volume). Counter to Aikhenvald, Boye and Harder (2009) have argued that, for languages that lack a closed grammatical system for this domain, evidentiality should be conceived as a “cognitive or functional substance phenomenon” (p. 6), expressed by whatever linguistic forms fulfll the function of indicating the source of information for the communicated content of a certain proposition, regardless of the grammatical versus lexical status to which the given linguistic device is ascribed. As Lampert and Lampert (2010) similarly argue, “the category of evidentiality is of use only, we conjecture, if a radical conceptual stance is taken in order to not miss capturing alternative linguistic strategies of expressing this notion” (p. 319). Aikhenvald (2004) likewise argues that the primary meaning of evidentiality as a source of information “covers the way in which the information was acquired, without necessarily relating to the degree of speaker’s certainty concerning the statement or whether it is true or not” (p. 3). A broader conception of evidentiality, however, includes both the source of information and an estimation of its reliability, as Chafe (1986) posited in his seminal publication.The degree of confidence or commitment of the speaker with respect to the validity of the proposition has traditionally been linked to the ‘reliability’ attributed by default to the type of evidence and mode of knowing (Chafe, 1986; Matlock, 1989; Willett, 1988). In a similar fashion to the pragmatic scales used for scalar inference (Levinson, 2000), Willett (1988, p. 57) proposes a hierarchy of different degrees of reliability of the type of source: personal experience ≫ direct (sensory) evidence ≫ indirect evidence ≫ hearsay

As San Roque and Loughnane (2012) observe, “Prototypically, the more ‘direct’ evidence is, the more reliable the knowledge and the higher it ranks on the hierarchy” (p. 16).They further argue that the hierarchy is consistent with the Gricean maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975), since: a speaker should present the most reliable knowledge they have for an event. Where evidence justifying the use of a more reliable evidential is available, the use of an evidential that is lower on the hierarchy is pragmatically marked . . . or otherwise infelicitous. (San Roque & Loughnane, 2012, p. 117) 113

Marín-Arrese

Fitneva (2001), however, cautions against a direct correlation between reliability and source type, since “particular contexts might impose an ordering on sources of information” (p. 404).A similar caution is expressed regarding reportative evidentiality, where, as Marín-Arrese (2011b) has pointed out, The presumed validity of mediated evidence relies to a great extent on whether the original source of the information is considered expert in the relevant feld, or having a prestigious social status, or whether the information is considered warrantable on the basis of its widespread or universal acceptability. (p. 44) Broader conceptions of evidentiality advocate for a continuum between grammatical and lexical marking of types of information sources, as well as the function of providing ‘epistemic justification’ for the proposition (Boye, 2018). These perspectives also take into account issues such as the responsibility of the speaker and accountability for their claims, and the potential persuasive effects on the hearer (Marín-Arrese, 2015).

2.2

Functions and categories of evidentiality

In the literature, we find various subdivisions of the domain of evidentiality, which draw on classifications proposed by Chafe (1986), Cornillie et al. (2015), Diewald and Smirnova (2010), Plungian (2001), and Willett (1988), among others. There is agreement with respect to a basic distinction between types and modes of access to knowledge: direct (sensory) or indirect (inferential, reportative).Willett (1988, p. 57) distinguishes between the following modes of evidence: (a) direct, or ‘attested’ through visual, auditory, or other sensory means; and (b) indirect, which comprises the two subcategories of ‘inferring’ from results or reasoning, and ‘reported,’ including ‘hearsay.’ Plungian (2001, p. 352ff.), for his part, posits two basic oppositions: (a) direct versus indirect evidence, on the basis of sources and forms of access to the information; and (b) personal versus mediated, which refers to the speaker’s involvement and personal or non-personal access to the evidence. Diewald and Smirnova (2010, p. 74) distinguish the following evidential values: (a) Direct, which involves perceptual (e.g., visual, auditory) access to the evidence, signaled in the described event.This feature is “origo-inclusive,” since it involves “the co-presence of the speaker and the event in the same deictic field” (Diewald & Smirnova, 2010, p. 54). (b) Indirect inferential, in which “the primary event is not co-present with the origo (and the secondary event): the marker expresses an origo-exclusive value” (Diewald & Smirnova, 2010, p. 55). According to Diewald and Smirnova (2010),“inferential evidentials primarily denote the speaker’s reflection of some evidence, i.e. they indicate the relation between the described situation and some other situation, which is treated by the speaker as evidence for the former” (p. 63). (c) Indirect mediated, through some communicative source. Diewald and Smirnova (2010) note that “indirect reportive evidentials express that the speaker has indirect access [to the event] based on someone else’s perceptual and cognitive capacities” (p. 64). The derived consequence of this three-way classification of evidentiality is that the concept itself is often viewed as a compact, coherent ‘functional-conceptual substance domain,’ with a number of subcategories, typically direct, indirect-inferential, and reportative evidentiality. 114

Pragmatics and semantics: Evidentiality

However, Nuyts (2017) has pointed out that “the notion of evidentiality is not a coherent semantic category,” since “it covers dimensions of a quite different nature, which need to be kept apart and deserve a distinct status in a cognitively and functionally plausible semantic analysis” (p. 58). Following this view, the ‘inferential’ category would form part of a wider semantic class together with epistemic modality, which is also a scalar category. Epistemic modality involves speaker-oriented assessments concerning the reality or veracity of the event and its likelihood, and inferential evidentiality involves degrees of the “reliability of the process of inferencing in view of the strength or quality of the evidence available” (Nuyts, 2017, p. 69). That is, certain inferential markers (e.g., must, obviously) signal a high degree of confidence of the speaker regarding the results of the inferential process from the evidence, whereas others (e.g., it seems, apparently) signal a lower degree of reliability. In contrast,‘direct’ and ‘reportative’ evidentiality are non-scalar. Direct evidential resources simply signal the mode of knowing and type of evidence (direct, sensory) and “differentiate between the different sense organs responsible for the experience (visual, acoustic, etc.)” (Nuyts, 2017, p. 69). Reportative evidential resources indicate that the speaker has acquired or learned the information indirectly through communication with others:“Hearsay is ‘monolithic,’ one-valued” (Nuyts, 2017, p. 69). An additional feature that differentiates inferential from direct and reportative evidentiality, according to Nuyts (2017), pertains to “what ‘effort’ they involve for the speaker” and the degree to which “the speaker can be said to be present in the meaning” (p. 70).This deictic character and the notion of strength is present in Frawley’s (1992, p. 413) distinction between an internal Source of Knowledge (Self) to distinguish the categories of “Inference” and of “Sensation” (visual, auditory, other senses), from an external Source of Knowledge (Other) and the categories of “External Information” (reportative evidentiality and hearsay). Evidentiality also signals a basic distinction between direct, unmediated access to knowledge versus indirect, mediated access. In sensory perception there is a direct connection between the speaker/conceptualizer and some external entity or stimulus. It involves “the speaker’s own direct assessment, unmediated by the view of another conceptualizer” (Langacker, 2017, p. 43). In the case of inference, the assessment is no longer direct, but mediated by processes of “higherlevel cognition: thought, reasoning, generalization, inference, conceptual integration, and so on” (p. 21). Finally, in the case of report, the proposition is ascribed to another conceptualizer; there is mediation by “other conceptualizers, whether individually or in generalized fashion (e.g., as cultural knowledge)” (p. 21).

3

Methodological considerations

3.1 Basic methodological considerations The dimensions and parameters discussed earlier serve as the methodological basis for distinguishing the various subcategories of evidentiality in Spanish, illustrated in Section 3.2. For the classification of the categories, we consider the following dimensions: (a) Mode of access: speaker/conceptualizer’s mode of access to the information, which involves the features (i) direct, non-mediated, access to the information, (ii) indirect, cognitionmediated, mode of access, and (iii) indirect access, mediated by some other speaker(s)/ conceptualizer(s); (b) Type of evidence: type of information source; that is, whether the evidence involves the perceptual, the mental, or the social level of communication. 115

Marín-Arrese

The following criteria have been applied in order to consider the use of a linguistic expression as a bona fide marker of evidentiality in Spanish (cf. Boye, 2010, 2018; Cornillie et al., 2015; Wiemer, 2010). (a) Degree of conventionalization and entrenchment: evidential expressions derived from lexical verbs are characteristically found as a fossilized 3SG form of the present indicative (parece ‘seems’), in the 3SG form of the impersonal passive (se ve ‘one sees’), or in set expressions or constructions (por lo que se ve ‘from what can be seen’). (b) Holistic units: in order to function as evidentials proper, these linguistic expressions need to be distinct, holistic units with a meaning component that indicates some type of information source. (c) Propositional scope: as Boye (2010) notes,“for a given linguistic expression to be considered as having evidential meaning, it must be attested with a proposition-designating clause as its semantic scope” (p. 304), not a state-of-affairs-designating clause. (d) Subjectification and pragmaticalization: there are cases where the evidential expression has undergone subjectification and has extended its use to a discourse-pragmatic marker, thereby bleaching its semantic evidential function. This is quite frequent in the case of adverbs. Additional methodological considerations involve the following issues: (a) Multifunctionality: the extent to which evidential expressions may be said to denote stable evidential values, or whether the same marker may be found expressing two or even three basic evidential values, as in the case of synchronic multifunctionality, to be illustrated in Section 3.3. (b) Tense-Aspect-Modality (TAM-E): Spanish is a synthetic language, with a complex system of inflections to express the various temporal, aspectual, and modal relationships. Section 3.4 discusses meaning extensions of some tense-aspect markers as expressions of evidentiality. Section 3.5 discusses the evidential nature of deber (de) (‘must’).

3.2

Functions and categories of evidentiality in Spanish

The dimensions and parameters discussed above serve as the basis for distinguishing the various subcategories of evidentiality, illustrated in the following corpus examples in Spanish: (i) Direct Perceptual Evidentiality (DPE): these expressions indicate personal, direct, non-mediated access to visual or other sensoric evidence. Common expressions indicating direct perceptual access are the following: see-verbs (se ve, se puede ver), hear-verbs (se oye/n). (2) Eh . . . María Asunción, que . . . cuando los soldados eh . . . iraquíes, eh . . . se rinden en una de esas tomas, en una de esas imágenes se ve como uno de ellos besa la mano de un soldado americano . . . (corlec) (Marín-Arrese, 2016, p. 337) ‘Eh . . . María Asunción, that . . . when the Iraqi soldiers eh . . . the Iraqis, eh . . . give themselves up in one of those shots, in one of those images you can see how one of them kisses the hand of an American soldier . . . ’ (ii) Indirect-Inferential Evidentiality (IIE): common expressions are the following: see-verbs and adverbials (se ve, por lo que se ve), seem-verbs, adverbs and constructions (parece, da la impresión, 116

Pragmatics and semantics: Evidentiality

aparentemente, claramente, evidentemente, obviamente), know-verbs (se conoce), say-verbs (se diría), modal verbs (debe de) and tense-aspect markers (será/n, habrá/n, sería/n). (3) . . . y bueno, aquí la televisión pública es un auténtico bodrio y una auténtica manipulación, y, por si fuera poco, nos gastamos el dinero en campañas en televisiones nacionales. Como nos sobra, se ve . Por lo que se ve nos sobra. (CORPES) ‘. . . and well, public television here is a total botch-up and total manipulation, and, to top it all, we spend the money on campaigns on national televisions. Since we have a surplus, apparently . Apparently , we have more than enough.’ In Spanish, we often fnd partial grammaticalization of perception verbs and constructions, such as por lo que se ve (Lit.‘from that which is seen’) or salta a la vista (Lit.‘it jumps into view,’), which readily undergo semantic extension to evidential uses in coding “speaker’s deduction based on the perception of the end results of an event” (Matlock, 1989, p. 216).The metaphors UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING (Lakof & Johnson, 1980, p. 48) and KNOWING IS SEEING (Lakof & Turner, 1989, p. 190) motivate and structure these meaning shifts from direct perception to speaker’s inference. More unconventional expressions are found with verbs of olfactory or auditory perception, such as me huelo que (‘I smell that’) or me suena que (‘it sounds to me that’) (cf. Carretero & Marín-Arrese, 2020). (iii) Indirect-Reportative Evidentiality (IRE): in reportative evidentiality, the information originates in some external voice(s), whose original perspective is defocused or lost. Reportative expressions in Spanish typically involve specific constructions with perception verbs: hear-verbs, as in he oído + QUE ‘I’ve heard that,’ por lo que he oído ‘from what I have heard,’ and see-verbs as in por lo visto ‘from what is seen.’ Reportative expressions are also frequent with seem-verbs and adverbs, as in parece ser + QUE ‘it seems that,’ según parece ‘from what it seems,’ al parecer ‘apparently,’ and aparentemente ‘apparently.’ In markers derived from sayverbs, the backgrounded external voice may be evoked by ‘genericization’ in impersonal constructions as a non-specific source, dicen ‘they say,’ según dicen ‘according to what they say,’ or made implicit through passivization, as in se dice ‘it is said,’ según se dice ‘according to what is said.’ Expressions with a reportative value are also found with believe-verbs and adverbs, such as se cree ‘it is believed,’ and supuestamente ‘supposedly.’ In using these forms of backgrounding of the original source, speakers may either adopt a neutral position in terms of alignment with the original voices, or else position themselves in disalignment with them. (4)

¡Ah . . . ! Escribe muy bien Mitterrand; hay que reconocerlo, ¿eh? Y, además, es un hombre imaginativo, que hasta . . . se dice que fingió . . . un un atentado. . . . Sí, sí, sí, sí, sí. Un atentao, para ganar en popularidad.A veces, se dice, probablemente, porque hay distintos intereses, . . . (CORLEC) Speaker ‘Ah! He writes very well Mitterrand; you have to admit, right? Speaker And, besides, he is an imaginative man, that even . . . they say he faked . . . an attempt on his life. . . .Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Speaker An attempt, to gain popularity. Sometimes, they say, probably because there are different interests, . . . ’ 117

Marín-Arrese

Expressions with prepositions and complex prepositions, like según X ‘according to X’ (cf. De la Mora & Maldonado, 2018) and de acuerdo con ‘in accordance with, according to,’ very often involve the explicit designation of the original speaker as prepositional object, and thus specify the perspective point of the original source. Demonte and Fernández Soriano (2013) claim that in independent clauses headed by an overt complementizer, the que complementizer (that.COMP) may be considered an evidential marker, since the “semantic contribution of que is to incorporate reference to a speech event heard (and reported) by the speaker” (p. 212).They provide the following example as an illustration: (5)

En la cena nos llama un compañero, oye que está nevando en el campo de vuelo. ‘At dinner a colleague calls and says, hey it is snowing at the flying field.’ (Taken from the Internet) (Demonte & Fernández Soriano, 2013, p. 219)

However, this example appears to be a case of speech representation, so the doubt remains whether the que complementizer is actually attested in Spanish as a bona fide reportative evidential expression.The literature on evidentiality makes a distinction between reportative evidentiality and reporting a speech event.As Chojnicka (2012) argues, the difference may be viewed in terms of a cline in the dimensions of ‘speaker perspective’ and ‘source realization.’ The original speaker’s perspective is present to the largest extent in direct speech; in indirect speech, the current speaker attributes knowledge to another speaker from his/her own perspective.As the cline moves towards reportive evidentiality, the original speaker’s perspective becomes gradually weaker and is fnally lost.When it comes to source, in reported speech it is stated and linked to the reported information, whereas in evidentiality the source is not given. (Chojnicka, 2012, p. 179) In Pan-American varieties of Spanish we also fnd the highly conventionalized expression of reportative evidentiality, the construction diz(que) ‘say-that.’ The form dizque is common and widespread in Mexican, Colombian, Dominican, and Ecuadorian Spanish, and in a variety of other Pan-American varieties of Spanish (De la Mora & Maldonado, 2015; Demonte & Fernández Soriano, 2013; López-Couso & Méndez-Naya, 2015). Spanish Diz(que) derives from the collocation of dize (say.3SG) + que (complementizer), (c.1310; see Olbertz, 2007). Mirroring the impersonal Latin dicitur ‘they say, it is said,’ the apocopated form diz que was used as an evidential strategy to convey hearsay or reportative information, and became a univerbated form, dizque, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, with a quasi-adverbial function. However, by the 17th century the form was stigmatized, and its use gradually declined toward the end of the century in Peninsular Spanish in parallel with the rise of the alternative impersonal forms of decir, se dice ‘it is said’ or dicen ‘they say,’ as reportative evidential strategies. In the present day, dizque is not found in European Spanish, except marginally in Galicia, due to the influence of the use of Galician disque (cf. López-Couso & Méndez-Naya, 2015). Travis (2006) consistently argues that the form dizque has extended its use from a verbal matrix predicate introducing reported speech, to a reportative evidential (‘hearsay’) expression, where “the notion of doubt is available as a pragmatic inference” and, finally, to mark epistemic stance, where “the notion of doubt has been conventionalized” through grammaticalization processes of generalization and subjectification.This is akin to a path of development “commonly found in grammaticized evidentiality systems,” which indicates that lexicon and grammar are 118

Pragmatics and semantics: Evidentiality

“subject to the same patterns of pragmatically induced semantic change” (p. 1294).The following example of Colombian Spanish is from Travis (2006): (6)

A: Por ejemplo, el a—- aquí el alcalde,Todo lo que ha hecho, Y . . . y ahorita, dizque ya lo están investigando. A: ‘For example, the mayor here, all that he’s done, and now, dizque he’s under investigation.’) (Travis, 2006, p. 1284)

It has been suggested that the grammaticalization of dizque as an evidential was probably reinforced by language contact with Amerindian languages, such as Quechua, which has an obligatory grammatical category of evidentiality (Babel, 2009).

3.3 Multifunctionality The phenomenon of multifunctionality or synchronic polyfunctionality of evidential expressions is attested in a considerable number of languages, and seems to point to a series of links connecting the semantic subspaces in the domain of evidentiality (cf. Boye, 2012, pp. 137ff.). One such link is that between direct perceptual evidentiality and indirect-inferential evidentiality.This link is observed in the extension of perception verbs, such as the verb ver ‘see,’ signaling direct evidentiality (DPE) as in earlier Example (2), to express inferential evidentiality (IIE), with the impersonal passive se ve ‘one sees,’ in Example (7): (7)

IIE: tiene su etiqueta que .  .  . que .  .  . identifica que el visón es esa clase de visón; y luego, simplemente ya con el brillo y todo eso se ve que es un visón un . . . un auténtico visón. (corlec) (Marín-Arrese, 2016, p. 337) ‘it has its label that . . . that . . . identifies that the mink is that kind of mink; and then, just simply by the shine and all that you can see it is a mink . . . a . . . a real mink [coat].’

Another link, that between the semantic spaces of inferential evidentiality and reportative evidentiality, motivates a number of cases of multifunctionality. Expressions such as parece,aparentemente,al parecer ‘it seems, apparently’ are attested with either an indirect-inferential meaning or a reportative meaning. The constructional blend, parecer + ser.INF + COMP is characteristically found with a reportative reading; though marginally, we may find cases of this construction with an inferential reading. There are some differences in usage of construction types with parece: both the raising construction, parece + INF, and the unraised construction, parece + que.COMP, are found with inferential and reportative values, although the reportative value is more frequent in discourse with the unraised construction (cf. Marín-Arrese, 2017; see Givón, 2001, for a functional description of raising constructions). (8)

IIE: En unos tiempos como los actuales en los que, al menos en la superficie de los acontecimientos, parece idolatrarse el materialismo, siempre defendió la vida del espíritu, . . . (CESJD-SLA) ‘In times like the present in which, at least on the surface of events, materialism seems to be idolized, he always defended the life of the spirit, . . . ’

(9)

IRE: Pero, al tiempo, se anuncia, y en el periódico que dirige Antonio Franco esta mañana lo leemos, que parece que Álvarez Cascos prepara una fuerte ofensiva en la línea de endurecer la acción contra la oposición. (CREA) 119

Marín-Arrese

‘But, at the same time, it is announced, and in the newspaper that Antonio Franco directs we can read it this morning, that it seems that Álvarez Cascos is preparing a strong offensive in the line of strengthening the action against the opposition.’ Much rarer are those cases of multifunctional expressions that bear witness to the cross-domain link between the semantic spaces of full epistemic support and inferential evidentiality. This is only marginally found in Spanish with the cognitive factive verb conocer ‘know’ in the passive impersonal construction, which may extend to an inferential evidential.This process of epistemic weakening would seem to be motivated by impersonalization and a corresponding decrease in subjective responsibility, conozco ‘I know’ > se conoce ‘it is known’ > se conoce ‘apparently, presumably.’ (10) Oye, se conoce que le encantan los “Holliwood” porque ya me lo encontré yo en otro con Inma, que fue cuando se me cayó todo el “Ketchup”. (CORLEC) ‘Hey, apparently s/he loves Hollywood (restaurants) because I already met him in another one with Inma, which was when I spilled all the Ketchup.’

3.4

Tense/Aspect and evidentiality

Tense-aspect forms and periphrases with modal verbs are attested for epistemic and evidential uses in Romance languages like French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish (Böhm & Hennemann, 2014; García Negroni, 2016; Kronning, 2015; Laca, 2005; Marín-Arrese, 2018, inter alia). In Spanish, we find the following evidential meanings associated with a number of tense-aspects forms. (a) Inferential evidential values: simple future, simple conditional, future perfect. Across languages, it is relatively common to find uses of future tense forms, which in certain contexts yield an epistemic, or ‘putative’ cognitive effect of uncertainty (Chilton, 2013). (11) No, no, no, no, no, no, es un “pí” del teléfono y . . . , y un eco; yo oigo un eco muy fuerte. Puede ser el satélite . Será el satélite . Por eso te preguntaba desde dónde llamabas . Digo, igual está fuera de Madrid . (CORLEC) Speaker ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, it’s a telephone ringing sound and . . . , and an echo, I hear a very strong echo. Speaker It may be the satellite. Speaker That will be the satellite.That’s why I was asking where were you calling from. I say, maybe it’s outside Madrid.’ Expressions in the conditional such as the following example with the impersonal passive form se dice ‘it is said’ are often attested with an epistemic or inferential evidential meaning. (12) El Gobierno presenta en el Palacio Real de Nápoles su prometida vuelta de tuerca, un conjunto durísimo de medidas. En un 80%, se dedican a restringir la entrada, la libre circulación y los derechos de los ciudadanos extranjeros que residen en el país. Se diría que la mayoría de las medidas, más que para garantizar la seguridad, han sido diseñadas para expulsar de forma inmediata a rumanos y gitanos. (CESJD-SNP) 120

Pragmatics and semantics: Evidentiality

‘The Government is presenting their promised turn of the screw in the Royal Palace of Naples, a very harsh set of measures. In about 80%, they are destined to restrict the entrance, unrestricted mobility, and rights of the foreign citizens living in the country. One would say that the majority of the measures, rather than serving to guarantee security, have been designed to expel the Romanians and the gypsies immediately.’ (Marín-Arrese, 2017, p. 206) The evidential extensions of the future perfect are not random, since they are attested in systems with grammatical evidentiality, as well as in systems lacking a fully grammaticalized system of evidentiality such as Spanish and other Romance languages. As Marín-Arrese (2018) notes, “The effect of inference based on a verifiable resultant state no doubt increases the potential of the extension of the future perfect to indirect inferential evidentiality” (p. 91). (13) Claro, pero . . . imagi . . . seguramente habrá tantos varones porque habrá habido algún infanticidio de mujeres. (CORLEC) Of course, but . . . I imagine there will probably be so many males because there [will have] must have been some infanticide of women. ’ (b) Reportative values: Imperfect, Simple Conditional, Conditional Perfect. According to Böhm and Hennemann (2014, p. 12), the imperfect may acquire near-reportative readings, in that it “implicitly makes reference to an external source of information,” as in the following: (14) No obstante, los demócratas celebran la llegada al Senado de dos fenómenos interesantes. Uno de ellos es Barack Obama, único negro en la Cámara Alta y figura creciente del partido, cuya victoria en Illinois era tan segura que antes incluso de ser elegido recorrió todo el país haciendo campaña por Kerry. (CESJD-SNP) ‘Nevertheless, the Democrats are celebrating the arrival of two interesting phenomena to the Senate. One of them is Barack Obama, the only black man in the Upper Chamber and an increasingly important figure in the party, whose victory in Illinois was so certain that even before he was elected he travelled throughout the country campaigning for Kerry.’ Though the conditional is characteristically found with the inferential evidential value, we also find reportative readings, typically in reportative contexts, as in (15) where the particle según explicitly designates the external information source.This co-occurrence of expressions of reportativity is relatively frequent in journalistic discourse. (15) Según una teoría evolucionista, Quintano sería el eslabón perdido del mudéjar de Serrano, . . . (CREA) ‘According to an evolutionist theory, Quintano would be the missing link of the Mudejar style in Serrano, . . .’ The irrealis feature in conditionals, as Marín-Arrese (2018) has observed, presents the situation as unrealized, and “contributes to distancing the speaker from the situation and diminishes speaker’s responsibility for the communicated information” (p. 101). 121

Marín-Arrese

The conditional perfect, in its own right, is becoming a common evidential expression for reportative evidentiality in Spanish, as exemplified in (16): (16) Hobeika habría dejado grabaciones y pruebas que implican a Sharon en la masacre de Sabra y Chatila (CESJD-SNA) ‘Hobeika [would have left] had reportedly left recordings and evidence that implicate Sharon in the massacre in Sabra and Chatila’ In Spanish, especially in the context of journalistic discourse, there is an increasing tendency to use the conditional perfect form (habría/n) with an evidential reportative value in news reports on the radio or on TV. This use has relatively recently permeated into written discourse and appears to be increasing during the past few years.

3.5

Evidentiality and epistemic modal verbs: deber (de)

The literature on evidentiality has for some time discussed the semantic distinctions and the relationship between evidentiality and epistemic modality (Cornillie, 2007; Dendale & Tasmowski, 2001; Hennemann, 2012, 2013). Boye (2012, p. 24) argues that “both notions (epistemic necessity and inferential justification) need to be invoked” in order to account for the evidential meaning of epistemic modal must, and for Spanish deber (de). One of the relevant features of evidentiality is whether there is an overt reference to the evidence for the claim expressed in the proposition under the scope of the evidential, in the immediately preceding or following co-text, or whether the claim is not based on any overt evidential justification. In Spanish, we find frequent cases of both perception-based and conceptual-based evidential uses, where the evidential justification is explicitly specified in the co-text, as in the following examples (Marín-Arrese, 2018, p. 88) (my underlining): (17) ¿Aquí venden gorros o qué? No. Deben ser juguetes.Yo . . . porque hay un caballito de esos que se mueven. . . . Soldaditos de plomo . . . Mira hay . . . ahí sí que hay un caballito que . . . (CORLEC) Speaker ‘Do they sell hats here or what? Speaker No. It must be toys. I . . . because there’s one of those little horses that move. . . . Little lead soldiers . . . Speaker Look there’s . . . there’s yes there’s a little horse that . . . ’ Cases of non-overt evidential justification or no justification are also found.These are mostly instances involving generic inferential meaning; i.e., speakers/writers’ reasoning on the basis of information derived from general world knowledge, or conjectural inferences, based solely on the speaker/writer reasoning process (Squartini, 2008), as in: (18) . . . después de este paréntesis, la representación de Cataluña irá a dar en quien de verdad la merece que es Carod Rovira, aunque ya no será él, sino alguno de sus amigos y colegas que debe de estar segándole la hierba bajo los pies. (CESJD-SOP) ‘ . . . after this parenthesis, the representation of Catalonia will end up with someone who really deserves it and that is Carod Rovira, though it won’t be him any more, but rather one of his friends and colleagues who must be mowing the grass beneath his feet.’ 122

Pragmatics and semantics: Evidentiality

Squartini (2008) distinguishes between inferences based on external sensory evidence (circumstantial inferences), speaker’s logical reasoning (generic inferences) deriving from general world knowledge, or personal assumptions (conjectural inferences). A characteristic feature of the modal deber (de), in common with evidentials, is that it most often involves circumstantial inferential access to the information, and to a lesser extent, generic inferences. The pragmatic association of high reliability with circumstantial or perception-based inferences no doubt paves the way for the partial conventionalization of the modal verb deber (de) as an inferential evidential. Similarly, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, Langacker (1991) notes that “must conveys immediacy” and “(on the strictest interpretation) indicates that confirmation is regarded as virtually inevitable” (p. 280).These notions of immediacy and inevitable confirmation of knowledge contribute to the meaning of strong epistemic commitment and justification for the proposition.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the study of the domain of evidentiality in European languages, and particularly in Romance languages such as Spanish, which rely on expressions along the lexico-grammatical continuum (Cornillie & Izquierdo Alegría, 2017; Estrada, 2013; Figueras Bates & Cabedo Nebot, 2018; González Ruiz et  al., 2016; Izquierdo Alegría, 2016; Marín-Arrese, Hassler, & Carretero, 2017a; Mulder, 2017, inter alia). There is a growing body of studies on pragmatic features of evidentiality in Spanish, such as the use of evidentials as markers of politeness and attenuation (Albelda Marco, 2018; Estellés & Albelda Marco, 2014; Kotwica, 2013). Discourse-pragmatic studies focus on their use in involvement and commitment in interaction (Cornillie, 2010, 2018; Cornillie & Gras, 2015; García Ramón, 2018). Recent research on evidentiality in discourse studies also explores the use and variation of evidential expressions in genres and text types (Figueras Bates & Cabedo Nebot, 2018; Kotwica, 2016; Marín-Arrese et al., 2017b). Evidentials as resources of speaker positioning and epistemic stance in the discourse may also index the speaker/writer’s interactional identity (González-Ramos, 2016; Marín-Arrese, 2016). Clift (2006) has argued that, in a social relationship with a co-participant, evidentials index the dimensions of accountability and authority: “evidentials are coordinates plotted along the dimensions of authority and accountability in the same way that prototypical deictic categories index the speaker in the dimensions of time and space” (pp. 583–584). Critical discourse studies examine the use of evidentials as strategies of epistemic legitimization in discourse (Chilton, 2004; Marín-Arrese, 2011a), or as a means of ‘epistemic control’ in the discourse (Langacker, 2013; Marín-Arrese, 2015). In order to strive for such control and to circumvent the epistemic defenses of their audience, speakers develop strategies of epistemic legitimization, which allow them to conceal deception. Epistemic stance resources may thus serve ideological purposes in the management of beliefs and knowledge in discourse and, more specifically, in the management of hearers’ acceptance of the information, persuading addressees of the veracity of their claims and the validity of their information. Regarding the issue of truthfulness in human communication and the degree to which hearers/addressees process an utterance as true or real, Sperber et al. (2010) have argued that humans “have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, targeted at the risk of being misinformed by others” (p. 359). As a result, it is in the interest of speakers, and persuaders, to overcome these defenses and strive for addressees’‘epistemic trust’ (Sperber et al., 2010). Chilton (2004) observes that an aspect of this cheater-detection ability is that of meta-representation; that is,“humans can decouple representations of the world from any inherent truth claim they may have” (p. 22). In this respect, evidential expressions may be seen in relation to meta-representation 123

Marín-Arrese

as “the presentation in language of sources, evidence or authority for the truth of a representation” (Chilton, 2004, p. 22). Evidentials as ‘source-tagging’ devices (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000) may contribute to increase or decrease the credibility of the proposition under their scope, very much depending on the credibility of the source. In certain realms of discourse, such as the media and political discourse, it is in the interest of speakers “to guard against the operation of their audience’s ‘cheater detectors’ and provide guarantees for the truth of their sayings” (Chilton, 2004, p. 23).The use of evidential expressions is a means whereby speakers may seek to ‘legitimize’ their utterances; that is,“imbue their utterances with evidence, authority and truth” (p. 23). From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, no strict boundary is posited between semantics and pragmatics. In the words of Langacker (2008),“The claim, instead, is that semantics and pragmatics form a gradation . . . , with no precise boundary between the two. But toward either extreme of the scale lie phenomena that are indisputably either semantic or pragmatic” (p. 40). Expressions of epistemicity indicate speakers’ judgments regarding the described situation, but they are also a basic means whereby speakers strive for ‘epistemic control’ and intersubjective alignment in the discourse (Langacker, 2013). In the case of evidentiality, Langacker (2017) argues that in striving for mental or epistemic control to cope with the world, we build up a conception of reality, which is constantly modified by access to knowledge through some basic sources of information, which in turn correlate with reliability: internal experience, sensory perception, higher-level cognition, as well as other conceptualizers. We must conclude that evidentiality is a central member of the semantic-pragmatic interface, partly overlapping with epistemic modality, and with mirativity or speaker’s emotive stance at discovering unexpected information (DeLancey, 2001). From a discourse-pragmatic perspective, evidentiality crucially relates to speaker commitment and responsibility, and to speaker positioning and intersubjective alignment.

Acknowledgments *This research has received support from the following projects: Stance and Subjectivity in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Framework for the Analysis of Epistemicity, Effectivity, Evaluation and Inter/Subjectivity from a Critical Discourse Perspective. (STANCEDISC), Ref. PGC2018095798-B-I00, funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities). The expression of evidentiality and modality in English and other European languages: Crosslinguistic perspectives (EUROEVIDMOD), Ref. FFI2011-23181, funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness).

Note 1 The reference system for the Spanish texts in the cesjd corpus is the following:

sla: Spanish-Leading article-ABC soa: Spanish-Opinion column-ABC sna: Spanish-News reports-ABC

slp: Spanish-Leading article-El País sop: Spanish-Opinion column-El País snp: Spanish-News reports-El País 

Further reading Albelda Marco, M., & Estellés, M. (Eds.). (2018). Discourse approaches to evidentiality in Spanish. Pragmatics and Society, 9(3). (Special issue) www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/18789722/9/3 This publication includes six papers on evidentiality and variation in genres and discourse domains. The topics include reportative evidentiality in scientific discourse, their use in Internet fora, spoken 124

Pragmatics and semantics: Evidentiality

autobiographical illness narratives, and parliamentary debates. There is also a comparison of its use in contexts such as conversations, press news, academic papers, and parliamentary debates. Figueras Bates, C., & Cabedo Nebot,A. (Eds.). (2018). Perspectives on evidentiality in Spanish: Explorations across genres.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. This volume represents a discourse-pragmatic perspective on evidentiality,explored in academic and political discourse, the discourse of biology, the expression of self in illness narratives, the language of fora, and oral discourse genres. Other studies examine epistemic phrases as stance frames, quotative markers, a diachronic view of an evidential-epistemic marker, and the discursive functions of the future tense in Spanish. González Ruiz, R., Loureda Lamas, O., & Izquierdo Alegría, D. (Eds.). (2016). La evidencialidad en español: teoría y descripción. Madrid: Iberoamericana,Vervuert. Chapters include an overview of evidentiality in Spanish, a discussion of evidentiality, attenuation, and epistemic modality, and strategies of attenuation or intensification. Also included are studies of the evidentiality of perceptual verbs, causative illative markers and reformulation markers, que complementizer independent clauses, modal auxiliaries and verbal forms, sentence adverbs, future temporal forms, and the past perfect form, as well as a contrastive study on evidentials in journalistic discourse.

Corpora CESJD. (2000–2012). Corpus of English and Spanish Journalistic Discourse. Madrid, UCM. CORLEC. (1992) Corpus Oral de Referencia de la Lengua Española Contemporánea. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. CORPES XXI. (2018). Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI, Real Academia Española. CREA (2008). Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual. Real Academia Española.

References Aikhenvald, A. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aikhenvald, A. (2007). Information source and evidentiality:What can we conclude? Rivista di Linguistica, 19(1), 209–227. Aikhenvald,A. (2014).The grammar of knowledge:A cross-linguistic view of evidentials and the expression of information source. In A. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (Eds.), The grammar of knowledge: A crosslinguistic typology (pp. 1–51). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aikhenvald,A. (Ed.). (2018). The Oxford handbook of evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Albelda Marco, M. (2018).Atenuación del compromiso del hablante? El caso de los evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que. RILCE. Revista de Filología Hispánica, 34(3), 1179–1214. Albelda Marco, M., & Estellés, M. (Eds.). (2018). Discourse approaches to evidentiality in Spanish. Pragmatics and Society, 9(3). (Special issue) www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/18789722/9/3 Anderson, L. (1986). Evidentials, paths of change, and mental maps:Typologically regular asymmetries. In W. Chafe & J. Nichols (Eds.), Evidentiality:The linguistic coding of epistemology (pp. 273–312). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Babel, A. (2009). Dizque, evidentiality, and stance in Valley Spanish. Language in Society, 38, 487–511. Boas, F. (1938). Language. In F. Boas (Ed.), General anthropology (pp. 124–145). Boston and New York: D.C. Heath & Company. Böhm,V., & Hennemann, A. (2014). The evidential use of the Spanish imperfect and the conditional in journalistic contexts. Studia Neophilologica, 86(2), 1–18. Boye, K. (2010). Evidence for what? Evidentiality and scope. STUF-Language Typology and Universals, 63(4), 290–307. Boye, K. (2012). Epistemic meaning:A crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive study. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Boye, K. (2018). Evidentiality. The notion and the term. In A. Aikhenvald (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of evidentiality (pp. 262–272). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 125

Marín-Arrese

Boye, K., & Harder, P. (2009). Evidentiality. Linguistic categories and grammaticalization. Functions of Language, 16(1), 9–43. Carretero, M., & Marín-Arrese, J. I. (2020). Expresiones metafóricas y epistemicidad en español: Usos y correspondencias traductológicas en inglés. In J. Lavid López (Ed.), Contrastes inglés-español y traducción: estudios basados en corpus (pp. 103–130). Madrid: Escolar y Mayo. Chafe, W. (1986). Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing. In W. Chafe & J. Nichols (Eds.), Evidentiality:The linguistic coding of epistemology (pp. 261–272). Norwood, NJ:Ablex. Chafe,W., & Nichols, J. (Eds.). (1986). Evidentiality:The linguistic coding of epistemology. Norwood, NJ:Ablex. Chilton, P. (2004). Analyzing political discourse:Theory and practice. London: Routledge. Chilton, P. (2013). Frames of reference and the linguistic conceptualization of time: Present and future. In K. M. Jaszczolt & L. de Saussure (Eds.), Time, language, cognition and reality (pp. 236–258). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chojnicka, J. (2012). Reportive evidentiality and reported speech: Is there a boundary? Evidence of the Latvian oblique. In A. Usonienė, N. Nau, & I. Dabašinskienė (Eds.), Multiple perspectives in linguistic research on Baltic languages (pp. 170–192). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Clift, R. (2006). Indexing stance: Reported speech as an interactional evidential. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(5), 569–595. Cornillie, B. (2007). Epistemic modality and evidentiality in Spanish (semi-) auxiliaries. A cognitive-functional approach. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Cornillie, B. (2010).An interactional approach to epistemic and evidential adverbs in Spanish conversation. In G. Diewald & E. Smirnova (Eds.), Linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages (pp. 309–330). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cornillie, B. (2018). On speaker commitment and speaker involvement. Evidence from evidentials in Spanish talk-in-interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 128, 161–170. Cornillie, B., & Gras, P. (2015). On the interactional dimension of evidentials:The case of the Spanish evidential discourse markers. Discourse Studies, 17(2), 141–161. Cornillie, B., Marín-Arrese, J. I., & Wiemer, B. (2015). Evidentiality and the semantics—pragmatics interface. An introduction. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 29, 1–18. Cornillie, B., & Izquierdo Alegría, D. (Eds.). (2017). Gramática, semántica y pragmática de la evidencialidad. Pamplona, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra (EUNSA). Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2000). Consider the source: The evolution of adaptations for decoupling and metarepresentation. In D. Sperber (Ed.), Metarepresentation: A multidisciplinary perspective (pp.  53–116). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, C., Potts, C., & Speas, M. (2007). The pragmatic values of evidential sentences. In T. Friedman & M. Gibson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th semantics and linguistic theory conference, SALT XVII (pp. 71–88). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. De la Mora, J., & Maldonado, R. (2015). Dizque: Epistemics blurring evidentials in Mexican Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 85, 168–180. De la Mora, J., & Maldonado, R. (2018). Según along time. In C. Bates & A. Cabedo (Eds.), Perspectives on evidentiality in Spanish: Evidentiality and genre (pp. 205–222).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DeLancey, S. (2001).The mirative and evidentiality. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 339–464. Demonte,V., & Fernández Soriano, O. (2013). Evidentials dizque and que in Spanish. Grammaticalization, parameters, and the (fine) structure of Comp. Revista de Estudos linguísticos da Universidade do Porto, 8, 211–234. Dendale, P., & Tasmowski, L. (2001). Introduction: Evidentiality and related notions. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 339–348. Diewald, G., & Smirnova, E. (2010). Evidentiality in German. Linguistic realization and regularities in grammaticalization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Estellés Arguedas, M., & Albelda Marco, M. (2014). Evidentials, politeness, and prosody in Spanish:A corpus analysis. Journal of Politeness Research, 10(1), 29–62. Estrada, A. (2013). Panorama de los estudios de la evidencialidad en el español.Teoría y práctica. Buenos Aires:Teseo. Faller, M. (2019).The discourse commitments of illocutionary reportatives. Semantics and Pragmatics, 12(8), 1–46. Figueras Bates, C., & Cabedo Nebot,A. (Eds.). (2018). Perspectives on evidentiality in Spanish: Explorations across genres.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fitneva, S. (2001). Epistemic marking and reliability judgments: Evidence from Bulgarian. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 401–420. Frawley, W. (1992). Linguistic semantics. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 126

Pragmatics and semantics: Evidentiality

García Negroni, M. (2016). Polifonía, evidencialidad citativa y tiempos verbales.Acerca de los usos citativos del futuro morfológico y del futuro perifrástico. In R. González Ruiz, D. Izquierdo Alegría, & O. Loureda Lamas (Eds.), La evidencialidad en español: teoría y descripción (pp.  279–302). Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana,Vervuert. García Ramón,A. (2018). Epistemicidad en interacción: (a)simetrías epistémicas en secuencias de acuerdo y su relación con la construcciones de roles funcionales en conversaciones y entrevistas (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Universitat de València,Valencia, Spain. Givón, T. (2001). Syntax. An introduction (Vol. 2).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. González-Ramos, E. (2016). Contribución al estudio de la evidencialidad en español actual: los signos “por lo visto,” “al parecer,”“en mi opinión” y “personalmente” (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain. González Ruiz, R., Loureda Lamas, O., & Izquierdo Alegría, D. (Eds.). (2016). La evidencialidad en español: teoría y descripción. Madrid: Iberoamericana,Vervuert. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics,Vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York:Academic Press. Hennemann, A. (2012).The epistemic and evidential use of Spanish modal adverbs and verbs of cognitive attitude. Folia Linguistica, 46(1), 133–170. Hennemann, A. (2013). A context-sensitive and functional approach to evidentiality in Spanish or why evidentiality needs a superordinate category. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Izquierdo Alegría, D. (2016). Alcances y límites de la evidencialidad: aspectos teóricos y propuesta de análisis aplicada a un conjunto de adverbios evidencialoides del español (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Jakobson, R. (1957). Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verbs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kotwica, D. (2013). Los valores del significado de la partícula evidencial al parecer: la atenuación y el efecto de disociación. In A. Cabedo, M.Aguilar, & E. López-Navarro (Eds.), Estudios de lingüística: investigaciones, propuestas y aplicaciones (pp. 403–410).Valencia, Spain: Universitat de València. Kotwica, D. (2016). Evolución del género artículo científico en español (1799–1920) a la luz de la expresión de la evidencialidad (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Universitat de València,Valencia, Spain. Kronning, H. (2015). El condicional epistémico de atribución en francés, italiano, y español: aspectos diafásicos, diatópicos, y diacrónicos. In K. Jeppesen Kragh & J. Lindschouw (Eds.), Les variations diasystématiques et leurs interdépendances dans les langues romanes (pp. 507–521). Strasbourg, France: Société de linguistique romane/ÉLiPhi. Laca, B. (2005).Tiempo, aspecto y la interpretación de los verbos modales en español. Lingüística ALFAL, 17, 9–44. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More than cool reason.A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lampert, G., & Lampert, M. (2010).Where does evidentiality reside? Notes on (alleged) limiting cases: Seem and be like. STUF-Language Typology and Universals, 63(4), 308–321. Langacker, R.W. (1991). Foundations of cognitive grammar (Vol. 2). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, R.W. (2008). Cognitive grammar:A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langacker, R.W. (2013). Modals: Striving for control. In J. I. Marín-Arrese, M. Carretero, J.Arús, & J. van der Auwera (Eds.), English modality: Core, periphery, and evidentiality (pp. 3–55). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, R.W. (2017). Evidentiality in cognitive grammar. In J. I. Marín-Arrese, G. Hassler, & M. Carretero (Eds.), Evidentiality revisited: Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives (pp. 13–55). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. López-Couso, M. J., & Méndez-Naya, B. (2015). Epistemic/evidential markers of the type verb + complementizer. Some parallels from English and Romance. In A. D. M. Smith, G. Trousdale, & R. Waltereit (Eds.), New directions in grammaticalization research (pp.  93–120). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Marín-Arrese, J. I. (2011a). Effective vs. epistemic stance and subjectivity in political discourse: Legitimising strategies and mystification of responsibility. In C. Hart (Ed.), Critical discourse studies in context and cognition (pp. 193–223).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Marín-Arrese, J. I. (2011b). Epistemic legitimizing strategies, commitment, and accountability in discourse. Discourse Studies, 13(6), 789–797. 127

Marín-Arrese

Marín-Arrese, J. I. (2015). Epistemic legitimisation and inter/subjectivity in the discourse of parliamentary and public inquiries:A contrastive case study. Critical Discourse Studies, 12(3), 261–278. Marín-Arrese, J. I. (2016). Epistemicidad y posicionamiento discursivo: un estudio interlingüístico de la evidencialidad en el discurso periodístico en castellano y en inglés. In R. González Ruiz, D. Izquierdo Alegría, & O. Loureda Lamas (Eds.), La evidencialidad en español: teoría y descripción (pp. 329–350). Madrid: Iberoamericana,Vervuert. Marín-Arrese, J. I. (2017). Multifunctionality of evidential expressions in discourse domains and genres: Evidence from cross-linguistic case studies. In J. I. Marín Arrese, G. Hassler, & M. Carretero (Eds.), Evidentiality revisited: Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives (pp. 195–223). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Marín-Arrese, J. I. (2018). Evidentiality and the TAM systems in English and Spanish:A cognitive and crosslinguistic perspective. In D. Ayoun, A. Celle, & L. Lansari (Eds.). Tense, aspect, modality, and evidentiality (pp. 83–107).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Marín-Arrese, J. I., Hassler, G., & Carretero, M. (Eds.). (2017a). Evidentiality revisited: Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Marín-Arrese, J. I., Lavid, J., Carretero, M., Domínguez Romero, E., Martín de la Rosa,V., & Pérez Blanco, M. (Eds.). (2017b). Evidentiality and modality in European languages: Discourse-pragmatic perspectives. Berlin: Peter Lang. Matlock, T. (1989). Metaphor and the grammaticalization of evidentials. In K. Hall, M. Meacham, & R. Shapiro (Eds.), Proceedings of the fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 215–225). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Mulder, G. (2017).When feeling is thinking:The semantics of evidential and epistemic predicates in Spanish. In J. I. Marín Arrese, G. Hassler, & M. Carretero (Eds.), Evidentiality revisited: Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives (pp. 105–122).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nuckolls, J. B., & Michael, L. (2012). Evidentiality in interaction. Pragmatics and Society, 3(2). (Special Issue) Nuyts, J. (2017). Evidentiality reconsidered. In J. I. Marín-Arrese, G. Hassler, & M. Carretero (Eds.), Evidentiality revisited: Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives (pp. 57–83).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Olbertz, H. (2007). Dizque in Mexican Spanish: The subjectification of reportative meaning. Rivista di linguistica, 19(1), 151–172. Plungian,V. (2001).The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 349–357. San Roque, L., & Loughnane, R. (2012).The New Guinea Highlands evidentiality area. Linguistic Typology, 16, 111–167. Sperber, D., Clément, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H., Origgi, G., & Wilson, D. (2010). Epistemic vigilance. Mind and Language, 25, 359–393. Squartini, M. (2008). Lexical vs. grammatical evidentiality in French and Italian. Linguistics, 46(5), 917–947. Travis, C. E. (2006). Dizque:A Colombian evidentiality strategy. Linguistics, 44(6), 1269–1297. Wiemer, B. (2010). Hearsay in European languages:Toward an integrative account of grammatical and lexical marking. In G. Diewald & E. Smirnova (Eds.), Linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages (pp. 59–130). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Willett, T. (1988). A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Studies in Language, 12, 51–97.

128

7 The role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structures Catherine E. Travis and Rena Torres Cacoullos

1

Introduction

Discourse pragmatics is the study of linguistic phenomena that are affected by broader textual considerations, such as information flow. As such, it is most compatible with a usage-based perspective, according to which grammatical structures are shaped by their frequency and contexts of use, in contrast to a formalist view of syntax as autonomous from discourse function and cognitive processes. In this chapter, we demonstrate how pragmatic notions can be replicably tested by devising operationalizations that convert pragmatic constructs into countable entities in discourse. Spontaneously produced, sustained discourse, and not intuition-based or cherry-picked example sentences, provides the most reliable data source.This is because pragmatic constructs invoke speaker-hearer cognitive operations that transcend propositional meaning at the level of the individual clause or sentence (cf. Givón, 2001, p. 437). And, as Hopper and Thompson note,“Only actual texts can . . . inform us about the real contexts for speech forms in a way that can give us clues to the motivations for these forms” (1993, p. 372). Above all, spontaneous speech corpora approximate the mode of everyday speech (the vernacular), thus providing a baseline against which to evaluate findings from elicited data, since variation is more patterned in unmonitored speech than in formal styles (Labov, 1984, p.  29) (see Chapter 32 on corpus pragmatics, this volume). We begin by reviewing the “given vs. new” distinction, to highlight that its scope is restricted by the discourse referentiality of noun phrases (Section 2).We then test two pragmatic notions that have received vast attention in the literature: “referent accessibility” (Section 3.1) and “topicality” (Section 3.2), as applied to Spanish noun phrase (NP) realization (lexical vs. pronominal vs. unexpressed subjects) and word order (pre- vs. postverbal subjects). We will see that the inherent variability in these subsystems provides a tool for assessing how pragmatic aspects interplay with grammatical structure, even in a language contact situation (Section 3.3).

129

Travis and Torres Cacoullos

2 2.1

Review of existing research Dimensions of information flow in natural speech: The role of discourse referentiality

Information flow concerns the “cognitive and social aspects of the way people ‘package’ ideational content” (Thompson, 1997, p.  65). The dimension of information flow that is most widely applied is the status of the referent in terms of its accessibility (Ariel, 2001, p. 33; Givón, 1983a, p. 17) or activation (Chafe, 1994, p. 75).While this notion is often interpreted in cognitive terms, it must be operationalized since, as has been noted, “el estatus cognitivo de las entidades en la mente de los hablantes (su grado de activación o accesibilidad) no es un dato directamente observable” (‘the cognitive status of entities in the minds of speakers (their level of activation or accessibility) is not directly observable’) (Vázquez Rozas, 2006, p.  394, our translation). A measure that has been developed to assess accessibility is distance from previous mention in the discourse; i.e., the more recently a referent has been mentioned, the more likely it is to be active in the hearer’s mind, or “given,” and the longer it hasn’t been mentioned the more likely it is to be “new” (cf. Givón, 1983a). But there are other dimensions orthogonal to accessibility that must be taken into account in order to understand the role of information flow in shaping grammar; namely, identifiability, specificity, and, crucially, discourse referentiality. Accessibility is often confused with identifiability, and though the two overlap, they do so only partially.While given NPs are necessarily identifiable, new NPs can be identifiable through association with another identifiable element, shared background, or presence in the extralinguistic context (cf. Prince, 1981). In Example (1), la mayor de mis hijas ‘my oldest daughter’ in line 1 is new, not having been mentioned previously in the current conversation, but it is identifiable through association with the speaker, via the use of possessive pronoun (here, mis ‘my-pl’). We can think of new non-identifiable NPs as creating a new entity, new identifiable NPs as placing an existing entity into the discourse model, and given NPs as representing entities already in the discourse model (cf. Prince, 1981, pp. 235–236). In a computer-based metaphor, new nonidentifiable NPs create a new cognitive file, new identifiable NPs open an existing file, and given NPs correspond to a currently open file (cf. Du Bois, 1980, p. 220ff) as in (1):1 (1)

130

Accessibility and identifiability (new, identifiable NP) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Trinidad:

la mayor de mis hijas, uh te- tenía amigas en colegio de -en New Mexico State, . . . que hablaban -que eran de México, . . . de modo que ella aprendió !muy bien, a hablar. Ø lo hablaba muy bonito, como los de México.

1 2 3 4 5

Trinidad:

‘my oldest daughter, uh had friends in college -in New Mexico State, . . . who spoke -who were from Mexico,

Pragmatics and linguistic structures

6 7 8 9

. . . so she learned very well, to speak. (she) spoke it beautifully. like people from Mexico.’ [21 Demerits, 03:20–03:30]

Accessibility cannot be measured without first taking into account the information flow dimension of discourse referentiality, which concerns how a noun is deployed in the broader discourse. According to this understanding, discourse referential, or “manipulable,” NPs (Hopper & Thompson, 1984, p. 711) are “used to speak about an object as an object, with continuous identity over time” (Du Bois, 1980, p. 208). A practical way of thinking about discourse referentiality is as referent “tracking,” whereby a discourse referential NP is used “for the purpose of either introducing [a referent] for further tracking or continuing tracking an earlier mention” (Thompson, 1997, p. 69). The three subjects in lines 1, 6, and 8 in Example (1) are all discourse referential, in that they represent a referent that is being tracked: la mayor de mis hijas ‘my oldest daughter’ is what the speaker is talking about in this stretch of discourse. Similarly, amigas ‘friends’ in line 2 is also tracked (albeit only briefly). On the other hand, los de México ‘people from Mexico,’ which occurs in the oblique phrase with the preposition como ‘like’ in line 9, does not introduce a referent to talk about it, but serves to describe the manner of the verb (the way she speaks); this is a non-discourse referential use. Non-discourse referential NPs abound in everyday speech.These include NPs used to orient an event, as in line 9 in (1) and in (2).Also non-referential are NPs used to classify another referent, as in predicate nominals, illustrated in (3).A third common non-discourse-referential use is in verb-noun units in which the noun is absorbed into the predicate, illustrated in (4) (cf. Hopper & Thompson, 1984, p. 711ff;Thompson, 1997, p. 69). In Spanish, this includes verb-object combinations (as in tener hambre ‘have hunger/be hungry’ or tener problemas ‘have problems’), as well as in dative experiencer constructions (as in dar miedo ‘give someone fear/be afraid’; cf. Bentivoglio & Sedano, 2007, p. 203). (2)

(3)

(4)

Non-referential orienting use eso haces todos los días, ‘you do that every day,’

(Dumont, 2016, p. 58)

Non-referential classifying use pero ella es profesora, ‘but she is a teacher,’

(Dumont, 2016, p. 57)

Non-referential predicate-forming use in verb-noun unit with light verb ellos siempre tenían hambre. ‘they were always hungry.’ yo no tengo problema en que se quede ahí. ‘I don’t have a problem with it staying there.’ y a él le dio mucho miedo, ‘and he was very scared,’

[23 El Pacific, 12:40–12:42] [CCCS, 02 Restaurante, 328]2 [18 Las Minas, 1:12:08–1:12:09]

As these examples illustrate, non-discourse-referential NPs often combine with light verbs, such as tener ‘have’ or dar ‘give,’ to form units, or chunks (cf. Bybee, 2010, p. 34).Verb-noun units need not be entirely fixed, however, allowing for noun modifiers (for example, dar miedo/dar mucho miedo ‘give someone fear/give someone a lot of fear’), or variant verbs (for example, tener/pasar/ 131

Travis and Torres Cacoullos

traer hambre, literally ‘have/go through/carry hunger’). Even so, the noun remains non-referential; it contributes to the meaning of the predicate, naming an activity or state, rather than representing a referent for the purposes of saying something about it (Thompson & Hopper, 2001, p. 33).That is, hambre ‘hunger’ in pasar hambre or traer hambre is no more a true object than it is with the light verb in the more frequent tener hambre, and no more referential than the predicate adjective in estar hambriento ‘be hungry.’ Note also the common use of bare nouns in this context, consistent with the lack of discourse referentiality, as observed by Torres Cacoullos and Aaron (2003, pp. 306–307; cf.Alarcos Llorach, 1972, p. 176;Alonso, 1951, pp. 161–162; Lapesa, 1975, p. 129). Verb-noun units are not restricted to abstract nouns, nor to light verbs. An example is the expression montar bicicleta ‘ride a bicycle,’ where bicicleta does not refer to an object but, adjoined to the verb, represents a situation (akin to an incorporated noun, as it would be in the constructed ‘bicycle ride’). Similarly, with montarse en canoa ‘get in a canoe’ in (5),‘canoe,’ here a prepositional object, is used non-referentially (‘to canoe’). (5)

Non-referential predicate-forming use as prepositional object, with non-light verb (re: escaping from a tidal wave in Chocó, Colombia) Ángela:

Y ahí mismo pues la gente empezó a levantar a todo el mu=ndo a montarse en canoas y, y a huir hacia las fincas. pero pues no les dio tiempo. ‘And right then well the people started to wake everyone up to get in the canoes and, and escape to the farms. but well they didn’t have time.’ [CCCS, 30 Terremoto, 53–55]

Recognizing non-discourse referential uses is crucial for analyses of accessibility, because accessibility applies only to discourse-referential NPs. In todos los días ‘every day,’ ella es profesora ‘she is a teacher,’ or montar bicicleta ‘to ride a bicycle,’ for example, we cannot ask whether días, profesora, or bicicleta have been activated in the hearer’s mind or whether they are being newly activated; they simply are not candidates for activation at all because the referent is not being talked about as an entity. Non-discourse referential NPs must be set aside in coding for accessibility, since a wrong interpretation of them as “new” (due to their tendency to occur without a previous mention; cf. Dumont, 2016, p. 89) would inflate the proportion of “new” referents and mask true accessibility effects. Discourse referentiality is not to be confused with specificity. Non-specific NPs refer to any member of a class, as in amigas ‘friends’ and los de México ‘people from Mexico’ in lines 2 and 9 in Example (1); specific NPs refer to an entity that is not interchangeable, as in la mayor de mis hijas ‘my oldest daughter’ in line 1 (Ashby & Bentivoglio, 1993, pp. 60–70;Torres Cacoullos & Aaron, 2003, p. 307). Discourse referential NPs tend to be specific (as is the case for la mayor de mis hijas) while non-discourse referential NPs tend to be non-specific (as in los de México). The two dimensions are not, however, conflatable. For example, amigas is not specific but it is discourse-referential—it refers to any of the friends from Mexico, and is used to talk about them. In the following example, trabajo ‘work’ is specific but non-discourse referential (it refers to a specific workplace, and serves an orienting function in the oblique phrase en el trabajo ‘at work’). (6)

132

Specific but non-referential use Y le darían permiso en el trabajo? ‘And will he be given permission at work?’

(Dumont, 2016, p. 54)

Pragmatics and linguistic structures

An important conclusion to draw here is that accessibility intersects with other dimensions of information flow. In particular, its scope is limited by discourse referentiality, such that the given/new distinction applies to only a portion of NPs in a corpus; specifically, to those that are discourse referential. Let us now consider the impact of these dimensions of information flow on grammar.

2.2 Role of information flow in shaping the grammar of NPs The impact of accessibility on NP realization has been widely observed cross-linguistically: greater accessibility is associated with more minimal formal expression, and vice versa (Ariel, 2001, p.  33; Givón, 1983a, p.  18; Levinson, 1987, p.  384). Example (1) serves to illustrate where a subject referent is introduced into the discourse for the first time as a lexical NP (la mayor de mis hijas ‘my oldest daughter’), followed by a pronominal mention in line 6 (ella ‘she’), and then an unexpressed (null) subject in line 8. Similarly in Example (7), the referent is introduced in line 1 with a lexical NP, and subsequently referred to in line 2 with an unexpressed subject. (7)

New lexical subject and given unexpressed (Ø) subject 1 2 1 2

Bartolomé: porque m- mi papá era ranchero y, . . . Ø vendía verduras, Bartolomé: ‘because m- my dad was a rancher and, . . . (he) sold vegetables,’ [02 La Marina, 38:30–38:44]

Thus, pronouns and unexpressed arguments tend to be given. New referents are mostly introduced with lexical NPs (e.g.,Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2018, p. 80).The reverse, however, is not the case, in that most lexical NPs do not represent new referents (e.g., Bentivoglio, 1993, pp. 218–219; Dumont, 2016, pp. 84, 88). Furthermore, most “new” referents are identifiable, be that through anchoring to a given referent such as the speaker, as with la mayor de mis hijas ‘my oldest daughter’ in (1) and mi papá ‘my dad’ in (7), or through a frame, as is the case for la profesora ‘the teacher’ in (8), due to the mention of clases ‘classes’ in the previous clause. (8)

New, identifiable lexical subject También habían unas clases de música interesantes, Vale, la profesora daba canciones así del maestro Sojo ‘There were also some interesting music lessons, the teacher used to present songs by Maestro Sojo’ (Bentivoglio, 1993, p. 216)

The asymmetrical association between lexical forms and new referents becomes apparent from a set of studies reporting that one-third of lexical NPs (across syntactic roles) represent new information, and even fewer are “brand new information,” that is non-identifiable, as per Prince (1981) (e.g.,Ashby & Bentivoglio, 1993, p. 71; Bentivoglio, 1993, p. 221). Also impacting NP realization is discourse referentiality. Personal pronouns overwhelmingly have discourse referential uses, but the same is not true of lexical NPs (Dumont, 2016, p. 71). Discourse referentiality bears on syntactic role as well.While discourse referential NPs predominate in subject position, and are found, though to a lesser degree, in object position, they are less 133

Travis and Torres Cacoullos

common in obliques and predicate nominals, as seen in Examples (2) and (3) (Dumont, 2016, p. 76).The intersection of discourse referentiality with syntactic role is linked, in turn, with the impact on NP realization. Lexical NPs occur more in obliques and predicate nominals, while pronouns occur more in the core roles of subject and object, and unexpressed mentions are largely restricted to subjects in Spanish (Thompson, 1997, p. 83).3 These associations have a methodological consequence. Because subjects are more likely than objects to have given human referents (e.g., Prince, 1981, p. 243;Vázquez Rozas, 2006, p. 405), the syntactic and semantic combination of human-specific subjects serves as a proxy for discourse referentiality (cf. Dumont, 2016, p. 81).That is, while other subject types and other syntactic roles will often host non-referential NPs, human-specific subjects will be overwhelmingly discourse referential. In the next section, we therefore rely on human-specific subjects to illustrate how pragmatic notions related to information flow may be operationalized in natural speech data.

3

Methodological considerations

How may the pragmatic notions of accessibility and topicality be operationalized for quantitative tests? For a quantitative exploration of how discourse-pragmatic aspects shape linguistic structures, a heuristic device is the linguistic variable: forms with a shared grammatical function that exist as competing variants between which speakers have a choice (cf. Labov, 1972, p. 72). The working hypothesis of the variationist method is that “within a given locus of variability, or variable context, . . . [the] competing variants will occur at greater or lesser rates depending on the features that constitute the context” (Poplack, 2001, p. 405, italics in original). The impact of pragmatic aspects on the competing variants may be discerned in their rates of occurrence in contexts that are hypothesized to be associated with the pragmatic aspects being tested.Tokens of the variant forms are coded for co-occurring elements to determine if one variant is more likely than an alternative to co-occur with particular elements as hypothesized. For these analyses, we draw on the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual (NMSEB) corpus. NMSEB is a community-based corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with Hispanic New Mexicans who regularly use Spanish and English in their daily lives (Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2018, Chapters 2 & 3). The transcription is prosodically based, such that each line represents an Intonation Unit (IU), a segment of speech produced with “a single, coherent intonation contour” (Du Bois, Schuetze-Coburn, Cumming, & Paolino, 1993, p.  47; cf. Chafe, 1994, pp. 58–60). Here we look at the linguistic variables of Spanish subject realization (lexical, pronominal, and unexpressed subjects) and position (pre- and postverbal subjects), focusing on first-person and third-person singular (1sg and 3sg).The dataset for analysis consists of 4,218 unexpressed and 1,598 pronominal subjects, and, for 3sg, 807 lexical NPs.

3.1

Accessibility and subject forms

We first consider pronominal, unexpressed, and lexical subjects in the context of greater vs. lesser distance from previous mention, as an operationalization of lesser vs. greater accessibility.

3.1.1

Accessibility and subject realization

For Spanish subject realization, accessibility is often examined in terms of “switch reference”; i.e., whether the subject referent of the target clause differs from that of the previous clause, as in lines 3, 6, and 7 in (9), or whether it is the same, as for the target subject in line 4, 134

Pragmatics and linguistic structures

showing continuity of reference with the subject of line 3. Subject pronoun expression in Spanish has long been known to be sensitive to switch reference (since Silva-Corvalán, 1982, p. 104; see also Cameron, 1994). Still, accessibility, and the sensitivity of subject expression, extends beyond the immediately preceding clause (Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2018, p. 72). A heuristic for accessibility in a stretch of discourse is the anaphoric measure of distance from previous discourse mention (initially explored across languages as Referential Distance in Givón (1983b), including for Spanish (Bentivoglio, 1983); cf. Givón (2001, p. 463)). Distance, as applied here, is the number of intervening clauses between the target subject and the previous mention, which we limit to mention of that same referent in subject role.4 For example, in (9), the target subject in line 7 yo ‘I’ has a distance value of 3, because there are three clauses intervening between it and the previous subject mention in line 1; the target subject she in line 4, in turn, has a distance of 0, as there is a subject mention in the immediately preceding clause (as a bilingual corpus, clauses are Spanish or English; see Section 3.3; speech originally produced in English is given in italics in the translation that follows). (9)

Distance (intervening clauses between subject mentions) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Betty: Carrie: Betty:

. . . Ø le fajé una nalgada. . . @@@ . . she was starting to walk, . . . and she wanted to go to the fireplace, sit on the mantel, . . . (1.0) y no la dejaba la ~Bobbie. yo no sé qué estarían haciendo allá.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Betty: Carrie: Betty:

‘. . . (I) gave her a slap on the bottom. . . @@@ . . she was starting to walk, . . . and she wanted to go to the fireplace, sit on the mantel, . . . (1.0) and Bobbie wouldn’t let her. I don’t know what they were doing there.’ [13 La Acequia, 18:16–18:28]

As a manifestation of accessibility, we would predict a correlation between distance and subject realization.To determine this, for each clause in the dataset, we counted the distance in clauses between the target and previous coreferential subject, from 0 (for a previous mention in the immediately preceding clause) up to 10 (counting as 10 all instances at a distance of 10 or more intervening clauses, including newly introduced referents).5 Figure 7.1 shows the mean distance for 1sg and 3sg subjects according to realization as unexpressed or as preverbal pronominal or lexical NP (we consider postverbal subjects in Section 3.2). Consistent with the predicted pattern, unexpressed subjects have the lowest distance (with the previous coreferential mention occurring on average approximately two clauses back), followed by pronominal subjects. This pattern holds for both 1sg and 3sg subjects, despite the view of 1sg as always given (e.g., Chafe, 1994, p. 79; Givón, 2001, p. 460); we return to grammatical person in the following section. Lexical subjects, which only apply to 3sg, have a notably higher distance than both unexpressed and pronominal subjects (with the previous mention on average nearly seven clauses back, over twice the distance of 3sg pronouns, and over three times that of 3sg unexpressed subjects). 135

Travis and Torres Cacoullos

Figure 7.1 Distance (intervening clauses between subject mentions) of preverbal subjects by form

The pattern behind these average distances is that most 1sg and 3sg unexpressed and pronominal subjects occur in a coreferential context or with just one clause intervening, whereas the majority of the lexical subjects occur with 10 or more clauses intervening.We can confirm, then, that the preferred form for new 3sg referents are lexical NPs (Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2018, p. 107). 

3.1.2

Accessibility and grammatical person

Much has been made of the difference between first- and third-person subjects. For example, the distinction between speech act participants (first- and second-person) and all other NPs (including 3sg animate NPs) often has greater impact on grammatical structures than does that between animate and inanimate NPs (cf. Dahl, 2008, p. 143).6 From a discourse-pragmatic perspective, as a discourse participant, a first-person referent is thought to be always accessible; third person referents, on the other hand, are typically made accessible through a mention in the discourse (e.g., Chafe, 1994, pp. 78–79; Dahl, 2000, pp. 64–66; Prince, 1981, p. 236). For this reason, it is often understood that the first person is used deictically (to point out a referent in the discourse setting), whereas third person is used anaphorically (to refer back to a previous mention) (e.g., Grundy, 2000, p. 78). We might then expect accessibility to be irrelevant for first-person subject expression as would be manifested, for example, in a lack of sensitivity to distance. However, as seen in Figure 7.1, 1sg subjects do show a tendency for pronouns to be favored over unexpressed subjects at greater degrees of distance (Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2018, p. 76). Thus, there are degrees of accessibility even for discourse participants. In fact, while the same general tendency for distance holds for 1sg and 3sg pronominal and unexpressed subjects, 3sg exhibits greater clustering than 1sg, as seen in the shorter average distance (3 for 3sg pronouns, and 3.8 for 1sg). Such a clustering pattern is consistent with the observation that speech act participants “pop in and out all the time,” while third-person subjects, once introduced into the discourse,“stay on the scene” (Dahl, 2000, p. 66), though they tend to 136

Pragmatics and linguistic structures

do so only for a short time, as is the case for mi papá ‘my dad’ in (10) (Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2018, p. 79). (10) Short-term persistence of 3sg subjects Bartolomé:

Gabriel: Bartolomé:

Gabriel: Bartolomé:

Gabriel: Bartolomé:

Gabriel:

porque m- mi papá era ranchero y, . . . Ø vendía verduras, y=, sí=. y= . . . y veníamos a la plaza aquí a vender, . . . (1.6) los blanquillos . . . los huevos. . . . a diez centavos la docena. . . uh huh ? no me digas. ‘because m- my dad was a rancher and, . . . (he) sold vegetables, and, yes. and. . . and we would come to the plaza here to sell, . . . (1.6) the little white ones . . the eggs. . . . for ten cents a dozen. . . uh huh ? you don’t say.’ [02 La Marina, 38:30–38:44]

To summarize, by operationalizing accessibility via distance from previous subject mention, we confirm that lexical NPs are the preferred form to introduce a new referent into the discourse, while unexpressed and pronominal subjects tend to be used to refer to more accessible subjects (with lesser distance between mentions). Accessibility also affects grammatical person. Despite first person being present in the discourse context, it, too, is susceptible to distance. Considering unexpressed and pronominal subjects, for 1sg these tend to occur with greater distance between mentions than is the case for 3sg, reflecting greater clustering of the latter.

3.2 Topicality and word order Another pragmatic notion that has been understood to play a role in grammatical structure is topicality, which we may intuitively understand as related to “aboutness” or “the frame within which the sentence holds” (Chafe, 1976, p. 50). The definitions for topicality, however, are nebulous and discrepant.We illustrate here two discourse measurements corresponding to two psychological aspects of topicality: the accessibility and the importance of a referent (Givón, 1988). Accessibility, as discussed earlier, relates to the prior mention, and applies to topicality in the sense that a topical referent is likely to have already been mentioned in the preceding discourse. Importance, on the other hand, relates to subsequent mentions, and applies to topicality in the sense that a topical referent is likely to be mentioned again (Givón, 2001, p. 198). The linguistic variable we examine here is variable word order. Subjects in Spanish occur most often preverbally, and as such, verb-subject (VS) word order is generally thought to be 137

Travis and Torres Cacoullos

pragmatically motivated, with topicality implicated as a motivating factor, though accounts vary as to whether it is post- or preverbal subjects that are topical.

3.2.1

Topicality and word order: Distance

Let us first consider topicality as accessibility, using distance (Section 3.1) as an anaphoric measure. Topics (often contrasted with focus or comment) are typically considered to be “given” (Ocampo, 2003, p. 199); according to this understanding, NPs with lower average distance can be considered more topical. How does this apply to word order? The literature yields two opposing scenarios. If postverbal subjects are associated with low topicality (Delbecque, 1988, p. 182), they should be favored with new referents; this is consistent with an effect for first mention reported in some studies (e.g., Bentivoglio & Weber, 1986, p. 25; Rivas, 2013, p. 105).We would thus expect postverbal subjects to display a higher distance than preverbal ones.A contradictory view is that postverbal subjects are associated with “higher referential predictability” (Givón, 1988, p. 251), from which we might infer that they are high in topicality. Accordingly, we would expect postverbal subjects to display a lower distance. Figure 7.2 compares distance for post- vs. preverbal pronominal and lexical subjects. First we observe that the impact of distance on subject realization noted earlier (Section 3.1.1) holds independently of word order; whether pre- or postverbal, lexical subjects have a higher value than both 1sg and 3sg subject pronouns. For subject position, however, there is no difference in average distance for pronouns, nor for lexical subjects (4.1 for postverbal and 3.8 for preverbal 1sg pronouns, 3.3 and 3 for 3sg pronouns, and 7 and 6.7 for lexical subjects). Similarly, a minimal distance difference has been reported for definite NP human subjects, which, like the subjects studied here, can be considered to be discourse referential (average distance is 6.28 for postverbal and 7.98 for preverbal subjects, though the sample is modest, N = 132) (Bentivoglio, 1983, p. 299, Table 10). As an interim conclusion, topicality operationalized as accessibility is not an overarching motivation for the choice between pre- vs. postverbal human-specific subjects. Let us, then, consider an alternative operationalization of topicality; that based on importance. 

Figure 7.2 Distance (intervening clauses between subject mentions) of subjects by position and form 138

Pragmatics and linguistic structures

3.2.2

Topicality and word order: Persistence

A text-based correlate of topicality as the importance of a referent in the discourse is the measure of persistence. This cataphoric measure assesses the subsequent mentions of a referent once it has been introduced (Givón, 1988, p. 248). If a subject is placed postverbally when its referent is important or, put differently, when it is the “point of the utterance” (Bolinger, 1954, p. 49), we would expect a higher average rate of postverbal subjects with persistent than non-persistent referents. But it has also been proposed that VS is associated with “communicative peripherality” (Naro & Votre, 1999, p. 75), which leads to the contrary prediction of a lower average rate of postverbal position with persistent subjects. Here we counted the number of mentions of the referent in subject role in the three clauses subsequent to the target subject and categorized as persistent those with at least one subject mention in the following three clauses. For example, in (11), mi mamá ‘my mother’ is persistent; it is mentioned twice in the following three clauses: (11) Persistence Javier:

Gabriel: Javier:

Javier:

Gabriel: Javier:

. . . y= unos panes que se ha -unos -. . . pasteles que hacía mi mamá. . . . (1.0) pu=ras calabazas había. . . hm. . . . poquita canela Ø le echaba áhi no más, y poquita azúcar, porque Ø no tenía suficiente. ‘and some breads that -some -. . . sweets that my mother-post made. . . . (1.0) it was all pumpkin. . . hm. . . . just a bit of cinnamon (she) would put, and a bit of sugar, because (she) didn’t have enough.’ [17 La Comadreja, 29:15–29:28]

Figure 7.3 depicts persistence of pronominal and lexical subjects in the height of the columns, and VS rate in the light shading within each column (also indicated by the percentage).We first observe that both 1sg and 3sg pronominal subjects have a higher proportion of persistent subject referents than do lexical subjects (seen in the relative heights of the columns within each pair; for pronouns, the number of persistent doubles that of non-persistent referents, but for lexical subjects it is just slightly greater).This confirms, then, that pronouns are more topical than lexical subjects in terms of importance, consistent with the result for topicality measured as accessibility.  As to subject position,VS rates for 1sg subjects are the same with persistent and non-persistent referents (17% and 15%, respectively), and for 3sg subjects, they appear to be somewhat lower with persistent referents (16% vs. 23% for pronouns, and 42% vs. 57% for lexical NPs). However the slight difference found here, again matching reports for other varieties of Spanish (Bentivoglio, 1983, p. 299, Table 10), is in keeping with the cross-linguistic absence of a “clear pattern relating [persistence] and word order” (Myhill, 2005, p. 480). 139

Travis and Torres Cacoullos

Figure 7.3 Distribution of tokens and postverbal subject rate according to topic persistence

3.2.3

Topicality and constructions

Another way to think about how topicality may affect word order is not as a general characterization of post- versus preverbal subjects but rather as pertinent to specific constructions (see Chapter 4 on pragmatics and word order, this volume). Constructions are generally defined as pairings of form and meaning (e.g., Goldberg, 2013). In discourse, we may define constructions in discourse as follows: as fixed parts and schematic slots co-occurring in particular discourse-pragmatic contexts.An example is the existential-presentative VS construction represented in (12), and illustrated with the indefinite NP subject una bruja ‘a witch’ (cf. Bentivoglio, 1983, pp. 279, 297–298; Ocampo, 1995, p. 427).The indefinite article is a fixed element, the verb slot is schematic but is circumscribed to certain classes, and the subject slot is more schematic, open to any human-specific referent. (12) [estar/vivir/motion verb + un(a) human, specific X] = new and persistent X Rocío:

. . . pues ahí, . . dicen, que vivía una bruja. . . . (2.0) y que, . . que esa bruja, se cambiaba de cuerpo.

Rocío:

‘. . . well there, . . they say, that there lived a witch-POST. . . . (2.0) and that, . . that that witch, changed bodies.’ [05 Las Tortillas 30:59–31:08]

The quantitative patterns of the co-occurring elements that constitute the construction show the relevance of accessibility and importance in the discourse. Lexical subjects with an indefinite 140

Pragmatics and linguistic structures

article lack a previous mention within the preceding 10 clauses most of the time (96%, 27/29), compared with just over half the time for other lexical subjects (427/735).That is, indefinite NP subject referents are less accessible or predictable. At the same time, they are more important as measured by persistence, displaying a higher proportion of persistent instances (75%, compared with 54% for all others).These new referents that persist tend to co-occur with verbs of location (estar ‘be located’), existence (ser ‘be,’ vivir ‘live’) or intransitive motion (llegar ‘arrive’) (53% of indefinite NP subjects, compared with 26% for all others). And, they favor VS (at a rate of 53%, compared with 39% for all others, a tendency similar to that reported in Sedano & Bentivoglio, 2014, p. 152 for another variety). Constructions show more consistent subject position patterns than do individual verbs. For example, locative estar ‘be,’ seen in (13), has a VS rate about triple that of predicative [estar + Adj], seen in (14) (43%, 55/128 vs. 14%, 5/35). As Myhill (2005, p. 480) suggests, existential-presentative constructions in SVO languages likely lie behind the idea that old information precedes new information, and may account for the reported favoring of postverbal subjects with new referents in some studies of Spanish. (13) Estar in locative construction Miguel: pues ahí estaba Valeria, ‘well there was Valeria-post,’ [04 Piedras y Gallinas, 1:03:33–1:03:34] (14) Estar in predicate adjective construction Miguel: . . . y Valeria también estaba más o menos flaca también. ‘. . . and Valeria-pre was also more or less thin too.’ [04 Piedras y Gallinas, 1:04:12–1:04:15] In sum, we have seen how topicality may be operationalized through the measures of distance and persistence.Though it does not seem to play a global role in subject position, we can identify specific topicality constructions in discourse. In the existential-presentative construction, postverbal subjects have low accessibility but high persistence, and the construction is thus associated with topicality as importance in the discourse, for new referents.

3.3 Pragmatics in language contact As has been indicated in this chapter, the findings for distance and persistence presented here, from a bilingual Spanish-English corpus, are not unique to these bilingual data, but are consistent with findings for other varieties of Spanish.The bilinguals in this community maintain the grammatical patterns of subject expression, as they do of other Spanish variables hypothesized to be sensitive to pragmatic constraints, such as differential object marking (Sankoff et al., 2015) and subjunctive use (LaCasse, 2018).These results are particularly interesting, as pragmatics has been implicated in contact-induced grammatical change. A prominent conjecture is that grammatical subsystems at “the syntax-discourse interface” are “vulnerable” to contact-induced change (Sorace, 2004, p. 143). An example of proposed “loss of semantic-pragmatic constraints” is word order in the Spanish of minority-language communities in contact with English (Silva-Corvalán, 1994, p. 144). The hypothesis is that contact with English lowers the rate of postverbal subjects. A bilingual corpus supplies a compelling test of contact-induced pragmatic loss, because it features the most intimate language contact, in the spontaneous use of both languages by the same speakers.This is captured in the NMSEB corpus through ample code-switching, or alternating between English 141

Travis and Torres Cacoullos

and Spanish multi-word sequences.The bilingual corpus allows us to apply a stringent test, comparing postverbal subject rates in the presence vs. absence of code-switching, as a measure of the online consequences of activation of English. If speakers’ English is affecting their Spanish,VS rates should tend to be lower when they are code-switching (Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2018, Chapter 9). Proximate code-switching is operationalized as the use of English multi-word strings within the same or immediately preceding clause as the target Spanish subject, as in (15). The comparison is with absence of proximate code-switching as illustrated in (16). (15) Subject position with proximate code-switching Fabiola:

and when they came again, seguro ya no vino la Nancy. ‘and when they came again, Nancy-post didn’t come.’ [09 La Salvia, 43:40–43:43]

(16) Subject position in the absence of proximate code-switching Fabiola:

trujeron casi a todas, pero esa Nancy se me hace que no vino. ‘they brought nearly all of them, but that Nancy-pre I think didn’t come.’ [09 La Salvia, 43:00–43:03]

Figure 7.4 shows that VS rates are no lower in the presence than in the absence of proximate code-switching in the NMSEB dataset. In addition, the disparity between subject forms in VS rates seen earlier (Section 3.2) is maintained in the presence and absence of code-switching, with VS rates under 20% for pronominal subjects, and close to 50% for lexical subjects.  Furthermore, the hypothesis of contact-induced change is refuted by comparing factors conditioning variable subject placement in bilingual and monolingual varieties. Previous work has

Figure 7.4 Postverbal subject rate in the presence vs. absence of code-switching (CS) 142

Pragmatics and linguistic structures

found no support for this hypothesis for 1sg subject placement in New Mexican Spanish, where contexts favoring the postverbal pronoun yo ‘I’ (according to verb type and the presence of preverbal structural elements) are similar to those reported for monolingual varieties (Benevento & Dietrich, 2015, p. 415). In sum, as to loss of pragmatic constraints being particularly vulnerable to change, thanks to operationalizations that permit quantitative comparisons, we have seen here that these bilinguals maintain existential-presentative constructions. In this local topicality effect on word order, there is continuity, not change.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Operationalizing pragmatic notions will be a profitable avenue for quantitative explorations of the role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structures. By converting pragmatic constructs into countable entities in discourse and measuring their impact in a corpus of natural speech, we can test their interplay with grammatical structures. This can be done through the analysis of quantitative co-occurrence patterns produced by speakers’ repeated choices between structural alternatives, within the set of contexts where a choice is available to speakers (the variable context). Only through such operationalization can pragmatic functions proposed in the literature confront distribution tendencies observed in everyday speech. The impact of accessibility in discourse will be accurately assessed only if discourse referential deployment of NPs is distinguished from uses in which there is no referent tracking.Thus, orienting, classifying, and predicate-forming uses of nouns must be set aside in the analyses of accessibility. Moving forward in coding NP tokens, distributions according to information flow dimensions in conjunction with syntactic role and referent animacy point to human-specific subjects as a proxy for discourse referentiality. Accessibility can then be operationalized as distance from previous mention. Here this operationalization showed how accessibility affects variable subject realization, with some observable grammatical person differences associated with how first vs. third person is deployed in discourse. The intuitive but slippery notion of topicality can be the object of replicable study by decomposing it into referent predictability (utilizing the corresponding anaphoric measure of distance from the previous mention) and importance (with the cataphoric measure of persistence in subsequent mentions). Applying these measures to variable subject position, we have seen that pragmatic functions may reside in discourse-oriented constructions, as in existential-presentative constructions with an indefinite postverbal NP subject for new and topical referents. Greater attention to constructions as units of analysis may allow pragmatic effects to be more readily discerned and interpreted. Quantitative assessments of contexts of occurrence—the distribution tendencies of linguistic structures according to features of the environment—allow us to identify usage patterns and the associations between particular structures and discourse-pragmatic functions.We can then evaluate candidate pragmatic functions of a structure with respect to the contexts in which it appears, but also with respect to the variants with which it competes.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise indicated, examples are from the New Mexico Spanish–English Bilingual (NMSEB) corpus (Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2018, Chapters 2 & 3).Within parentheses is the recording number and name, and the time stamps for the example produced. See Appendix for transcription conventions. Examples are reproduced verbatim from the transcripts, with, where relevant, the addition of bolding of pertinent material and insertion of Ø to indicate unexpressed subjects, marked in the English translation with parentheses around the pronoun. 143

Travis and Torres Cacoullos

2 Corpus of Conversational Colombian Spanish (cf.Travis, 2005, pp. 9–25). 3 That syntactic roles differ in distribution according to discourse referential uses and accessible referents has been proposed to motivate the cross-linguistic core-oblique distinction, a canonical example of the role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structure (Thompson, 1997, pp. 73–75). 4 Subjects account for the vast majority of mentions, for both distance (this section) and persistence (Section 3.2.2): 85% of mentions of the same referent in the immediately preceding clause occur as a subject (858/1007,Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2018, p. 86), and 85% of referents that are mentioned at least once in the subsequent three clauses are mentioned as a subject (349/410). 5 Excluded are instances where precise distance cannot be determined, for example because of unclear speech (N =160). 6 For example, in split-ergative marking, the split is most commonly drawn between speech act participants and others (e.g., Delancey, 1981, p. 628); switch-reference marking may apply only to the third person (e.g., Haiman & Munro, 1983, p. xi); and zero-marked agreement is more likely on the third person (e.g., Bybee, 1985, p. 53).

Further reading Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A highly accessible synthesis of cross-linguistic findings (diachronic and synchronic, corpus-based and experimental), suggesting that the basis for grammatical knowledge is speakers’ experiences of the frequency and contexts of use of linguistic forms, and that the units of grammar are constructions. Labov,W. (2018).The role of the Avant Garde in linguistic diffusion. Language Variation and Change, 30(1), 1–21. A community-based study of a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews that highlights both social and linguistic constraints in variation and change, revealing who the leaders are in the adoption of the English be like and for which kinds of quotations it is favored, demonstrating an operationalization of exclamations. Torres Cacoullos, R., & Schwenter, S. (2008). Constructions and pragmatics:Variable middle marking in Spanish subir(se) ‘go up’ and bajar(se) ‘go down.’ Journal of Pragmatics, 40(8), 1455–1477. An illustration of how to operationalize pragmatic hypotheses of counter-expectation and speaker involvement as factors in systematic quantitative analysis of variation and how to make a quantitative argument for usage-based constructions of differing degrees of fixedness and lexical specificity. Travis, C. E., & Torres Cacoullos, R. (2012).What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics, 23(4), 711–748. A refutation of the widely espoused function of contrast for pronominal vs. unexpressed subjects, putting forward semantic, interactional, and cognitive operationalizations, and a demonstration of first-person singular cognition verb constructions, centered around highly frequent yo creo ‘I think.’

144

Appendix Transcription Conventions (Du Bois, Schuetze-Coburn, Cumming, & Paolino, 1993)

Carriage return new Intonation Unit . final intonation contour , continuing intonation contour ? appeal intonation contour -- truncated intonation contour - truncated word = lengthened syllable

. . . . . . . .( ) @

!word

short pause (0.5 secs) medium pause (0.5–0.7 secs) timed pause (longer than 0.7 secs) one syllable of laughter speech produced while laughing speech produced with notably high pitch

Acknowledgments We gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1019112/ 1019122, 1624966; http://nmcodeswitching.la.psu.edu) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.We thank Jenny Dumont,Ashley Pahis, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

References Alarcos Llorach, E. (1972). El artículo en español. In E. Alarcos Llorach (Ed.), Estudios de gramática funcional del español (2nd ed., pp. 166–177). Madrid: Gredos. Alonso,A. (1951). Estilística y gramática del artículo en español. In A.Alonso (Ed.), Estudios lingüísticos, temas españoles (pp. 151–194). Madrid: Gredos. Ariel, M. (2001).Accessibility theory:An overview. In T. Sanders, J. Schillperoord, & W. Spooren (Eds.), Text representation: Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects (pp. 29–87).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ashby,W. J., & Bentivoglio, P. (1993). Preferred argument structure in spoken French and Spanish. Language Variation and Change, 5(1), 61–76. Benevento, N., & Dietrich,A. (2015). I think, therefore digo yo:Variable position of the 1sg subject pronoun in New Mexican Spanish-English code-switching. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(4), 407–422. Bentivoglio, P. (1983).Topic continuity and discontinuity in discourse: A study of spoken Latin-American Spanish. In T. Givón (Ed.), Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-linguistic study (pp. 255–311). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bentivoglio, P. (1993). Full NPs in spoken Spanish:A discourse profile. In W. J.Ashby, M. Mithun, G. Perissinotto, & E. Raposo (Eds.), Linguistic perspectives on the Romance languages (pp. 212–224).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 145

Travis and Torres Cacoullos

Bentivoglio, P., & Sedano, M. (2007).The light subject constraint in spoken Spanish. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 3, 195–205. Bentivoglio, P., & Weber, E. G. (1986). A functional approach to subject word order in spoken Spanish. In O.A. Jaeggli & C. Silva-Corvalán (Eds.), Studies in Romance linguistics: Selected papers of the 14th linguistics symposium on Romance languages (pp. 23–40). Riverston: Foris. Bolinger, D. (1954). English prosodic stress and Spanish word order. Hispania, 37(2), 152–156. Bybee, J. (1985). Morphology:A study of the relation between meaning and form. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, R. (1994). Switch reference, verb class and priming in a variable syntax. Papers from the Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Parasession on Variation in Linguistic Theory, 30(2), 27–45. Chafe,W. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C. N. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 25–55). New York:Academic Press. Chafe,W. (1994). Discourse, consciousness and time:The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dahl, Ö. (2000). Egophoricity in discourse and syntax. Functions of Language, 7(1), 37–77. Dahl, Ö. (2008).Animacy and egophoricity: Grammar, ontology and phylogeny. Lingua, 118(2), 141–150. Delancey, S. (1981).An interpretation of split ergativity and related patterns. Language, 57(3), 626–657. Delbecque, N. (1988). On subject position in Spanish:A variable rule analysis of the constraints at the level of the subject NP and of the VP. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 3, 85–200. Du Bois, J. W. (1980). Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse. In W. Chafe (Ed.), The pear stories: Cognitive, cultural and linguistic aspects of narrative production (pp. 203–274). Norwood, NJ:Ablex. Du Bois, J.W., Schuetze-Coburn, S., Cumming, S., & Paolino, D. (1993). Outline of discourse transcription. In J. Edwards & M. Lampert (Eds.), Talking data:Transcription and coding in discourse (pp. 45–89). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Dumont, J. (2016). Third person references: Forms and functions in two spoken genres of Spanish. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Givón,T. (1983a).Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In T. Givón (Ed.), Topic continuity in discourse:A quantitative cross-linguistic study (pp. 1–41).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Givón, T. (Ed.). (1983b). Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-linguistic study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Givón,T. (1988).The pragmatics of word order: Predictability, importance and attention. In M. Hammond, E. Moravcsik, & J.Wirth (Eds.), Studies in syntactic theory (pp. 243–384).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Givón, T. (2001). Syntax: An introduction (Vol. 1, 2nd ed.).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goldberg,A. E. (2013). Constructionist approaches. In T. Hoffman & G.Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar (pp. 15–31). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grundy, P. (2000). Doing pragmatics. London: Arnold. Haiman, J., & Munro, P. (1983). Introduction. In J. Haiman & P. Munro (Eds.), Switch reference and universal grammar: Proceedings of a symposium on switch reference and universal grammar (pp. ix–xv). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hopper, P. J., & Thompson, S. A. (1984). The discourse basis for lexical categories in universal grammar. Language, 60(4), 703–752. Hopper, P. J., & Thompson, S.A. (1993). Language universals, discourse pragmatics, and semantics. Language Sciences, 15(4), 357–376. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Labov,W. (1984). Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In J. Baugh & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Language in use: Readings in sociolinguistics (pp. 28–53). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. LaCasse, D. (2018). The subjunctive in New Mexican Spanish: Maintenance in the face of language contact (PhD thesis). Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, Pennsylvania State University. Lapesa, R. (1975). El sustantivo sin actualizador en español. Boletín de la Comisión Permanente de Academias, XXI, 50–67. Levinson, S. C. (1987). Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora: A partial pragmatic reduction of binding and control phenomena. Journal of Linguistics, 23(2), 379–434. Myhill, J. (2005). Quantitative methods of discourse analysis. In R. Köhler, G. Altmann, & R. Piotrowski (Eds.), Quantitative linguistik: Ein internationales handbuch (pp. 471–497). Berlin and New York:Walter de Gruyter. Naro,A. J., & Votre, S. J. (1999). Discourse motivations for linguistic regularities:Verb/subject order in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Probus, 11(1), 75–100. 146

Pragmatics and linguistic structures

Ocampo, F. (1995).The word order of two-constituent constructions in spoken Spanish. In P. Downing & M. Noonan (Eds.), Word order in discourse (pp. 425–447).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ocampo, F. (2003).The expression of topic in spoken Spanish:An empirical study. In R. Nuñez-Cedeño, L. López, & R. Cameron (Eds.), A Romance perspective in language knowledge and use: Selected papers from the 31st linguistic symposium on Romance languages (LSRL), Chicago, 19–22 April 2000 (pp. 195–208). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Poplack, S. (2001).Variability, frequency, and productivity in the irrealis domain in French. In J. Bybee & P. J. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (pp. 405–428). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Prince, E. F. (1981). Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In P. Cole (Ed.), Radical pragmatics (pp. 223–255). New York:Academic Press. Rivas, J. (2013).Variable subject position in main and subordinate clauses in Spanish:A usage-based approach. Moenia, 19, 97–113. Sankoff, D., Dion, N., Brandts, A., Alvo, M., Balasch, S., & Adams, J. (2015). Comparing variables in different corpora with context-based model-free variant probabilities. In R. Torres Cacoullos, N. Dion, & A. Lapierre (Eds.), Linguistic variation: Confronting fact and theory (pp. 335–346). New York: Routledge. Sedano, M., & Bentivoglio, P. (2014). Uso del sujeto y del objeto directo en el habla de once ciudades hispanohablantes. In A. Enrique-Arias, M. Gutiérrez, A. Landa, & F. Ocampo (Eds.), Perspectives in the study of Spanish language variation: Papers in honor of Carmen Silva-Corvalán (pp. 137–176). Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Editorial Verba. Silva-Corvalán, C. (1982). Subject expression and placement in Mexican-American Spanish. In J. Amastae & L. Elías Olivares (Eds.), Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic aspects (pp.  93–120). New York: Cambridge University Press. Silva-Corvalán, C. (1994). Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sorace,A. (2004). Native language attrition and developmental instability at the syntax—discourse interface: Data, interpretations and methods. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7(2), 143–145. Thompson, S. A. (1997). Discourse motivations for the core-oblique distinction as a language universal. In A. Kamio (Ed.), Directions in functional linguistics (pp. 59–82).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Thompson, S.A., & Hopper, P. J. (2001).Transitivity, clause structure, and argument structure: Evidence from conversation. In J. Bybee & P. J. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (pp. 27–59). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Torres Cacoullos, R., & Aaron, J. E. (2003). Bare English-origin nouns in Spanish: Rates, constraints and discourse functions. Language Variation and Change, 15(3), 289–328. Torres Cacoullos, R., & Travis, C. E. (2018). Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Travis, C. E. (2005). Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish:A study in polysemy. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Travis, C. E., & Torres Cacoullos, R. (2018). Discovering structure: Person and accessibility. In N. L. Shin & D. Erker (Eds.), Questioning theoretical primitives in linguistic inquiry (Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy) (pp. 67–90).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vázquez Rozas, V. (2006). Animación, accesibilidad y estructura argumental preferida. In M. Sedano, A. Bolívar, & M. Shiro (Eds.), Haciendo lingüística: homenaje a Paola Bentivoglio (pp. 393–409). Caracas: Comisión de Estudios de Postgrado-Facultad de Humanidades y Educación Universidad Central de Venezuela.

147

8 Pragmatics and prosody in research on Spanish Victoria Escandell-Vidal and Pilar Prieto

1

Introduction

Any linguistic expression, whether a single word or a complex utterance, can be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on its prosodic features. Consider Examples (1) and (2): Sí. ¡Sí! ¡¡Síiiii!! ¿Sí? ‘Yes’

(1)

a. b. c. d.

(2)

a. Ha llegado Juan. b. ¿Ha llegado Juan? c. ¡Ha llegado Juan! ‘Juan has arrived’

The punctuation marks of the different forms in (1) are conventional ways to suggest the intonation that accompanies, respectively, a neutral affirmation, an imposition, an enthusiastic agreement, and the expression of doubt. By the same token, the punctuation marks of the sentences in (2) are intended to illustrate the difference between three kinds of sentential modalities—a declarative, an interrogative, and an exclamative—that all share the same basic propositional content. Written forms, however, can hardly represent the full range of nuances in meaning that can be conveyed through small prosodic variations in one or more of the dimensions of sound; namely, fundamental frequency (henceforth F0), duration, intensity, and voice quality. Understanding how prosodic cues contribute to utterance interpretation involves developing specific tools to describe, analyze, and represent the features of relevant cues, as well as trying to establish the level at which their contribution is made. In order to describe the conventional uses of prosody, we claim that researchers need to analyze not only the phonologically distinct intonational patterns used by speakers, but also the consistent phonetic changes or modulations in prosodic properties; like fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity, and voice quality. An example of how features are combined is the prosodic expression of disbelief or incredulity. Speakers can overtly

149

Escandell-Vidal and Prieto

show disbelief, that is, make it clear that they do not accept certain propositional content, by choosing a specific and contrastive pitch contour (see Section 3.3), but also by modifying voice quality and increasing speech rate and pitch levels. While some variations in the pragmatic interpretation of prosody can ultimately be tied to different syntactic structures (i.e., different ways in which sentential constituents are linked to each other, as in Está fumando rubio ‘She/He is smoking Virginia tobacco’ vs. Está fumando, rubio ‘She/he is smoking tobacco,Virginia tobacco’ or ‘She/he is smoking, blondie’); in other cases, the differing interpretations of a single syntactic structure depend on prosody alone (see EscandellVidal, 2012; Hirschberg, 2017; Prieto, 2015; Prieto & Rigau, 2011;Wichmann, 2011; and Brown & Prieto, in press, 2020, for a review).The impact of prosodic variations on utterance interpretation is significant, both revealing and modifying social relations, including the modulation of speech acts (a directive can range from a blunt order to a mild suggestion), the derivation of implicatures (e.g., ironic statements; see Chapter 1 on implicature research in Spanish, this volume), and the identification of the speakers’ attitude toward both the audience (see Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness and impoliteness) and the content of their utterance (e.g., surprise, disbelief, impatience). Prosodic variations can also communicate the epistemic state of the participants and the relation of utterances to the ongoing discourse (e.g., how a piece of information fits in, or whether that information is already present in the common ground or needs to be introduced). The main goal of this chapter is to present a current review of the literature on the contribution of prosody to pragmatic interpretation in the Spanish language. Section 2 introduces the reader to the main concepts needed to understand how prosody is currently described and analyzed in the field, ranging from the set of phonological distinctions made at the intonational level to the phonetic analysis of prosodic features such as F0, duration, and intensity and voice quality. Section 3 discusses the main pragmatic functions of prosodic variation in Spanish as they bear on sentential modality and speech act distinctions (Section 3.1), information structure (Section 3.2), epistemic stance (Section 3.3), irony (Section 3.4), (im)politeness (Section 3.5), and speaker identity (Section 3.6). Finally, Section 4 concludes by summarizing the pragmatic role of prosodic features in Spanish and suggests new avenues for future research in the relationship between prosody and pragmatics.

2

Review of existing research: Prosody and pragmatic interpretation

This section examines the main pragmatic functions of prosodic variation in Spanish by focusing on a variety of phenomena related to interpretation in the following subsections.The details regarding the model used for the transcription of intonational pitch contours, as well as the relevance of other phonetic cues, are explained in Section 3, “Current methodological considerations,” of this chapter.

2.1

Sentence modality, illocutionary force, and speech acts

Prosody in Spanish contributes to establishing sentence modality, as has been traditionally acknowledged by grammars of Spanish (RAE-ASALE, 2011 §10). Final pitch contours correlate with sentence modalities in a systematic way, and even appear to be the only clue for distinguishing among some of the modalities, as we saw in the difference between declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory in Example (2). In fact, the clearest example of this is the contrast between the nuclear pitch contour of declarative sentences (used for statements) and polar interrogatives (used for yes/no questions). Declaratives have a falling contour, with a low pitch accent and a low 150

Pragmatics and prosody in Spanish

boundary tone, rendered as (H+)L* L% in ToBI annotation, whereas polar interrogatives show a characteristic rising pitch pattern, either L* H% or L+H* H% (Estebas-Vilaplana & Prieto, 2010; Hualde & Prieto, 2015). In these cases, prosodic patterns have a clear phonological status, as instantiations of abstract tonal morphemes (Truckenbrodt, 2012), in the sense that they are overt markers of different grammatical categories. However, such distinctions are not always as clear-cut as might be expected, and several considerations are at issue here. Exclamations like (2c), for instance, do not have a specific contour per se; rather, they present a declarative pattern with expanded pitch range, usually together with increased intensity and duration of some segments (see chapters in Prieto & Roseano, 2010, for descriptions of exclamatory sentences across several Spanish dialects). Therefore, the difference here is not so much categorical as a matter of degree; this suggests that exclamations form not a grammatical class of their own, on a par with declaratives and interrogatives, but rather a subclass of emphatic expressions. Interrogatives are particularly fertile ground for analyzing the relationship between syntactic structure, on the one hand, and speech acts, illocutionary force, and speaker attitude on the other. Interrogatives are open sentential schemata with an unspecified value for a variable ranging over either sentence polarity (yes/no, or polar, interrogatives) or a sentential constituent appearing as a fronted wh- word (wh- interrogatives). Different varieties of Spanish use slightly different resources for the marking of interrogativity, which makes it difficult to isolate standard patterns and make descriptive generalizations: the fall-rise contour is found in most varieties, but others (e.g., Canary Islands and Caribbean dialects) consistently exhibit a rise-fall contour (Prieto & Roseano, 2010; see Frota & Prieto, 2015, for a cross-linguistic Romance perspective). Wh- interrogatives have the same falling contour as declaratives, a consequence of the fact that they are overtly marked as interrogatives by word order: the wh- element is fronted, and (for most varieties) this triggers the inversion of the subject, which occupies a postverbal position. Still, these differences create no significant difficulties in understanding across varieties, which calls for an explanation cast in more abstract terms. The logical form of interrogatives is that of an open proposition: this makes them particularly appropriate to the task of obtaining unknown information that can fill the unspecified variable; in short, behaving like real questions. However, the communicative intentions that can be pursued by means of an interrogative in fact encompass nearly the full range of illocutions (EscandellVidal, 1999, 2012). Thus, a query for information is but one of many possible interpretations for an interrogative. Interrogatives can also be used to perform requests, make offers and strong assertions, suggest courses of action, and criticize behaviors. Crucially, prosody is a major clue to distinguishing among these various possible interpretations and identifying the speaker’s real communicative intentions. For instance, wide tonal excursions and increased intensity and duration can be applied to interrogatives to indicate marked epistemic and emotional stances, such as disbelief or surprise, as in¡¿Me tomas por tonto?! ‘You take me for a fool?!’ (see Section 3.3 for more details on how prosody is used for epistemic marking across statements and questions in Spanish). Similarly, a quicker tempo and reduced tonal range is observed in interrogatives with requestive or imperative force, like ¿Te quieres callar? ‘Will you shut up?’ In addition, the nuclear pitch configurations of both polar and wh- interrogatives can have other shapes as well. For instance, as described in the literature, speakers of Castilian Spanish can produce other patterns besides the standard fall-rise to express a polar interrogative, such as a rise-fall, circumflex L+¡H* L% contour or a high-rise H* H% pattern (Escandell-Vidal, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2017; Estebas-Vilaplana & Prieto, 2010; Fernández Ramírez, 1959; Hualde & Prieto, 2015; RAE-ASALE, 2011, sections 10.7–10.9;Thorson, Borràs-Comes, Crespo-Sendra, Vanrell, & Prieto, 2014). Figures 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 illustrate these three different intonational pitch 151

Escandell-Vidal and Prieto

Figure 8.1 Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the interrogative sentence ¿Ha llegado? ‘Did she/he arrive?’ produced with a fall-rise pitch contour

Figure 8.2 Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the interrogative sentence ¿Ha llegado? ‘Did she/he arrive?’ produced with a rise-fall pitch contour

Figure 8.3 Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the interrogative sentence ¿Ha llegado? ‘Did she/he arrive?’ produced with a high-rise pitch contour 152

Pragmatics and prosody in Spanish

contours as applied to the interrogative sentence ¿Ha llegado? ‘Did (s)he arrive?’The distribution of these marked patterns seems to depend systematically on evidentiality, or the source of the propositional content communicated (see Escandell-Vidal, 1998, 2002, 2017; also see Chapter 6 on evidentiality, this volume).    For example, the high-rise pattern indicates that the speakers are the source of the propositional content and hence know the answer to their own question; this pattern is thus appropriate, for example, in riddles and examination questions such as ¿Es 13 un número primo? ‘Is 13 a prime number?’The rise-fall contour, in contrast, indicates that the propositional content is attributed to a source that is not the current speaker (either another individual or the speakers themselves on a previous occasion); hence it occurs in biased and confirmation-seeking questions, as in Entonces, ¿se lo pregunto? ‘So, shall I ask him/her?’ Evidentiality is therefore marked as a grammatical category, and, at the same time, allows for a wide range of speech acts and illocutionary forces (Escandell-Vidal, 1998, 2002, 2017).As a result, new correlations arise between interrogative structures and prosodic patterns, conflating markers of sentence modality with indications of epistemic stance and illocutionary force (Armstrong & Prieto, 2015; Prieto & Borràs-Comes, 2018;Vanrell,Armstrong, & Prieto, 2017). Wh- interrogatives also occur with any of the aforementioned marked patterns, with the same interpretive properties that have been described for polar interrogatives, namely, that the speaker knows the answer (high-rise contour: ¿En qué mano lo tengo? ‘Which hand do I have it in?’) or that the speaker is echoing words by another individual (rise-fall contour: ¿(Que) por qué no se lo pregunto? ‘[You want to know] why I don’t ask him?’), thus restricting the range of possible illocutions and interpretations (Escandell-Vidal, 2017). Interestingly, wh- interrogatives can be uttered with the fall-rise contour of polar interrogatives as well. Again, this has consequences in the interpretation, which in this case is connected to politeness and speaker involvement in questions like ¿Cómo te llamas? ‘What is your name?’ (Estebas-Vilaplana & Prieto, 2010; Navarro Tomás, 1944; Quilis, 1993). Let us turn now to imperatives. In Spanish, verbal inflection of the imperative mood seems sufficient to characterize the imperative modality from a grammatical point of view; hence, imperative utterances do not have a specific intonational contour and are uttered with the same contour as declaratives. Sentences in the imperative mood can be used with a variety of illocutionary intentions, from issuing commands (¡Suelta el arma de inmediato! ‘Drop the weapon immediately!’) to expressing good wishes (¡Cúrate pronto! ‘Get well soon!’), and from making requests (Llévame contigo ‘Take me with you’) to giving advice (Llévate el abrigo ‘Take your coat’). These different illocutions tend to correlate with a set of prosodic features: higher F0 toplines and wider tonal excursions indicate a higher speaker involvement, whereas higher intensities tend to correlate with a higher social position of the speaker relative to the hearer (RAE-ASALE, 2011, §10.6k-l; see also Section 3.5 for the use of prosodic features as politeness markers). Extra emphasis can be obtained (particularly in one-word imperatives) by adding a second peak on the last syllable or even by shifting the peak to the final syllable (Hualde & Prieto, 2015). The exact import and the intended illocutionary force depend crucially on the integration of these prosodic clues with world knowledge, including the social relationship between the interlocutors and the expectations about who benefits from the course of action represented in the utterance.

2.2 Information structure and common ground management The role of prosody is not restricted to expressing sentence modality and providing useful clues to identify speaker intentions. Prosody can also contribute to indicating the relationship between the content of the utterance and the conversational common ground and the ongoing discourse, 153

Escandell-Vidal and Prieto

and particularly the hearer’s informational state (see Chapter 4 in this volume on pragmatics and word order; and Chapter 7 on the role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structures).There are three main distinctions relevant to understanding how information status is related to the common ground: (a) ‘given/new’ (already present in the common ground vs. newly introduced); (b) ‘topic/comment’ (indication about the locus where new information must be added vs. informational update); and (c) ‘focus/background’ (most relevant information vs. background information).These three distinctions are related to each other, so typically, topics represent given and background information, and foci are new information; however, there are cases in which the distinctions are independent from each other (Féry, 2016; Krifka, 2008;Vallduví, 1992). The four main resources to indicate the information status of a constituent are pitch accentuation, phrase boundary location, syntactic word order, and overt/null realization. Languages differ with respect to how they use these resources to convey the relevant distinctions (Vallduví & Engdahl, 1996). For example, to highlight a constituent as focus (i.e., the most salient part of the informational update), English can use pitch accentuation in a relatively free way, marking the intended constituent with a rising-falling pitch L+H* L% configuration (JOHN has to bring the salad; John has to BRING the salad; John has to bring the SAlad). In contrast, Spanish, and Romance languages in general, tend to keep the nuclear pitch accent in its canonical sentence-final position and resort to word order to align the focused constituent with the rightmost edge (e.g., Tiene que traer la ensalada Juan vs. Juan, la ensalada, tienen que traerla vs. Juan tiene que traer la ensalada). When the focused constituent provides new information not related to the information already present in the common ground (informational focus), no particular prosodic marking is used. However, other modifications can then be found, such as an increased tonal range and/or increased duration. For instance, if the new information is intended to replace a piece of information already present in the common ground, we have corrective focus, as in La ensalada tiene que traerla JUAN, no Pedro ‘It is JOHN who must bring the salad, not Peter’ vs. Juan tiene que traer la torTIlla, no la ensalada ‘John must bring the TORTILLA, not the salad’ (Hualde & Prieto, 2015). On the other hand, when this new information conflicts with previous expectations or assumptions, we have counter-expectational, or mirative, focus, as in Entre los dos se bebieron cuatro boTEllas ‘Between the two of them, they drank FOUR BOTTLES.’ Constituents treated as marked foci (i.e., corrective and mirative) can also be fronted and are prosodically realized with a distinctive pitch accent, with the rest of the information prosodically de-accented and backgrounded (La ensaLAda tiene que traer Juan, no la tortilla; Cuatro boTEllas se bebieron entre los dos). In English, a rising pitch accent with a high peak on a focused constituent also triggers a search for contrasting alternatives (i.e., for constituents of the same sort as the focused one), which are discarded (Rooth, 1992). It must be noted, however, that languages and linguistic varieties can use these resources to differing degrees and with different interpretive results (see Vanrell & FernándezSoriano, 2013, about dialectal variation in the syntactic and prosodic marking of focus across different modalities in Catalan and Spanish). If the speaker believes that it should be obvious that a discourse referent was already present in the common ground (or easily inferable from it), a distinctive rise-fall-rise L+H* L!H% focus contour is used to indicate obviousness (¡Sí, mujer, de GuiLLERmo! ‘Yes, [obviously], woman, [it’s] Guillermo’s!’; Estebas-Vilaplana & Prieto, 2010; see also Prieto & Roseano, 2010, and Section 3.3, following).When the full propositional content is already in the common ground and both interlocutors are aware of it, lengthening of the final stressed vowel is the resource of choice (Llévate el abri::go ‘Take your coat”; Escandell-Vidal, 2011; Escandell-Vidal, MarreroAguilar, & Pérez-Ocón, 2014). In the latter two cases, again stating content that is already in the common ground usually favors interpretations of impatience and insistence; here the degree of markedness represents the intensity of the speaker’s attitude. Figures 8.4 and 8.5 illustrate the 154

Pragmatics and prosody in Spanish

Figure 8.4 Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the statement of the obvious Sí, mujer, de GuiLLERmo! ‘Yes, [obviously], woman, [it’s] Guillermo’s!’

Figure 8.5 Spectrogram and F0 pitch contour of the insistent suggestion Llévate el abri::go ‘Take your coat’

intonational pitch contours of the statement of the obvious Sí, mujer, de GuiLLERmo! ‘Yes, [obviously], woman, [it’s] Guillermo’s!’ and the insistent suggestion Llévate el abri::go ‘Take your coat.’   Word order changes and the production of intonational phrase boundaries are the usual resources to mark topic constituents in Spanish; topics can occur either fronted (left-dislocated) or postposed (right-dislocated). In fronted topics, a slightly rising phrase boundary indicates that the constituent has been detached and singled out from the rest of the sentence, as seen in sentences like La tortilla, la trajo Luis; La tiene que traer María, la ensalada; Luis, la tortilla, tuvo que comprarla; Luis tuvo que comprarla, la tortilla. Sentences with marked topics thus tend to have two or more intermediate phrases.Topics can relate to given discourse referents but can also select new ones from a contextually given larger set (e.g., food to bring to a party as in the preceding examples). 155

Escandell-Vidal and Prieto

Summarizing, prosodic indications marking information structure can simultaneously play several roles in discourse; for example, by marking the informational status of a constituent but at the same time expressing or revealing various aspects of the speakers’ stance toward the content of their utterances.

2.3

Epistemic commitment and epistemic stance

Languages can express different degrees of belief about the truth of the propositional content through the use of specific epistemic markers (e.g., the use of quizás ‘perhaps’), as well as the use of prosodic features. In relation to prosody, Spanish uncertainty statements (e.g., those uttered with low epistemic commitment) are characterized by a rising intonational pitch contour (e.g., the answer Ljubljana to the question ¿Cuál es la capital de Eslovenia? ‘What is the capital of Slovenia?’) and the use of a slower tempo than for certainty statements. Navarro Tomás (1944) pointed out that “cualquier reserva o vacilación en la expresión de lo que se piensa reduce la amplitud de la cadencia. En las unidades finales de la aseveración dubitativa no se da el descenso . . . de la aseveración ordinaria y categórica” (pp. 80–81). Epistemic commitment is expressed not only in statements but also in questions. For example, in a detailed investigation of the intonation of polar questions in Puerto Rican Spanish, Armstrong (2017) suggested that the difference between questions in which the speaker has no belief about the propositional content and questions where the speaker believes the propositional content to be true is expressed by a difference in the alignment of the falling F0 movement in the circumflex rising-falling pitch contour.While information-seeking questions (or questions with no epistemic biases) were produced with the nuclear ¡H* L% configuration, confirmationseeking questions were produced with a falling H+L* L% nuclear pitch configuration (see also Section 3.1 and Escandell-Vidal, 2017; for more examples related to other dialects, see Prieto & Roseano, 2010). The epistemic stance of the speaker is a widely used concept in discourse studies that comprises not only the commitment of speakers toward the propositional content of an utterance but also their position with respect to their interlocutor’s messages, encompassing a wide set of epistemic dimensions. Speakers can express agreement or disagreement (or disbelief, incredulity) with the previous turn (or a situation that has just happened) through the use of specific tune choices, as well as other prosodic changes. For instance, speakers can overtly show disbelief toward an explanation by modifying voice quality and increasing duration, in order to make it clear that they do not accept certain propositional content. The epistemic dimensions of (dis)agreement can be expressed in both statements and questions through the use of specific tune choices, depending on the language.A number of Spanish dialects employ a fall-rise-fall L* HL% nuclear pitch contour to express disagreement or contradiction in statements (see Hualde & Prieto, 2015). Armstrong (2017) has described a specific fall-rise-fall L* HL% pattern that is used in Puerto Rican Spanish to encode disagreement in so-called incredulity questions, which contrasts with the risingfalling ¡H* L% contour indicating no specific belief states on the part of the speaker (see also Armstrong & Prieto, 2015, for the effects of context). Another epistemic dimension encoded through intonational means is that of obviousness, which encodes the speakers’ belief that the interlocutors surely have shared knowledge (see Section 3.2 for the distinctive rise-fall-rise L+H* LH% contour indicating obviousness in some Spanish dialects; Prieto & Roseano, 2010). To summarize, Spanish speakers can use a wide set of epistemic stance markers that include intonational marking, as well as more gradient pitch, duration, and voice quality features. 156

Pragmatics and prosody in Spanish

2.4. Irony Verbal irony has been characterized as a form of indirect intentional language in which there is some kind of incongruity between what is said (i.e., the propositional content of an utterance) and what is meant (i.e., the intended meaning of that utterance); e.g., when a speaker says He is amazing! but actually means the contrary. Production studies in the last few decades have shown that ironic sentences are prosodically marked with lower or higher F0 mean and higher F0 variability values than their non-ironic counterparts, as well as intensity modulations in the form of higher intensity values and variability (e.g., Bryant, 2010, for English; González-Fuente, Prieto, & Noveck, 2016, for French; Padilla, 2004, 2009, 2011, for Spanish; Scharrer, Christmann, & Knoll, 2011, for German). Perception studies have also shown that in several languages, ironic intent can be successfully extracted from prosodic cues, even in the absence of contextual cues (e.g., Loevenbruck, BenJannet, D’Imperio, Spini, & Champagne-Lavau, 2013, for French; Padilla, 2011, for Spanish). When they asked 20 French-speaking participants to listen to 234 pairs of utterances presented without a previous discourse context and judge whether the speaker was being ironic or sincere, Loevenbruck et al. (2013) found that the average accuracy score was 79%.The ironic and sincere utterances for this study were obtained from a previous production experiment in which the ironic comments were produced with significantly higher pitch levels, wider span, and longer durations as compared to sincere comments. Padilla (2011) reported that 50 Spanish listeners successfully identified the ironic utterances from a total of 40 ironic and literal utterances in 92% of cases. In this case, the utterances were presented together with the previous context and were extracted from a corpus of spontaneous speech. After the identification task, participants were asked to judge whether they considered context or tone of voice more useful in making their judgments. A total of 48% of the participants considered tone of voice to be more useful than the previous context, 50% of the participants believed that both cues were equally important, and the remaining 2% responded that context was more useful than tone of voice. Apart from the presence of specific F0 and durational features, ironic sentences may also be produced with specific intonational pitch contours. Padilla (2004, 2009) showed that ironic utterances in Spanish can be marked with specific rising-final inflectional patterns. Similarly, González-Fuente et  al. (2016) showed that some ironic utterances in French were produced using a specific H+H!* H% contour, which has been described in the French_ToBI annotation system as containing a specific pragmatic meaning related to disagreement in the expression of counterfactual statements. All in all, while the aforementioned experimental research has shown that specific prosodic modulations are used in the expression and detection of verbal irony, studies have also pointed out the lack of systematicity in the marking of ironic statements.While speakers tend to use prosodic modulations in their ironic speech, these modulations are not mandatory, thus showing that the notion of a systematic ‘ironic tone of voice’ is oversimplified (Bryant, 2010, 2011, 2012; Padilla, 2004, 2009). In our view, within this complex set of relationships, in order to find more systematic correlations between prosody and irony, studies should also take into account the specific intent of the speaker (for example, emotionally positive or negative intent) within the ironic comment.

2.5 (Im)politeness The groundbreaking work by Brown and Levinson (1987) has been generally taken as the theoretical basis for the study of politeness across languages (see Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness/impoliteness, this volume). Brown and Levinson’s theory relies on the concept of ‘face,’ 157

Escandell-Vidal and Prieto

the self-image that one projects to the public. Politeness strategies are designed to mitigate the potential damage to the interlocutor’s face resulting from face-threatening acts. Later, Culpeper (2011) complemented this work to include impoliteness, whose main goal is to damage the face of the interlocutor. Each of the politeness strategies outlined in Brown and Levinson (1987) has a corresponding impoliteness strategy in Culpeper’s framework. Regarding the study of prosody as a politeness strategy, as Culpeper (2011, p. 146) noted, “remarkably, the bulk of research on politeness or impoliteness pays woefully little attention to the role of prosody” (see also Hidalgo Navarro, 2009; Hidalgo Navarro & Cabedo Nebot, 2014, two studies that highlight the need to include the analysis of prosody in the study of (im)politeness in Spanish in particular). Some decades ago, Ohala (1984, 1994) put forward the ‘frequency code’ hypothesis, which postulated a universal relationship between prosodic features and politeness. Here, high pitch is associated with social meanings such as politeness, deference, submission, or uncertainty and, by contrast, low or falling pitch is associated with assertiveness, authority, aggression, and confidence. Since then, while several studies have yielded evidence for high pitch as related to politeness, other studies have produced evidence that seems to contradict the hypothesis (see Hübscher, Borràs-Comes, & Prieto, 2017; Brown & Prieto, 2017, for a review). In the case of Spanish, some research on prosody has corroborated the strong association between the use of high pitch and politeness marking, with some exceptions. In Venezuelan Spanish,Álvarez and Blondet (2003) found that politeness in interrogative utterances was marked not only through rising tone, but also through more marked F0 height and F0 modulations. These authors compared the intonation of two Venezuelan Spanish interrogatives: an informational wh- question and a more ‘polite’ indirect command expressed through a yes–no question.The results showed that the polite yes–no question displayed more F0 variability than the relatively flat wh- question. With regard to Peninsular Spanish, phonetic analyses of the Val. Es.Co. corpus have shown that polite interrogative sentences maintain a generally higher F0 level across the utterance than neutral questions (Hidalgo Navarro & Folch, 2012). By contrast, other research has found that, in Spanish, occasionally the use of a low F0 can have a polite, mitigating effect (Hidalgo Navarro & Folch, 2012; see also Hidalgo Navarro, 2009; Hidalgo Navarro & Cabedo Nebot, 2014). It has also been shown that pitch contour choice encodes politeness across languages, with a tendency for a more frequent use of high tones for polite styles. Orozco (2008, 2010) asked 12 speakers of Mexican Spanish to produce eight unpunctuated written requests in, first, a neutral style, followed by a polite one.The results showed that these speakers preferred to use not only a high final boundary tone but also a high initial tone when producing polite requests. In a study along the same lines, Rojas, Blondet, and Álvarez (2014) showed that Venezuelan Spanish speakers from Mérida used a specific nuclear pitch configuration (e.g., the rising-falling pattern H*+L) to encode politeness in requests. For Catalan, Devís Herraiz (2014) found that the most successful melodic characteristics of politeness attenuators for Catalan were the use of high and suspended final and internal pitch inflections, as opposed to low final F0 movements. Other prosodic features, such as durational and intensity patterns as well as voice quality, are strongly affected by politeness. Hübscher et al. (2017) showed that Catalan speakers exhibited a slower speech rate, lower mean pitch, less intensity, less shimmer, and less jitter in formal speech than in informal speech. Several authors investigating the attenuating prosody of Venezuelan Spanish from Mérida have highlighted the importance of slow speech rate in the expression of politeness.Álvarez and Blondet (2003) showed a positive correlation between the perception of an utterance as being polite in this dialect and the presence of vowel and syllable lengthening. And for the same dialect, Rojas et al. (2014) found that the duration of attenuated syllables was twice as long as the duration of those syllables with no function of attenuation. 158

Pragmatics and prosody in Spanish

In general, the prosodic correlates of politeness in Spanish have been found to be similar to those seen in other languages. One result of this is that, contrary to previous claims, Ohala’s (1984, 1994) frequency code model does not appear to hold systematically for Spanish and other languages (see Hübscher et  al., 2017, for a review). Second, prosodic features other than high pitch, such as slow speech rate and vocalic lengthening, have been shown to characterize polite speech.All in all, it seems that prosodic mitigation or prosodic attenuation strategies characterized by slower and more attenuated speech play a strong role in marking politeness cross-linguistically (see Chapter 22 on mitigation in Spanish, this volume). By contrast, impoliteness is characterized by non-mitigated and non-attenuated speech (for the role prosody plays in so-called ‘mock impoliteness,’ see McKinnon & Prieto, 2014).

2.6 Speaker and social identity The perceptual properties of an utterance can reveal or provide information about many different aspects of the speaker, such as sex, age, geolect, social class, emotion, and mental state, to mention just a few.Taken together, these properties make it possible to recognize a speaker. The set of constant attributes of an individual constitute the speaker’s identity; a notion that may “encompass (a) macro-level demographic categories; (b) local, ethnographically specific cultural positions; and (c) temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 592; see also Arundale, 2010). Most of the time, speakers are unaware of the fact that these features are providing information about them and their stance, information that goes far beyond what they are more or less consciously aiming to communicate. However, speakers can sometimes focus on these properties and modify them intentionally to build themselves a slightly different identity, by enhancing some features and/ or suppressing others. Upon entering any form of social interaction, all individuals construct a public persona, the image of self they wish to project. This is the concept of ‘face’ as it is employed in sociological studies, “an image of self, delineated in terms of approved social attributes” (Goffman, 1967, p. 5). This kind of modification of self-image is often apparent during Spanish election campaigns, when candidates attempt to disguise their regional accent when addressing the public outside their local area but reinforce it for audiences back home. Similarly, criminals such as drug-traffickers are known to distort their voices when speaking by phone to avoid being recognized. Of course, these attempts are not always successful; sometimes the modification of parameters intended by the speaker goes unnoticed by the audience. But even if attempts fail, they show how important projecting identity through speech style can be. There are occasions, in contrast, in which the modification of persona must be overt and clearly perceptible. For instance, when reproducing a dialogue, or someone else’s words, speakers normally try to imitate the source’s voice and speech style or produce a voice that is neither that of the person whose words are being cited nor, crucially, that of the speaker (cf. EstellésArguedas, 2015).When quoting, speakers often resort to stereotyped features with prosodic correlates, thus constructing a fictitious identity that makes it clear that the speakers are not taking full responsibility for the content of their utterances. The importance of self-presentation strategies in social networks also favors the conscious manipulation of phonetic properties of discourse in order to create a distinctive identity.YouTubers and influencers need to stand out from other people in order to be easily recognized by their followers (Yus, 2015). Here, what is important is not whether the manipulation is perceived as such or not, but rather that speakers can claim a unique identity. 159

Escandell-Vidal and Prieto

3

Methodological considerations

In this section, we review the types of methods used to study prosody, especially in relation to pragmatics. We first describe a commonly used method to represent prosodic variation across languages, which is based on a combination of the phonological description of the contrasting patterns in intonation with the phonetic description of the patterns of four acoustic dimensions of prosody; namely, F0, duration, intensity, and voice quality.We view these two types of analyses as complementary and, as we will see, both of them affect pragmatic interpretation.

3.1

The representation of prosody: Intonation

Regarding the description of intonational pitch contours, although other conventions have been used in the description of Spanish, such as the analysis by synthesis of speech melody method based on the international transcription system for intonation (INTSINT; Hirst & Di Cristo, 1998) or the melodic speech analysis approach (Font-Rotchés & Cantero-Serena, 2009), the current consensus among researchers tends to favor the tone and break indices (henceforth ToBI) annotation conventions, which are based on the autosegmental-metrical (or AM) model of intonation (see Ladd, 2008; Gussenhoven, 2002, 2004, for a review of this model).The ToBI conventions establish four layers of labeling; namely, words, tones, break indices, and miscellaneous information, which are all aligned with the speech signal. Specific sets of ToBI conventions have been developed for a number of typologically diverse languages, one of which is Spanish, and we use these conventions, abbreviated as Sp_ToBI, in this chapter (see Hualde & Prieto, 2015, for a review; see Prieto & Roseano, 2010, for the application of ToBI to several Spanish dialects). In ToBI, utterances are described as a set of tiers, including phonetic information like F0 contours and waveforms, a transcription of verbal content, and then phonological information like tones (pitch accents and boundary tones) and break indexes. In ToBI systems for intonational languages, pitch accents are represented as a sequence of phonologically distinctive tonal units; i.e., pitch accents and boundary tones, represented as high (H) and low (L) targets and their combinations, which are associated with metrically prominent syllables and phrase boundaries. The nuclear pitch accent is the most prominent pitch accent within a prosodic group, and in languages such as Spanish, the nuclear pitch accent is typically the final pitch accent appearing in a phrase.The combination of a nuclear pitch accent followed by one or a set of boundary tones is called the ‘nuclear pitch configuration.’ Pitch accents and boundary tones are manually annotated in the tones tier of the transcription of an utterance following a precise set of definitions applied to the language in question. The break index tier of the transcript represents the phrase grouping structure of the language through numerical indices that indicate degrees of disjuncture between any two adjacent words. In Spanish, a break index marked “4” represents intonational phrases (IPs), while one marked “3” represents intermediate phrases (ips).Tones associated with IPs are transcribed with a percent mark (%) and tones associated with ips are transcribed with a dash (-). In the ToBI system, the nuclear pitch configurations of a language are often represented in the form of schematic diagrams. Examples can be seen in Figure 8.6, which illustrates the ToBI representation of a set of three commonly occurring Spanish nuclear configurations; i.e., the falling L* L% contour, the rise-fall L+H* L% contour, and the low rise L* H% contour.The table contains a schematic representation of the contour (the shaded area represents the nuclear-accented syllable, the Sp_ToBI label, and a potential pragmatic function). A full inventory of nuclear pitch configurations in a variety of Spanish dialects can be found in Prieto and Roseano (2010) and Hualde and Prieto (2015). 160

Pragmatics and prosody in Spanish

Commonly occurring Spanish nuclear conÿgurations

L* L%, low fall broad focus statement

L+H* L%, rise fall narrow focus statement

L* H%, low rise info-seeking questions

Figure 8.6 Commonly occurring Spanish nuclear pitch configurations

Apart from the specific intonational contours, four important acoustic dimensions (and perceptual correlates) are typically analyzed as prosodic correlates of sociopragmatic meanings.

3.2 Fundamental frequency (F0) parameters ‘F0’ is the acoustic correlate of the perception of pitch in speech. Physically, it measures the rate of vibration of the vocal cords. It is typically measured in Hertz, or cycles per second.Temporal changes in fundamental frequency correspond closely to the perceived tonal and melodic changes in speech; i.e., intonation. This is why F0 curves graphically represent intonational melodies. Among the set of phonetic measures related to pitch and closely linked to pragmatic meanings are maximum pitch (or highest F0 value in the utterance, also called topline), pitch register or average pitch (a measure of contour pitch raising or lowering in the F0 space, which is calculated by determining the mean pitch value of the pitch contour), and pitch range or pitch span (a measure of pitch excursion, typically calculated by finding the difference between the lowest and highest F0 measures in the utterance).Variations in pitch range can be measured across the full utterance or, locally, by measuring the difference between the lowest and highest point in a given pitch accent (e.g., an F0 movement associated with a prosodically prominent unit).

3.3 Duration A variety of duration and duration variability measures, as well as speech rate (or tempo), correspond to the perception of length of some speech units and the rhythm of the utterance. Segmental or syllable duration is commonly measured in milliseconds and milliseconds per unit. Speaking rate is often expressed in number of syllables or words per unit of time.As we will see, variability in speaking rate and other measures of duration are relevant to pragmatic marking.

3.4 Intensity Intensity is the acoustic correlate of perceived loudness and is typically reported in decibels (dB). The two most frequent measures of intensity reported across studies are ‘mean utterance intensity’ and ‘intensity variability.’

3.5 Voice quality Voice quality has been defined as the characteristic auditory ‘coloring’ of a speaker’s voice, and it is derived from a variety of laryngeal and supralaryngeal adjustments.While laryngeal adjustments are related to the tensions and adjustment forces acting on the vocal folds that induce different phonation types, such as breathy, whispery, creaky, falsetto, or harsh voices, supralaryngeal changes trigger nasalized, dentalized, or velarized voices. In order to characterize such phonation 161

Escandell-Vidal and Prieto

types acoustically, researchers have used parameters like ‘jitter’ (the % of change in the duration of pitch periods) and ‘shimmer’ (the % of change in speech amplitude between pitch periods). Creaky voice, for example, exhibits high indexes of jitter and shimmer, which makes it noticeably different from a natural-sounding voice with regular pitch periods. From a methodological point of view, it is important to emphasize that pragmatic descriptions of prosody must be complemented with detailed analyses of prosodic features such as those described in this section.

4

Future directions and conclusion

In this chapter, we have seen that both intonational choices and the prosodic properties of sound, such as fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and voice quality, are importantly involved in the expression of a speaker’s communicative intentions and attitudes. Speakers provide overt clues about their intentions by using the set of linguistic resources that best suit their communicative purposes. Intentions are therefore recognized by the audience, so different hearers can agree upon the basic aim of an utterance and react accordingly. An interesting issue is the status of these prosodic resources: whether or not and to what extent they are part of a system of encoded, grammatical distinctions. Prosody always impacts the final interpretation of an utterance, but this is probably not sufficient justification to claim that all intonational configurations are the expression of grammatical categories.Though for users it is of no interest to know which part of a contour encodes a phonological distinction and which part is a conventionalized prosodic encoding of an attitude, for linguists it is important to understand how such different elements work together (Escandell-Vidal, 2012; Prieto, 2015). The distinction between what is encoded as part of the linguistic system and what is represented along a gradient spectrum cannot be made by looking at the physical properties of utterances alone, but rather must be viewed at a more abstract level by disentangling the whole range of entailments and commitments that are linked to the phonetic form of utterances together with other contextual factors. Discreteness can be considered one of the main criteria for determining whether a prosodic pattern encodes a grammatical distinction or not. Grammatical categories are assumed to be discrete (i.e.,‘all-or-nothing’), and not gradient.Thus, for example, there are no degrees of syntactic interrogativity: from a formal point of view, a syntactic structure is either interrogative or not—it cannot be ‘slightly’ or ‘extremely’ interrogative. By contrast, other pragmatic functions allow for graded variations and modulations. For instance, when speakers produce questions, they can have varying degrees of certainty: they may be totally sure of the answer, or reasonably certain; or they may be merely guessing; or they may have no idea at all. In our view, in order to have a more comprehensive view of intonational meaning, there is a need for studies that systematically assess the pragmatic uses of intonation across languages. Recent empirical investigations have addressed specific hypotheses related to the precise contribution of intonation to utterance interpretation. Some of the results show that not only can intonation (in conjunction with other prosodic features) provide conventional indicators for information structure, epistemic stance, speech act modulation, politeness, and affective stance, but crucially, it has the capacity to encode several of these indications simultaneously (e.g., Prieto & Borràs-Comes, 2018, among others). For example, the prosodic pattern of an incredulity contour such as Are you drinking ALCOHOL? (uttered by a teacher talking to a 14-year-old student and produced with an extremely angry voice) encodes a question expressing a disagreement epistemic operator that, at the same time, singles out a prominent mirative focus and expresses a negative emotional stance. This simultaneity of operations can be observed also in the use of sentence-final pragmatic particles fulfilling functions that are similar to intonation, which 162

Pragmatics and prosody in Spanish

suggests a strong parallel between these two kinds of operators. Based on this cross-linguistic analysis, we propose that the theoretical interpretation of prosodic meanings is most sound if it takes the speech act dialogical framework as a point of reference (e.g., Krifka, 2015, 2017). Thus, in our view, prosody can play multiple roles at the pragmatic level. As a result, new correlations arise between grammatical structures and prosodic patterns, conflating markers of sentence modality with indications of epistemic stance and illocutionary force (Armstrong & Prieto, 2015; Escandell-Vidal, 2017; Prieto & Borràs-Comes, 2018; Vanrell et  al., 2017). The evidence points to the need to regard intonational meaning as a set of multidimensional and dynamic pragmatic operators that are activated in certain contexts and interact with other parts of grammar, with a significant impact on face-to-face communication.This suggests that, from a methodological point of view, future work could benefit from the integration of corpus methods with more focused, discourse-based experiments (see Chapter 32 on corpus pragmatics, this volume). Importantly, accurate pragmatic descriptions of prosody need to be complemented with detailed analyses of a variety of prosodic features, and fine-grained acoustic analysis and descriptions need to consider grammatical and discourse properties. Importantly, prosodic features are not produced in isolation; rather, they occur in association with other visual clues, such as gestures and facial expressions, in an integrated way. Basic faceto-face communication is therefore inherently multimodal (Brown & Prieto, in press, 2020).The link among linguistic properties (both syntactic and semantic), prosodic features, and gesture opens a wide new field of research that poses important questions about how this integration is produced and what serves as its basis in both the cognitive and the social domains.These are important issues that must be confronted in the future.

Acknowledgments We thank Iris Hübscher (University of Zürich), two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of the volume for very helpful suggestions. This work was funded by grant FFI2015–63497-P from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for the first author’s research project “The semantic/pragmatics interface and the resolution of interpretive mismatches,” grant PGC2018– 097007-B-100 for the second author’s research project “Multimodal language learning,” and by grant 2017 SGR-971 from the Generalitat de Catalunya to the Prosodic Studies Group.

Further reading Escandell-Vidal,V. (2012). Prosodia y pragmática. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 4(1), 1–14. This paper discusses the role and status of prosody regarding the encoding of grammatical features, semantic meaning, and pragmatic interpretation from a cognitive perspective.The effects of prosody on utterance interpretation can be observed at the level of propositional explicatures, higher-order (illocutionary) explicatures, and implicatures. Escandell-Vidal, V. (2017). Intonation and evidentiality in Spanish polar interrogatives.  Language and Speech, 60(2), 224–241. This paper argues that the three intonational contours found in Castilian Spanish polar interrogatives can be accounted for as encoding different evidential distinctions. The various interpretations can be seen as inferential developments of a restricted set of semantic distinctions, together with contextual information. Hirschberg, J. (2017). Pragmatics and prosody. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 532– 549). Oxford: Oxford University Press. This chapter contains a review of the literature on how prosodic features can influence the interpretation of linguistic phenomena in many languages. It discusses how prosodic prominence and prosodic 163

Escandell-Vidal and Prieto

phrase boundaries, as well as differences in overall F0 contours, and changes in intensity, duration, and speaking rate, have a strong impact on pragmatic interpretation. Hualde, J. I., & Prieto, P. (2015). Intonational variation in Spanish: European and American varieties. In S. Frota & P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonation in Romance (pp. 350–391). Oxford: Oxford University Press. This chapter summarizes the current state of our knowledge about intonational variation across geographical Spanish varieties. It describes the main intonational patterns of the Spanish language, pointing out differences among geographical varieties.The chapter is based on prior work on Spanish intonation using the autosegmental metrical system. Vanrell, M. M., Armstrong, M., & Prieto, P. (2017). Experimental evidence for the role of intonation in evidential marking. Language and Speech, 60(2), 242–259. This experimental study investigated the role of intonation in the marking of direct evidentiality (or directly perceived information) in Majorcan Catalan polar questions.A perception experiment with 72 participants showed that Majorcan Catalan listeners use intonation and the presence of the sentenceinitial que particle to infer information about evidentiality.

References Álvarez, A., & Blondet, M. A. (2003). Cortesía y prosodia: un estudio de la frase cortés en el español de Mérida (Venezuela). In P. M. Butragueño & E. Herrera (Eds.), La tonía. Dimensiones fonéticas y fonológicas (pp. 319–330). México, DF: El Colegio de México. Armstrong, M. (2017).Accounting for intonational form and function in Puerto Rican Spanish polar questions. Probus, 10, 1–40. Armstrong, M., & Prieto, P. (2015).The contribution of context and contour to perceived belief in polar questions. Journal of Pragmatics, 81, 77–92. Arundale, R. (2010). Constituting face in conversation: Face, facework, and interactional achievement. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(8), 2078–2105. Brown, L., & Prieto, P. (2017). (Im)politeness: Prosody and gesture. In M. Haugh, D. Kádár, & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Palgrave handbook of linguistic politeness (pp. 357–379). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, L., & Prieto, P. (in press, 2020). Gesture and prosody as sister systems in multimodal communication.  In M. Haugh, D. Kádár, & M. Terkourafi (Eds.),  The Cambridge handbook of sociopragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryant, G.A. (2010). Prosodic contrasts in ironic speech. Discourse Processes, 47(7), 545–566. Bryant, G.A. (2011).Verbal irony in the wild. Pragmatics and Cognition, 19(2), 291–309. Bryant, G.A. (2012). Is verbal irony special? Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(11), 673–685. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A socio-cultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devís Herraiz, E. (2014). The intonation of mitigating politeness in Catalan. Journal of Politeness Research, 10(1), 127–149. Escandell-Vidal, V. (1998). Intonation and procedural encoding: The case of Spanish interrogatives. In V. Rouchota & A. Jucker (Eds.), Current issues in relevance theory (pp. 163–203). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Escandell-Vidal,V. (1999). Los enunciados interrogativos. Aspectos semánticos y pragmáticos. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. 3, pp. 3929–3991). Madrid: Real Academia Española/Espasa. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2002). Echo-syntax and metarepresentation. Lingua, 112, 871–900. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2011). Verum focus y prosodia: cuando la duración (sí que) importa. Oralia, 14, 181–201. Escandell-Vidal,V. (2012). Prosodia y pragmática. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 4(1), 1–14. Escandell-Vidal, V. (2017). Intonation and evidentiality in Spanish polar interrogatives.  Language and Speech, 60(2), 224–241. Escandell-Vidal,V., Marrero-Aguilar,V., & Pérez-Ocón, P. (2014). Prosody, information structure, and evaluation.In G.Thompson & L.Alba-Juez (Eds.),Evaluation in context (pp. 153–178).Amsterdam:John Benjamins. Estebas-Vilaplana, E., & Prieto, P. (2010). Castilian Spanish intonation. In P. Prieto & P. Roseano (Eds.), Transcription of intonation of the Spanish language (pp. 17–48). Munich: Lincom Europa. 164

Pragmatics and prosody in Spanish

Estellés-Arguedas, M. (2015). Expressing evidentiality through prosody? Prosodic voicing in reported speech in Spanish colloquial conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 85, 138–154. Fernández Ramírez, S. (1959). Oraciones interrogativas españolas. Boletín de la Real Academia Española, 39, Cuaderno 157, 243–276. Féry, C. (2016). Intonation and prosodic structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Font-Rotchés, D., & Cantero-Serena, F. (2009). Melodic analysis of speech method applied to Spanish and Catalan. Phonica, 5, 33–47. Frota, S., & Prieto, P. (Eds.). (2015). Intonation in Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual. Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Doubleday. González-Fuente, S., Prieto, P., & Noveck, I. (2016). A fine-grained analysis of the acoustic cues involved in verbal irony recognition in French. In J. Barnes, A. Brugos, S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, & N.Veilleux (Eds.). Proceedings of speech prosody 2016 (pp.  902–906). Boston, MA: International Speech Communication Association. Gussenhoven, C. (2002). Intonation and interpretation: Phonetics and phonology. In B. Bel & I. Marlien (Eds.), Proceedings of speech prosody 2002 (pp. 47–57).Aix-en Provence, France: Université de Provence. Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hidalgo Navarro, A. (2009). Modalización (des)cortés y prosodia: estado de la cuestión en el ámbito hispánico. Boletín de Filología, 44(1), 161–195. Hidalgo Navarro, A., & Cabedo Nebot, A. (2014). On the importance of the prosodic component in the expression of linguistic im/politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 10(1), 5–27. Hidalgo Navarro, A., & Folch, M. P. (2012). Aprender a ser cortés: aspectos pragmáticos de la enseñanza de ELE, expresividad fónica y comunicación cortés a través de la entonación. In A. Cabedo Nebot & P. Infante Ríos (Eds.), Lingüística XL. El lingüista del siglo XXI (pp. 43–54). Madrid: SEL Ediciones. Hirschberg, J. (2017). Pragmatics and prosody. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 532–549). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirst, D., & Di Cristo, A. (1998). Intonation systems: A survey of twenty languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hualde, J. I., & Prieto, P. (2015). Intonational variation in Spanish: European and American varieties. In S. Frota & P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonation in Romance (pp. 350–391). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hübscher, I., Borràs-Comes, J., & Prieto, P. (2017). Prosodic mitigation characterizes Catalan formal speech: The Frequency Code reassessed. Journal of Phonetics, 65, 145–159. Krifka, M. (2008). Basic notions of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 55, 243–276. Krifka, M. (2015). Bias in commitment space semantics: Declarative questions, negated questions, and question tags. In S. D’Antonio, M. Moroney, & C. R. Little (Eds.), Semantics and linguistic theory (SALT) 25 (pp. 328–345).Washington, DC: LSA Open Journal Systems. Krifka, M. (2017). Negative polarity questions as denegations of assertions. In C. Lee, F. Kiefer, & M. Krifka (Eds.), Contrastiveness in information structure, alternatives and scalar implicatures (pp. 359–398). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loevenbruck, H., BenJannet, M., D’Imperio, M., Spini, M., & Champagne-Lavau, M. (2013). Prosodic cues of sarcasm speech in French: Slower, higher, wider. In Proceedings of the 14th annual conference of the international speech communication association (INTERSPEECH 2013): Speech in life sciences and human societies. Baixas, France: Curran Associates. McKinnon, S., & Prieto, P. (2014). The role of prosody and gesture in the perception of mock impoliteness. Journal of Politeness Research, 10(2), 185–219. Navarro Tomás, T. (1944). Manual de entonación española. New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States. Ohala, J. J. (1984). An ethological perspective on common cross-language utilization of F0 of voice. Phonetica, 41, 1–16. Ohala, J. J. (1994). The frequency code underlies the sound symbolic use of voice pitch. In L. Hinton, J. Nichols, & J. J. Ohala (Eds.), Sound symbolism (pp. 325–347). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orozco, L. (2008). Peticiones corteses y factores prosódicos. In Z. E. Herrera & P. M. Butragueño (Eds.), Fonología instrumental. Patrones fónicos y variación (pp. 335–355). México, DF: El Colegio de México. Orozco, L. (2010). Estudio sociolingüístico de la cortesía en tratamientos y peticiones. Datos de Guadalajara. México, DF: El Colegio de México. Padilla, X. (2004). El tono irónico. Estudio fonopragmático. Español Actual, 81, 85–98. Padilla, X. (2009). Marcas acústico-melódicas: el tono irónico. In L. Ruiz Gurillo & X. Padilla (Eds.), Dime cómo ironizas y te diré quién eres (pp. 371–390). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 165

Escandell-Vidal and Prieto

Padilla, X. (2011). ¿Existen rasgos prosódicos objetivos en los enunciados irónicos? Oralia, 14, 203–224. Prieto, P. (2015). Intonational meaning. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 6(4), 371–381. Prieto, P., & Borràs-Comes, J. (2018). Question intonation contours as dynamic epistemic operators. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 36(2), 563–586. Prieto, P., & Rigau, G. (2011). Prosody and pragmatics. In L. Payrató & J. M. Cots (Eds.), The pragmatics of Catalan (pp. 17–48).The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton de Gruyter. Prieto, P., & Roseano, P. (Eds.). (2010). Transcription of intonation of the Spanish language. Munich: Lincom Europa. Quilis, A. (1993). Tratado de fonología y fonética españolas. Madrid: Gredos. RAE-ASALE. (2011). Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Fonética y fonología. Madrid: Espasa. Rojas, D., Blondet, M.A., & Álvarez,A. (2014). Configuración tonal de la atenuación en el habla de Mérida. Lengua y Habla, 18, 93–106. Rooth, M. (1992).A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1(1), 75–116. Scharrer, L., Christmann, U., & Knoll, M. (2011).Voice modulations in German ironic speech. Language and Speech, 54(4), 435–465. Thorson, J., Borràs-Comes, J., Crespo-Sendra, V., Vanrell, M. M., & Prieto, P. (2014). The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children. Probus, 26(1), 59–82. Truckenbrodt, H. (2012). Semantics of intonation. In C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger, P. Portner (Eds.), Semantics.An international handbook of natural language meaning (Vol. 3, pp. 2039–2969). Berlin: de Gruyter. Vallduví, E. (1992). The informational component. New York and London: Garland. Vallduví, E., & Engdahl, E. (1996). The linguistic realization of information packaging. Linguistics, 34(3), 459–520. Vanrell, M. M., Armstrong, M., & Prieto, P. (2017). Experimental evidence for the role of intonation in evidential marking. Language and Speech, 60(2), 242–259. Vanrell, M. M., & Fernández-Soriano, O. (2013).Variation at the interfaces in Ibero-Romance. Catalan and Spanish prosody and word order. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 12, 1–30. Wichmann,A. (2011). Prosody and pragmatic effects. In G.Andersen & K.Aijmer (Eds.), Pragmatics of society (pp. 181–213). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Yus, F. (2015). Discourse and identity. In J. D.Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (Vol. 6, pp. 498–502). Oxford: Elsevier.

166

9 Pragmatics and sociolinguistics María José Serrano

1

Introduction

As is widely known, pragmatics is a linguistic discipline concerning the situated expression and interpretation of linguistic meaning, considering the way that utterances are expressed and understood in a context. It is the study of language use in contrast with semantics1 and is devoted to the analysis of the meanings entailed by linguistic units (Leech, 1983; Levinson, 1983). Historically, the analysis of meaning has been difficult to accomplish, and it becomes more difficult when meanings take place in conditions that come from different contexts, social interactions, and/or communicative settings. Notwithstanding these obstacles, the analysis of pragmatic meaning is a challenging and promising area of research that has contributed to the understanding of not only the meanings detached from linguistic structures, but also the general cultural patterns of communication in societies.The discoveries made in pragmatics cannot be separated from the social backgrounds in which communication takes place because participants make it possible to generate a contextual or situated meaning of a particular linguistic structure. Pragmatics approaches language as a communicative tool whose existence is determined by speakers and their purposes according to the topic, place, social conditioning, contextual cues, and shared knowledge among interlocutors, as well as other possible diverse social elements. For this reason, pragmatics shares a clear empirical aim with sociolinguistics, a discipline that studies linguistic variation in its social and cultural context (Labov, 1970, 1972).Variants, especially morphosyntactic ones,2 always convey different meanings that are unevenly distributed across the social and stylistic spectrum (Aijón Oliva, 2019;Aijón Oliva & Serrano, 2013; Serrano, 2011, 2016, forthcoming).Variation in the use of a form is strongly related to its meaning and to the differential tendency of participants to use it in order to perform different communicative styles. For this reason, the pragmatic meanings of variation have served as a useful tool in explaining linguistic variation and its social scope (Serrano, 1999a). Communicative exchanges between participants are socially and culturally conditioned (Spencer-Oatey & Zegarac, 2002) and the analysis of these communicative exchanges should be based on the premise that social relations affect communicative interaction (Spencer-Oatey, 1993). In fact, pragmatic variation and sociopragmatic approaches tend to include social explanations to pragmatic phenomena (Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005). 167

Serrano

According to Romaine (1984), the goal of sociolinguistics should be “the differential use of pragmatic resources by different speakers in different situations” (p. 430). In addition, Brown and Levinson (1987) point out that the interest of sociolinguistics in approaching meaning relies on the differential use of pragmatic resources by speakers; hence, such a discipline should be better considered as an ‘applied pragmatics.’ Topics in applied pragmatics are rather diverse; therefore, the social study of pragmatic meanings may be included in such a discipline. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the four main Spanish phenomena that have required sociolinguistic explanations: 2.1 (im)politeness; 2.2 forms of address; 2.3 information structure and cognitive-functional analysis of subject expression; and 2.4 pragmaticalization of discourse markers. Section 3 is devoted to the analysis of the methodological procedures related to the study of pragmatic phenomena from a sociolinguistic viewpoint. Section 4 explores the future directions of the combination of pragmatic and sociolinguistic theories, and how such a combination may contribute to extending knowledge about communication in Spanish.

2

Review of existing research

In this section, I review Spanish phenomena that have been explained in terms of pragmatics and sociolinguistics.

2.1

(Im)politeness

Research on (im)politeness has necessarily included social and cultural perspectives by adding the notions of the speech community and the user’s context as proposed by Gumperz (2001) within the ‘interactional sociolinguistic’ trend. This has led to the emergence of a subdiscipline called ‘sociocultural pragmatics’ (Bravo, 2009), which supports the idea that (im) polite usages may be conditioned by the speaker’s social image and identity as displayed during interaction and through various cultural values. Consequently, the analysis of pragmatic categories, such as greetings, attenuations, flattery, compliments, or requests (among others), has reached insightful conclusions regarding their geographical and/or social distribution, and the self-image participants portray in their language use (see Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness issues, this volume). Acevedo-Halvick (2008) conducted a study on greetings in Guatemala. Results revealed that the use of greetings among youngsters is in consonance with the construction of a self-image in conversation as part of an in-group affiliation with other young people. However, the use of a non-normative greeting style does not alter politeness rules. As pragmatic elements manage the social distance between participants (Haverkate, 2004), attenuation is another commonly studied topic that serves to enforce or mitigate such social distance in a gradual manner (Briz Gómez, 2004). Albelda Marco (2008) analyzed attenuation by one first-generation speaker from Spain and one from Chile in order to evaluate how representatives of these speech communities managed social distance.The Chilean speakers showed a higher frequency of attenuating usages like pues ‘well’ or cabros ‘guys,’ which indicates social and geographical differences in the use of such items. Flattery is also strongly related to the social and cultural values of specific varieties of Spanish. Rodríguez Alfano and Jiménez Martín (2010) studied the function of ándale ‘come on’ as a strategy to convey flattery in Monterrey, Mexico.They concluded that the use of politeness strategies 168

Pragmatics and sociolinguistics

is highly dependent upon the specific socio-situational contexts in which the interactions take place, and varies depending on the speaker’s communicative purposes (see also Félix-Brasdefer, 2008a, 2008b). Márquez Reiter (2002) conducted a cross-varietal investigation on making requests using several speakers of Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish.The less familiar the interlocutors are with each other, the more likely it is for their requests to be realized indirectly.The author concluded that there were no significant differences between these varieties in the use of such pragmatic procedures (see Chapter 15 on regional pragmatic variation, this volume). Other studies have focused on how (im)politeness resources are used across different varieties of Spanish. For example, in Argentinean and Uruguayan Spanish, Alba Juez (2007) found both differences and similarities in the use of politeness phenomena such as address forms, as well as in the use of vos ‘you’ and its associated verbal inflections. Since impoliteness can be analyzed as a feature of speakers’ identities, it is also related to the use of forms of address.

2.2 Forms of address The study of forms of address in European and American Spanish has generally focused on the use of second-person paradigms, based on the semantic axes of solidarity and power proposed by Brown and Gilman (1960). Despite the important conclusions reached by this approach, a better description of this variation is possible when terms of address are linked to sociopragmatic and speaker-hearer interactive factors. In fact, it has been demonstrated that variants of the paradigm of tú, vos, and usted and their corresponding plural forms are not simply alternative ways of addressing interlocutors or an audience without any meaningful repercussions. Rather, they are pragmatic variants with relevant sociolinguistic distributions (Aijón Oliva, 2018; Serrano, 2018, 2019). Speakers tend to use each variant to address interlocutors or an audience according to several communicative purposes and depending on the situation. For that reason, it is the sociolinguistic distribution of address forms that supports their pragmatic differences.Therefore, each variant functions as a pragmatically distinct form of address. Many studies have shown that forms of address are variants with pragmatic repercussions, even though scholars persist in considering usted as the ‘formal or respectful’ second person and tú to encode ‘familiarity and intimacy’ between speakers. Such a binary model is recognized as “too rigid because it does not take into account the context of the utterance (. . .) and cannot be determined simply by the mere consideration of stable social categories” (Moyna, 2016, pp. 2–3). For example, the intended meaning of the social distance of usted is not present in all varieties of Spanish; the choice may actually index intimacy instead of distance (Moyna, 2016; Uber, 1985, 2011).Variation between tú and vos in the Spanish of the Americas also indicates strong differences at the pragmatic level, motivated by different levels of social prestige across the varieties where such variation exists. It is generally considered that tú is used to address interlocutors in urban areas, whereas vos is used in rural contexts and is associated with lesser prestige.Accordingly, the phenomenon of voseo ‘use of vos’ displays important pragmatic functions, such as the creation of solidarity and in-group bonds (Rivadeneira Valenzuela, 2016).As would be expected, these forms exhibit different social distributions that have also promoted linguistic change over time (Bertolotti, 2016; Moyna & Vanni Ceballos, 2008). For pragmatic reasons, the object clitic pronoun os, deriving, like vos, from the plural second-person paradigm, was progressively replaced by te in Colonial Spanish (Díaz Collazos, 2016). Indeed, forms of address are ways of expressing social deixis, and the best explanations for them are those that are sociopragmatically based, even though they are not always easily found. 169

Serrano

The meanings traditionally attributed to tú and usted are not inherent to them, but are rather construal functions that depend on the context and the social and cultural situations in which they are used.This would explain why these forms are unevenly distributed across most European Spanish varieties and, therefore, why there are so many meanings of address forms in the Spanish language. For example, due to diverse linguistic and social factors, in the Basque Country, the second person tú form is more commonly used than the usted.This tendency has not been observed in the Spanish spoken in Valencia, where there is still a significant group of speakers using usted despite an increase in the use of tú (Blas Arroyo, 2005). The pragmatic meaning of address forms also emerges when these are approached from a cognitive-functional viewpoint, whereby they are considered meaningful choices that help develop communicative styles in discourse (Aijón Oliva, 2019; Aijón Oliva & Serrano, 2013). Usted and ustedes involve an apparent contradiction between grammatical form and extra-discursive reference that places them halfway between the third person (considering their formal features) and the second person (considering the kinds of participants they are meant to construct; i.e., addressees and audiences). For that reason, the second-person paradigm usted(es) has been labeled the ‘displaced second person’ (Aijón Oliva, 2018). When addressing interlocutors or audiences, speakers use variants to construct messages conveying different degrees of objectivity or subjectivity according to their communicative purposes. In mass-media discourse, the use of usted(es) is often preferred by politicians and journalists, who take advantage of this choice as a way to objectivize their utterances and develop a particular self-image3 (Serrano, 2017, 2018). Moreover, there are cognitive and pragmatic reasons for the increasing use of the verbal clitic variant associated with plural second-person vosotros (i.e., os) by Canarian speakers in texts found on social media. Though this is not a normative Canarian variant, it is used as a communicative device to specify the referents more clearly from a pragmatic viewpoint, providing a value of intimacy between participants, especially in emotional contexts (Serrano, 2019). In Example (1), the expected variant would be the second-person clitics les or los, but the participant has chosen the more salient variant: the second-person plural clitic os. (1)

Gracias a todos por estar ahí . . . semanas muy intensas, pero colmadas de grandes personas en mi vida y mejores amigos. . . . Os quiero. ‘Thank you all for being there . . . these have been very intense weeks, but ones full of great people in my life and even better friends . . . I love you.’

As a part of the pronominal system, forms of address can also be analyzed according to their possibility of being expressed or omitted in the clause (see Chapter 16 on variation in forms of address, this volume).

2.3

Information structure and cognitive-functional analysis of pronominal subject expression

The expression of the pronominal subject (which is optional in the Spanish language) generates diverse pragmatic effects. Overt pronouns are placed under the informative focus of the sentence; when there is an expressed subject in a clause, it tends to be focused or pragmatically stressed, with the rest of the sentence remaining as informational background (Silva-Corvalán & Enrique-Arias, 2017).4 Actually, the pragmatics of expressed subjects have already been acknowledged in traditional correlational sociolinguistic studies, even though, paradoxically, this 170

Pragmatics and sociolinguistics

approach has always insisted—and still does—that morphosyntactic variants should fulfill the prerequisite of synonymy for their sociolinguistic distribution to be analyzable and explainable (see Silva-Corvalán & Enrique-Arias, 2017). Indeed, subject expression always conveys some differences in meaning, as does its omission (Serrano & Aijón Oliva, 2011); hence, pragmatic meanings are undoubtedly present in variation.Various hermeneutic proposals have tried to approximate them. One of the best-known is the notion of ‘pragmatic weight’ introduced by Davidson (1996). In Example (2), the expressed subject yo signals that the correct interpretation of the verb is the semantically ‘heavier’ or more assertive form of the clause. (2)

Dando la clase—yo te lo digo—que es, es muy maja, muy agradable, y muy simpática. (Davidson, 1996, p. 561). ‘Giving class—I say/claim to you—[she] is very nice, very pleasant, and very friendly.’

The process of ‘structural priming’ has also been considered an important phenomenon to explain the differences in use between first- and third-person overt subjects in Spanish. It consists of the “unintentional and pragmatically unmotivated tendency to repeat the general syntactic pattern of an utterance” (Bock & Griffin, 2000, p. 177). The use of a certain structure in one utterance functions as a prime on a subsequent utterance, such that the same structure is repeated (Travis, 2007). Consider the use of the first-person singular yo in Example (3): (3)

Ahí estaba yo, comenzaba yo a hablar en inglés. Yo me comencé en el nineteen fifty-two. (Travis, 2007, p. 107) ‘There I was, I started to speak in English. I started in 1952.’

Structural priming is a cognitive phenomenon basically applied to the study of the use of linguistic units in textual genres; however, some studies have exhibited relevant sociolinguistic patterns due to its cross-linguistic nature. It occurs in varieties other than Spanish and also among bilingual speakers (Abreu, 2012;Torres-Cacoullos & Travis, 2010). In a similar vein, the discursive-cognitive notion of ‘accessibility’ is employed to evaluate the distance existing between referents as a factor conditioning their explicit formulation.This approach considers the number of clauses intervening between the target subject and the previous mention of the same referent in the subject position. A first-person referent is accessible as a discourse participant, whereas third-person referents are typically made accessible through a previous mention in the discourse (Travis & Torres-Cacoullos, 2018). The analysis of subject expression by priming and accessibility itself gives rise to pragmatic meanings.The most striking ones emerge from the comparison of the expressed variant with the omitted one, since overt pronouns are known to mark contrast, emphasis, or focus (Chafe, 1994). From a cognitive-functional approach, ‘informativeness’5 has also been revealed as a useful tool in explaining subject expression in Spanish, emphasizing the presence of the referent in the discourse and shaping different pragmatic meanings. On the other hand,‘salience’6 explains the meanings conveyed by the omitted variants (see Aijón Oliva, 2019; Aijón Oliva & Serrano, 2013).These cognitive notions are inherent to grammar and are responsible for the creation of diverse pragmatic meanings in texts. For example, in constructions with creer ‘to think, to believe,’ the first-person singular variation is a resource used to create pragmatic meanings based on 171

Serrano

argumentation when expressed ((+ informative): yo creo) as in Example (4), or evidentiality when omitted ((+ salient): ø creo, in Example (5) (Aijón Oliva & Serrano, 2010). (4)

pue:s no sé: a mí me parece: bien/yo creo/ ¿no?/porque tampoco-/ tampoco hay mucho sitio donde aparcar y a veces es muy complica:o ¿eh? / ‘Well, I don’t know.That seems good to me, I think, because there aren’t many places to park and sometimes it is very complicated.’

(5)

Estamos rodeados/creo/digamos||| casi atrapados. / ‘We are surrounded, I think.We could say we’re almost trapped.’

It has been found that the high frequency of the expressed first-person singular in such constructions as yo creo ‘I think’ has led to an advanced grammaticalization process (Posio, 2013). In general terms, the explicit indexation of first- and second-person referents through pronoun expression bestows a more subjective character on discourse; that is, it emphasizes the fact that it evolves around human subjects, particularly the direct participants in the interaction. On the contrary, a preference for subject omission signals some displacement toward objectivity, placing the focus on the clause and its content as a whole (Aijón Oliva & Serrano, 2013). As for the social distribution of the expressed and omitted variants of subjects in Spanish, a gender-based study following such a cognitive-functional approach indicated that male discourse usually shows higher rates of the expressed variants, while women are more inclined to omit pronouns (Aijón Oliva & Serrano, 2010, 2016).There are also differences in their respective preferences for particular grammatical subjects. Men frequently use the first person, while women tend to omit these pronouns. Due to these different tendencies among genders, women display a more objective style than men.

2.4

Pragmaticalization of discourse markers

The pragmaticalization of grammatical or lexical units in discourse (i.e., discourse markers) is also a subject that includes pragmatic tools. Leaving aside the complex processes by which a construction becomes pragmaticalized, markers are endowed with pragmatic values and their usage is socially grounded. In fact, their study has been approached from a sociopragmatic perspective, given that they may be somehow linked to politeness. Discourse markers can be crucial for the negotiation of interpersonal relations and face (Blas Arroyo, 2011) because they are linked to social, stylistic, and geographical features.There are still large knowledge gaps in the study of the relationships between Spanish discourse markers and some of these factors. Geographical factors, however, are an exception, in that there has been significant work connecting it to the analysis of discourse markers. Blas Arroyo (2011) studied the construction muy bien ‘very well’ as a vernacular marker in the speech of Castellón, Spain. It serves a politeness function, having an evaluative meaning that allows participants to continue with the same thematic progression or to redirect topics, and also acts as a response marker. Its use is related to a process of contact and convergence with the Catalan construction molt bé ‘very well.’ Fuentes-Rodríguez, Placencia, and Palma-Fahey (2016) conducted regional research on the use of pues ‘well, indeed, you know, by the way’ in Quito, Ecuador, and Seville, Spain, and concluded that there is geographical variation regarding its position and discursive functions. Valencia Espinoza (2014) analyzed discourse markers in Santiago de Chile and concluded that conversational markers like eh ‘eh,’ bueno ‘well’ or claro ‘sure’ are the most frequently used. 172

Pragmatics and sociolinguistics

Moreover, there are also intercultural and comparative studies about discourse markers; García Vizcaíno and Martínez Cabeza (2005) examined the respective uses of well and bueno ‘well’ in English and Spanish. One sociolinguistics-based study is that of Serrano (2001) on the Canarian and Madrid varieties of Spanish.An analysis was conducted on pues and la verdad (lit.‘the truth’) as discourse markers.The marker pues is used to convey an opposition-causality meaning and la verdad to promote assertiveness. It is also worth noting that sex/gender interacts with social class in the use of each discourse marker (e.g., the lower social class prefers la verdad and the higher social class pues), suggesting that men and women from different social levels vary in their socio-communicative behavior.This is due to both the social structure of the speech community and the parameters of linguistic interaction. Similarly, the analysis of bueno ‘well’ as a discourse marker in an urban Canarian speech community reveals significant sociolinguistic and discursive patterns (Serrano, 1999b). Speakers from lower social class levels make the most assiduous use of this marker so as to carry out pragmatically attenuated and indirect utterances. Discourse markers can undoubtedly be analyzed with a combination of pragmatic and sociolinguistic theories (see Chapter 10 on discourse markers, this volume). The phenomena reviewed in this section show that it is necessary to include social explanations to understand pragmatic uses of the Spanish. (Im)politeness and forms of address necessarily involve the consideration of social features of speakers and the social communicative situations in which they take part. Subject expression and discourse makers are also strongly related to social interactions and the communicative goals of speakers, because they are part of a society.

3

Methodological considerations

If the main goal of pragmatics is to study language in its real contexts of use, an adequate methodology should include rigorous means of studying the social aspects that may influence usage(s) in actual communicative settings. From a theoretical point of view, the existence of a relationship between pragmatic meaning and social factors is straightforward, but a consistent and adequate methodology to analyze and explain this relationship has not yet been developed (Andersen, 2001). One of the most relevant methodological issues is how the pragmatic meaning of a unit, construction, or utterance can be shown to be culturally, socially, and/or universally shared in a linguistic variety or speech community. Some tendencies are regularly observed; e.g., the use of forms of address generally encodes degrees of social distance between participants, but there are some striking differences among the use of forms of address in the Spanish-speaking world, which make it difficult to establish regular or universal patterns of usage (see Section 2.2.), even in a specific variety. Speakers’ creativity may give rise to pragmatic meanings or words, constructions, or utterances in particular contexts, but they cannot be studied as socially relevant if they are not systematically shared by a group of speakers.This would hinder the analysis of the social distribution or stratification of pragmatic meanings, since they emerge from different concrete communicative situations. In such cases, the relationship between linguistic use and social factors may become difficult to assess.As noted by Spencer-Oatey and Zegarac (2002), pragmatics attempts to explain how the thought expressed by a given utterance on a given occasion is recovered by the addressee. However, there might be a gap between the meaning of the utterance used by the speaker and the thought that the speaker tries to express by using those words on a particular occasion. In fact, a main concern in most pragmatics studies has been how to approach the engagement between the speaker and hearer in order to reach a pragmatic meaning (Leech, 2014). 173

Serrano

Another important methodological problem is how to gather data to show a social distribution or stratification of pragmatic meanings. In that sense, considering that pragmatics pays attention to language in context, obtaining a sufficient number of items of a concrete pragmatic use may be a difficult task. First of all, it would be necessary to make sure that a word, construction, or utterance with a particular pragmatic meaning is widespread or regularly used by a group of speakers in a concrete communicative setting. As Schneider and Barron (2008) note, one research question posed within variational pragmatic research is what realizations mean and how they are phrased in different regional subcultures of the same language community; e.g., level of commitment in promises such as Mañana vendré ‘I’ll come tomorrow.’ Secondly, the communicative settings where a pragmatic expression is used should also be determined.A traditional sociolinguistic approach examines the correlation between a pragmatic usage and so-called extralinguistic factors, such as age, social class, or sex/gender, but in considering all these social factors, the actual communicative settings or contexts where forms are used are ignored. A major problem faced when determining the regularity of some meaning across a group of speakers and/or in a speech community is that there might also be some difficulties in establishing clear-cut social categories to distribute the meanings. For example, a study of the usage of the second-person plural clitic pronouns les, las, and los versus os, according to a concrete social factor (e.g., age), would probably produce significant results regarding its distribution among generations, but it would not explain why a speaker chooses one form over another and its communicative repercussions. Even when these problems are apparently solved, this can still lead to an excessively structural view of the relationship between a pragmatic issue and its social background (Brown & Levinson, 1987). For example, an outcome of applying such methodology could be that an indirect speech act like ¿Podrías cerrar la puerta? ‘Could you close the door?’ is more frequently used by elderly people or women, or that the use of discourse markers such as la verdad es ‘the truth is’ is more widespread among first-generation speakers.The description of this stratification would be right, but it would not truly explain such uses in their real contexts of use. Thus, traditional sociolinguistic and pragmatic methodologies are difficult to reconcile. In other words, it is difficult to find a balance between the micro- and macro-social sides of pragmatics, but it is obvious that such sides should not be working separately. The methodologies used in pragmatics to collect data are varied: e.g., surveys,7 recorded role playing, interactions from (non)participant observations, and TV program recordings (FélixBrasdefer, 2019, Chapter 10; Félix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 2017; Jucker, 2018; see Chapter 33 on research methods, this volume).There are no concrete guidelines on how to collect data in order to conduct pragmatics research (Murillo, 2006). Debates about procedures to obtain data usually involve the distinction between a particular and a universal scope.8 A pragmatic approach that is linguistically based is not concerned with gathering large-scale data; rather, theorizations come from the analysis of concrete and singular communicative situations. In fact, utterances are already known to be the most basic units of analysis in pragmatics, and a micro-pragmatic focus is prevalent (Schneider, 2018).Thus, the use of larger units, such as entire discourses, written texts, digital or computed-mediated data, and even non-verbal behavior data, are seen as difficult in practice (Jucker, 2018). However, it is highly advisable to use different types of data to accomplish a better understanding of pragmatic issues (Félix-Brasdefer, 2007; Jucker, 2018). A pragmatic approach would have a more universal scope and would include social elements in the analysis; therefore, more diverse amounts and types of data would be needed. There have been efforts to combine variational and pragmatic approaches and their respective methods to study language.Variational pragmatics (see Chapter 15 on regional pragmatic variation, this volume) is intended to go beyond traditional and social dialectology to provide 174

Pragmatics and sociolinguistics

an examination of pragmatic variation across geographical and social varieties of a language. It aims to determine the impact of factors such as region, social class, gender, age, and ethnicity on communicative language use (Schneider & Barron, 2008). Focused mainly on regional or dialectal pragmatic variation, it proposes some cues for future work in this field, such as studying a phenomenon in the same varieties of the same language using different data, and/or across different national varieties of one or more languages (Schneider & Barron, 2008).The purpose of such a combination is laudable but, unfortunately, it does not satisfy the need for a convenient methodology regarding the social side of pragmatics. As the authors aptly state, there has been a serious lack of pragmatic perspective in the study of language variation research, which has focused on forms and ignored their communicative functions.This represents an incomplete and inadequate procedure. Furthermore, traditional sociolinguistic approaches have dismissed the meanings of variants and studied only the social distribution of forms. Nevertheless, major studies have indirectly acknowledged that variants convey meaning differences, and thus communicate different things (Cheshire, 1987; Romaine, 1984; Serrano & Aijón Oliva, 2011).9 The classical debate on the synonymy of morphosyntactic variants initiated by Lavandera (1978) has recently encouraged discussion about whether pragmatic meanings should be part of sociolinguistic analysis and how such an inclusion could be made hermeneutically and methodologically feasible (Terkourafi, 2011, 2012). In addition, other related questions have already been addressed and effectively answered, such as the nature of pragmatic meaning considered in variationist studies (e.g., communicative, conversational, semasiological, onomasiological), or the inclusion of discursive elements in the analysis of meaningful variants. Nevertheless, the consideration of pragmatic factors in the analysis of sociolinguistic variation is hardly new. A large number of studies have already analyzed morphosyntactic variation and its social distribution from a pragmatic perspective (Serrano, 1999a, 2011, 2016). This reflects the second period in the study of syntactic variation, which was initiated around the late 1990s (Serrano, 2011).The methodologies employed in these investigations are varied; they usually rely on traditional sociolinguistic stratification (e.g., Bentivoglio & Sedano, 2011), while some have necessarily developed new hermeneutical devices. However, the social analysis of morphosyntactic variation requires a more dynamic and specific characterization of social factors. Hence, traditional notions like social class or sociocultural levels have begun to be replaced by those of ‘socioprofessional identity’ (Aijón Oliva, 2019; Aijón Oliva & Serrano, 2013) and ‘contextual identity’ (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2005).The term ‘socioprofessional’ is aimed at reflecting the fact that these identities combine specific communicative duties in some context (i.e., roles), with more personal features that qualify participants for those roles in a concrete context. These identities are largely situation-dependent characterizations, rather than inherent features of the speakers.They should be viewed as aggregations of features that make people qualify for playing a certain role in some context. Participants often need to enjoy a certain professional or social status in order to be assigned a role within some format. A profitable classification of identities has been that of journalists, politicians, public figures, and anonymous individuals (Aijón Oliva & Serrano, 2013). In the same vein, sex/gender does not constitute a static and monolithic social category; rather, a relevant distribution of a linguistic variant across genders would reveal that men and women perform different communicative styles according to the situation (Aijón Oliva & Serrano, 2016).The main benefit of such a method is that it is possible to observe and explain the social distribution and usage of variants as meaningful choices in a contextualized and appropriate way.Thus, contextually based classifications of speaker identity contribute to solving the problems of traditional social stratification and provide a socio-communicative viewpoint of the relationship between the construction of discursive and social meanings. 175

Serrano

A convenient methodology entails the need to use hermeneutical devices not only from the field of pragmatics, but also from discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, or corpus linguistics in order to pursue the following goals: (a) analyzing variants as meaningful choices by observing their use according to cognitive, discursive, and conversational features; (b) presenting a consistent social distribution of these meanings in concrete communicative settings.This would include not only variation at the ‘dialectal’ or ‘speech community’ levels, but also in a range of situations: e.g., conversations, media discourse, social media texts, written texts; (c) according to the goals in (a) and (b), considering social categories not as pre-existing and static, but as dynamic communicative functions carried out by participants. Even though there has been some progress in the goal of achieving a suitable methodology that integrates pragmatics and sociolinguistics, such a methodology needs to be further developed. A starting point to accomplish this goal is to identify specific hermeneutical devices in order to ensure the quality of the results that may be reached.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Future research within an interdisciplinary pragmatic and sociolinguistic model should be expected to refine methods of analysis and hermeneutical procedures. The first step would be to acknowledge that every form in language has its own meaning, and that meaning can be pragmatic. Therefore, the study of the pragmatic differences among forms should lead to a better understanding of the relationship between usage and users; i.e., the participants. An adequate methodology for analyzing these meanings, in order to establish their regular usage in a concrete communicative setting or social group, contributes to our understanding of the social roots of pragmatic meanings. This includes a detailed examination of the contexts in which the meanings of a form appear, starting from some hermeneutical pragmatic assumptions; e.g., whether an evidential, epistemic, or deontic value is being encoded. Examination should also include adequate statistical methods for analyzing linguistic choices. In fact, quantification should not only determine macrosocial categories, such as class, age, or sex/gender, but also accurately codify the communicative functions carried out by participants in their interactions. In the future, research should help discover further communication phenomena in which pragmatic and social meanings are engaged.Variation at the morphosyntactic level offers especially challenging opportunities for that purpose, as there are still many facts of grammatical construction that remain unexplored from a combined pragmatic and social perspective.

Notes 1 However, it is not easy to distinguish the real scope of semantics from pragmatics. Semantics tends to deal with conventional or propositional meaning, whereas pragmatics studies “the systematic study of meaning by virtue of, or dependent on, language use” (Huang, 2014, p. 4). 2 The advances made in the management of meaning overcome the traditional consideration of variants as mere formal units.This implies disregarding the sameness of meaning prerequisite in the study of non-phonological variation and allowing the value of meaning in analyzing morphological and syntactic variation.The assumption that any formal change always involves a change in meaning entails some communicative and socio-stylistic functions, making it necessary to look in depth into the internal grammatical 176

Pragmatics and sociolinguistics

3

4 5

6

7

8 9

factors on which morphological and syntactic variations are based (Aijón Oliva, 2019; Serrano, 2011, 2016). Consider the following example of a journalist in a mass media text: ¿Usted, qué consejos le daría al partido socialista? /¿Usted cree que será capaz de sacar el país adelante? ‘What advice would you give to the socialist party?/ Do you think it will be capable of moving this country forward?’ The preference shown by journalists to choose the objective meaning of usted might be interpreted as a way to shape a self-image of credibility and seriousness, since one of their communicative goals should be the construction of a particular kind of professional identity of objectivity (Serrano, 2017). However, the high frequency of expressed subjects in some varieties, like those in the Caribbean, may not follow such a tendency (see, for example, Cameron & Flores-Ferrán, 2004). The notion of ‘informativeness’ is based on textual coherence and the way in which referents are cognitively processed and loaded. Informativeness is central in textuality and is defined as the extent to which presented materials are new or unexpected, exerting important control on the selection and arrangement of options in a text (Beaugrande & Dressler, 1997; Lambrecht, 1994). This is a cognitive conceptualization that implies that a referent is accessible or easily recoverable within the discourse; therefore, its formulation is not necessary. Those referents that are known or predictable under the attention focus of speakers or participants are considered salient (Croft & Cruse, 2004; Langacker, 2009).Although it is usually related to the ‘known’ or ‘given’ status information, it is more than a mere discursive notion; rather, it constitutes a mental process by which a referent is accessible or is under the focus of participants. Cognitive salience is more accurately defined through other notions like ‘perceptibility,’‘autonomy,’ and ‘accessibility’ (Aijón Oliva, 2019). The Discourse Completion Test (DCT) (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989; Ogiermann, 2018) is a methodological device created to fill the gap between the linguistic and social sides of pragmatics (especially in the inter- and cross-cultural approaches). Used to collect data for politeness studies, it basically consists of asking participants about metapragmatic information concerning their beliefs and customs concerning polite choices, as well as how they would be used in interactions with other participants. Since the use of surveys tends to condition the responses given by participants, the results obtained by this method are not seen as completely valid. See Murillo (2006), Lopera Medina (2015–2016) and Schneider (2018), as well as Chapter 33, this volume, for an overview of DCT methodology and its application. For example, Bravo (2004) proposes a balanced solution for the study of politeness, considering not only the communicative event or situation to be studied, but also the social and cultural diversity of the communication, since both aspects may condition the nature of (im)polite speech acts. Silva-Corvalán and Enrique-Arias (2017) state that:“Gran parte de esta variación [morfosintáctica] parece estar condicionada por factores sintácticos, semánticos y pragmáticos . . . la sociolingüística integra los diferentes niveles analíticos que se han identificado tradicionalmente: la fonología, la morfología, la sintaxis y la semántica agregando uno más: la pragmática.” (pp. 152–210) ‘A large part of this [morphosyntactic] variation seems to be conditioned by syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors . . . sociolinguistics integrates the different analytical levels that have been traditionally identified: phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as adding one more: pragmatics.’ Despite these considerations, these authors and many others hold on to the traditional consideration of variants as “ways to say the same thing,” disregarding the pragmatic meaning that variants at the morphosyntactic level convey.

Further reading Cameron, R., & Schwenter, S. (2013). Pragmatics and variationist sociolinguistics. In R. Bayley, C. Cameron, & R. Lucas (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics (electronic copy). Oxford: Oxford University Press. This chapter recognizes the fact that pragmatics and sociolinguistics would greatly benefit from mutual engagement. However, the authors face problems arising from the application of traditional correlational sociolinguistic analysis to variation phenomena—most of them morphosyntactic—where differences in pragmatic meaning are obviously involved. Even so, they argue for the possibility of defining pragmatic variables by resorting to the Labovian Principle of Accountability. Dumitrescu, D. (2011). Aspects of Spanish pragmatics. Bern: Peter Lang. This book is a collection of essays about Spanish pragmatic phenomena. These articles are mainly focused on the study of politeness in a wide range of Spanish-speaking varieties across different cultural and linguistic contexts. 177

Serrano

Tagliamonte, S.A. (2012). Variationist sociolinguistics: Change, observation, interpretation. Oxford: Wiley. Chapter 9 (pp. 247–177), entitled “Discourse/pragmatic features,” provides insight into the nature of discourse and pragmatic variables by providing some examples of them (e.g., be like). The examples illustrate how to pursue a qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of this kind of variable, implying the management of pragmatic meaning.

References Abreu, L. (2012). Subject pronoun expression and priming effects among bilingual speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish. In K. Geeslin & M. Díaz-Campos (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 14th Hispanic linguistics symposium (pp. 1–8). Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Acevedo-Halvick, A. (2008). ¿Qué onda vos . . . ? ¿cortés o descortés en la interacción verbal juvenil? In A. Briz, A. Hidalgo, M. Albelda, J. Contreras, & N. Hernández-Flores (Eds.), Cortesía y conversación: de lo escrito a lo oral (pp. 72–79).Valencia: Universitat de València. Aijón Oliva, M.A. (2018). Not just you:The construction of radio audiences through second-person choice in Peninsular Spanish. Language & Communication, 60, 80–93. Aijón Oliva, M.A. (2019). Constructing us.The first and second persons in Spanish media discourse. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Aijón Oliva, M. A., & Serrano, M. J. (2010). El hablante en su discurso: expresión y omisión del sujeto de creo. Oralia, 13, 7–38. Aijón Oliva, M. A., & Serrano, M. J. (2013). Style in syntax. Investigating variation in Spanish pronoun subjects. Bern: Peter Lang. Aijón Oliva, M. A., & Serrano, M. J. (2016). A matter of style: Gender and subject variation in Spanish. Gender and Language, 110(2), 240–269. Alba Juez, L. (2007). An overview of politeness studies on Argentinean and Uruguayan Spanish. In M. E. Placencia & C. García (Eds.), Research on politeness in the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 35–58). London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Albelda Marco, M. (2008).Atenuantes en Chile y en España: distancia o acercamiento. In A. Briz,A. Hidalgo, M. Albelda, J. Contreras, & N. Hernández-Flores (Eds.), Cortesía y conversación: de lo escrito a lo oral (pp. 98–113).Valencia: Universitat de València. Andersen, G. (2001). Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation. A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Beaugrande, R.A., & Dressler,W. U. (1997). Introducción a la lingüística del texto. Barcelona: Ariel. Bentivoglio, P., & Sedano, M. (2011). Morphosyntactic variation in Spanish-speaking Latin America. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics (pp.  168–186). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Bertolotti, V. (2016). Voseo and tuteo, the countryside and the city: Voseo in Río de la Plata Spanish at the beginning of the 19th century. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 15–33).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2005). Sociolingüística del español. Desarrollos y perspectivas en el estudio de la lengua en su contexto social. Madrid: Cátedra. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2011). From politeness to discourse marking: The process of pragmaticalization of muy bien in vernacular Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 855–874. Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000).The persistence of structural priming:Transient activation or implicit learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177–192. Bravo, D. (2004).Tensión entre universalidad y relatividad en las teorías de la cortesía. In D. Bravo & A. Briz (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 15–38). Barcelona: Ariel. Bravo, D. (2009). Pragmática, sociopragmática y pragmática sociocultural del discurso de la cortesía. Una introducción. In D. Bravo, N. H. Flores, & A. Cordisco (Eds.), Aportes pragmáticos, sociopragmáticos y socioculturales a los estudios de la cortesía en español (pp. 31–68). Stockholm and Buenos Aires: Dunken. Briz Gómez, A. (2004). Cortesía verbal codificada y cortesía verbal interpretada en la conversación. In D. Bravo & A. Briz Gómez (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 67–93). Barcelona: Ariel. 178

Pragmatics and sociolinguistics

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, R., & Gilman, A. (1960).The pronouns of power and solidarity. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Style in language (pp. 253–276). New York:The MIT Press. Cameron, R., & Flores-Ferrán, N. (2004). Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish. Spanish in Context, 1, 41–65. Chafe,W. (1994). Discourse, consciousness and time:The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cheshire, J. (1987). Syntactic variation, the linguistic variable, and sociolinguistic theory. Linguistics, 25, 257–282. Croft,W., & Cruse,A. D. (2004). Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidson, B. (1996). Pragmatic weight and Spanish subject pronouns:The pragmatic and discourse uses of ‘tú’ and ‘yo’ in spoken Madrid Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 543–566. Díaz Collazos, A. M. (2016). Pragmatic forces in the evolution of voseo object pronouns from os to te in Colonial Spanish. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 35–61).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2007). Natural speech vs. elicited data. Spanish in Context, 4(2), 159–185. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008a). El discurso de la (des)cortesía en México. Cuestiones teóricas y metodológicas. In L. Rodríguez Alfano (Ed.), El discurso de la (des)cortesía en México. Monterrey: Nuevo México. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008b). Politeness in Mexico and the United States:A contrastive study of the realization and perception of refusals.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2017). Elicited data. In A. Barron (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 27–40). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Fuentes-Rodríguez, C., Placencia, M. E., & Palma-Fahey, M. (2016). Pragmatic variation in the use of the discourse marker pues in informal talk among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile), and Seville (Spain). Journal of Pragmatics, 97, 74–92. García Vizcaíno, M. J., & Martínez Cabeza, M. A. (2005).The pragmatics of well and Bueno in English and Spanish. Intercultural Pragmatics, 2(1), 69–92. Gumperz, J. (2001). Interactional sociolinguistics. A personal perspective. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. Hamilton (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 215–228). Oxford: Blackwell. Haverkate, H. (2004). El análisis de la cortesía comunicativa, categorización pragmalingüística de la cultura española. In D. Bravo & A. Briz (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 55–65). Barcelona: Ariel. Huang,Y. (2014). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jucker,A. H. (2018). Data in pragmatic research. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 3–36). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (2005). Le discours en interaction. Paris:Armand Colin. Labov,W. (1970).The study of language in its social context. Studium Generale, 23, 30–87. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Langacker, R.W. (2009). Investigations in cognitive grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lavandera, B. R. (1978).Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop? Language in Society, 7, 171–182. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. Leech, G. (2014). Pragmatics, indirectness and neg-politeness. A basis for politeness modeling. In G. Leech (Ed.), The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship online. Retrieved August 25, 2018, from www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341386.001.0001/acprof9780195341386. Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lopera Medina, S. A. (2015–2016). Reflexión sobre el uso del cuestionario de hábitos sociales. Núcleo, 32–33, 329–337. Márquez Reiter, R. (2002). A contrastive study of indirectness in Spanish: Evidence from Uruguayan and Peninsular Spanish. Pragmatics, 12(2), 135–151. Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish pragmatics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Moyna, M. I. (2016). Introduction. Addressing the research questions. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 1–12).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 179

Serrano

Moyna, M. I., & Vanni Ceballos, B. (2008). Representaciones dramáticas de una variable lingüística:Tuteo y voseo en obras de teatro del Río de la Plata. Spanish in Context, 5(1), 64–88. Murillo, J. (2006). Sobre la metodología de investigación en estudios sobre el discurso de la cortesía: a propósito del empleo de cuestionarios sobre hábitos sociales. In A. Briz,A. Hidalgo, M.Albelda, J. Contreras, & N. Hernández-Flores (Eds.), Cortesía y conversación: de lo escrito a lo oral (pp. 53–70). Valencia: Universitat de València. Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 229–256). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Posio, P. (2013). Subject expression in grammaticalizing constructions:The case of creo and acho ‘I think’ in Spanish and Portuguese. Journal of Pragmatics, 63, 5–18. Rivadeneira Valenzuela, M. (2016). Sociolinguistic variation and change in Chilean voseo. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 87–117).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rodríguez Alfano, L., & Jiménez Martín, E. (2010). El halago en boca propia es vituperio. Usos del halago y del ándale como estrategias de cortesía. In F. Oretti & L. Mariottini (Eds.), (Des)cortesía en español. Espacios teóricos y metodológicos para su estudio (pp. 131–150). Stockholm: Stockholm University. Romaine, S. (1984). On the problem of syntactic variation and pragmatic meaning in sociolinguistic theory. Folia Linguistica, 18(3–4), 409–437. Schneider, K. (2018). Methods and ethics of data collection. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 37–94). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Schneider, K., & Barron, P. (2008).Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: Introducing variational pragmatics. In K. Schneider & P. Barron (Eds.), Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages (pp. 1–32).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Serrano, M. J. (1999a). Nuevas perspectivas en variación sintáctica. In M. J. Serrano (Ed.), Estudios de variación sintáctica (pp. 11–43). Frankfurt am Main and Madrid:Vervuert/Iberoamericana. Serrano, M. J. (1999b). ‘Bueno’ como marcador discursivo de inicio de turno y contraposición: estudio sociolingüístico. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 140, 115–133. Serrano, M. J. (2001).The socio-communicative function of two discourse markers in Spanish. Estudios de Sociolingüística, 2(1), 101–122. Serrano, M. J. (2011). Morphosyntactic variation in Spain. In M. Díaz Campos (Ed.), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics (pp. 188–204). Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell. Serrano, M. J. (2016). La variación sintáctica. In J. Gutiérrez-Rexach (Ed.), Enciclopedia de lingüística hispánica (pp. 809–821). London: Routledge. Serrano, M. J. (2017). Going beyond address forms: Variation and style in the use of the second-person pronouns tú and usted. Pragmatics, 27(1), 87–115. Serrano, M. J. (2018).Análisis cognitivo-discursivo y situacional de las formas de tratamiento en función de sujeto y de objeto en español. Spanish in Context, 15(1), 105–128. Serrano, M. J. (2019). Los objetos verbales de persona como variantes de tratamiento interpersonal canario en la red social Facebook. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada, 32(1), 333–359. Serrano, M. J. (forthcoming). Morphological and syntactic variation in European Spanish. In Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Serrano, M. J., & Aijón Oliva, M. A. (2011). Syntactic variation and communicative style. Language Sciences, 33, 138–153. Silva-Corvalán, C., & Enrique-Arias,A. (2017). Sociolingüística y pragmática del español (2nd ed.).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Spencer-Oatey, H. (1993). Conceptions of social relations and pragmatic research. Journal of Pragmatics, 20, 27–47. Spencer-Oatey, H., & Zegarac,V. (2002). Pragmatics. In N. A. Schmitt (Ed.), Introduction to applied linguistics (pp. 74–91). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Terkourafi, M. (2011).The pragmatic variable:Toward a procedural interpretation. Language in Society, 40(3), 343–372. Terkourafi, M. (2012). Between pragmatics and sociolinguistics:Where does pragmatic variation fit in? In C. Félix-Brasdefer & D.A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues (pp. 295–318).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Torres-Cacoullos, R., & Travis, C. E. (2010). Testing convergence via code-switching: Priming and the structure of variable subject expression. International Journal of Bilingualism, 14(3), 1–27. Travis, C. E. (2007). Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change, 19, 101–135. 180

Pragmatics and sociolinguistics

Travis, C. E., & Torres-Cacoullos, R. (2018). Discovering structure: Person and accessibility. In N. Lapidus Shin & D. Erker (Eds.), Questioning theoretical primitives in linguistic inquiry (Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy) (pp. 67–90).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Uber, D. R. (1985). The dual function of usted: Forms of address in Bogotá, Colombia. Hispania, 62(2), 388–392. Uber, D. R. (2011). Forms of address:The effect of the context. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics (pp. 244–262). Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell. Valencia Espinoza, A. (2014). Marcadores del discurso de Santiago de Chile. In A.Valencia Espinoza (Ed.), Cuadernos de la ALFAL: Marcadores discursivos en la norma culta hispánica: 1964–2014 (pp. 246–276). Santiago de Chile:ALFAL.

181

 Part III

Pragmatics and discourse

183

10 Discourse markers in Spanish1 Ana Belén Llopis Cardona and Salvador Pons Bordería

1

Introduction

Discourse markers (DMs) are words and phrases such as pero ‘but,’ por tanto ‘so,’ o sea ‘I mean,’ bueno ‘well,’ por lo visto ‘apparently,’ ¿verdad? ‘right?,’ or hombre ‘man.’As we can expect by observing such a set of items, they form a heterogeneous class and play several roles in communication, such as connecting discourse units, marking textual relationships, showing attitudes or managing conversation, etc.; for this reason, they are particularly relevant in language as well as difficult to study. According to Portolés Lázaro (1998), the role that DMs play in discourse is to guide the inferences of the communicative process in relation to their particular morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties. Similarly, Fischer (2000, p. 282) stated that DMs are “devices by means of which the speaker signals her mental states and processes and thus makes herself transparent, disclosing her thoughts to the hearer.” Given their importance in communication, DMs have been crucial in the development of pragmatics and discourse studies. This crucial role has been observed in many discourse- and usage-oriented approaches to the field.Text linguistics has studied DMs as cohesive and coherence-building devices. In conversational analysis, DMs are signposts of changes in the structure of conversations, either in turns or in sequences. According to relevance theory (Blakemore, 1987; Wilson & Sperber, 1993), DMs are a way to prove that some of the theory’s basic distinctions (e.g., the conceptual-procedural division of meaning) are sound. French argumentation theory (Ducrot, 1983) provides examples of how instructions for use are rooted in the meaning of some words within the study of DMs. Finally, in grammaticalization studies (Traugott & Dasher, 2002), DMs test the limits of explanations regarding degrammaticalization, pragmaticalization, constructionalization, and so on. Regardless of the theoretical stance adopted, DMs are a basic concept in any theory pertaining to pragmatics; they push the boundaries of formal versus functional explanations in linguistics and have characterized a way of ‘doing linguistics’ over the past three decades.The interest created by DMs is even clearer when considering the numerous studies that have been dedicated to DMs since the 1990s. The preceding considerations are also reflected in Spanish linguistics: the study of DMs has not only mirrored issues addressed in general linguistics, such as the limits of descriptions of categories based on necessary and sufficient criteria, but it has also functioned as a catalyst, as they are 185

Llopis Cardona and Pons Bordería

the last frontier of descriptive grammar.That is, DMs are the last category to have been defined, classified formally and functionally, and described diatopically. A distinctive feature of the study of DMs in Spanish linguistics is the amount of research on informal speech (español coloquial) in this approach.This interest has gained a real impetus, fostering many particular descriptions of DMs in different Spanish-speaking countries, and has also been the driving force behind the theories pertaining to discourse units developed in the Romance and Spanish-language domains. Overall, the efforts devoted to the description of DMs in Spanish have given rise to an impressive body of studies; accordingly, the core of the category can be considered to be well established (Martín Zorraquino & Portolés, 1999).Two examples suffice: the first collective volume on DMs in Spanish (Martín Zorraquino & Montolío, 1998) had 286 pages; only 12 years later, a similar volume (Loureda & Acín, 2010) contained 746 pages, a quantitative difference that was also supported by a greater number of researchers, a wider diversity of approaches, and the proliferation of references to Spanish DMs.The second example relates to the existence of no fewer than three dictionaries of DMs in the Spanish domain (Briz Gómez, Pons Bordería, & Portolés, 2008; Fuentes Rodríguez, 2009; Santos, 2003). This flourishing of lexicographical descriptions was made possible by the descriptive activities mentioned earlier. This chapter provides a critical review of studies of Spanish DMs. In Section 2, a historical background is provided and some controversial points regarding the characterization of DMs are discussed. Section 3 offers methodological considerations regarding research approaches in the field of DMs.The final section suggests some future directions in this regard.

2

Review of existing research

This section provides a brief overview of existing research on Spanish DMs. Section 2.1 examines references to DMs that are scattered across descriptive grammars throughout the history of Spanish. Section 2.2 addresses the most important topics in the study of Spanish DMs, as well as some theoretical issues that deserve more detailed attention. Section 2.3 considers diachronic and grammaticalization studies, together with their implications for research on DMs.

2.1

Historical view of DMs in Spanish

This section provides fundamental issues and ideas about DMs before the field of pragmatics was developed (2.2.1) and linguistic theories that had an influence on the descriptive studies of Spanish DMs (2.2.2).

2.1.1

DMs before DMs

Information about DMs published before 1980 can be found in three different sources: grammatical descriptions, dictionaries, and studies of spoken language (español coloquial). Although it would be somewhat of an exaggeration to refer to DMs as part of the Spanish grammatical tradition, attention to pragmatic uses of the so-called conjunctions, adverbs, or ‘expressions’ (partículas) can be traced back to at least 1535.Valdés (1535) devoted one page to the description of some bordoncillos ‘expletives’ that were frequent in conversations. Scattered attention to DMs, under the grammatical labels of ilativas, partículas, or expletivos, can also be found in some of the most-informed grammars of the 17th and 18th centuries. Some of the most relevant descriptive grammars in the 19th and 20th centuries (Alcina Franch & Blecua, 1975; Bello, 1847; Gili Gaya, 1943; Salvá, 1835) have also written of the conversational usages 186

Discourse markers in Spanish

of conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs, providing sharp and accurate avant la lettre pragmatic descriptions of some DMs. Lexicography has also focused on the description of DMs. Two references stand out in this regard: in the 18th century, Garcés’s (1791) comprehensive volume on ‘particles,’ an umbrella term including idioms, adverbial or prepositional phrases, pragmatic expressions, and discourse markers, and, in the 20th century, María Moliner’s groundbreaking dictionary (Moliner, 1967), provided detailed and accurate definitions of the meanings of DMs, which was particularly remarkable given the reluctance of most lexicographers to provide careful lexicographical descriptions of words with grammatical meanings at that time. Studies of spoken language constitute a tradition in Spanish linguistics throughout the 20th century, particularly during the period from 1960 to 1990. In this tradition, DMs were considered to be the key to revealing the structure of the “grammar of spoken language” (Beinhauer, 1978 [1929]; Narbona Jiménez, 1989;Vigara Tauste, 1980). In contrast to the commonly accepted idea that DMs were fillers or expletive terms, deprived of any meaning or function, studies of spoken language emphasized their role as organizers of linguistic structures: DMs group utterances in the same way that conjunctions group sentences.

2.1.2

DMs and the rise of pragmatics

Research on DMs in Spanish is assumed to have begun with the works by Puig (1983), Fuentes Rodríguez (1987), and Portolés Lázaro (1989).Text linguistics, particularly the works of Mederos Martín (1988) and Casado (1993), had an initial strong influence. Research on DMs led to the inclusion of foreign theories into Spanish linguistics, thus enriching the fledgling studies of pragmatics.The German Partikelforschung (Martín Zorraquino, 1992), French argumentation theory (Portolés Lázaro, 1998), and British relevance theory (Montolío, 2001), laid the foundations for the field at this early stage. Regarding Spanish, the first generation of pragmatists began to research syntax and spoken language. Scholars of Spanish and other languages had concluded that conversations could not be studied by applying sentence-grammar labels, and sought a solution to the problem known as ‘the limits of syntax’ issue in the field of pragmatics (Briz Gómez, 1993a, 1993b, 1998; Cortés Rodríguez, 1991; Narbona Jiménez, 1989). A significant descriptive task that was dominated by a taxonomic orientation began in the 1990s. It is not by chance that the decade closed with the comprehensive descriptive work by Martín Zorraquino and Portolés (1999), the first global characterization of Spanish DMs as a functional word class and a milestone for upcoming studies. In this decade, Pons Bordería (1998) and Cuenca (1999) provided an account of the category in terms of a prototype; thus began a systematic study of spoken-language DMs (Briz Gómez, 1993a, 1993b, 1998). This strand of research integrated new studies of pragmatics into traditional research on spoken language. In the 2000s, the descriptive strand of research initiated a decade prior expanded to include diachrony. Synchronic description incorporated new groups of DMs, such as ‘reformulatives’ (Garcés Gómez, 2008) or ‘perception verbs’ (Fernández Bernárdez, 2002). Attention to DMs in colloquial language increased, as shown by the number of publications relating to markers and register, from 181 in 1986 to 1999, to 677 between the years 2000 and 2015 (Cortés Rodríguez, 2018).This background descriptive task made it possible for lexicographical descriptions of the DMs mentioned in Section 1 to flourish. In addition, the application of new theories continued; thus,Travis (2005) applied Wierzbicka’s natural semantic metalanguage to the study of Colombian Spanish DMs.Attention was paid to the different uses of DMs in different regions (Section 3.1), and some of the basic features of DMs, such as prosody (Section 2.2) and procedural meaning (Section 2.2), were reviewed critically. 187

Llopis Cardona and Pons Bordería

At the time of writing, the description of the category can be considered to be well established in Peninsular Spanish, which does not mean that the current descriptions cannot be refined, reinterpreted, or questioned in the light of new theoretical approaches. In American Spanish, however, the descriptive task remains incomplete (Section 3.2.).

2.2

General issues and theoretical topics

DMs were recognized as a class during the 1980s when different units such as but, well, and you know were grouped together and considered to constitute a distinct class (Ducrot et al., 1980; Fuentes Rodríguez, 1987; Schiffrin, 1987). Since DMs are a new and complex category, several tags have been used to refer to the class and the possible subclasses; hence, some guidelines are required to identify which meaning is indicated by the different terms (Section 2.2.1). A new category also requires complete characterization that takes grammar (Section 2.2.2), semantic (Section 2.2.3), and prosodic (Section 2.2.4) features into account; however, the traditional criteria are insufficient since this is a functional class (Section 2.2.5) of which the raison d’ être is to fulfill a pragmatic-discourse function.

2.2.1

Terminology

Since the mid-1980s, different names have been used to refer to the category of DMs, such as enlaces extraoracionales, conectores or conectores pragmáticos, operadores, partículas or partículas discursivas, and marcadores del discurso (‘extra-sentential links, connectives or pragmatic connectives, operators, particles or discourse particles, and discourse markers’). Of these, the initial name of the class was conector or enlace extraoracional. Later, the widely accepted name became marcador del discurso and its variant was marcador discursivo, due partly to Schiffrin (1987), as well as to Martín Zorraquino and Portolés (1999). It is important to note that, in Spanish linguistics, marcador del discurso is a hypernym for all the elements signaling speaker-hearer relationships (interactives such as ¿sabes? ‘you know?’), speakers’ attitudes toward what they are saying (modalizers, such as por supuesto ‘of course’), and relationships among units (connectives, such as no obstante ‘however’ and por tanto ‘therefore’); one of the hyponyms for ‘discourse marker’ is ‘connective’ (Pons Bordería, 2006). By contrast, for English-speaking scholars (Fraser, 1999; Jucker & Ziv, 1998), DMs are generally equal to connectives.To complicate matters further, in Spanish linguistics, the term ‘connective’ has been used with at least three different meanings: (a) Connectives establish an argumentative relationship between the preceding unit A—either explicit or implicit—and the following unit B.This is in line with the role of connectives in argumentation theory and relevance theory (López Serena & Borreguero, 2010; Martín Zorraquino & Portolés, 1999; Portolés Lázaro, 1998). (b) Connectives also signal a discourse relationship between two units; consequently, reformulatives (o sea ‘I mean’) and organizers (de entrada ‘from the get-go’) are also included (Cortés & Camacho, 2005; Fuentes Rodríguez, 2003, 2009; Montolío, 2001; Pons Bordería, 2001, 2006). (c) Connectives mark sequences of spoken units; accordingly, interactive markers (¿eh?), and modalizers (claro ‘sure’) are also included in the class (Briz Gómez, 1993a, 1993b, 1998). In this last case, a connective equals a DM. To add to the confusion, an additional group of (pragmatic) operators (Ducrot, 1983)—mainly focal particles—is sometimes included in the DM class (incluso ‘even,’ en concreto ‘particularly,’ or al menos ‘at least’). Focal particles are one-place operators (Fuentes Rodríguez, 2003, 188

Discourse markers in Spanish

2009) with a narrower scope than that of discourse markers (Casado, 1993; Fuentes Rodríguez, 2003; Portolés Lázaro, 1998). Thus, when considering these units, Briz Gómez, Pons Bordería, and Portolés (2008) used the tag discourse particle as a more general term, which is a hypernym for DMs. Figure 10.1 shows the subcategories included in the DM functional class as discussed here: 

Figure 10.1 Subcategories included in the DM category

2.2.2

Characterization: grammar

DMs are a word class consisting of linguistic items in disparate grammatical categories (adverbs, conjunctions, and interjections, but also nouns and verbs) that lack morphological inflection; except in cases such as mire/mira ‘look,’ oye/oiga ‘hey,’ as a result of the grammaticalization process. Sentence or modal adverbs (sinceramente, afortunadamente ‘sincerely, fortunately’), whose meaning is predictable and compositional, are not considered to be DMs (Portolés Lázaro, 2014). Only a few modal adverbs have been grammaticalized as DMs, such as naturalmente or evidentemente ‘naturally, evidently’ (Company, 2014). As additional properties, DMs cannot be modified, are not part of the syntactic structure of a sentence, and do not fall under the scope of negation, interrogation, or the protasis of a conditional (Martín Zorraquino & Portolés, 1999). Moreover, they normally have scope over sentences (1), groups of sentences (2), or turns (3). In these cases, DMs include uses of adverbs such as entonces ‘then’ or conjunctions such as y ‘and’ or pero ‘but’ (Pons Bordería, 1998, 2006; Schwenter, 2002). On occasion, however, DMs have scope over words and phrases (4), or relate a turn to extralinguistic information (5). (1)

Había dieciocho plazas, ha sacado la número uno y está trabajando en lo que quiere, o sea, que es un chico competente (Briz Gómez & Val.Es.Co. research group, 2002). ‘There were 18 openings, he got the first one and is working in what he likes; that is, he is a competent guy.’

(2)

Es una persona que dice muchas mentiras, o sea, no me creo lo que dice. ‘He/she is a person that lies a lot; that is, I don’t believe what he says.’ 189

Llopis Cardona and Pons Bordería

(3)

A: Nací en el año setenta. B: O sea, tienes cincuenta años, ¿no? A: ‘I was born in ’70.’ B: ‘That is, you are 50, right?’

(4)

Está animada, o sea, con ilusión. ‘S/he is enthusiastic; that is, excited’

(5)

A: B: A: A: B: A:

¿Vas a venir a visitar a Juan? (facial denial) O sea, ¿te quedas en casa? ‘Are you coming to visit Juan?’ (facial denial) ‘So, you are staying at home?’

For most scholars, scope is a criterion that is used to exclude focal particles (incluso ‘even,’ casi ‘almost,’ en particular ‘particularly,’ justamente ‘precisely,’ ‘just as,’ al menos ‘at least’) from DMs, since they have scope over phrases and can be expressed in a semantic proposition (6), regardless of whether they are found in sentences (7) or in turns (8): (6)

Todos, incluso Pablo, vienen a la fiesta. ‘Everyone, including Pablo, is coming to the party.’

(7)

Todos quieren venir a la fiesta. Incluso quieren quedarse a dormir en casa. ‘Everyone wants to come to the party.They even want to stay and sleep here.’

(8)

A: B: A: B:

Todos quieren venir a la fiesta. Incluso quieren quedarse a dormir en casa. ‘Everyone wants to come to the party’ ‘They even want to stay and sleep here’

Finally, DMs occupy different positions in turns and in utterances; some correlations can be established between the type of DM and its prototypical position. Connectives usually appear in initial positions (9), and less frequently in medial positions (10); moreover, modalizers and interactive DMs generally have more mobility (initial, medial, or final positions), and changes in position often correspond to changes in function. For example, in (11), ¿no? in sentence-final position is a request for confirmation. In (12), where ¿no? is in the medial position, its function is that of reinforcing the speaker’s stance. (9)

No aguanto mucho el calor del interior. No obstante, recuerdo veranos muy agradables. ‘I can’t stand the heat in the interior. Still, I remember very pleasant summers.’

(10) No aguanto mucho el calor del interior. Recuerdo, no obstante, veranos muy agradables. ‘I can’t stand the heat in the interior. I remember, nevertheless, very pleasant summers.’ (11) Has visto la película, ¿no? ‘You have seen the movie, right?’ (12) Quería pasarme por la tienda a comprar fresas ¿no? estamos en temporada. ‘I wanted to pass by the store to buy strawberries, right? it’s the season.’ 190

Discourse markers in Spanish

2.2.3. Characterization: Meaning According to compositional semantics, DMs do not contribute to the truth conditions of the proposition over which they have scope. Following the conceptual-procedural distinction posited by Blakemore (1987), connectives are non-truth-conditional items with a procedural meaning—encoding procedural constraints—that are characterized by their rigidity (EscandellVidal & Leonetti, 2011).Although Blakemore’s distinction seems clear-cut, it is in fact a complex issue with implications that are still far from being resolved. In Spanish linguistics,‘procedural meaning’ generally has a broad and open meaning.All DMs have procedural meaning, sometimes integrating remnants of the conceptual meaning derived from the etymon (e.g., some remnants of the meaning contrario ‘contrary’ can be found in the DM por el contrario ‘on the contrary’); this meaning, correlating with the pragmatic functions of the DM (such as por el contrario), shows an opposing relationship between the two elements bound by the DM (Llopis Cardona, 2016). However, this extension of the procedural meaning has given rise to certain contradictions. Following relevance theory, procedural meaning has the effect of guiding the inference triggered in the interpretation process (Wilson & Sperber, 1993), which is quite clear in the case of connective or scalar particles.2 Nonetheless, the kind of inference triggered by DMs is not clear in all cases. For example: (a) Many structural DMs mark the beginning (en primer lugar ‘first of all’), the continuation (a continuación ‘next’) or the end (en último lugar ‘finally’) of a discourse unit; here, conceptual and procedural meanings are so close that the difference between the two meanings is a gradient. (b) Some modal DMs perform speech acts when they are the only element in a turn (por supuesto ‘of course,’ en efecto ‘in effect’); hence, there is no proposition for which the explicatures can be modulated. (c) Many interactive DMs perform a modal function while simultaneously taking the floor (oye ‘listen,’ hombre ‘man’) or yielding it (¿verdad? ‘right?’). Hence, the concept of ‘procedural meaning’ needs to be redefined in order to be applied successfully to all DMs (Hummel, 2016; Llopis Cardona, 2016). Another controversial issue is the specific role played by context or, more precisely, those contextual features that determine the specific meaning of a DM.With regard to modal DMs and interactives, position seems to be a key feature, while the most relevant feature for connectives might also be the type of discourse operation (e.g., restriction, justification, evidence, rewording, comments). Nonetheless, contextual keys remain open to further research.

2.2.4

Characterization: Prosody

The well-established assumption that DMs have their own prosodic contours and clear boundaries delimited by pauses, represented graphically by punctuation marks (full stops, semicolons, or commas), is almost a cliché in the description of DMs, but this assumption is based on those DMs that are typically represented in written texts.The question at present is whether all DMs fit this pattern. Experiments conducted on conversational DMs show disparate results: when the data are based on interviews, the results seem to be conclusive. DMs are found between two marked tonal inflections; the tonal schema H*L% accounts for 50% of the cases and, in this case, DMs 191

Llopis Cardona and Pons Bordería

are preceded and followed by pauses (Martín Butragueño, 2003). Nevertheless, when the data are based on spontaneous conversations, DMs show different patterns. Around 70% of the interactive DMs do not have separate prosodic contours, and 46% of the DMs are not associated with prosodic boundaries (Cabedo Nebot, 2013).These results call for further research on this subject to provide a better understanding of the prosodic structure of DMs in spontaneous conversations.

2.2.5

DMs as a functional class

It is well known that all DMs fulfill a pragmatic function; hence, they constitute a functional class. However, how this function can be characterized is a cause of contention. Some scholars (López Serena & Borreguero, 2010; Pons Bordería, 2001, 2006) have posited discourse markedness as a function; this refers to a “hypernym comprising all functions possible outside the propositional content of an utterance” (Pons Bordería, 2001, p. 223).‘Discourse markedness’ is a cover term including dimensions such as connection (the text-to-text relationship), modalizing (the speaker-to-text relationship), and interaction (the speaker-to-hearer relationship). These three dimensions are all reflected in the various classifications of DMs. Some typologies introduce subdivisions in broader categories; e.g., argumentation and discourse structure are part of connection for Briz Gómez (1998) and Pons Bordería (2001, 2006); argumentation and modalization are hyponyms for the cognition dimension (López Serena & Borreguero, 2010). Other typologies include partly overlapping dimensions: modalization is part of conversational markers (Martín Zorraquino & Portolés, 1999), while argumentation is included in the textuality dimension (Cortés & Camacho, 2005). As seen here, the linguistic descriptions do not provide clear-cut criteria for distinguishing DMs from non-DMs, since formal or functional features can be posited only in the form of a gradient.At this point, the fact that DMs fulfill pragmatic-discourse functions would seem to be the only common feature of this functional word class.

2.3

Diachronic studies

Diachronic studies of DMs constitute a significant percentage of the attention given to this word class in Spanish linguistics (see Pons Rodríguez, 2010). In the 1990s, research on the historic development of DMs was simply a desideratum (Cano Aguilar, 1990; Garachana Camarero, 1998; Ridruejo, 1993); however, it was only from 2000 onwards that this wish began to become a reality in Spanish linguistics. It was not by chance that this occurred after the attempts at a description from a synchronic perspective had almost been completed. Two additional factors made this diachronic turn possible; namely, the existence of a successful theory concerning the grammaticalization of DMs (Traugott & Dasher, 2002), and the development of historical databases, particularly the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE), developed by the Real Academia Española (RAE), and the Corpus del Español (Davies, 2010). The first factor provided scholars with the appropriate hypotheses to be tested, and the second with the means to test such hypotheses. The continuity of this collective, descriptive effort is guaranteed by the new corpora that have appeared in recent years, such as the Corpus del Nuevo Diccionario Histórico del Español (CDH) 2013) (texts in different genres from the 12th to the 20th centuries), the Corpus Hispánico y Americano en la Red (CHARTA) (legal and administrative documents from the 12th to the 19th centuries), and the Corpus Diacrónico y Diatópico del Español de América  (legal and administrative documents, chronicles, and letters from 1494 to 1905). The diachronic research conducted in Spanish linguistics focuses unevenly on the different periods of Spanish: while the Middle Age and the Golden Age are the better-described periods 192

Discourse markers in Spanish

by far (Cano Aguilar, 2007; Ridruejo, 1993), modern Spanish was disregarded until very recently, and the 19th (Kotwica, 2019) and 20th centuries (Pons Bordería, 2014a) are now slowly attracting attention. In conjunction with this orientation, other studies are addressing the complete evolution of a given DM or a specific paradigm from its early stages as a free construction to its full grammaticalization in present-day Spanish. The descriptive efforts in grammaticalization studies have occurred in tandem with reflections on their theoretical foundations. Among the principles that have been discussed are the nature of the process and the terminology (‘discursivization’ for Ocampo, 2006), subjectification (Company, 2006; Travis, 2006), unidirectionality (Company, 2008), and the left- versus rightperiphery debate (Pons Bordería, 2018a). Perhaps the most original departure from general linguistics originated in variational linguistics (Koch & Oesterreicher, 1990), particularly from the paradigm of discourse traditions developed by German Romanists (Kabatek, 2005) and adopted by language historians. Variational linguistics introduced two relevant ideas into diachronic research: the first is a dual vision of linguistic change.Together with changes initiated in the strand of talk by (inter-) subjective processes, changes are also initiated by elaboration processes (Kabatek, 2005), which are linked to written practices as languages evolve and new communicative needs are created. The development of legal systems, the advent of journalism, and the introduction of modern science are clear examples of elaboration.The development of DMs is related to such processes: in order to fulfill a communicative need, a speaker/writer can create new DMs via calques (Pons Bordería, 2008) or loanwords (Garachana Camarero, 2018), or permitting their use in new text types (Pons Rodríguez, 2010). The second idea pertains to the spread of linguistic change: in most cases, grammaticalization studies disregard the influence of dialects, registers, or sociolects in the consolidation, spread, or decline of linguistic changes, but disparate events such as the influence of courts, rhetorical sanctions, prestige, popularity, or even fashion have had an impact on the survival or death of linguistic innovations (Garachana Camarero, 2018; Octavio de Toledo, 2016; Oesterreicher, 2007). Attention to the spread of changes also sheds light on (uses of) DMs that have been lost over time; e.g., the construction de resultas was grammaticalized as a consecutive marker during the 18th century, but it fell into disuse in the 20th century (Pons Rodríguez, 2010).

3

Methodological considerations

3.1 A broader (poly)functional view The study of DMs can be conducted in one of two ways; namely, from form to function (i.e., from the description of a specific DM to the functions it fulfills), or from function to form (i.e., from the description of a function to the markers displaying it). The first approach is not strictly formal, since the basis for cataloging an item as a DM is its functional and pragmatic behavior and not its formal features, which are not common to the entire category. Both views are complementary and, together, provide a more complete description of the markedness of discourse. The form-to-function approach can be considered either paradigmatically or syntagmatically. The first explores multifunctionality at the type level and addresses the issue of polysemy, which means that the function fulfilled by a DM depends on the context, as observed for bueno (Fuentes Rodríguez, 2009; Pons Bordería, 2006;Travis, 2005), which is used as an agreement marker in (13), a correction marker in (14), a signal of continuity in (15), or as a new topic marker in (16). 193

Llopis Cardona and Pons Bordería

(13) L: pero en los grandes almacenes síi que suelen haber (bañadores) B: bueno hay/pero de esos de natación (Briz Gómez & Val.Es.Co. Research Group, 2002, p. 151) L: ‘but in the big department stores they do usually have (swimsuits)’ B: ‘well there are/but the kind for swim workouts’ (14) A: ¿cómo sabías la dirección? S: yo tengo una amiga que se ha montado una pi(s)cina pequeñita // bueno/ pequeña/ diecisiete metros (Briz Gómez & Val.Es.Co. Research Group, 2002, p. 150) A: ‘how did you know the address?’ S: ‘I have a friend who has built a small pool //well/small/16 meters’ (15) B:

yo sabía que era esta la dirección// bueno pues por lo que me acuerdo de cuando estuve. (Briz Gómez & Val.Es.Co. Research Group, 2002, p. 83) ‘I know that this was the address // well so from what I remember from when I was there’

(16) A: Bueno/vamos a comenzar ‘Well/let’s begin’ At the paradigmatic level, the goal of the description consists of cataloguing the entire range of functions fulfilled by a DM.This goal is achieved via introspection, or supported by formal tests (morphosyntactic, lexical, discursive, or monologic versus dialogic). Among the previous features, position stands out as being crucial to account for multifunctionality, particularly for those DMs that are typically used in informal registers (Briz Gómez & Pons Bordería, 2010). Position must be subspecified in relation to a specific discourse unit (Briz Gómez & Pons Bordería, 2010; Pons Bordería, 2014b); thus, ¿verdad? in the final position of an intervention fulfills the function of seeking confirmation (17), while it functions as an attention-getter (18) if placed in the final position of an act (Llopis Cardona, 2014). (17) A: Juan se recupera bien/¿verdad? ‘Juan is recovering well/right?’ (18) A: . . . si tienen problemas/que encuentren los medios para solucionarlos/¿verdad?/ hemos hecho una nueva propuesta . . . ‘. . . if they have problems/they should find the means to resolve them/right? we made a new proposal . . .’ The syntagmatic form-to-function approach to multifunctionality is seen at the token level (López Serena & Borreguero, 2010; Pons Bordería, 2001, 2006); in other words, when a DM displays more than one function in the same context. For example, in (19), no sé is mitigating an opinion as well as closing comment and giving the floor to the hearer. (19) A: B: A: B:

está bastante bueno este vino/¿no? estaba mejor el vino que bebimos ayer no sé ‘this wine was pretty good, right?’ ‘the wine that we drank yesterday was better, I don’t know’

At the syntagmatic level, a primary, foregrounded function stands out from secondary, backgrounded functions (Cortés & Camacho, 2005); in (19), the modal function would be the primary 194

Discourse markers in Spanish

function and the others, the secondary functions.Although multifunctionality at the token level is commonly accepted as a theoretical possibility, this idea is seldom found in specific descriptions of DMs (Briz, Pons Bordería, & Portolés, 2008; Cestero Mancera, 2019; Fuentes Rodríguez, 2009; Portolés Lázaro, 2010).A detailed account of this issue is necessary in order to understand how DMs help to manage the floor, while contributing simultaneously to the discursive and argumentative structures of conversations. The function-to-form approach represents a different means to account for how a pragmatic function can be expressed (e.g., conclusions, a topic change, (dis)agreement); hence, this approach exceeds the limits of DMs and has been disregarded in DM studies to some extent.This is not new in Spanish pragmatics, since mitigation (Briz Gómez & Albelda Marco, 2013), prosodic cues (Estellés Arguedas, 2015), and multimodal cues have been analyzed in this way. These types of studies help create a more accurate picture of how discourse operates.

3.2 A variationist view The use of DMs is linked to the issue of variation, comprising, among other things, register, region, and users; thus making the variationist issue crucial in the description of DMs. However, such aspects have not been considered systematically thus far; instead, the description of DMs has been based partly on markers in formal and written texts, and partly on the DMs used in informal and conversational texts (López Serena & Borreguero Zuloaga, 2010). Hence, the literature shows a dual characterization of DMs whereby DMs are simultaneously cohesive macrotextual devices and interactive speaker- and hearer-oriented devices. As studies on variation have indicated, the central axis ordering all linguistic varieties is register, which is conceived of as a continuum from communicative immediacy to distance (Koch & Oesterreicher, 1990), or a gradual scale from informal to formal. The sociolectal cues related to the social stratum are foregrounded on the formal side, whereas the dialectal and sociolectal varieties (particularly age and gender) are foregrounded on the informal side; e.g., a dialectal DM (such as the Mexican Spanish güey) can be associated with a given sociolect (younger speakers) and with a given register (informal). In addition, discourse genres play a role: by definition, a spontaneous conversation is more informal than an interview, and an academic paper is more formal than a newspaper article.Accordingly, it is clear that differences stemming from the aforementioned parameters should be explored. With regard to register, it is relevant to consider whether a DM is indifferent to register (por eso ‘because of that’) or if it is used more frequently in only one register, either informal (la verdad, literally ‘the truth’) or formal (por ende ‘hence’). Thus, interactive DMs (hombre ‘man’) are linked strongly to informal register, while connectives (pero ‘but’) and modal DMs can be found in both registers, albeit at different frequencies. Complementary distributions may be observed, such as the informal total ‘in short’ versus the formal en síntesis ‘to sum up.’ In turn, although register and mode (oral/written) are related, they do not always coincide, as observed in the case of some DMs. For example, de acuerdo ‘agree’ and para empezar ‘to start with’ are typical of oral discourse, but are not informal; moreover, some DMs are used in formal oral genres or informal written genres (like Twitter and Instagram) (López Quero, 2018). It follows that register and mode cannot be ignored if a more complete account of DMs is desired. With regard to dialects or regional variations, the description of the core of DMs can be considered to be well established for the case of Peninsular Spanish; however, in American Spanish, there is still work to be done.The following lines provide a brief overview of the work conducted on American Spanish in recent years. 195

Llopis Cardona and Pons Bordería

Three strands of research are possible: the first focuses on studies of DMs that are only used in one dialect, such as the River Plate má que and otra que (García Negroni, 2012), the Venezuelan ¿oyó? ‘you heard’ (Chinellato, 2013), the Mexican Spanish dizque ‘so-called’ (Maldonado & de la Mora, 2015; among others) and the Argentinian Spanish che ‘hey man’ (Borzi, 2016). The second direction focuses on the description of DMs in a dialectal area. Some works are currently available, such as the papers on Chilean interactive DMs by Poblete Bennett (1999), Mexican extenders (Domínguez Mujica, 2005), and Chilean reformulative DMs (San Martín Núñez, 2017). Some studies describe specific uses of a given DM in American Spanish, such as the Colombian pues (Grajales Alzate, 2011) or the Southern Cone igual (García Negroni & Marcovecchio, 2014). Finally, the third direction concerns comparative studies of Spanish dialects. Thus far, this area has been neglected and requires further research (Fuentes Rodríguez, Placencia, & Palma-Fahey, 2016; Graham, 2018; Jørgensen, 2012). Finally, some dialectal studies have also considered sociolinguistic variables, such as works by Jørgensen (2012) and Hernández and Baldazo (2013), among others. The provision of full descriptions of all the American Spanish DMs is an immediate challenge for future research (for more work on pragmatic variation, see Chapter 15, this volume).

4 4.1

Future directions and conclusion Syntagmatic combinations of (informal) DMs

The combination of DMs (such as pues bueno ‘so well’), which is quite frequent in spontaneous conversations, is one of the less-addressed questions in this field, specifically as a result of the atomistic approach to DMs, in which often only a single DM is studied at a time. The few studies that address this issue (Cuenca & Marín, 2009; Pons Bordería, 2018b) focus mainly on differentiating between casual co-occurrences and those that are fixed to some degree. Cuenca and Marín (2009) observed two degrees of integration; namely, addition (y bueno ‘and well’) and composition (pues vale ‘so ok’).The first corresponds to casual co-occurrences expressing the propositional and structural functions of DMs occurring in minor transition places.The second functions as a complex unit that performs both structural and modal functions and that normally indicates major transition places (such as the beginning or the end of narratives). In turn, Pons Bordería (2018b) discusses the combination of DMs and discourse units. For example, in bueno pues the combination (modalization marker + connective) occurs in different discourse units, with the first having scope over the second; thus, each performs a different function ([bueno [pues . . .]]). By contrast, both DMs belong to the same discourse unit in pues bueno, perform a single function, and are routinized as a construction ([pues bueno]). At this point, further research is clearly necessary to indicate the rules guiding the combinations of DMs, and to explain the limits of such co-occurrences.

4.2

Contrastive studies

Although contrastive studies of DMs have increased in recent years, this area of study has not yet received sufficient attention. Four books have gathered contributions concerning the translation of Spanish DMs into other languages (Aschenberg & Loureda, 2011; Borreguero & GómezJordana, 2015). All the contributions discuss the known difficulty of finding equivalents in the target language; thus, pairs such as the English anyway/Spanish pues nada (Stenström, 2009) or Italian allora/ Spanish entonces ‘then’ (Bazzanella & Borreguero, 2011) show only partial matches. In some cases, the translations of Spanish DMs do not have any direct equivalents, as is the 196

Discourse markers in Spanish

case for hombre ‘man’ in French; the translator is compelled to select the most appropriate DM depending on the context (ça alors! ‘well,’ dis donc! ‘hey!,’ ben voyons! ‘well well’) (Djian & Pérez, 2014). In other cases, the best solution is a null translation or a non-DM equivalent, particularly in the case of reformulative DMs, which are much more frequent in Spanish than in English (Murillo, 2016).The translation of German modal particles into Spanish is extremely interesting, as they are a word class that is nonexistent in Romance languages. In this case, translation strategies vary from null translations to the use of -mente adverbs (Hasler, 2011). Moreover, the frequency of DM use varies according to the discourse genres or varieties that rarely coincide in L1 and L2. For example, since the Italian insomma and the Spanish en suma ‘in sum’ both stem from the Latin construction en summa ‘in sum,’ the etymological information and formal resemblance could lead to them being considered as equivalents. However, insomma is frequently used in conversations in Italian, while en suma is restricted to highly formal texts (Flores Acuña, 2003).An additional issue is the DMs used in languages in contact, either as loanwords (Aaron, 2004), or as the result of the influence of other languages (Escobar, 2005).This is undoubtedly an interesting point to be explored in multilingual regions, digital chats (e.g., the use of man in American chats), and in grammaticalization studies (Garachana, 2018). Directions for future work can follow the line of fine-tuning the set of L1 equivalents for Spanish DMs: contrastive studies of paradigms of DMs will help to improve a translation process that is highly dependent on factors such as position, frequency, register, and discourse genres. In addition, contrastive studies of languages that are typologically distant from Spanish will contribute to the development of automatic translations, and will provide a clear reference for future bilingual/multilingual dictionaries of Spanish DMs. Such dictionaries are essential in order to develop strategies for the teaching of DMs (see, for example, Holgado, 2017), since they may cause difficulties when learning a foreign language.

Notes 1 This paper was made possible by the research project Project FFI2016–77841-P, Unidades discursivas para una descripción sistemática de los marcadores del discurso en español (UDEMADIS), funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad/ AEI and ERDF. 2 The research group Diskurspartikeln und Kognition at the University of Heidelberg has conducted many experiments using techniques such as eye tracking and Linger to measure the processing costs of connectives and focus particles during reading tasks.The data provide empirical evidence that DMs decrease the processing time of the utterance, which indicates that they play a relevant role in the interpretation of utterances (Loureda, Recio, Nadal, & Cruz, 2019).

Further reading Loureda, O., & Acín, E. (Eds.). (2010). Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en español, hoy. Madrid: Arco Libros. This volume presents an updated, multidimensional view of Spanish DMs studies. It includes chapters on linguistic properties, as well on genres, variation, lexicography, and applications. Martín Zorraquino, M. A., & Portolés, J. (1999). Los marcadores del discurso. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 4051–4213). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. This is the first grammatical description of Spanish DMs that provides a complete classification; it constitutes the starting point for understanding how DMs operate and how this functional category is organized. Pons Rodríguez, L. (2010). Los marcadores del discurso en la historia del español. In Ó. Loureda & E.Acín (Eds.), Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en español, hoy (pp. 523–615). Madrid:Arco Libros. This chapter offers a detailed survey of diachronic and grammaticalization studies of Spanish DMs, as well as consideration of relevant methodological and theoretical points under discussion. 197

Llopis Cardona and Pons Bordería

References Aaron, J. E. (2004).‘So respetamos un tradición del uno al otro’: So and entonces in New Mexican bilingual discourse. Spanish in Context, 1(2), 161–179. Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. Corpus Diacrónico y Diatópico del Español de América (Cordiam) Retrieved from www.cordiam.org Alcina Franch, J., & Blecua, J. M. (1975). Gramática española. Barcelona: Ariel. Aschenberg, H., & Loureda, Ó. (2011). Marcadores del discurso: de la descripción a la definición. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert. Bazzanella, C., & Borreguero Zuloaga, M. (2011). Allora e entonces: problemi teorici e dati empirici. Oslo Studies in Language, 3(1), 7–45. Beinhauer,W. (1978 [1929]). El español coloquial. Madrid: Gredos. Bello, A. (1988 [1847]). Gramática de la lengua castellana. Destinada al uso de los americanos. Con las Notas de Rufino José Cuervo. Madrid:Arco Libros. Blakemore, D. (1987). Semantic constraints on relevance. London: Basil-Blackwell. Borreguero Zuloaga, M., & Gómez-Jordana Ferary, S. (Eds.). (2015). Les Marqueurs du discours dans les langues romanes: une approche contrastive. Limoges, France: Lambert-Lucas. Borzi, C. (2016). El ‘che’ argentino: sus contexto de uso y su significado. Philologia hispalensis, 30, 9–32. Briz Gómez,A. (1993a). Los conectores pragmáticos en español coloquial (I): su papel argumentativo. Contextos, 21/22, 145–188. Briz Gómez, A. (1993b). Los conectores pragmáticos en español coloquial (II): su papel metadiscursivo. Español Actual, 59, 39–56. Briz Gómez,A. (1998). El español coloquial en la conversación. Esbozo de pragmagramática. Barcelona: Ariel. Briz Gómez, A., & Albelda Marco, M. (2013). Una propuesta teórica y metodológica para el análisis de la atenuación lingüística en español y portugués. La base de un proyecto en común. Onomázein, 28, 288–319. Briz Gómez,A., & Pons Bordería, S. (2010). Unidades, marcadores discursivos y posición. In Ó. Loureda & E.Acín (Eds.), Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en español, hoy (pp. 327–358). Madrid:Arco Libros. Briz Gómez, A., Pons Bordería, S., & Portolés, J. (2008). Diccionario de partículas discursivas del español. Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat de València [online]. Retrieved from http: //www.dpde.es Briz Gómez, A., & Val.Es.Co. research group. (2002). Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales. Madrid: Arco-Libros. Cabedo Nebot,A. (2013). Sobre prosodia, marcadores del discurso y unidades del discurso en español: evidencias de un corpus oral espontáneo. Onomázein, 28, 201–213. Cano Aguilar, R. (1990). Periodo oracional y construcción del texto en la prosa medieval castellana. Glosa, 1, 13–30. Cano Aguilar, R. (2007). Conectores de discurso en el español del siglo XVI. Lexis, 31(1–2), 5–45. Casado, M. (1993). Introducción a la gramática del texto en español. Madrid:Arco Libros. Cestero Mancera, A. M. (2019). Apéndices interrogativos de control de contacto: estudio sociolingüístico. Cuadernos de lingüística, 6(1), 1–65. Corpus Hispánico y Americano en la Red: Textos Antiguos (CHARTA). Retrieved from www.corpuscharta.es Chinellato, A. (2013). El marcador ¿oyó? en el habla coloquial venezolana. Una aproximación pragmadiscursiva. Sapiens, 14(1), 103–114. Company, C. (2006). Subjectification of verbs into discourse markers: Semantic-pragmatic change only? In B. Cornillie & N. Delbecque (Eds.), Topics in subjectification and modalization (pp. 97–121). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Company, C. (2008). The directionality of grammaticalization in Spanish. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 9(2), 200–224. Company, C. (2014). Principios teóricos versus datos de corpus: ¿diálogo o enfrentamiento? Los adverbios en -mente como marcadores de discurso. In M. M. García Negroni (Ed.), Marcadores de discurso. Perspectivas y contrastes (pp. 13–33). Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos. Cortés Rodríguez, L. (1991). Sobre conectores, expletivos y muletillas en el español hablado. Málaga: Ágora. Cortés Rodríguez, L. (2018). 1985–2015: El creciente interés por la oralidad en los estudios del español. In J.V. Lozano (Ed.), Études de Linguistique Ibéro-romane en hommage à Marie-France Delport (pp. 13–51). Rouen, France: Publications électroniques de l’Eriac—LIbeRo. Cortés Rodríguez, L., & Camacho, M. M. (2005). Unidades de segmentación y marcadores del discurso: elementos esenciales en el procesamiento discursivo oral. Barcelona: Arco-Libros. 198

Discourse markers in Spanish

Cuenca, M. J. (1999). La connexió i la construcció del text. Revista de didàctica de la llengua i la literatura, 17, 77–90. Cuenca, M. J., & Marín, M. J. (2009). Co-occurrence of discourse markers in Catalan and Spanish oral narrative. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 899–914. Davies, M. (2010). Corpus del español. Retrieved from www.corpusdelespanol.org Djian Charbit, M., & Pérez, J.V. (2014). Estudio discursivo del marcador hombre y sus equivalencias en francés. In M. M. García Negroni (Ed.), Marcadores de discurso. Perspectivas y contrastes (pp.  123–139). Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos. Domínguez Mujica, C. L. (2005). Marcadores de (in)conclusión en el español hablado en Mérida-Venezuela. Boletín de Lingüística, 17, 3–22. Ducrot, O. (1983). Opérateurs argumentatifs et visée argumentative. Cahiers de linguistique Française, 5, 7–36. Ducrot, O. et al. (1980). Les mots du discours. Paris: Édition de Minuit. Escandell-Vidal, M.V., & Leonetti, M. (2011). On the rigidity of procedural meaning. In M.V. EscandellVidal, M. Leonetti, & A. Ahern (Eds.), Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (pp. 81–101). Bingley, UK: Emerald. Escobar, A. M. (2005). From subordinate marker to discourse marker: Que in Andean Spanish. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 4(1), 93–113. Estellés Arguedas, M. (2015). Expressing evidentiality through prosody? Prosodic voicing in reported speech in Spanish colloquial conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 85, 138–154. Fernández Bernárdez, C. (2002). Expresiones metalingüísticas con el verbo decir. A Coruña: Universidade da Coruña. Fischer, K. (2000). From cognitive semantics to lexical pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyer. Flores Acuña, E. (2003). La traducción de los marcadores del discurso en italiano y español: el caso de insomma. TRANS. Revista de Traductología, 7, 35–45. Fraser, B. (1999).What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 931–952. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (1987). Enlaces extraoracionales. Sevilla: Alfar. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2003). Operador/conector, un criterio para la sintaxis discursiva. RILCE. Revista de Filología, 19(1), 61–85. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2009). Diccionario de conectores y operadores. Madrid:Arco Libros. Fuentes Rodríguez, C., Placencia, M. E., & Palma-Fahey, M. (2016). Regional pragmatic variation in the use of the discourse marker pues in informal talk among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile) and Seville (Spain). Journal of Pragmatics, 97, 74–92. Garachana Camarero, M. (1998). La evolución de los conectores contraargumentativos: la gramaticalización de no obstante y sin embargo. In M.A. Martín Zorraquino & E. Montolío (Eds.), Los marcadores del discurso. Teoría y análisis (pp. 193–212). Madrid:Arco Libros. Garachana Camarero, M. (2018). New challenges to the theory of grammaticalization. Evidence from the rise of Spanish counter-argumentative markers no obstante, no contrastante and no embargante. In S. Pons Bordería & Ó. Loureda Lamas (Eds.), Beyond grammaticalization and discourse markers: New issues in the study of language change (pp. 198–230). Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Garcés, G. (1852 [1791]). Fundamento del vigor y elegancia de la lengua castellana expuesto en el propio y vario uso de sus partículas. Madrid: Rivadeneyra. Garcés Gómez, M. P. (2008). La organización del discurso: marcadores de ordenación y reformulación. Madrid and Frankfurt: Lingüística Iberoamericana. García Negroni, M. M. (2012). “Ma qué” y “otra que”: dos marcadores de descalificación del español rioplatense. Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica, 28, 57–75. García Negroni, M. M., & Marcovecchio, A. M. (2014). Igual a un lado y otro del Atlántico: Un origen común para dos valores argumentativos. In M. M. García Negroni (Ed.), Marcadores de discurso. Perspectivas y contrastes (pp. 141–158). Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos. Gili Gaya, S. (1961 [1943]). Curso superior de sintaxis española. Barcelona: Biblograf. Graham, L. A. (2018).Variation in hesitation.The case of este vs. eh in Latin American Spanish. Spanish in Context, 15(1), 1–26. Grajales Alzate, R. (2011). Funciones del marcador discursivo pues en el habla de Medellín, Colombia. Forma y función, 24(1), 25–45. Hasler, G. (2011).Adverbios españoles, marcadores discursivos alemanes: ¿un problema terminológico o un desafío para la lingüística contrastiva? In H.Aschenberg & Ó. Loureda (Eds.), Marcadores del discurso: de la descripción a la definición (pp. 247–262). Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert. Hernández, J. E., & Baldazo, R. (2013). Distribución variable de un marcador del discurso: No decir nada es como decir verdad. Revista Española de Lingüística, 43(2), 113–150. 199

Llopis Cardona and Pons Bordería

Holgado Lage, A. (2017). Diccionario de marcadores discursivos para estudiantes de español como segunda lengua. Bern: Peter Lang. Hummel, M. (2016). The semiotic basis of conceptual and procedural meaning. In B. García Hernández & M. A. Penas Ibáñez  (Eds.), Semántica latina y románica:  unidades de significado conceptual y procedimental (pp. 57–100). New York: Peter Lang. Instituto de Investigación Rafael Lapesa de la Real Academia Española. (2013). Corpus del Nuevo Diccionario Histórico del Espñaol (CDH) [online]. Retrieved from http://web.frl.es/CNDHE Jørgensen,A. M. (2012). Funciones del marcador pragmático como en el lenguaje juvenil español y chileno. In M. E. Placencia & C. García (Eds.), Pragmática y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispanohablante. Foro Hispánico (pp. 209–231).Amsterdam: Rodopi. Jucker,A. H., & Ziv,Y. (1998). Discourse markers. Descriptions and theory.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kabatek, J. (2005).Tradiciones discursivas y cambio lingüístico. Lexis: Revista de Lingüística y Literatura, 29(2), 151–177. Koch, P., & Oesterreicher, W. (1990). Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch. Tubingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer. Kotwica, D. (2019). La evidencialidad en el artículo científico. Historia de un género discursivo de 1799 a 1920. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Llopis Cardona,A. (2014). Aproximación funcional a los marcadores discursivos. Frankfurt and Bern: Peter Lang. Llopis Cardona, A. (2016). Significado y funciones en los marcadores discursivos. Verba: Anuario galego de filoloxia, 43, 231–268. López Quero, S. (2018). La función apelativa del marcador discursivo venga en Twitter. Onomázein, 39, 48–65. López Serena, A., & Borreguero Zuloaga, M. (2010). La variación lengua hablada vs lengua escrita. In Ó. Loureda & E. Acín (Eds.), Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en español, hoy (pp. 415–495). Madrid: Arco Libros. Loureda, Ó., & Acín, E. (Eds.). (2010). Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en español, hoy. Madrid: Arco Libros. Loureda, Ó., Recio, I., Nadal, L., & Cruz, A. (2019). Empirical studies of the construction of discourse: Pragmatics and beyond.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Maldonado, R., & de la Mora, J. (2015). Dizque: Epistemics blurring evidentials in Mexican Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 85, 168–180. Martín Butragueño, P. (2003). Hacia una descripción prosódica de los marcadores discursivos. Datos del español de México. In P. Martín Butragueño & E. Herrera (Eds.), La tonía. Dimensiones fonética y fonológicas (pp. 375–402). México, DF: El Colegio de México. Martín Zorraquino, M. A. (1992). Partículas y modalidad. In G. Holtus, M. Metzeltin, & C. Schmitt (Eds.), Lexikon der romanistischen Linguistik (pp. 110–124).Tubinga, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Martín Zorraquino, M.A., & Montolío, E. (Eds.). (1998). Marcadores del discurso. Barcelona:Arco Libros. Martín Zorraquino, M. A., & Portolés, J. (1999). Los marcadores del discurso. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 4051–4213). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Mederos Martín, H. (1988). Procedimientos de cohesión en el español actual. Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain: Publicaciones del Cabildo Insular de Tenerife. Moliner, M. (1967). Diccionario de uso del español. Madrid: Gredos. Montolío, E. (2001). Conectores de la lengua escrita. Barcelona:Ariel Practicum. Murillo, S. (2016). Reformulation markers and polyphony:A contrastive English-Spanish analysis. Languages in Contrast, 16(1), 1–30. Narbona Jiménez,A. (1989). Las subordinadas adverbiales impropias en español. Málaga: Ágora. Ocampo, F. (2006). Movement towards discourse is not grammaticalization: The evolution of claro from adjective to discourse particle in spoken Spanish. In N. Sagarra & A. J.Toribio (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 308–319). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Octavio de Toledo,Álvaro S. (2016). El aprovechamiento del CORDE para el estudio sintáctico del primer español moderno (ca. 1675–1825). In J. Kabatek (Ed.), Lingüística de corpus y lingüística histórica iberorrománica (pp. 57–89). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Oesterreicher,W. (2007). Gramática histórica, tradiciones discursivas y variedades lingüísticas. Esbozo programático. Revista de Historia de la Lengua Española, 1, 109–128. Poblete Bennett, M. T. (1999). Distribución de marcadores discursivos en distintos tipos de discurso. Onomázein, 4, 53–75. Pons Bordería, S. (1998). Conexión y conectores. Estudio de su relación en el registro informal de la lengua.València, Spain: Universitat de València. 200

Discourse markers in Spanish

Pons Bordería, S. (2001). Connectives/Discourse markers. An overview. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Literaris, VI, 219–243. Pons Bordería, S. (2006). A functional approach to the study of discourse markers. In K. Fischer (Ed.), Approaches to discourse particles (pp. 77–99).Amsterdam: Elsevier. Pons Bordería, S. (2008). Gramaticalización por tradiciones discursivas: El caso de ‘esto es.’ In J. Kabatek (Ed.), Sintaxis histórica del español y cambio lingüístico: Nuevas perspectivas desde las tradiciones discursivas (pp. 249–274). Madrid: Iberoamericana. Pons Bordería, S. (2014a). El siglo XX como diacronía: intuición y comprobación en el caso de “o esa.” Rilce, 30(3), 985–1016. Pons Bordería, S. (Ed.). (2014b). Discourse segmentation in Romance languages.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pons Bordería, S. (2018a). Paths of grammaticalization: Beyond the LP/RP debate. In S. Pons Bordería & Ó. Loureda (Eds.), Beyond grammaticalization and discourse markers: New issues in the study of language change (pp. 334–383). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Pons Bordería, S. (2018b). The combination of discourse markers in spontaneous conversations. Revue Romane, 53(1), 121–158. Pons Rodríguez, L. (2010). Los marcadores del discurso en la historia del español. In Ó. Loureda & E.Acín (Eds.), Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en español, hoy (pp. 523–615). Madrid:Arco Libros. Portolés Lázaro, J. (1989). El conector argumentativo pues. Dicenda, 8, 117–133. Portolés Lázaro, J. (2001 [1998]). Los marcadores del discurso. Barcelona: Ariel. Portolés Lázaro, J. (2010). Los marcadores del discurso y la estructura informativa. In Ó. Loureda & E.Acín (Eds.), Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en espanol, hoy (pp. 281–325). Madrid:Arco Libros. Portolés Lázaro, J. (2014). Gramática, semántica y discurso en el estudio de los marcadores. In M. M. García Negroni (Ed.), Marcadores de discurso. Perspectivas y contrastes (pp. 203–231). Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos. Puig, L. (1983). En torno a la conjunción pero. Una aplicación de la teoría de la argumentación al análisis del discurso. Nueva Antropología, 22, 107–118. Real Academia Española. Corpus diacrónico del español (CORDE). Retrieved from http://corpus.rae.es/ creanet.html Ridruejo, E. (1993). Conectores transfrásticos en la prosa medieval castellana. In G. Hilty (Ed.), Actes du XX Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes (pp. 629–642).Tübingen, Germany: Francke. Salvá,V. (1988 [1835]). Gramática de la lengua castellana. Madrid:Arco Libros. San Martín Núñez, A. (2017). Análisis sociolingüístico de los reformuladores de explicación en el español hablado de Santiago de Chile. Revista signos, 50(93), 124–147. Santos Río, L. (2003). Diccionario de partículas. Salamanca: Luso-Española de Ediciones. Schiffrin, D. (1997 [1987]). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwenter, S. (2002). Discourse markers and the PA/SN distinction. Journal of Linguistics, 38, 43–69. Stenström, A. B. (2009). Pragmatic markers in contrast: Spanish pues nada and English anyway. In A. B. Stenström & A. M. Jørgensen (Eds.), Youngspeak in a multilingual perspective (pp. 137–159). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Traugott, E. C., & Dasher, R. (2002). Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Travis, C. E. (2005). Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish:A study in polysemy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Travis, C. E. (2006). Subjetivización de construcciones: los verbos ‘cognitivos’ en el español conversacional. In R. M. Ortiz Ciscomani (Ed.), Serie Memorias del VIII Encuentro Internacional de Lingüística en el Noroeste (Vol. 2, pp. 85–109). Hermosillo, Sonora, México: UniSon. Valdés, J. D. (1983 [1535]). Diálogo de la lengua. Barcelona: Orbis. Vigara Tauste,A. M. (1980). Aspectos del español hablado. Madrid: SGEL. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1993). Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua, 90, 1–25.

201

11 Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics1 Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig and Sabrina Mossman

1

Introduction

‘Formulaic language’ describes a variety of recurrent multiword strings that form a phrase or unit of meaning. Units of formulaic language, or ‘formulas,’ have been referred to by a number of terms, including ‘formulaic sequences,’‘multiword expressions,’‘routines,’ and ‘lexical phrases,’ to name only a few (Schmitt, 2004; Wray, 2002). Multiple terms are also found in articles on Spanish, including expresiones fijas ‘fixed expressions’ (García, 2011), unidades fraseológicas ‘phraseological units’ (Chiang, 2004), fórmulas rutinarias ‘routine formulas’ (Martín Noguerol, 2013), and secuencias formulaicas ‘formulaic sequences’ (Martos Eliche & Contreras Izquierdo, 2018). Formulaic language is often explored for its psycholinguistic properties (ARAL, 2012; Schmitt, 2004; Wray, 2002). In contrast, in this chapter, we explore pragmatic perspectives of formulaic language.The terms adopted in pragmatics for formulaic language focus attention on the conventional, social, and pragmatic features, as seen in the terms ‘conventional expressions’ (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009;Taguchi, Li, & Xiao, 2013), ‘pragmatic routines’ (Roever, 2005), ‘routine formulas’ (Coulmas, 1994), and ‘situation-bound utterances’ (Kecskes, 2003). Coulmas (1981) emphasized the role that such expressions play in the social life of a community, describing them as “tacit agreements, which the members of a community presume to be shared by every reasonable co-member” (p. 4).The term ‘conventional expression’ was adopted by Bardovi-Harlig (2009) to emphasize conventionality (Erman & Warren, 2000) and communitywide use (Myles, Hooper, & Mitchell, 1998). Conventional expressions are “combinations of at least two words favored by native speakers in preference to an alternative combination which could have been equivalent had there been no conventionalization” (Erman & Warren, p. 31). In this chapter we use the terms ‘conventional expressions’ and ‘pragmatic routines,’ which we operationalize more fully in Section 3, to describe the type of formulaic language of interest here. Conventional expressions and pragmatic routines are closely tied to specific speech acts and indicate the illocutionary force of the speech acts in which they occur and include No problem and No hay de qué used to deflect thanking, and See you (later) and Nos vemos used for leave-taking. They are inherently social in nature and characterize language use within speech communities, often indicating speakers’ membership within those communities. Conventional expressions are distinguished from pragmatic routines by their relatively high use in particular situations, operationalized as use by over 50% of native speakers in a specific context, whereas pragmatic routines 203

Bardovi-Harlig and Mossman

are identified by frequency of production in the realization of certain speech acts. Because our use of ‘conventional expressions’ and ‘pragmatic routines’ requires empirical verification, we will employ ‘formulaic language’ or other relevant terms used by the authors to describe formulaic language whose preference or frequency of use has not been explicitly established or reported. In the sections that follow, we review the existing literature on formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics, providing an evaluation in light of current empirical research in other languages.We then present research protocols that have been used internationally in the study of conventional expressions as pragmalinguistic resources for native speakers and learners and illustrate these with one dialect of Spanish.The chapter closes by considering how research designs can be modified to account for social and regional variation in Spanish.

2

Review of existing research

Although conventional expressions are only one of many pragmalinguistic resources available to speakers (Bardovi-Harlig, 2016), formulaic language has been of interest to pragmatics researchers for quite some time (Coulmas, 1981) and discussions of a range of languages have appeared in the international English-language pragmatics literature (Bardovi-Harlig, 2012). Kuiper (2004) distinguishes between formulas that are used pragmatically, and other types of “phrasal lexical items” (p. 51) that are not. Kuiper observes: Since all formulae are indexed for particular conditions of use, they will appear only in situations where such conditions are appropriate. Apologies, farewells, condolences will be used when speakers need to say sorry, goodbye, or express sympathy to someone who has lost a relative or friend. (p. 51) In studying formulaic sequences in pragmatics, we have found it useful to distinguish ‘conventional expressions’ from ‘pragmatic routines.’While both are associated with speech acts and indicate illocutionary force, there may be many pragmatic routines associated with a speech act, such as hasta luego ‘until later,’ hasta mañana ‘until tomorrow,’ and hasta otro día ‘until another day’ for leave-taking (Chiang, 2004). In contrast, conventional expressions are additionally associated with specific pragmatic contexts and are the preferred expression of NSs in those contexts (cf. Erman & Warren, 2000). Because conventional expressions are closely tied to particular pragmatic contexts, they can differ noticeably from one context to another. These contexts, or context-expression mappings, cannot be guessed at but must be empirically identified. For example, a speaker may use different thanking expressions with the same interlocutor depending on the specific context in which gratitude is expressed. A case in point comes from two contexts in which native English-speaking undergraduates who participated in an oral conversation simulation thanked their teacher in two ways.When granted a make-up test, they said “{Thanks/ Thank you} so much,” but they said “{Thanks/Thank you} for your {time/help}” at the end of office hours (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009). Establishing native-speaker use of conventional expressions is a prerequisite to the investigation of their acquisition in L2 pragmatics.

2.1

The acquisition of conventional expressions

Research on the acquisition of formulaic language in L2 pragmatics dates to the earliest studies on pragmatics (Coulmas, 1981; Scarcella, 1979), but was only occasionally undertaken in the immediate subsequent years (e.g., House, 1996); it was reinvigorated in the early 2000s, following studies by Kecskes (2003) and Roever (2005). Studies on the acquisition of conventional expressions have 204

Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics

increased in the last decade, investigating English (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009), Chinese (Bardovi-Harlig & Su, 2018;Taguchi, Li, & Xiao, 2013), French (Edmonds, 2014), and Russian (Furniss, 2016). The learnability challenge is for learners to recognize conventional expressions from among a set of grammatical equivalents; what Pawley and Syder (1983) called nativelike selection.This is by no means automatic, as Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993, p. 9), among others, have observed, “one area where insufficient control of pragmalinguistic knowledge is particularly obvious is that of pragmatic routines.” Recent research on the acquisition of conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics shows that they are learned relatively late. Their acquisition can be influenced by proficiency (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009; Bardovi-Harlig & Su, 2018), morpho-syntactic development (Bardovi-Harlig & Stringer, 2017; Stengers, Boers, Housen, & Eyckmans, 2011), instruction (Bardovi-Harlig, Mossman, & Su, 2017; Bardovi-Harlig, Mossman, & Vellenga, 2015), study abroad (Taguchi et  al., 2013), intensity of interaction in the target language (Bardovi-Harlig & Bastos, 2011), the specific conventional expression, and the context(s) in which they occur. Increased interaction (Bardovi-Harlig & Bastos, 2011) and instruction (Furniss, 2016) help learners distinguish conventional expressions from grammatical—but unconventional—sequences. It is this type of knowledge that underpins Pawley and Syder’s (1983) principle of nativelike selection. While form garners much attention, the pragmatics of use is equally important. Learners’ ability to use a conventional expression depends on their pragmatic competence. Sociopragmatic knowledge allows a learner to create or recognize the cultural context in which the conventional expression is used (e.g., recognizing or creating a culturally appropriate context for an apology creates an opportunity to use an apology expression; Bardovi-Harlig, 2019; Kuiper & Tan, 1989). Pragmalinguistic knowledge allows a learner to master the form and meaning of a conventional expression and associate it with appropriate speech acts and illocutionary force.

2.2 Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics The number of articles on formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics is modest compared to the robust investigation on Spanish pragmatics more generally. In this review we attempt to highlight the issues that have been raised in the Spanish pragmatics literature thus far and to convey a sense of the expressions that have been identified.The papers have a variety of goals: refining definitions of formulaic language in pragmatics, describing native-speaker usage (from data or intuition), and advocating instruction for L2 learners. In this section we use the term ‘formula’ to reflect its use by the authors. Alvarado Ortega (2007, 2008) defines formulas rutinarias ‘routine formulas’ by identifying their unique characteristics, relating them to pragmatics, and distinguishing them from other types of formulaic language. She proposes that the key distinction between routine formulas and other types of formulaic language is that routine formulas exhibit three types of fixedness: formal, semantic-pragmatic, and psycholinguistic. She illustrates these with vaya tela, an expression of (often negative) surprise; loosely, ‘what a nightmare’ (Vaya tela was attested in Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales, Val.Es.Co., the Valencia Español Coloquial Corpus, Briz & Grupo Val. Es.Co., 2002). Formal fixedness refers to the fixed word order and morphology (vaya tela but *tela vaya, *va tela). Semantic-pragmatic fixedness refers to the context; the expression vaya tela can be used only if the situation warrants an expression of surprise. Psycholinguistic fixedness refers to the conventionalized and institutionalized nature of the expression as well as speakers’ conceptualization of it as a single unit. García (2011) employs Alvarado Ortega’s (2008) classification system, focusing on the semantic-pragmatic criterion, relating expressions to illocutionary contexts, and further classifying the 205

Bardovi-Harlig and Mossman

expressions by linguistic structure (interrogatives, imperatives, declaratives, and exclamatives) and type of modality (epistemic, deontic, and subjective). For example, the deontic category includes expressions associated with requests (me hace el favor ‘could you do me a favor’ or perdone la molestia ‘excuse me for bothering you’) and commands (¡póngase pilas! ‘hurry up!’). García additionally addresses the issue of region in his examination of pragmatically formulaic language from Medellín, Colombia. The data primarily come from the DEVA (Diccionario Descriptivo del Español del Valle de Aburrá) corpus, a collection developed to describe the variety of Spanish used in Medellín and the surrounding metropolitan area.The corpus is comprised of spontaneous local conversations, regional news, and colloquial writing from the Medellín region, and while some of the expressions found in the corpus are also found in standard Spanish, such as ¿y a usted qué le importa? ‘what do you care?,’ many of the expressions are specific to the region, including an expression of pleasant surprise, ¡qué nota! ‘how cool!,’ along with variants including ¡qué verraquera! and ¡qué verriondera! and an expression of anger ¡qué ira! ‘I’m so angry!’ Dumitrescu (2011) reports on formulas used in Spanish well-wishing and thanking exchanges. In order to study wishes, Dumitrescu elicited written data from 66 NSs, ages 18–72 (30 from Mexico, the remainder from nine Latin American countries and Spain).The 24 wish-generating items were prefaced with the question, ¿Qué dice la gente en su país de origen en las siguientes situaciones? ‘What do people in your country of origin say in the following situations?’ followed by broadly described situations, which included Al despedirse de unos amigos que se van de viaje/ de vacaciones ‘Upon saying goodbye to some friends who are going on vacation’ and Antes de empezar a comer ‘Before beginning to eat.’ NSs wrote turns for both the well-wisher and the recipient in an imaginary conversation in response to the situations (cf. free DCTs, Barron, 2003). Dumitrescu reports the results anecdotally, providing a range of expressions, but not rates of use. For example, upon saying goodbye to someone who is taking a vacation, Dumitrescu describes the most commonly supplied wishes as Que te diviertas or Que lo pases bien (with the Latin American variant, Que la pases bien), equivalents of ‘have a good time.’ NS also listed the alternatives Que te la pases bien, Que lo pases lindo, Que te vaya muy bonito, Que te vaya muy suave (recall that of Dumitrescu’s 66 participants, 30 were from Mexico, the remainder from nine Latin American countries and Spain).The lack of clear preferences may be attributed to the age range of the speakers (18–72) and/or the range of countries of origin represented by the speakers (who lived in Los Angeles at the time of data collection). Dumitrescu similarly elicited gratitude exchanges. One hundred-twenty respondents (20 learners of Spanish, 65 Spanish-English bilinguals, and 35 NSs of Spanish who had recently arrived in the U.S. from Mexico, Spain, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Colombia, and Argentina) completed an adapted translation of the written DCT that had been used by Eisenstein and Bodman (1986) to elicit thanking expressions in American English. Participants wrote both the thanking expression and the reply.The learners were described as having “great difficulty” and both bilingual speakers and learners were described as demonstrating “poor expressivity” and “lack of variety” (p. 45). Dumitrescu estimates that 70% of the learner responses had grammatical errors, listing both NS production and learner errors as examples, but the list-like presentation for all groups fails to convey whether particular expressions are typical in specific contexts. The papers by Chiang (2004), de Pablos-Ortega (2011), Martín Noguerol (2013), and Valls (2012) share a pedagogical motivation. Additionally, de Pablos-Ortega presents NSs’ interpretation and correction of thanking expressions and Valls compares apologies in film and Spanish language textbooks. De Pablos-Ortega (2011) reported a survey of thanking expressions in 64 Spanish-as-aforeign-language (SFL) textbooks.2 To check the naturalness of the textbook thanking expressions, de Pablos-Ortega asked NSs to complete an acceptability judgment task with a correction 206

Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics

component. The acceptability judgment task included 12 scenarios adapted from textbook conversations in which the final thanking expression had been replaced by a cordial, but nonthanking turn as illustrated in Example (1), which had originally ended with a thanking expression followed by the closing, Muchas gracias por todo. Hasta la semana que viene ‘Thank you for everything. Until next week.’ (1)

En la consulta del médico:3,4 Doctor:

Primero voy a tomarle la tensión, y voy a recetarle una pomada para la espalda y unas pastillas. De todas formas, no debe preocuparse. Paciente: ¿Nos vemos, entonces, la semana que viene? Doctor: Sí, cuando estén listos los resultados de las pruebas.Yo le avisaré. Paciente: ¡Hasta luego doctor! ¿Cree que la respuesta final del personaje P es apropiada? NO ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ SÍ Si piensa que no, ¿qué cree que debería haber dicho? _____________________ ‘At a doctor’s office: Doctor. First I am going to take your blood pressure and I am going to prescribe for you some cream for your back and some tablets.Anyway, you shouldn’t worry. Patient: Shall I come back again next week? Doctor: Yes. Once the test results are ready, I’ll call/inform you. Patient: See you, doctor! Do you think that person P’s final reply is appropriate? NO ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ YES If not, what do you think s/he should have said?’ ______________________ Respondents were asked if the last turn was appropriate and given a 5-point Likert scale with Sí ‘Yes’ and No ‘No’ at the endpoints; they were then asked to provide an alternative turn whenever they judged the turn to be inappropriate.The participants were 100 Spanish NS between 18 and 35 who attended a university in Madrid.The written DCT responses from the NSs were more varied than the thanking tokens in the textbook that presented only gracias ‘thanks/ thank you,’ muchas gracias ‘many thanks/ thank you very much,’ and (muchas) gracias por ‘thank you (very much) for.’ Valls (2012) investigated apologies in Peninsular Spanish. She compared the apologies in seven SFL textbooks to apologies in 15 films to determine whether the apologies in textbooks were consistent with those found in movies, both in terms of form and context.The textbooks were current, distributed by major publishers and, with one exception, followed the guidelines for developing communicative competence by the Common European Framework (Consejo de Europa, 2002) and the Curricular Plan of the Cervantes Institute (Instituto Cervantes, 2007); both textbooks and films were produced in Spain. Apologies in the films were identified by first locating offense-causing situations and then coding the apologies. Apologies were classified as exhibiting: (a) routine formulas (lo siento, perdona, [and perdón, perdóname, perdone] and disculpa/e, which can mean ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘forgive (me)’ [formal and informal], and ‘excuse me’ [formal and informal], depending on the context); (b) explicit apologies (stating an intention or desire to apologize as in quiero pedirle perdón ‘I want to apologize’); or part of a mixed category (c), exhibiting 11 subcategories. Valls found that routine formulas were the single most common means of apologizing in both textbooks (25%) and in films (37%). They were largely the same in textbooks and films, with lamento que ‘I regret that’ and me avergüenza ‘I’m ashamed/ embarrassed’ occurring in the films 207

Bardovi-Harlig and Mossman

but not the textbooks.The textbooks provided several formulaic expressions that were not in the films, including no lo hice con mala intención/ adrede ‘I didn’t have bad intentions’/ ‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ lo hice sin querer/ sin darme cuenta ‘I did it without meaning to/ realizing it,’ and mis más sinceras disculpas ‘my sincerest apologies.’ Martín Noguerol’s (2013) paper argues for including formula instruction in classes whose goal is to promote intercultural competence. In making her case for the teaching of expressions in pragmatics, she identifies four situations that hypothetically could hold in a first language/ culture and a second language/culture: (a) same context, same expressions (hasta manaña ‘until tomorrow/later’); (b) (buenas tardes ‘good afternoon’ by a Spanish speaker and the equivalent of buenos días ‘good morning’ by a French speaker at 2 p.m.); (c) different contexts, or a context not worthy of comment in one language/culture, resulting in an expression in one language and no expression in the other; or (d) different contexts that use the same expression in one language, but two expressions in the other.5 To facilitate the acquisition of these expressions, she recommends identifying prototypical expressions for speech act realization. Illustrating this with thanking, she ranks muchas gracias ‘thank you very much’ as prototypical, moving to te lo agradezco mucho ‘I appreciate it very much,’ followed by no tenías que haberte molestado ‘you shouldn’t have bothered,’ and finally, the most restricted, Que Dios te lo pague ‘May God reward you.’6 She suggests that instruction should begin with prototypical expressions. She also identifies four factors that influence the choice of alternative expressions, illustrating these with greetings: relationship between interlocutors (¿Qué tal? ‘How are you?,’ ¿Cómo andamos? ‘How are you doing?,’ Hola, buenos días ‘Hi, good morning’), region (¿Qué onda? ‘What’s up?,’¿Qué hubo? ‘Hey’), text type (a letter, Querido Juan: ¿Cómo estás? ‘Dear John: How are you?’ or a conversation, ¿Qué te cuentas? ‘What’s new?’), and, relevant for greetings, time of day (buenos días ‘good morning,’ buenas tardes ‘good afternoon,’ buenas noches ‘good evening.’ Finally, she recommends considering each of the specific contexts in which the expressions occur (see also Chiang, 2004).7 Chiang (2004) also advocates including fórmulas rutinarias sociales ‘social routine formulas’ in pragmatics instruction. Chiang presents tables of routines organized by speech acts and divided into three main categories: routines that realize polite speech acts, those that realize impolite acts, and those that realize speech acts that are neutral with respect to politeness (from Haverkate, 1994; see also Alvarado Ortega, 2007). Among expressions realizing polite speech acts, Chiang places expressions for thanking, responding to thanks, apologizing, offering condolences, greetings, and leave-takings; e.g., for apologies, Con perdón ‘Excuse me,’ Lo siento ‘I’m sorry,’ and Mil disculpas/perdones ‘I’m so sorry.’ In the second group realizing impolite speech acts, Chiang places commands, refusals, and expressions of indifference; e.g., among refusals, Chiang lists a otro perro con ese hueso ‘to another dog with that bone’/ ‘ask someone else.’ Chiang encourages teaching social expressions by function or speech act and context. Taken together, these articles offer a picture of the current state of research in formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics. The authors raise the issue of variation, with regional variation being the most frequently considered (Dumitrescu, 2011; García, 2011; Martín Noguerol, 2013;Valls, 2012).This is important to new research in Spanish because variation has not been widely studied in the general acquisitional research on conventional expressions. De PablosOrtega also controls for pragmatic variables, such as addressee and value of the item/action referenced by thanking.Valls and Martín Noguerol are in line with current pragmatic pedagogy by verifying textbook examples against NS production, and in so doing provide examples of NS speech-act–based formula use.Valls’ comparison of films and textbooks also draws attention to morphological variation in response to addressee, where one formula may show both familiar and formal morphology as in disculpa/e ‘sorry.’8 While we can use these papers as a starting point 208

Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics

for empirical investigations in Spanish, verifying frequency or preference in contexts, testing hypothesized scales of prototypicality of expressions, and documenting regional variation, they lack the quantitative presentations used in recent empirical studies of pragmatics in general and formulaic language in particular. Intuition and anecdotal presentation are insufficient for determining target-language (and/or regional) norms for either acquisitional studies or pedagogical input. In the next sections we review methodology that has been used to determine targets in other languages and show how it could be applied to Spanish.

3

Methodological considerations

The most important methodological step in studies of the acquisition of formulaic language in L2 pragmatics is the identification of the expressions. In order to identify conventional expressions and pragmatic routines we divide the process into two steps: first, making an empirically based list of expressions that are likely to recur in specific contexts, which we will call ‘candidate expressions’ and, second, testing these expressions for relatively high use in particular situations (for conventional expressions) or for frequency of production (for pragmatic routines). When candidate expressions prove to be the favorite expression in a context or highly frequent, we refer to them as ‘conventional expressions’ and ‘pragmatic routines,’ respectively.

3.1 Identifying candidate expressions Candidate expressions have been collected from a variety of sources, including field notes on authentic conversations (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009; Bardovi-Harlig et al., 2010;Taguchi et al., 2013), TV reality shows, graffiti dialogues, and diary accounts (Culpeper, 2010), multiple-expression generation using DCTs (Edmonds, 2014), DCTs completed by instructors (Wong, 2012), L2 learners’ self-report on useful expressions during study abroad (Bardovi-Harlig & Su, 2018;Yang, 2016), textbooks (Bardovi-Harlig et al., 2015;Yang, 2016), travel phrasebooks (Taguchi et al., 2013), and the Soviet and Russian film subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus (Furniss, 2016).

3.2 Establishing the conventionality of candidate expressions Once candidate expressions have been identified, conventionality is established using two means: NS use in the same tasks completed by learners or frequency of occurrence in an appropriately matched corpus. When conventionality is confirmed by NS production, candidate expressions are regarded as conventional when they are the favorite response, exceeding a 50% cut-off (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009; Bardovi-Harlig & Su, 2018; Edmonds, 2014;Taguchi et al., 2013). Culpeper confirmed that 50% of the uses of the candidate impolite utterances he had collected were considered impolite in the British National Corpus.Yang (2016) used a higher cut-off for NS production at 67% and Taguchi et al. (2013) added a context judgment in which at least 50% of the NSs judged the situation as “occurring regularly” (p. 32). An alternative means of establishing conventionality is to ascertain the frequency of occurrence of candidate expressions in an appropriate corpus (e.g., a conversational corpus for conversational expressions). Biber and colleagues established a range of 10–40 occurrences per million words as frequent rates for multi-word expressions in corpora (Biber, Conrad, & Cortes, 2004; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999). Following this standard, Bardovi-Harlig et al. (2015) identified pragmatic routines as instructional targets when they met or exceeded the range of 10–40 occurrences/ million words using the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken 209

Bardovi-Harlig and Mossman

English (MICASE; Simpson, Briggs, Ovens, & Swales, 2002).Wong (2012) used the Center for Chinese Linguistics Online Corpus to identify frequent and conventional expressions in Chinese, although threshold levels were lower in this thesis than in the published literature. Production data are analyzed in terms of speech act realization and formula production. Speech act production is analyzed first to determine the speech act context, and for learners, whether the environment for the target expression has been created. Although an elicitation task may create a context for a thanking expression, if the learner responds with an apology, the thanking context is not realized.The production of conventional expressions and pragmatic routines depends on the sociopragmatic knowledge to create the appropriate context. Second, the analysis of the conventional expressions uses exact-match coding. Exact-match coding allows for learners to exhibit the same variation as NSs (e.g., {Thanks/ Thank you} or {I’m/ I am} sorry), but excludes non-target-like variation, such as ‘Sorry I forget’ for ‘Sorry I forgot.’This is followed by interlanguage analysis, which captures the development of the morphosyntax of the expressions. Learners seem to be able to make associations between pragmatics and conventional expressions even before the expressions are fully formed (e.g., the use of ‘Sorry for lating’ in a late-for-office-hours context, Bardovi-Harlig & Stringer, 2017; Stengers et al., 2011). Recent studies differ on whether they analyze the production data directly (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009; Bardovi-Harlig & Su, 2018) or whether they employ holistic rating by judges (Taguchi et al., 2013), but both analyses evaluate appropriateness and form. Because conventional expressions can be regional, the most conservative approach is to collect data regionally; examples include data from NSs and learners in the same university community (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009), the Northern Chinese dialect (Bardovi-Harlig & Su, 2018), southwest France (Edmonds, 2014), and pragmatic routines for instruction matched to an academic spoken corpus from the same region (Bardovi-Harlig et al., 2015) (see Chapter 15 on pragmatic variation, this volume).

3.3

Applying the methodology to Spanish

The current published research on Spanish pragmatic routines is a good source for candidate expressions. Using written DCTs, a corpus, a judgment task with corrections, and films, de Pablos-Ortega (2011), Dumitrescu (2011), García (2011), and Valls (2012), respectively, collected expressions by a variety of means; Chiang (2004) and Martín Noguerol (2013) supplement the list with intuitively generated expressions.We attempted to expand the list of Spanish candidate expressions and the speech acts investigated, employing two methods used to collect candidate expressions in other languages.To that end, we examined textbooks (Bardovi-Harlig et al., 2015; Yang, 2016) and used Yang’s (2014) expression-generating list with both learners and NSs. In this section we report on the methodological issues that arose. We examined five U.S. textbook series for teaching Spanish at the beginning and intermediate levels, focusing on featured presentations of expressions. Not all textbooks included pragmatic elements, but those that did, tended to present different sets of expressions, overlapping only partially with other textbooks.This means that they are reasonable sources for candidate expressions for further testing but cannot be relied on to provide a consensus on what is conventional. We next adapted the questionnaire that Yang (2014) devised to prompt learners of Chinese to remember what expressions were useful during study abroad in China.We asked learners who had recently returned from Spanish-speaking countries to complete Yang’s questionnaire shown in (2). (2)

210

Modified candidate-expression generation questionnaire for returning study abroad students (Yang, 2014)

Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics

We are interested in knowing what Spanish expressions you found useful while in Mexico. (If you were in a different Spanish-speaking country please write it here _____________.) Please write down expressions that you found useful and describe the situations in which you heard them, used them, or heard other people use them. We’d be happy to know about any expressions in any situations.We include a list of places here to jog your memory, but please don’t feel limited to this list. From students’ (questionnaire) Useful expressions for (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f ) (g) (h) (i) ( j) (k) (l) (m)

dining out shopping taking public transportation (e.g., bus, taxi, airplane, train) entertainment banking greeting saying good-bye or leave-taking small talk requests compliments (or responding to compliments) saying thank you/responding to “thank you” visiting people’s apartments or houses other expressions you find useful

The aim of the questionnaire was to get study-abroad returnees to provide as many expressions as they could remember; to that end, the questionnaire supplied a combination of settings and speech acts. Settings such as shopping, restaurants, or public transportation were included, as they are contexts that may have associated formulas. When learners were asked to provide expressions for specific speech acts, such as thanking or complimenting, the expressions they provided were consistent with what was expected.When they were provided with settings such as ‘restaurant’ or ‘shopping,’ they provided expressions they would use when speaking to their companions in those contexts rather than expressions they would use to interact with the service provider. This points to the need for the use of elaborated scenarios, a finding consistent with pragmatics research more generally (e.g., Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989). We next adapted Yang’s questionnaire for use with residents rather than study abroad students, translating it into Spanish in order to collect candidate expressions from NSs living in Mexico.The modified Spanish version of the questionnaire was distributed to a group of native Spanish speakers residing in a large Mexican city bordering the United States.The speakers’ ages ranged from 19–25. Despite their proximity to the United States, the speakers were not bilingual nor did they necessarily have more than a novice-level knowledge of English. Nevertheless, language contact has led the local dialect of Spanish to be considerably influenced by English to the degree that monolingual Spanish speakers may use anglicized words in Spanish without being aware of their English origins.We began with Spanish of the U.S.–Mexico border region because this is where the second author works and resides.We plan on additionally collecting data in the capital city of Mexico and a major city in Spain, but any regional starting point would represent local usage (see Koike, 2001). In distributing the questionnaire to NSs, we had two goals: to test the usefulness of the instrument and the regional character of expressions.We found both task effect and regional influence. 211

Bardovi-Harlig and Mossman

The task did not provide speakers with information about the characteristics of the interlocutors, and they were therefore free to determine the register, familiarity, and power or distance. The expressions provided and informal register that our informants used (Mexican residents in the U.S.–Mexico border region) suggest that they assumed the interlocutor was both familiar and a peer. Examples include ¿Qué tranza/transa? ‘What’s up?’ for greeting, tira paro ‘do me a favor’ for requesting, and te (la) rifaste ‘you’re amazing’ to express appreciation, all of which are informal and highly regional. Some of the expressions provided by the NS were the same as those found in the literature, but most were not found in the other sources. For example, NS produced the greeting ¿Qué tal? ‘How are you?’ which is found in the literature and in SFL textbooks, but the greeting most frequently produced by NSs, ¿Qué onda? ‘What’s up?,’ was reported only by Martín Noguerol (2013), who discusses region as a variable. Some expressions of gratitude found in the literature were attested in the NS data. NSs produced muchas gracias, which is consistently used across the Spanish-speaking world and can be found in all of the other sources, and there were some instances of the quantifier + gracias structure described by Dumitrescu (2011), specifically mil gracias ‘a thousand thanks.’ Others produced the expression Que Dios te lo pague described in multiple sources. Most of the expressions, however, were unique to the border region. There are two likely reasons. First, some of the expressions, such as Ay/ Ahí te wacho, a leave-taking expression on a par with ‘See you later,’ are local to the speech community rather than the Spanish-speaking world at large (the verb wachar does not exist in standard Spanish; it is a loanword derived from the English verb ‘watch’). The second reason is the assumed familiarity of speakers, discussed previously. Using more elaborated contexts in future elicitation tasks will be essential, which we consider in the next section.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Our review of the literature and the issues discussed therein suggests that the first avenues for future research are to establish the frequency or conventionality of expressions empirically and to test the variables identified in the literature systematically. Once these are undertaken, research on the acquisition of conventional expressions and pragmatic routines can be conducted.

4.1

Conventionality

In light of the current practices of empirically establishing conventional expressions outlined in the previous section, the next step is to implement the same process in Spanish. The published literature and our own elicitations provide several candidate expressions to which more can be added. In order to ascertain the frequency of use, candidate expressions can be searched in a regionally appropriate corpus matched for register, speaker age, and speech events (see Chapter 32 on corpus pragmatics for L1 and L2 research, this volume). For example, in English, the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English has conversations among families and friends whereas MICASE has academic conversations and, as a result, the requests used in each are distinct (Bardovi-Harlig & Mossman, 2016). Using a corpus of conversations, such as Corpus del Español (www.corpusdelespanol.org/) or Corpus de conversación coloquial del Grupo Val. Es.Co. (Valencia Español Coloquial; www.valesco.es/), we can identify pragmatic routines used to realize speech acts. A minimum of 10–40 occurrences/million words constitutes a frequent pragmatic routine (Biber et al., 1999, 2004). 212

Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics

From the concordance lines returned when searching for pragmatic routines we can identify the contexts in which they occur, and thus have authentic contexts for constructing elicitation tasks. For example,Vinther (2007) used the subcorpus of oral texts of the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA; http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html) to analyze the uses of ¿por qué no . . . ? ‘why not . . .?’ Currently, analyzing the contexts has to be done manually because corpora are not usually tagged for speech acts. Some progress is being made in the automatic tagging of discourse, but so far this has been carried out on written discourse (Taguchi, Kaufer, GómezLaich, & Zhao, 2016). Corpora can also be used to teach expressions. Martos Eliche and Contreras Izquierdo (2018) explore teaching formulaic sequences in Spanish using principles from data-driven learning and the lexical approach, and Bardovi-Harlig et al. (2017) test the efficacy of corpus-based instruction of pragmatic routines in English. Another avenue is the investigation of conventional expressions by developing data-informed scenarios for use in oral discourse completion tasks, which include interlocutor turns whenever possible. Both NSs and learners complete the same oral DCT presented in the target language (Bardovi-Harlig, 2019). Conventional expressions are identified by greater than 50% NS usage in any single context.We use oral DCTs because conventional expressions and pragmatic formulas generally occur in the speaker’s first turn since they carry the illocutionary force; this allows us to control turns addressed to participants.They are oral because we are investigating spoken conversations, and there is evidence that modality affects production. In the initial stage of identification of candidate expressions in Chinese, Su (unpublished) collected expressions via both written and oral DCTs.The written responses were so different from the oral responses that the written responses were ultimately excluded (personal communication, June 2017).

4.2 Variables and variation Regional variation must be taken into account in studies of both NS usage (Dumitrescu, 2011; García, 2011; Martín Noguerol, 2013;Valls, 2012) and acquisition. In order to capture regional variation, a task must be administered in different regions.When corpora are used to check the frequency of candidate expressions, the corpus and the expressions must be matched for region (see Chapter 15 on regional pragmatic variation, this volume). In constructing tasks for the elicitation of conventional expressions and pragmatic routines, variables identified by the preceding review of the Spanish literature should also be taken into account; variables include context, interlocutors, register, and text type (see also Chapter 33 on research methods for pragmatics study, this volume).The existing tasks for English have varied contexts (for example, being 5 or 25 minutes late, meeting someone for the first time or subsequently running into them, thanking for different things, and wanting help or not when shopping), but variables related to interlocutor and register have not been investigated systematically. Here we present oral DCT items that are intended to test these variables. Example (3) tests the difference in greeting familiar interlocutors with equal and unequal power. (3)

Greeting (familiar interlocutor + equal power & familiar interlocutor/unequal power) Usted se va a reunir con {su amigo/ su profesor} para tomar un café. Usted entra al café y ve a {su amigo/ su profesor} sentado en una mesa. Usted se acerca a la mesa y le dice: ‘You are meeting your {friend/professor} for coffee.You enter the café and see your {friend/professor} at a table. You approach the table and say:’ 213

Bardovi-Harlig and Mossman

Example (4a) is designed to elicit leave-taking expressions in an equal status encounter between friends, and (4b), an unequal status encounter leaving a meeting with one’s boss. (4)

Leave-taking a. Familiar + equal power Su amiga la fue a visitar y ahora ya se va. Ella se levanta y se pone su abrigo. Amiga: Bueno, ya me voy. Hasta luego. Usted dice: ‘Your friend was visiting you, but now she is leaving. She stands up and puts her coat on. Friend: Okay I’ve got to go. See you later. You say:’ b. Familiar + unequal power Está usted en una reunión de trabajo y su jefe acaba de concluir la reunión.Todos se levantan para salir, pero como usted está más cerca de la puerta, va a salir primero. Usted le dice a su jefe: ‘You are in a business meeting and your boss just wrapped it up. Everyone stands up to leave, but being nearest to the door you will leave first. You say to your boss:’

Example (5) presents a high indebtedness (+ power) situation in an attempt to elicit intensified or elaborated thanking expressions other than muchas gracias. (5)

Thanking (familiar interlocutor + unequal power + high indebtedness) Usted necesita una medicina que es excesivamente cara y no la puede pagar. Su doctor dice que él le dará muestras de la medicina para que no la tenga que comprar. Doctor: No se apure por el costo de la medicina.Aquí tiene unas muestras. Usted dice: ‘You need some medicine, but it is extremely expensive and you can’t afford it.Your doctor says he’ll give you free samples of the medicine so you don’t have to pay for it. Doctor: Don’t worry about the price of the medicine. Here are some free samples. You say:’

DCT and role play scenarios also convey cultural information, and for that reason should be constructed based on ethnography (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999), observation (Bardovi-Harlig et al., 2010), or identification of contexts from corpora (Bardovi-Harlig & Su, 2018). As an illustration, the doctor’s office scenario in Example (5) reflects the medical system and the cost of medicine in the United States, which may not be the same in other countries. Similarly, the “shopping no help” scenario in which a sales person approaches a customer and asks “Can I help you?” may also be restricted to the U.S. or North America, and although Spanish respondents may be familiar with such interactions from movies, they do not experience them.9 To capture these observations, one might employ the technique used by Taguchi et  al. (2013) asking NS respondents to rate the likelihood of situations in an instrument. Instruments that we develop should have scenarios that are unique to the different speech communities that we investigate, thus fully demonstrating regional differences in action-formula mapping (cf. Martín Noguerol, 2013). 214

Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics

4.3 Accounting for variation within conventional expressions English-based research on formulaic language often reflects lexical variation (for discussion, see Bardovi-Harlig, 2009); for example, ‘Thank you for {inviting/having} me’ in a reciprocal thanking context or ‘Thank you for your {time/help}’ in an office hour closing. Where two conventional expressions are used (as in the case of ‘Thanks/Thank you’ and ‘I’m just looking’), there can also be variation in order, such as ‘Thanks. I’m just looking./ I’m just looking.Thanks.’ Our Spanish NS data showed word order variation, alternating presence and absence of expression components, and variation in mood. The same lexical elements with variation in word order occurs in al rato nos vemos ‘later we’ll see each other’ and nos vemos al rato ‘we’ll see each other later’ for leave-taking (recall that Alvarado Ortega’s description ruled out such alternation).The expression of appreciation te (la) rifaste ‘you’re amazing’ was the most common form of the te + rifar structure, but speakers also omitted the pronoun (te rifaste) or retained it but used a different tense (te la rifas).The leave-taking expression based on the verb cuidarse ‘take care’ varied in mood between the imperative (cuídate) and the indicative (te cuidas). Similarly, both disculpa(me) and disculpe(me) ‘forgive me’ are reported in the literature. Accounting for linguistic variation may lead us to consider whether these closely related alternatives are one or more expressions. Careful consideration may result in different analyses for word order that does not reflect status, and morphological alternations that do, but this remains to be considered both empirically and theoretically. Proposals concerning the lexical core of expressions could allow such variation within a single expression (Bardovi-Harlig & Stringer, 2017), but it seems premature to extend this to Spanish before considering the empirical evidence.

4.4 Concluding remarks Researchers who have studied formulaic language use in Spanish pragmatics have not yet conducted acquisitional research, although such research has been conducted on English, Chinese, French, and Russian. The current literature on Spanish does identify regional variation and other variables as key features of research going forward, whether identifying target expressions or documenting second-language acquisition.We anticipate that future work on Spanish conventional expressions that incorporates both cross-culturally common variables and variables unique to Spanish will further enrich our understanding of formulaic language in pragmatics more generally.

Notes 1 We thank our colleague, Rachel Shively of Illinois State University, for generously providing us with the Spanish source articles.Thank you also to Llorenc Comajoan of University of Vic for his insightful comments on this project. 2 The abbreviation used for SFL in the source articles was ELE (Español como lengua extranjera). We have used the English convention here. 3 The original format of numbered lines was changed to reflect D[octor] and P[atient]. 4 In this section Martín Noguerol refers to “la cultura española” (p. 62) by which we understand the culture of Spain. 5 In response to a reviewer’s request for more information about Martín Noguerol pedagogical suggestions, we can only say that Martín Noguerol does not elaborate on relationship or region, see Figure 2, p. 71; we have interpreted text type and time of day from the meanings of the routines that she suggested. Her target audience, Spanish teachers, may recognize these examples as illustrative of her claims. 6 The necessity of large-scale empirical studies is emphasized by the differences in interpretation of Dios te lo pague ‘May God repay you’ as restricted. Both the second author and a colleague from Barcelona report that this can be said between close friends and may also have a joking quality to it. 215

Bardovi-Harlig and Mossman

7 Martín Noguerol also discusses the use of realia to illustrate culture and usage, which is beyond the scope of this chapter. 8 One of the editors notes that there is further variation across varieties of Spanish. 9 We thank Llorenc Comajoan for these observations.

Further reading Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2009). Conventional expressions as a pragmalinguistic resource: Recognition and production of conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics. Language Learning, 59, 755–795. This empirical study investigates recognition and production of English conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics. It discusses how conventional expressions were identified by observation in a speech community and how the oral discourse completion task was designed. A decontextualized aural recognition task containing both authentic expressions and modified strings was designed to test learners’ familiarity with expressions.The relation of recognition of expressions to their use (or nonuse) in production is examined. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2018). Formulaic language in second language pragmatics research. In A. SiyanovaChanturia & A. Pellicer-Sánchez (Eds.), Understanding formulaic language: A second language acquisition perspective (pp. 97–114). New York: Routledge. This chapter relates the study of formulas in pragmatics to the study of formulaic language more generally and shows how the elicitation tasks used in pragmatics, most notably, oral discourse completion tasks, set up scenarios to which learners respond.This allows learners to be compared to NSs and other learners at different levels of proficiency.The oral DCT contrasts markedly with less controlled contexts, such as essays, in which learners express more varied content in response to a prompt. Dumitrescu, D. (2011). Aspects of Spanish pragmatics. New York: Peter Lang. Chapters 2 and 3 address formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics. Dumitrescu employs free DCTs (in which respondents write turns for both speakers) to elicit thanking expressions and responses from NSs and learners (Chapter 2,“Gratitude exchange: L1 vs. L2”) and wishes by NSs in various settings (Chapter 3,“Ritual politeness:The speech act of wishing”).The results are presented in anecdotal fashion. Other researchers could use Dumitrescu’s questionnaires to explore regional variation, influence of context, and identification of conventional expressions. Martín Noguerol, M. (2013). ¡No me digas!: las fórmulas rutinarias, un elemento para el desarrollo de la competencia intercultural. Actas del IV Taller “ELE e interculturalidad” del Instituto Cervantes de Orán. Retrieved from https://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/publicaciones_centros/oran_2013.htm Martín Noguerol discusses the importance of formulas in the development of intercultural competence with the goal of improving instruction in Spanish as a foreign language. She emphasizes how formula use differs by situation, illustrating the relationship of four thanking expressions. She also discusses the influence of different variables on greeting selection.

References Alvarado Ortega, M. B. (2007). Las fórmulas rutinarias como unidades fraseológicas. Estudios de Lingüística de Universidad de Alicante, 21, 1–13. Retrieved from http://rua.ua.es/dspace/handle/10045/5770 Alvarado Ortega, M. B. (2008). Las fórmulas rutinarias en el español actual (PhD thesis). Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain. ARAL. (2012). Annual Review of Applied Linguistics:Topics in Formulaic Language, 32. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1999). Researching method. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 9, 237–264. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2009). Conventional expressions as a pragmalinguistic resource: Recognition and production of conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics. Language Learning, 59, 755–795. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2012). Formulas, routines, and conventional expressions in pragmatics research. ARAL, 32, 206–227. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2016). How formulaic is pragmatics? Pragmatics and Language Learning, 14, 325–340. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2019). Routines in L2 pragmatics research. In N.Taguchi (Ed.), Handbook of SLA and pragmatics (pp. 47–62). New York: Routledge. Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Bastos, M.-T. (2011). Proficiency, length of stay, and intensity of interaction and the acquisition of conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics, 8, 347–384. 216

Formulaic language in Spanish pragmatics

Bardovi-Harlig, K., Bastos, M.-T., Burghardt, B., Chappetto, E., Nickels, E., & Rose, M. (2010). The use of conventional expressions and utterance length in L2 pragmatics. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 12, 163–186. Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Mossman, S. (2016). Corpus-based materials development for teaching and learning pragmatic routines. In B.Tomlinson (Ed.), SLA research and materials development for language learning (pp. 250–267). New York: Routledge. Bardovi-Harlig, K., Mossman, S., & Su,Y. (2017).The effect of corpus-based instruction on pragmatic routines. Language Learning & Technology, 21, 76–103. Bardovi-Harlig, K., Mossman, S., & Vellenga, H. E. (2015).The effect of instruction on pragmatic routines in academic discussion. Language Teaching Research, 19, 324–350. Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Stringer, D. (2017). Unconventional expressions: Productive syntax in the L2 acquisition of formulaic language. Second Language Research, 33, 61–90. Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Su, Y. (2018). The acquisition of conventional expressions as a pragmalinguistic resource in Chinese as a foreign language. The Modern Language Journal, 102, 732–757. Barron, A. (2003). Acquisition in interlanguage pragmatics: Learning how to do things with words in a study abroad context.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes,V. (2004). If you look at . . .: Lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics, 25, 371–405. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman. Blum-Kulka, House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.). (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Briz,A., & Grupo Val.Es.Co. (2002). Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales. Madrid:Arco Libros. Retrieved from www.uv.es/corpusvalesco/corpus.html Chiang, T-J. (2004). Didáctica de las unidades fraseológicas basada en su componente pragmático. In M. Martí Sánchez (Ed.), Estudios de pragmagramática para la E-LE (pp. 19–38). Madrid: Edinumen. Consejo de Europa (2002). Marco común europeo de referencia para el aprendizaje, la enseñanza y la evaluación de lenguas. Madrid: Instituto Cervantes, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte,Anaya. Coulmas, F. (Ed.). (1981). Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech.The Hague: Mouton. Coulmas, F. (1994). Formulaic language. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (Vol. 3, pp. 1292–1293). New York: Pergamon Press. Culpeper, J. (2010). Conventional impoliteness formula. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 3232–3245. De Pablos-Ortega, C. (2011).The pragmatics of thanking reflected in the textbooks for teaching Spanish as a foreign language. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 2411–2433. Dumitrescu, D. (2011). Aspects of Spanish pragmatics. New York: Peter Lang. Edmonds, A. (2014). Conventional expressions: Investigating pragmatics and processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36, 69–99. Eisenstein, M., & Bodman, J.W. (1986).‘I very appreciate’: Expressions of gratitude by native and non-native speakers of American English. Applied Linguistics, 7, 167–185. Erman, B., & Warren, B. (2000).The idiom principle and the open choice principle. Text, 20, 29–62. Furniss, E. A. (2016). Teaching the pragmatics of Russian conversation using a corpus-referred website. Language Learning & Technology, 20, 38–60. García, C. (2011). Las  fórmulas rutinarias en  el  español coloquial de  Medellín y  su área metropolitana. Lingüística y  literatura (Departamento de  Lingüística y  Literatura de  la  Universidad de  Antioquía), 60,195–207. Haverkate, H. (1994). La cortesía verbal: Estudio pragmalingüístico. Madrid: Gredos. House, J. (1996). Developing pragmatic fluency in English as a foreign language: Routines and metapragmatic awareness. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 225–252. Instituto Cervantes (2007). Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. Niveles de referencia para el español. Madrid: Biblioteca nueva. Retrieved from http://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/plan_curricular/ Kasper, G., & Blum-Kulka, S. (1993). Interlanguage pragmatics: An introduction. In G. Kasper & S. BlumKulka (Eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics (pp. 1–17). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kecskes, I. (2003). Situation-bound utterances in L1 and L2. Berlin: Mouton. Koike, K. (2001). La variación fraseológica del español (pp. 77–92). Retrieved February 2, 2019, from http:// gamp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~ueda/varilex/art/vx9-a3.pdf Kuiper, K. (2004). Formulaic performance in conventionalized varieties of speech. In N. Schmitt (Ed.), Formulaic sequences (pp. 37–54).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 217

Bardovi-Harlig and Mossman

Kuiper, K., & Tan, D. G. L. (1989). Cultural congruence and conflict in the acquisition of formulae in a second language. In O. García & R. Otheguy (Eds.), English across cultures: Cultures across English (pp. 281–304). Berlin: de Gruyter. Martín Noguerol, M. (2013). ¡No me digas! las fórmulas rutinarias, un elemento para el desarrollo de la competencia intercultural. Actas del IV Taller “ELE e interculturalidad” del Instituto Cervantes de Orán. Retrieved from https://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/publicaciones_centros/oran_2013.htm Martos Eliche, F., & Contreras Izquierdo, N. M. (2018). El empleo de corpus para el aprendizaje de secuencias formulaicas en ELE/EL2: La frecuencia de uso en el nivel B2 del PCIC. CHIMERA: Romance Corpora and Linguistic Studies, 5, 1–26. Myles, F., Hooper, J., & Mitchell, R. (1998). Rote or rule? Exploring the role of formulaic language in classroom foreign language learning. Language Learning, 48, 323–363. Pawley, A., & Syder, F. H. (1983). Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In J. C. Richards & R.W. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and communication (pp. 191–226). London: Longman. Roever, C. (2005). Testing ESL pragmatics: Development and validation of a web-based assessment battery. Berlin: Peter Lang. Scarcella, R. (1979).Watch up! Working Papers in Bilingualism, 19, 79–88. Schmitt, N. (Ed.). (2004). Formulaic sequences:Acquisition, processing and use.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Simpson, R. C., Briggs, S. L., Ovens, J., & Swales, J. M. (2002). The Michigan corpus of academic spoken English. Retrieved multiple times between May 2013 and December 2014 from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/ micase. Stengers, H., Boers, F., Housen, A., & Eyckmans, J. (2011). Formulaic sequences and L2 oral proficiency: Does the type of target language influence the association? International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL), 49, 321–343. Taguchi, N., Kaufer, D., Gómez-Laich, M. P., & Zhao, H. (2016).A corpus linguistic analysis of on-line peer commentary. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 14, 357–370. Taguchi, N., Li, S., & Xiao, F. (2013). Production of formulaic expressions in L2 Chinese:A developmental investigation in a study abroad context. Chinese as a Second Language Research, 2, 23–58. Valls, C. (2012). Ay perdona, no quería, molestarte. Enseñar y aprender a disculpar en español. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from Marcoele.com. ISSN: 1885-2211. Vinther,T. (2007). Función ilocutiva y nivel de cortesía de la expresión ¿por qué no . . .? Spanish in Context, 4, 99–188. Wong, H. (2012). Use of formulaic sequences in task-based oral production of Chinese (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Durham University, Durham. Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yang, J. (2014). Toward a pedagogy of conventional expressions in Chinese culture (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Yang, J. (2016). CFL learners’ recognition and production of pragmatic routine formulae. Chinese as a Second Language, 51, 29–61.

218

12 Pragmatics and argumentation Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez

1

Introduction

Argumentation is a common, discursive activity of those who seek to persuade their interlocutor to carry out an action, share their ideas, or simply to be accepted by the other. For Plantin (1990), it is an operation by which speakers seek to transform by linguistic means the system of beliefs and representations of their interlocutor. According to Stati (1990), “it is the strategy by means of which a speaker, expressing himself in a natural language, achieves valid conclusions” (p. 63). It implies presenting a reason to lead the addressee to reach a conclusion (Anscombre & Ducrot, 1983), or a set of discursive techniques that allow the adhesion of the audience to the thesis that is presented for their understanding and agreement (Perelman, 1977). Argumentative discourse is related to pragmatics since it constitutes a perlocutionary act that implies a context and users (communicative intention). I would also add an ideology and shared knowledge that is presupposed by the participants in the communicative encounter.These four components are united in a symbiosis. Argumentation is directly connected to rhetoric. Unlike pragmatics, which emerged in the 20th century in linguistics studies, rhetoric has been studied since ancient times, generally limited to certain types of text or genres, such as the political or legal domain. Today the study of argumentation must be extended to all of them. Conversation is clearly persuasive; political discourse, advertising, comments on social networks, recommendations, and prescriptions add justifications to their thesis. Democratic society demands discussion, the confrontation of opinions, which inevitably involves argumentation. The discourse genre must be added to the preceding factors (context, users, communicative intention, and ideology) for an adequate analysis of an argumentative discourse.The goals are varied and may coexist in: (a) convincing others and inducing them to act in a certain way, such as in purchasing (via commercial advertising), voting (political elections), social action (non-profit organization (NGOs), public bodies); (b) defending and legitimizing oneself in power relations and facework; (c) defending an ideology and imposing it, as in politics; and (d) configuring an identity in order to be successful communicatively and socially. On the other hand, argumentation means exploring the expressive mechanisms (verbal and non-verbal resources) and also the strategies adopted. This is the objective of the theory of 219

Fuentes Rodríguez

argumentation in language (Anscombre & Ducrot, 1983), the pragmalinguistic methodology specialized in argumentation. This discursive activity (argumentation) seeks to elicit persuasion (to induce a change in behavior), a pragmatic activity that is influenced by the context, the presuppositions, the roles played by the participants, and the characteristics of the communicative situation in which it occurs.Argumentative activity requires a dialectical exchange between changing positions, a set of shared knowledge and expressions that are directed toward a thesis that the speaker defends and tries to convince the listener to share. It also involves the strategic use of linguistic resources aimed at this objective. This chapter is organized as follows: I begin in Section 2 with a presentation of different studies about argumentation. In Section 3, a multidisciplinary approach is adopted in order to integrate the discursive perspective with the pragmatic one. The strategic use in context must be linked to all the factors that are involved in the communicative process: agents, situation, discursive types, and collective memory. Finally, Section 4 presents conclusions and suggestions for future work.

2

Review of existing research

Plantin (1990) establishes a chronology of studies on argumentation starting from Aristotle’s Rhetoric1 and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (1st century BC). In ancient rhetoric, three genres are distinguished: judicial, epideictic, and deliberative.With Christianity, religious exhortation was added, in the Early Middle Ages the epistolary genre, and in the Modern Age advertising or media information and ideological propaganda. In the second half of the 20th century, several methodologies evolved; e.g., the new rhetoric of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1971), and Toulmin’s (1958) influential model in The uses of argument.These depart from juridical discourse and seek to bring argumentation closer to daily practice. In the late 20th century, authors like Hamblin (1976) and Woods and Walton (1989) studied fallacies and paralogisms (argumentum ad hominem, ad verecundiam . . .). Plantin situates the following paradigms in the pragmatics of argumentation: (a) the pragma-dialectics of van Eemeren (see van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004); (b) Moechsler’s (1985) analysis in Argumentation et conversation; (c) the rhetoric of Ducrot, as a linguistic pragmatics integrated in language; (d) the philosophical pragmatics and theory of communicative action, with the work of Habermas (1984 [1981]) centered on the ethics of communicative action and pragmatic logic (Grize, 1990;Vignaux, 1988).2 Current work, as shown in the following sections, is therefore focused on four areas: (a) rhetoric (Section 2.1); (b) linguistic typology and textual structure (Section 2.2); (c) conflict negotiation, confrontational acts of speech, sociopragmatic perspective (Section 2.3); and (d) pragmatic-linguistic perspective (Section 2.4). In this section, the fundamental aspects dealt with by each methodology are described and, in Section 3, I propose an integrated pragmatics for the analysis of argumentative discourses.

2.1

Rhetoric

Rhetoric, for López Eire (2000),“is the art of persuading through a speech act addressed to a recipient of the message physically different from the speaker, but capable himself of being an interlocutor” (p. 99, my translation). Rhetorical studies deal with types of arguments and their provenance 220

Pragmatics and argumentation

(i.e., the structure of real, logical arguments) and the cases in which rules are violated (fallacies or false arguments). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1971) distinguish them by the mechanism used: argumentation by association, dissociation, use of examples and comparison, or pseudoarguments. Recently, rhetorical studies have been applied to Spanish parliamentary discourse (López Eire & de Santiago Guervós, 2000).

2.2 On discursive types Discursive types constitute a fruitful field for the study of argumentation. For Roulet (1997),3 argumentation is considered a dimension that can appear in every discursive type. Regarding political discourse, the studies of Charaudeau (2008, 2009) and Fuentes Rodríguez on parliamentary debates (2009a, 2011) should be highlighted. Blas Arroyo (2011) examines Spanish electoral debates, Fernández (2018) analyzes impoliteness in these texts, and Bolívar (2001) focuses on confrontation and insult. Works included in Fuentes Rodríguez (2016a, Ed.) study the strategies of the “new Spanish politics” and Fuentes Rodríguez and Álvarez Benito’s edited volume (2016) comprises several studies on the Andalusian parliamentary discourse and the gender perspective. Atienza (1993, 2006) and Alexy (1989) are devoted to legal argumentation. Armañanzas and Díaz Noci (1996) address argumentation in the genre of opinions,Vigara Tauste and Hernández Toribio (2011) in advertising, and De la Fuente (2006) in journalistic discourse on immigration. On types of discourse,Álvarez (1994), Candela (1991), Cros (2003), Díaz (2002), and Henao and Stipcich (2008) examine argumentation in pedagogy (persuasive strategies in the classroom). Many fields use argumentation, although there is a lack of contrast among the mechanisms used. It would be interesting to see if there are preferences for certain mechanisms or strategies in each of them. Studies on argumentation can be found in Spanish journals such as Oralia, Discurso y Sociedad, Pragmalingüística, Rilce, Tonos Digital, and Cultura, Lenguaje, y Representación, and in South American journals, like Signos, Onomázein, Signo y Seña. The latter devoted an important issue (n. 9, 1998) to the theory of argumentation in language: “Language, argumentation and polyphony.” Other international journals are related to sociopragmatics, as discussed next. All these works have highlighted the strategies that speakers use to persuade their audience. It is, therefore, the work of applied pragmatics. Argumentative discourse is oriented toward a goal and conditioned by its objectives and the situation in which it occurs. Its analysis, then, is always pragmatic, although it is interconnected with the description of discursive tools.

2.3 Sociopragmatics In the field of sociopragmatics, argumentation is defined as the study of mechanisms for resolving conflicts and focuses on speech acts.The main paradigm is ‘pragmadialectics’ of van Eemeren and his collaborators. Fundamental to their model is a dialectical perspective, which constitutes the basis of their methodology, an analysis of the arguments, and their application to different situations (e.g., parliament, communication between doctor-patient, institutional communication). Thus, the latest works by van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004) allude to the use of strategies (van Eemeren, 2010; van Eemeren & Snoeck Henkemans, 2017) to resolve a conflict. A general treatment can be found in van Eemeren et al. (2014). The authors aim to construct an inclusive model, in which rhetoric is combined with dialectics and addresses not only the interlocutors’ dialectical goals but also their rhetorical goals. For these authors, argumentation “is a verbal, social, and rational activity aimed at convincing a reasonable critic 221

Fuentes Rodríguez

of the acceptability of a standpoint by putting forward a constellation of propositions justifying or refuting the proposition expressed in the standpoint” (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004, p. 1). Pragma-dialectics views argumentation as a complex speech act, a discourse activity with specific communicative goals.The model proposes 10 rules that apply to an argument (e.g., burden of proof, relevance, unexpressed premise).Violations of the discussion rules impede a reasonable resolution of a difference of opinion; they are then considered as fallacies.The model differentiates stages of discussion (confrontation, opening, argumentation, and concluding stages) and dimensions (dialectal, rhetorical, aspect of topical choice, aspect of anticipating audience demand, and aspect of presentational choice). This pragma-dialectical approach, which has applications within sociopragmatics and critical discourse analysis, is at the core of Santibáñez’s (2012) proposal, in which argumentation is considered an eminently social act involving dialectic confrontation. By means of conversation, speakers may modify the opinions held by their interlocutor, but this is not always achieved.This perspective embraces not only the types of arguments used and the belief system of each individual, but also the legitimacy of the objectives pursued and the procedures followed. For example, Santibáñez (2018) studies argumentation on deception and manipulation. Similarly, Laborda (2018) is concerned with good discursive practices in media argumentation. Much of the research in this area is published in the journals Argumentation and Context,Argument, or Cogency. In critical discourse analysis (Wodak & van Dijk, 2000), although he does not follow an exact argumentative methodology, van Dijk includes the use of “rhetorical devices” in the construction of ideological texts (see van Dijk, 2002 or the “pragmatics of liar” of the Spanish president Aznar in van Dijk, 2008).The author includes strategies and discursive structures that show both group ideological beliefs and the personal opinions derived from them. The basic strategies he considers are the polarization of positive self-presentation and negative presentation of the other. Both are shown in argumentative categories such as authority, topos (warrant), comparison, counterfactives, exemplification, euphemism, irony, or generalization, among others (van Dijk, 2005).

2.4

Pragmalinguistic perspective

From a discursive perspective, argumentation is a dimension of discourse that can appear in different types of sequences: narrative and descriptive (Fuentes Rodríguez, 2017 [2000]), not only in the argumentative sequence. Languages have paradigms of specialized elements for argumentation. Hence there are studies on the grammar of argumentation (Lo Cascio, 1998) and on argumentation in language (Anscombre & Ducrot, 1983). Fuentes Rodríguez and Alcaide (2002) collected other contributions and offer an integrated discursive theory. Regarding the theory of argumentation, the works of Anscombre and Ducrot (1983) and Ducrot (1995) can be added to those of Anscombre and Donaire on “opérateurs discursifs” (Anscombre, Donaire, & Haillet, 2013, 2018) and Donaire (2002) on concession. Pragmalinguistics is an integral approach to discourse. It explains the elements that express the speakers’ positions, their relationship with the listener, or allusions to the context. This field has developed significantly with a focus on discourse markers. The field of argumentative markers has received the most attention in Spanish language (connectors like sin embargo, encima, además, or operators like solo, al menos, como mucho ‘nevertheless, on top of, besides, only, at least, at the most’). Noteworthy are the studies on markers by Anscombre (1998), Briz Gómez (1993), Borzi (2013), Fuentes Rodríguez (2009b), and García Negroni (1998). 222

Pragmatics and argumentation

Portolés (1998, 2013, 2016) develops concepts such as “argumentative sufficiency” (al menos ‘at least’), which adds to those of ‘scalar valuation’ and ‘orientation.’ It is important to add work on argumentative operators; specifically, Fuentes Rodríguez (1995, 2002, 2009b, 2016b) and Montolío Durán (2003), or Alcaide Lara (2004) on irony. Work relating to argumentation in Argentina and Mexico tends to adopt a more cognitivist perspective; e.g., Santibáñez (2009) on metaphor. In Spain, the Argumentation and Persuasion group has published studies on political discourse (Fuentes Rodríguez, 2016c, 2018; Fuentes Rodríguez & Álvarez Benito, 2016) and the media (Brenes Peña, 2011a, 2011b; Brenes Peña & Fuentes Rodríguez, 2017; Fuentes Rodríguez, 2013; González Sanz, 2018).They have analyzed verbal resources such as repetition or enumeration, and strategies like intensification, (im)politeness, emotion, polyphony, or the construction of social identity. In the sections that follow (Sections 3.2 and 3.3), other works are cited. In general, the studies are still partial and argumentation theory has not been universally adopted as an approach within discourse analysis.Therefore, some research trends are discussed in the following.

3

Methodological considerations

This section brings together some of the approaches described and incorporates both the pragmalinguistic analysis of the theory of argumentation in language, as well as the pragmaideological or contextual approach of van Dijk (2003) and the typological theory proposed by those who work in discourse analysis (Adam, 2005; Charaudeau, 2004) or rhetoric.

3.1 Components of argumentation 3.1.1

Argument, conclusion, and warrant

Argumentation is a habitual cognitive framework for the speaker, because when two pieces of information are received, one tends to seek the persuasive objective and the connection between them. For example, if one hears “A dangerous prisoner has escaped from prison.The president appears in the media,” the tendency is to relate both reports and consider that the president’s appearance is a consequence of the prisoner’s escape. In “voy al supermercado. Es el día sin IVA”4 ‘I’m going to the supermarket. It’s the day without VAT,’ I understand that “it is the day without VAT” is the argument of the first statement.The presupposition is:“it is a good time to buy when there are sales (i.e., no sales tax).” Argumentative discourse is characterized by three basic components: argument, conclusion, and topos, to which other optional elements must be added, such as ‘rebuttal,’ ‘argumentative framework,’ or ‘qualifier,’ according to Lo Cascio (1998) and as proposed in Fuentes Rodríguez and Alcaide Lara (2002).This allows a more complete analysis of the text’s macro-structure. The topos is usually omitted since it is presupposed (“it’s good to buy in sales”). It is a collective belief, shared at least by the members of the communicative exchange in order to allow the passage from the argument to the conclusion. Generally, its wide extension points to a linguistic community, although it depends on the particular socio-historical situation. Anscombre and Ducrot (1983) described the topos as universal, but this is not always the kind of logical relationship we use to support the argumentation. Undoubtedly, if the scope of the topos is very general, the degree of legitimacy is, likewise, very general. For example,“take the umbrella, it’s going to rain” will be understood by the majority of the recipients, since it is based on a general presupposition, known by the whole community. However, “Giuseppe’s thesis defense can be held 223

Fuentes Rodríguez

because I have Lucía’s laptop” requires prior knowledge of previous conversations that allow us to deduce an argumentative process, as follows: Arg. 1:The defense must be done by Skype. (Conclusion: a computer with Internet access is required) Therefore, Lucía’s computer already has Skype installed. (Conclusion: the defense of Giuseppe’s thesis can go forward) This presupposition, which acts as a guarantor of the argument, is known by a smaller group of recipients. If we are not in the group with access to this information, it is difficult to legitimize the argumentative process. It would be possible, then, to establish a topoi hierarchy ranging from the most general (natural, shared by all humans: think-exist) to those more restricted to natural experiences (rain—taking the umbrella) or to more specific events (thesis defense), as in Figure 12.1. The topos leads us to other shared knowledge that is assumed to be in the participants’ possession in the communication, which includes ideology. It also implies the situationality or inclusion in the space-time of communication. It is a fundamental contextual (pragmatic) aspect. The verbal part of the message usually comprises an argument and conclusion, but they are not always explicit. The speaker may believe that one or the other can be retrieved from the context and asks for the listener’s collaboration in retrieving them.This often occurs in markedly persuasive texts such as advertising, which uses different means to achieve the desired goal. As a multimodal text, it mixes verbal and visual codes. For example, the advertisement of Aldi, a wellknown supermarket, uses the slogan:“Lo que vale mucho cuesta muy poco”‘What’s worth a lot costs

the defense of Giuseppe's thesis can be carried out because I have Lucía's laptop

take the umbrella, it’s going to rain

I think, therefore I exist.

Figure 12.1 Extension of the topoi (warrants) 224

Pragmatics and argumentation

very little.’ It plays with the contrast: much versus very little, two extremes of gradation. At the same time the advertisement resorts to polysemy: vale has two values, ‘price’ and ‘prestige.’This pun reinforces the parallelism (mucho-muy poco). Here appears the argument for the conclusion: “Shop at Aldi.” Since the receiver understands that all supermarkets seek to promote sales, there is no need to explain either topos or conclusion. The repetition of structures is reproduced in advertising fruits and vegetables. (1)  ¡Cuánto te aportan las frutas y verduras! Agua, que ayuda a hidratarte Vitaminas y sales minerales Fibra, que facilita la digestión Azúcares, que proporcionan energía. ‘How much fruit and vegetables give you! Water, which helps hydrate you Vitamins and mineral salts Fiber, which facilitates digestion Sugars, which provide energy.’ The goal the supermarket seeks to achieve is the sale of fruit and vegetables. How does it convince the potential customer? • • •

by creating empathy through the intensified exclamation mode: How much they give you . . . ! by using familiarity as a strategy: it addresses the receiver using the informal form (te) by resorting to enumeration, with a parallelism in the structure ‘noun + cause of saying’ or relative clause (que + verb)

Since the products are of daily consumption, the lexicon is simple, easy to understand, and uses common procedures. In the case of ecological products, as in Example (2), it uses gustarencantar ‘to like-love’ in scale, an important element in argumentation: (2)

Cientos de ecológicos el doble de buenos porque te gustan a ti y le encantan a tubolsillo (Aldi, mayo, 2018). ‘Hundreds of ecological products twice as good, because you like them and your pocket loves them.’

All these arguments are included in a single statement, some referring to the product and others (emotional arguments) to the consumer’s feelings. Some specific mechanisms of the argument to which we refer are: intensifying expressions such as cientos de . . .‘hundreds of . . .,’ el doble de . . . ‘twice as many . . . ’ or the scalar vocabulary already mentioned: gustar, encantar ‘like, to love.’

3.1.2

Orientation and force

The arguments, according to Anscombre and Ducrot (1983), are qualified depending on their orientation and their force (cf. Fuentes Rodríguez & Alcaide, 2002). As for the first criterion, we differentiate between the co-oriented (in the same direction toward the conclusion) and the anti-oriented (in the opposite direction). Each generates a relationship: the co-oriented generates a relationship of addition and the anti-oriented, opposition. In Example (2) there is a co-orientation between the three arguments that sustain the conclusion.The last two are connected by an additive conjunction (y ‘and’: “porque le gustan y le encantan a su bolsillo” ‘because 225

Fuentes Rodríguez

you like them and your pocket loves them’) and introduced by another that expresses its function as arguments: porque.The first argument has no marks (“el doble de buenos”‘twice as good’) and is a syntactic unit. Arguments can also be understood. In fact, this approach allows us to understand the macrostructural organization of the texts and the strategic use of a number of different elements. Consider Examples (3) and (4): (3)

Yo nunca le diré a mi hijo que tiene que tener los valores como Maradona; sin embargo sí le diré que tiene que tener los valores de Messi, Iniesta, Ramos, Xavi, el Chino, etc. etc. . . . Esa es la diferencia. (benis43, 21/06/2018 07:32. El Mundo) ‘I will never tell my son that he has to have values like Maradona’s; however, I will tell him that he has to have the values of Messi, Iniesta, Ramos, Xavi, the Chino, etc. . . . That is the difference.’

(4)

El mejor equipo del mundo hizo ser el mejor a Messi (con Argentina nunca ha demostrado ser el mejor); Maradona, sin embargo, hizo ser los mejores a todos los equipos donde fue. (Jose_AB, 21/06/2018 07:33. El Mundo) ‘The best team in the world made Messi the best (with Argentina he has never shown he’s the best); however, Maradona made all the teams he was in the best.’

In these two tweets, a counter-argumentation is set up. Arguments lead to opposing conclusions. In both cases the connector is sin embargo ‘nevertheless.’ The argumentative force is expressed in el mejor, which implies a high position in the scale of evaluation of the players. In the first, the conclusion is implicit, but is easily inferred by the listener: Messi, Iniesta . . . are role models but not Maradona. Jose_AB, on the other hand, seems to be more in favor of Maradona and makes that explicit. His conclusion is that he is better. In suspended statements the speaker does not express the conclusion, only the argument, and needs the listener to make an inference, as in Example (5): (5)

Para lo que gano en ese trabajo . . . ‘For what I earn in that job . . . ’

The topical relationship (Anscombre & Ducrot, 1983) between them is known by the community: pay more—better work, pay less—poorer work.The listener can easily reach the conclusion without making it explicit (through inference). The other factor that affects arguments is their degree of force, manifested in a scalar organization, and it serves to reinforce the argumentation of speakers and allows them to impose themselves on the receiver.The argumentative force is so natural to the argumentation that it is shown in a series of specific elements and strategies. In Example (6), there are many argumentative operators; one at the bottom of the scale and others at the top: (6)

226

“Sabíamos de las dificultades que nos plantearía Irán, no nos ha sorprendido. Encajan poco, pelean mucho y salen rápidos a la contra,” recordó Hierro, antes de subrayar, con una sonrisa y mucha intención, quién dirige el equipo en estos momentos. (El Mundo; 21–6–2018) ‘We knew of the difficulties that Iran would pose to us, it did not surprise us.They don’t fit in very well, they fight a lot and they come out fast against us,’ said Hierro, before emphasizing, with a smile and a lot of intention, who is leading the team at the moment.’

Pragmatics and argumentation

Poco ‘a little’ and mucho ‘a lot’ mark the limits, solo ‘only’ and apenas ‘barely’ indicate insufficiency and low position on the scale, and encima ‘on top’ or demasiado ‘too much,’ the excess. Some appear in this fragment to reinforce the conclusion, as in (7): (7)

Esta casa es una pocilga. Solo puede usarse el baño cuando a usted le queda cómodo.Apenas  hay  espacio  para  nada  y  encima  tenemos  que  pagar  un  alquiler exorbitante. (CORPES5, L. de Gonzalo: La catalana, 2016) ‘This house is a pigsty. The bathroom can only be used when it suits you. There is hardly any room for anything and on top of that we have to pay an exorbitant rent.’

The force of the argument determines the extent to which the conclusion is justified and affects the degree of strength of the speech act and the role played by the speaker vis-à-vis its recipients.These linguistic indicators thus correspond to a strategy whereby the speakers emerge victorious in the dialectic confrontation and impose themselves in the interaction.The speech acts are oriented to persuade the receiver to perform an action.

3.1.3

Rebuttal and source

The rebuttal (Brenes Peña, 2017) is an argument that is presented as an alternative or a caveat for cases where the topos does not apply, as in (8): (8)

La casa está a oscuras. Probablemente no hay nadie, a no ser que no quieran que entren mosquitos. (Lo Cascio, 1998, p. 148) ‘The house is dark. Probably there’s no one there, unless they don’t want mosquitoes to get in.’

The structure is: conclusion—argument 1 (there is nobody) + rebuttal (argument 2, in another direction with another less likely topos that, according to relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986), is more difficult to access). The source expresses the origin of the argument, which can be used as legitimation or delegitimization. It is the argument of authority, as shown in (9): (9)

Nos guste o no,“la sensación del flujo del tiempo—en palabras de Einstein- no es más que una ilusión psicológica.” (CREA, R.Alemañ: Relatividad para todos, 2004) ‘Whether we like it or not,“the sensation of time flow—in Einstein’s words—is nothing more than a psychological illusion.”’

Rebuttal and source act in opposite directions: the former offers a new option in the argument, while the source reinforces the conclusion.

3.2 Argumentative mechanisms As we have seen, argumentation involves semantic content, intonation, or syntactic structures, and specific elements such as operators and connectors. In Example (6), polyphony is used: the manager6 is the authority, and there is also parallelism and contrast of mucho-poco, or the introduction of a comment from the speaker: “with a smile and a lot of intention.” The speaker can lend force to an argument with intonation (10a), with intonation and 227

Fuentes Rodríguez

an operator or connector (súper, 10b), or by making use of the semantic properties of the terms (10c): (10a)

Me encanta esta playa. Es PRE-CIO-SA. ‘I love this beach. It’s BEAU-TI-FUL.’

(10b) Me encanta esta playa. Es súper relajante. ‘I love this beach. It’s super relaxing.’ (10c)

Me encanta esta playa. Es espectacular. ‘I love this beach. It’s spectacular.’

In terms of specific mechanisms, connectors (e.g., sin embargo, encima, además) and operators (solo in (9) and poco) constitute specialized kinds of words; the former, above all, express orientation and the latter, argumentative force. Elevated position in the scale is signaled by a lo sumo, sumamente ‘at most, extremely,’ and low position by un poco ‘a little.’ Operators of scalar limits are como poco, como mínimo, como mucho, como máximo ‘at least, at most.’ The operators sobre todo and especialmente ‘above all, especially’ are preference markers, as in (11): (11) Son las preguntas que Chuno hace a sus espectros pero sobre todo a sí mismo en este inesperado monólogo-diálogo con el que inicia su libro. Pero están también las respuestas que hacen que la acción no sea únicamente un ejercicio de meditación y de recuerdos (CREA, La Prensa Literaria. Suplemento semanal del diario La Prensa, 01/05/2004). ‘These are the questions that Chuno asks his ghosts but above all himself in this unexpected monologue-dialogue with which he begins his book. But there are also the answers that make the action be not only an exercise of meditation and memories.’ Syntactically, there are constructions in which a modifier alters the force or orientation of the core segment. The ‘realizing’ modifiers (Ducrot, 1995) indicate an increase in force of an argument (una soberbia elección ‘a superb choice’) while the ‘derealizing’ attenuates its force (somera descripción ‘brief description’) or changes its orientation (pesadilla maravillosa ‘wonderful nightmare’).

3.3

Strategies

A strategy implies planning, or re-elaboration of the linguistic material to use it with a persuasive intention. Speakers resort to strategies such as the attenuation or intensification of what has been said to conceal their responsibility (indirectness).At times, sociocultural and sociopragmatic aspects such as self-presentation, politeness, and the creation of a certain discursive identity, are involved.

3.3.1

Attenuation, intensification, and indirectness

Related to or derived from the argumentative force, there are two strategies that have wide scope and use. One is aimed at increasing the strength of the argument (‘intensification,’ Albelda, 2007; Fuentes Rodríguez, 2016c) and the other at decreasing it (‘attenuation’). The objectives of each are varied, but both are used to intensify the persuasive effect in the receiver. Indirectness sometimes implies attenuation and always enunciative distance from the speaker, 228

Pragmatics and argumentation

who declines to be involved in what has been said. How the strategies operate may be seen in Table 12.1: Table 12.1 Intensification, attenuation, and indirectness strategies Strategy Objective

Intensifcation

Attenuation

Indirectedness

Intensify persuasive effect.

Intensify persuasive effect

Irony

Characteristic of the discursive type: Characteristic of the political discourse, discourse of power. discursive type: political discourse, discourse of Self-image operation. power. Identity creation. Ideological feature.

Self-image operation.

Linked to modality at times (and then can indicate proximity or distance).

Identity creation. Politeness device.

Can establish distance in the conversation

Proximity in conversation

Mechanisms Operators: absolutamente, realmente, muy, a lo sumo

Evasion Generalization Mitigation or modulation of the assertion

‘absolutely, really, very, at most’

Operators: en cierto modo, Operators: de alguna manera, algo, casi generalmente, por lo ‘in a certain way, in some general, por así decir

Repetition

way, somewhat, almost’

Polyphony

Diminutive

‘generally, in general, in that way’

Modals, enunciation adverbs

Indirectness

Impersonality

Arguments (y por decirlo así) Ironic uses of decontextualization

We can see some strategies in this comment entry on a newspaper page, illustrated in Example (12): (12) Sjaj:

El juego que está jugando Ciudadanos para desgastar el PP tiene claramente sus peligros. Pero, por el momento, parece que le está saliendo bien.Y, francamente, en esta fase política, enfrentarse al PP sobre temas de corrupción no es muy difícil: el PP lo pone muy pero muy fácil. (El Mundo; 21/6/2018) ‘The game that Ciudadanos are playing to wear out the PP clearly has its dangers. But, for the moment, it looks like it’s going well.And, frankly, in this political phase, confronting the PP on corruption issues is not very difficult: the PP makes it very, very easy.’

The author, Sjaj, offers an opinion on the performance of Ciudadanos (center-right political party) and expresses two points of view. The connector that establishes the opposition is pero (Pero, por el momento . . . , pero las polémicas ‘But, for the moment . . . but the polemics’). He is cautious and expresses his attenuated opinion in parece que le está saliendo bien ‘it looks like it’s going well.’ However, he intensifies with argumentative operators as absolutamente, más, muy and other modal operators such as claramente or enunciatives like francamente. In this excerpt we can see how an argumentative scale is used in which the elements occupy different positions.The writer employs strategies such as negation to express his view in an attenuated form. Speakers are indirect when they attempt to mitigate their statements, do not show themselves openly, and perform one speech act by means of another. In this way, they are more polite and 229

Fuentes Rodríguez

their opponents accept their arguments more easily.The fragment in (13) belongs to a monologue of humor and discusses queues for buying tickets. (13) Le digo,“perdona, mira, ¿para comprar los tickets?” y dice:“sí, donde pone tickets” y yo “madre mía cómo hiláis eh, de verdad.” Bueno total, una cola que no veas, la cola era más larga que el columpio de la Heidi, y digo “pues bueno, vamos a esperar.” (Monólogo Dani Rovira 226; https//1000monologos.com) ‘I say to him, “excuse me, look, to buy the tickets?” and he says: “yes, where it says tickets” and I “My God, brilliant reasoning, eh, really.” Well, a line you’d never seen the likes of, the line was longer than Heidi’s swing, and I say “well, let’s wait.”’ The speaker, in the act of requesting, instead of using an imperative form (dame seis tickets ‘give me six tickets’) or a desire (quiero seis tickets ‘I want six tickets’), mitigates the illocutionary force and adopts a subordinate position. He begins with perdona and follows this with a question that serves as an attenuation strategy: ¿para comprar los tickets? Next in the narrative, he resorts to intensification, this time with two procedures: una cola que no veas (que no veas emphasizes the length of the line; the line was so long “that it could not be seen”), or with an explicit comparison (see Chapter 22 on mitigation, this volume).

3.3.2

Irony and subjectivity

Irony is an enunciative strategy in which the speaker says something that produces dissonance in the context and triggers an inference, generally in the opposite sense. For example, in the previous monologue, the reaction madre mía, cómo hiláis, eh, de verdad ‘My God, brilliant reasoning, eh, really’ implies an evaluation in a positive sense, of astonishment. It would imply “it’s very well thought out.” The meaning, as we all understand it, is the opposite. In Spanish, Ruiz-Gurillo (2013) relates irony and image in monologues and Alcaide Lara (2004) analyzes the argumentative function of irony. The expression of subjectivity of the speaker (by exclamation) can give strength to the argument, as in Aldi’s advertisement in Example (14): (14) Tiempo de terracita y ¡aperitivos! ‘Time for the terrace and aperitifs!’ The use of emotion in (14) is a powerful, persuasive tool, although according to the rhetorical model, it is a fallacy, as it eschews arguments based on reality and logic. In a 2015 TV interview, available on YouTube (“How Donald Trump Answers a Question”), Trump paints a negative picture of the situation in the U.S. to justify the change of government and asks for the public’s vote. Here the resources are the semantic properties of the words “tremendous” and “problem,” as well as the intonation, tense articulation, and slower enunciation that result in a focus.Thus, he appeals to feelings and generates a sensation of fear that promotes action by the hearer. In this excerpt we see how Trump’s hand gestures and his way of articulating serve to focus attention on certain elements of the discourse (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aFo_BV-UzI): (14) But, look, we have people coming into our countries that are looking to do a tremendous harm. Look at Paris. . . . Look at what happened last week in California with, you know, 14 people dead. Other people are going to die, they are so badly injured. We have a real problem.There is a tremendous hatred out there … And I wanna find out, what is the problem. . . .The people that are friends of mine that called said “Donald, you have done us a tremendous service. Because we do have a problem.” 230

Pragmatics and argumentation

The company eSky.co.uk is advertised as follows, appealing to emotion: (15) Discover undiscovered places, travel the way you like. Valuation is constantly used as a persuasive procedure.Take this message concerning the use of cookies: (16) Apple’s websites and online services may use “cookies.” Cookies enable you to use shopping carts and to personalize your experience on our sites, tell us which parts of our websites people have visited, help us measure the effectiveness of ads and web searches, and give us insights into user behavior so we can improve our communications and products. (www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/cookies/) It offers a positive experience:“personalize your experience . . . help us measure the effectiveness . . . improve our communications and products.”The company wants the public to infer that it is working for them and not merely exploiting their personal data. Slogans also appeal to emotion. Pablo Iglesias, leader of the Podemos party, said during 2016’s election campaign: Sonrían, que sí se puede.‘Smile, yes you can.’

3.3.3

Polyphony

Addressing the message to others (the source) enriches the text, increases the number of speakers, and generates a more convincing and comprehensive message. It intensifies the force of the argument. Thus, the Spanish Ministry’s posters alerting the public to the mistreatment of women adopt this strategy to show that the whole family is involved in and affected by this reality (see Figure 2 in Fuentes Rodríguez, 2012, p. 79).The advertisement includes the voice of the three family members and their affirmations, enclosed in quotation marks, as in (17): (17) MEN: “If you mistreat A WOMAN,YOU STOP BEING A MAN.” WOMAN: “Don’t you ever put your hand on me EVER.” SON/DAUGHTER: “Mom, do it for us.ACT.” The woman and her son/daughter use directive acts. The size of the lettering reflects the greater weight of some elements and a louder or more emphatic pronunciation.The highlighted elements are ever and act, the two keys used by the ministry to encourage the woman to report.

3.3.4

Self-image projection

The speaker can resort to sociopragmatic concepts such as the projection of a strong, powerful, or brilliant social image. One’s ‘face,’ according to Goffman (1967), is what a speaker uses in interactive play. It can be an individual or group face (Bravo, 2004). Sometimes even the image of an entire society is projected (Fuentes Rodríguez, 2010). This projection of the self-image can be used strategically as an argument.Thus, in the UNICEF advertisement in (17), a positive image of the organization is communicated through its work as lifesavers and, in this way, the recipients are persuaded to make donations. (17) UNICEF is already delivering food, water, medical supplies, temporary shelter, schooling, counseling, protection and family reunification services to these children in need. 231

Fuentes Rodríguez

Show these children that their lives—and futures—matter. Donate now so UNICEF can help the growing number of children on the run wherever they end up. The text can also create the image of a leader. For example,Trump plays with the opposition I-we, including himself in the collectivity and generating an image of intimacy with the voter: (18) I will fight for you with every breath in my body, and I will never, ever let you down. America will start winning again, winning like never before. We will bring back our jobs.We will bring back our borders.We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor. (www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/20/us/politics/ donald-trump-inauguration-speech-transcript.html 3/8) Speakers may create a stable identity arising from discursive behavior that is added to the social traits that characterize them. Thus, Pedro Sánchez, current president of Spain, resigned in 2016 as secretary general of the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español ‘Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party’) and left Congress because he did not want to support the then president, Mariano Rajoy. His slogan was “No es No.”When he presented himself to the PSOE primaries he wanted to create a winning identity, untainted by any hints of failure. His campaign then revolved around the slogan “Sí es sí.” Repetition, in positive terms, generates an identity with connotations of success. The low-cost airline Ryanair went on strike in July 2018 and caused cancellations affecting approximately 100,000 passengers in Spain. Some news reports reflected a positive image of the company and others were entirely negative. The headlines guide the inferences. They can be descriptive: “Ryanair Cabin Crews in 4 European Countries Go on Strike. Strike-Hit Ryanair Warns of Job Losses as Cuts Dublin Fleet” (The New York Times, 25–7–2018). In previous days they had been seeking a solution to the problem: “Ryanair Raises Laudamotion Loss Estimate to 150 Million Euros” (The New York Times, 23–7–2018). However, the headline of the Spanish newspaper El País conveys a more negative image than the American one: “Ryanair cumple su amenaza: habrá despidos en Irlanda por la huelga. La aerolínea anuncia que reducirá su flota en la isla un 20% con la supresión de 300 empleos” (El País, 24–7–2018) ‘Ryanair carries out its threat: there will be layoffs in Ireland because of the strike.The airline announces that it will reduce its fleet on the island by 20% with the elimination of 300 jobs.’ Among studies on argumentation and subjectivity are Fuentes Rodríguez (2013) and Alcaide, Carranza, and Fuentes Rodríguez (2016). Fuentes Rodríguez and Álvarez Benito (2016) include works on argumentation, politics, and gender. Fernández (2018) and Fuentes Rodríguez (2009a, 2011, 2016a) are dedicated to confrontational strategies in political discourses.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Research on argumentation operates in the rhetorical, sociopragmatic, and pragmatic fields. It describes fallacies, manipulation, and the use of reasons to resolve controversial discourse. It is to be expected in political, legal, or media discourse, but it has never been recognized that it exists in each communicative production.The speaker designs strategies to convince the receiver and selects linguistic forms to achieve it. Describing and discovering the persuasive goal of a text is 232

Pragmatics and argumentation

fundamental in order to be free in a society.Verbal forms help us to detect it, so it is essential to know them. Argumentative discourse is the meeting point between linguistic form, context, and ideology. Rhetoric joins the strategic, conditioned by belief systems and social, historical, and cultural impositions. The topoi or shared beliefs sustain a society and legitimize ideologies. The analyst must approach this complex reality with an integrated methodology where pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics join and reinforce each other. The work carried out so far needs to be extended in various directions: (a) argumentative dimension of intonation, word order, and all aspects related to evaluation; (b) argumentative function of speech acts and their contexts of realization (e.g., what speech acts are in the domain of political discourse, or advertising) and a comparison between the resources used in each type of discourse; (c) the relationship between argumentation and ideology, focusing on topoi and their social or historical legitimation; e.g., studies on the ideologies of the 20th century through journalistic texts, both in the political and social fields. Also, studies on issues of social impact such as poverty, equality, fake news, or post-truth, and the topoi used in advertising and their relationship with products and social and technological advances; (d) the pragmatics of discourses about immigration: arguments, presuppositions, and strategies; (e) the pragmatics of discourse about social violence, domestic violence, and terrorism; (f) argumentation and intercultural differences; arguments and legitimation; and (g) the pragmatics of institutional discourse: strategies, roles, (im)politeness, and indirectness; differences from political discourse.

Notes 1 4th century BC.This study has been carried out in part within the framework of the projects I+D+I FFI 2013–43205P and FFI2017–82898-P, funded by MINECO, Spain, and Feder. 2 Lo Cascio (1998) integrated semiotics with the theories of Toulmin (1958) and Ducrot (1984). 3 See Fuentes Rodríguez (2000, 2017). 4 The VAT is a consumption tax that is added to the price of each product in the European Union. 5 CORPES: Corpus del español del s. XXI. Real Academia Española. 6 Hierro was a Spanish national football team manager.

Further reading Anscombre, J. C., & Ducrot, O. (1983). L’argumentation dans la langue. Liège: Pierre Mardaga. This work establishes the principles of the theory of argumentation in language. It includes articles on theoretical aspects such as topoi and makes a theoretical-practical presentation on the basic concepts of the methodology. Fuentes Rodríguez, C., & Alcaide Lara, E. (2002). Mecanismos lingüísticos de la persuasión. Madrid:Arco Libros. It is an application from a pragmalinguistic approach to Spanish argumentative discourses. It presents a theoretical first part, focused, fundamentally, on the theory of argumentation in the language, and a second part applied to political discourses, advertising, and studies on lexicon or markers. van Eemeren, F. (2010). Strategic maneuvering in argumentative discourse: Extending the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. This work is fundamental to understand the pragmatic-dialectical perspective. It analyzes the strategies in detail and proposes an integral methodology in which not only the dialectical objectives of the interlocutors in the communicative encounter are taken into account, but also their rhetorical objectives. 233

Fuentes Rodríguez

References Adam, J.-M. (2005). La linguistique textuelle. Introduction à l’analyse textuelle des discours. Paris:Armand Colin. Albelda, M. (2007). La intensificación como categoría pragmática: revisión y propuesta. Berne: Peter Lang. Alcaide Lara, E. (2004). La ironía, recurso argumentativo en el discurso político. Rilce, 20(2), 169–198. Alcaide, E., Carranza,A., & Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2016). Emotional argumentation in political discourse. In C. Fuentes & G.Alvarez (Eds.), A gender-based approach to parliamentary discourse (pp. 129–160). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Alexy, R. (1989). Teoría de la argumentación jurídica. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales. Álvarez, M. (1994). Tipos de escrito II: Exposición y argumentación. Madrid:Arco Libros. Anscombre, J. C. (1998). Pero/sin embargo en la contra-argumentación directa: razonamiento, genericidad y léxico. Signo y Seña, 9, 75–104. Anscombre, J. C., Donaire, M. L., & Haillet, P. P. (Eds.). (2013). Opérateurs discursifs du français: eléments de description sémantique et pragmatique. Berne: Peter Lang. Anscombre, J. C., Donaire, M. L., & Haillet, P. P. (Eds.). (2018). Opérateurs discursifs du français, 2. Berne: Peter Lang. Anscombre, J. C., & Ducrot, O. (1983). L’argumentation dans la langue. Liège: Pierre Mardaga. Armañanzas, E., & Díaz Noci, J. (1996). Periodismo y argumentación: géneros de opinión. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco. Atienza, M. (1993). Las razones del derecho:Teorías de la argumentación jurídica. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales. Atienza, M. (2006). El derecho como argumentación. Barcelona: Ariel. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2011). Políticos en conflicto: una aproximación pragmáticodiscursiva al debate electoral cara a cara. Berne: Peter Lang. Bolívar, A. (2001). El insulto como estrategia en el diálogo político venezolano. Oralia, 4, 47–74. Borzi, C. (2013). El uso de “entonces/así que” en contexto narrativo sobre datos del PRESEEA-Buenos Aires. Estudios de lingüística E.L.U.A., 27, 61–88. Bravo, D. (2004).Tensión entre universalidad y relatividad en las teorías de la cortesía. In D. Bravo & A. Briz (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 15–37). Barcelona:Ariel. Brenes Peña, E. (2011a). Actos de habla disentivos: identificación y análisis. Sevilla: Alfar. Brenes Peña, E. (2011b). Descortesía verbal y tertulia televisiva: análisis pragmalingüístico. Berne: Peter Lang. Brenes Peña, E. (2017). La reserva argumentativa. Análisis pragmalingüístico de sus correlatos sintácticos. Pragmalingüística, 25, 89–106. Brenes Peña, E., & Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2017). Impoliteness and thematic variation in Spanish television interviews. Studies in Media and Communication, 5(1), 50–62. Briz Gómez, A. (1993). Los conectores pragmáticos en español coloquial (I): su papel argumentativo. Contextos, 21–22, 145–188. Candela, M. A. (1991). Argumentación y conocimiento científico escolar. Infancia y Aprendizaje: Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 55, 13–28. Charaudeau, P. (2004). Le contrat de communication dans une perspective langagière: contraintes psychosociales et contraintes discursives. In M. Bromberg & A.Trognon (dirs.), Psychologie sociale et communication (pp. 109–120). Paris: Dunod. Charaudeau, P. (2008). L’argumentation dans une problématique de l’influence. Argumentation et Analyse du Discours, 1. Retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/aad/193 Charaudeau, P. (2009). La argumentación persuasiva. El ejemplo del discurso político. In M. Shiro, P. Charaudeau, & L. Granato (Eds.), Haciendo discurso: Homenaje a Adriana Bolívar (pp. 277–295). Caracas: Facultad de Humanidades y Educación, Universidad Central de Venezuela. Cros, A. (2003). Convencer en clase: Argumentación y discurso docente. Barcelona: Ariel. De la Fuente, M. (2006). La argumentación en el discurso periodístico sobre la inmigración (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Universidad de León, León (Spain). Díaz, A. (2002). La argumentación escrita. Medellín: Universidad de Antioquía. Donaire, M. L. (2002). Estrategias concesivas y estructuras modales. In M. C. Figuerola, P. Solá, & M. Parra (Eds.), La lingüística francesa en el nuevo milenio (pp. 203–214). Lleida, Spain: Universidad de Lleida. Ducrot, O. (1984). El decir y lo dicho. Buenos Aires: Hachette. Ducrot, O. (1995). Les modificateurs déréalisants. Journal of Pragmatics, 24, 145–165. Fernández, F. (2018). La descortesía en el debate electoral cara a cara. Madrid: EUS. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (1995). Polifonía y argumentación: los adverbios de verdad, certeza, seguridad, y evidencia en español. Lexis, 19(1), 59–83. 234

Pragmatics and argumentation

Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2002). Los operadores argumentativos simple, mero, puro y solo. Anuario de Estudios Filológicos, 25, 83–101. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2009a). El debate entre Zapatero y Rajoy: ¿convencer a quién? Estudio textual e interactivo. Tonos Digital, 18, 1–51. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2009b). Diccionario de conectores y operadores del español. Madrid:Arco Libros. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2010). Ideología e imagen: La ocultación en la prensa de la violencia social o lo políticamente correcto. Discurso y Sociedad, 4(4), 853–892. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2011). El debate Zapatero/Rajoy: estudio argumentativo. Tonos Digital, 20, 1–29. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2012). Subjetividad, argumentación, y (des)cortesía. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 49, 49–92. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2013). (Coord.). Imagen social y medios de comunicación. Madrid:Arco Libros. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (Ed.). (2016a). Estrategias argumentativas y discurso político. Madrid:Arco Libros. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2016b). Los marcadores de límite escalar: argumentación y “vaguedad” enunciativa. Rilce. Revista de Filología Hispánica, 32(1), 110–137. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2016c). Intensification, identity and gender in the Andalusian Parliament. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez & G. Álvarez Benito (Eds.), A gender-based approach to parliamentary discourse (pp. 35–59).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2017). Lingüística pragmática y análisis del discurso. Madrid: Arco Libros. (Original work published 2000). Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (Ed.). (2018). Mujer, discurso, y parlamento. Sevilla: Alfar. Fuentes Rodríguez, C., & Alcaide Lara, E. (2002). Mecanismos lingüísticos de la persuasión. Madrid: Arco Libros. Fuentes Rodríguez, C., & Álvarez Benito, G. (Eds.). (2016). A gender-based approach to parliamentary discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. García Negroni, M. M. (1998). La negación metalingüística, argumentación y escalaridad. Signo y Seña, 9, 227–252. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual. Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Doubleday. González Sanz, M. (2018). Tertulia política e ideología. Berne: Peter Lang. Grize, J. B. (1990). Logique et langage. Gap: Ophrys. Habermas, J. (1984). Theory of communicative action: Reason and the rationalization of society (Vol. 1). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1981). Hamblin, C. L. (1976). Fallacies. London: Methuen. Henao, B. L., & Stipcich, M. S. (2008). Educación en ciencias y argumentación: la perspectiva de Toulmin  como  posible respuesta  a las  demandas  y  desafíos contemporáneos para  la  enseñanza  de las ciencias. Revista Electrónica de Enseñanza de las Ciencias (REEC), 7(1), 47–63. Laborda, X. (2018). Retórica del infortunio y periodismo testimonial. La forja del articulista Amador Contreras en Gran Sant Cugat (1999–2003). Tonos Digital, 35, 1–32. Lo Cascio,V. (1998). Gramática de la argumentación. Madrid: Alianza. López Eire, A. (2000). Retórica y política, In L. Ilundain, A. López Eire, & A. M. Seoane (Coords.), Retórica, política e ideología: desde la antigüedad hasta nuestros días. Actas del II Congreso Internacional (Vol. 3) (pp. 99–139). Salamanca:Asociación Española de Estudios sobre Lengua, Pensamiento y Cultura Clásica. López Eire,A., & de Santiago Guervós, J. (2000). Retórica y comunicación política. Madrid: Cátedra. Moechsler, J. (1985). Argumentation et conversation. Genève: Hatier-Crédif. Montolío Durán, E. (2003).“Es una buena periodista, en principio.” Sobre el operador discursivo ‘en principio’ y su función modalizadora en el discurso periodístico. Español Actual, 79, 45–58. Perelman, C. (1977). L´Empire rhétorique: rhétorique et argumentation. Paris: J.Vrin. Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1971). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Plantin, C. (1990). Essais sur l´argumentation. Paris: Kimé. Portolés, J. (1998). La teoría de la argumentación en la lengua y los marcadores del discurso. In M.A. Martín Zorraquino & E. Montolío (Eds.), Los marcadores del discurso. Teoría y análisis  (pp. 71–92). Madrid: Arco Libros. Portolés, J. (2013).Argumentación y oralidad: el caso de ‘además.’ Oralia, 16, 259–280. Portolés, J. (2016). ‘Razón de más’ como inversor argumentativo. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 27, 157–172. Roulet, E. (1997).A modular approach to discourse structures. Pragmatics, 7(2), 125–146. Ruiz-Gurillo, L. (2013). El monólogo humorístico como tipo de discurso: El dinamismo de los rasgos primarios. Cuadernos AISPI, 1, 189–212. 235

Fuentes Rodríguez

Santibáñez, C. (2009). Metáforas y argumentación:  lugar y función de las metáforas conceptuales en la actividad argumentativa. Signos: Estudios de Lingüística, 70, 245–269. Santibáñez, C. (2012).Teoría de la argumentación como epistemología aplicada. Cinta Moebio, 43, 24–39. Santibáñez, C. (2018). Engaño generalizado, pragmática y argumentación. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 73, 279–302. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Stati, S. (1990). Le transphrastique. Paris: PUF. Toulmin, S. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Dijk,T.A. (2002). Political discourse and political cognition. In P.A. Chilton & C. Schäffner (Eds.), Politics as text and talk:Analytical approaches to political discourse (pp. 204–236).Amsterdam: Benjamins. van Dijk,T.A. (2003). Ideología y discurso. Barcelona: Ariel. van Dijk,T.A. (2005). Politics, ideology, and discourse. In R.Wodak (Ed.), Elsevier encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 728–740).Amsterdam: Elsevier. van Dijk,T.A. (2008). Contextualization in parliamentary discourse:Aznar, Iraq, and the pragmatics of lying. In T.A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse and power (pp. 237–264). Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan. van Eemeren, F. H. (2010). Strategic maneuvering in argumentative discourse: Extending the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. van Eemeren, F. H., Garssen, B., Krabbe, E. C.W., Snoeck Henkemans, A. F.,Verheij, B., & Wagemans, J. H. M. (2014). Handbook of argumentation theory. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. van Eemeren, F. H., & Grootendorst, R. (2004). A systematic theory of argumentation: The pragma-dialectical approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Eemeren, F. H., & Snoeck Henkemans,A. F. (2017). Argumentation:Analysis and evaluation (2nd ed.). New York and London: Routledge. Vigara Tauste, A. M., & Hernández Toribio, M. I. (2011). Ciber(des)cortesía en los foros de opinion de la prensa escrita: un ejemplo. Estudios de Lingüística: E.L.U.A., 25, 353–382. Vignaux, G. (1988). Le discours, acteur du monde. Énonciation, argumentation et cognition. Paris: Ophrys. Wodak, R., & van Dijk, T. A. (Eds.). (2000). Racism at the top: Parliamentary discourses on ethnic issues in six European states. Klagenfurt,Austria: Drava Verlag. Woods, J., & Walton, D. (1989). Fallacies: Selected papers 1972–1982. Dordrecht, the Netherlands and Providence: Foris.

236

13 Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research José Portolés Lázaro

1

Introduction

One definition of censorship in modern languages addresses a certain type of communicative interaction, which can be considered its prototype: official censorship.An example is found in the Diccionario del español de México, which defines censurar ‘to censor’ as “to examine a written piece, a literary work, a film, etc. in order to remove or correct parts that are judged to be improper, immoral, etc. before allowing their release to the public” (Retrieved from http://dem.colmex. mx, 10 June, 2019). In this type of censorship, an employee of an institution officially blocks a message (e.g., a media news item) before its diffusion can reach the public.This involves, nevertheless, the institutionalization of a habitual communicative phenomenon. Conversation analysts believe that the peculiarities of oral communication within institutions are also found in ordinary conversation. The main difference is that while some actions occur sporadically in colloquial conversations, they are recurrent in institutional interactions, as institutions are strongly oriented toward a determined outcome (Heritage & Clayman, 2010). In the same way that the job of judges is to judge, even though everyone does it at some time, and the job of journalists is to inform, even though anyone can do it, the job of an institution’s censors is also one that anyone can do at any time. Censors include university officials who do not allow people with opposing ideologies to participate in their campus activities, trolls on social media who try to shut down the voices of those whose opinions they do not share (i.e., they do not limit themselves to arguing to the contrary), and even those parents who prohibit their children from discussing politics at family gatherings. In sum, all human beings can impose censorship at some time. Ever since the French Revolution, the words ‘censorship’ and ‘to censor’ have been considered pejorative in Western culture (Infelise, 2013). In fact, they tend to be avoided in situations where they are considered to be morally justified, as when parents do not allow their young children to watch television programs that they consider inappropriate. However, this moral consideration has no place in linguistic pragmatics research.According to our criteria, any prohibition of a message must be considered to be an act of censorship, whether or not the researcher considers it morally justified. But why do we censor? We impose censorship because, as speech act theory (Austin, 1975; Searle, 1969) demonstrates, activities like asking, advising, or requesting are done with words, and what we say has effects or consequences for those who receive our messages, like elation, sadness, 237

Portolés Lázaro

or fright, whether we want them to or not.These consequences have been named “perlocutionary acts” by Austin (1975), and “perlocutionary effects” by Searle (1969). In order to justify censure, one must keep in mind that the messages affect not only those to whom they are addressed, but also all others who might receive them. If these others, the third parties, perceive them as a threat, they may impose censorship on them in turn. In accordance with this idea, censorship can be defined in a way that can be useful to pragmatics (Portolés, 2016a): Whoever, for ideological motives, impedes communication between or among sender/s and his/her/their addressees, or otherwise causes them harm, imposes censorship. (2016a, p. 19) Pragmatics normally focuses on the interaction between two participants: the sender (1) and the addressee (2); in other words, a dyadic interaction.The study of censorship, however, demonstrates that communicative interaction can also depend on a third participant: the censor (3), even in cases where the censor is not present at the time of the interaction. The censors may consider a message to be threatening to the ideology of their group and may have the power to impede this message and even to punish the participants.When the participants learn of the existence of a censor, their communication is carried out with the knowledge that a third participant is involved, and while their interaction is by all appearances dyadic, it is in reality triadic. Furthermore, since the censor is considered to be a member of an ideological group, a seemingly interpersonal interaction becomes an inter-group interaction. Drawing on documented facts, the study of censorship shows that many of the communicative interactions, which for a novice researcher in pragmatics might seem to be dyadic and interpersonal, are actually triadic and intergroup in nature. A third participant appears in these interactions, and often conditions the message sent: how it is formulated and even how it is interpreted. For example, the Real Academia Española (RAE) responded to a comment that considered discriminatory the fact that the adjective marrón ‘brown’ does not have a feminine form, marrona, as follows: (1)

“There are adjectives with both masculine and feminine forms, such as rojo-a (red), amarillo-a (yellow), and listo-a (smart)—and others that have only one form for both genders, such as marrón, azul (blue), and imbécil (imbecile)” (Message posted to https:// twitter.com/RAEinforma, 20 Feb, 2019)

In this way, the Real Academia (1), rather than call the commenter (2) an imbecile directly for fear of negative public opinion (3, the censor), managed to do it indirectly, making it clear to anyone who might subsequently comment that its answer contained no insult, that it was merely an explanation of grammar.To put it differently, an institution (1) responds to an individual (2), keeping in mind that its answer is not only to the individual, but also to the general public. Some of the general public might consider an insult such as ‘imbecile’ inappropriate for such an institution and might consequently criticize it on social media (3), causing the RAE@ informa to compose its message in such a way that, while insinuating that it could be an insult, allowed it to escape the criticism of the censoring group (the critics). In conclusion, even though the interaction between RAE@informa and the commenter appears to be dyadic, it is actually triadic, and the third participant—the censor—is the one that conditioned the response (which could not be neglected), how it was formulated (with no direct insult), and how it would be interpreted (as an insult made in a most ingenious way) (see Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse, this volume). 238

Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research

A broad view of pragmatics, sometimes called a “European view,” as presented in Fitch and Sanders (2005) and applied in Portolés (2016a), is fitting for the study of censorship.This chapter is organized as follows: Sections 2.1 and 2.2 deal with concepts relevant to a pragmatic study of censorship; the properties of censorship and the characteristics of a censurable message, respectively. Section 3 is devoted to various methodological considerations: what is a censorious phenomenon and what is not (Section 3.1); how censorship compares with other types of close interaction (Section 3.2); what other communicative interactions are related to censorship (Section 3.3). Finally, we examine how data for a pragmatic study of censorship can be obtained (Section 3.4).The chapter ends with suggestions of topics for further study (Section 4).

2

Review of existing research

The term ‘censorship’ comes from the Roman political structure that bestowed powers performed by a ‘censor,’ a noun that derives from the Latin verb censeo ‘to value, to classify’ and from census ‘census.’The origin of this magistrate is explained by the timocratic character of Roman society, where, from the beginning, the obligations and rights of citizens were based on their properties.The Roman censor organized citizens into census groups and established corresponding taxes.To do this, a detailed description of all properties and family connections was necessary; consequently, the censor obtained personal information about property owners. Because of this knowledge, the censor began to occupy himself with not only the citizens’ properties, but also their customs, in the conviction that the high-class Roman ought to conserve traditional customs and be an example to others (Suolahti, 1963). The study of censorship as a pragmatic phenomenon does not seek to describe the functioning of any official historic censoring institution (e.g., how the Council of the Indies approved the printing of books in the 17th century; Reyes Gómez, 2000), but rather to explain the actions of people who act as censors at a given moment in a specific interaction, whether or not they are supported by an official institution.To analyze censorship as a pragmatic phenomenon, we categorize a series of concepts by the properties of censorship and the characteristics of the censurable message.

2.1 Properties of censorship 2.1.1

Triadic interaction

The censor forms part of a triadic interaction; that is, one having three participants.Those who impose censorship (3) impede communication between, or otherwise punish, those who send (1) and those who receive (2) a message. Other types of triadic interactions would be: media interviews, where a public (3) reads or listens to the interaction between an interviewer (1) and one who is interviewed (2); or in courts, where a jury (3) listens to the interaction between a district attorney (1) and a witness (2). Even if censors do not actively participate in an actual interaction, they condition the way the other participants act; in this way, the senders (1), who know they may be punished for what they say, can try to accommodate a message for the censor’s (3) ears rather than for those of the addressee (2). In 1814, the viceroy of New Spain, Félix María Calleja, proclaimed that instead of using words like “insurrection and insurgents” to refer to those who had published the Constitution of Apatzingán, the terms “rebellion, treason, traitors, and rebels” should be used (Gómez Álvarez & Tovar de Teresa, 2009). From that moment on, for example, those who stopped calling Morelos an insurgent and began calling him a traitor did so not for the addressees of their messages, but in fear of the censor’s ideology. 239

Portolés Lázaro

2.1.2

Ideology

To differentiate censorship from other restraints on speech or writing (e.g., prohibiting shouting in hospitals), we must keep in mind that censors apply an ideology as a behavioral norm that both they and everyone else are required to follow.The possibility of a third party participating in an interaction between two others can happen in any normal situation; thus, for example, a judge (3) condemns certain persons (1) for robbing another person (2), not because the robbery affects them directly, but because there is a norm that punishes this kind of action. Human beings do not act solely in a physical manner, but also with words, so it is not unusual that norms are followed in this situation.Those who impose censorship ensure that these norms are followed and impede the communication of anything that might be a threat to their ideology. Van Dijk (1997) explains ideology with a metaphor: just as a grammar conditions the particular uses of a language by its speakers, an ideology is a ‘grammar’ of the specific social practices of a group. People are told what to think about different social matters.Therefore, for censorship to happen, those who share the ideological motives of a group must establish respect for their ideology as a norm that all others must follow. In 1500, in defense of the Catholic faith, the Archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Giménez de Cisneros, ordered the burning of the Korans in the possession of Muslim families in Granada (Pérez García, 2006) and, years later (1562), Friar Diego de Landa burned 27 Mayan codices to ashes in Yucatán (Báez, 2008, 2009). Both Franciscans (3), in accordance with their Catholic ideology, eliminated texts (1) that they considered a threat if read by the people (2) whom they wished to convert to Christianity. Take note, nevertheless, that because an ideology guides the actions of the censor, it does not necessarily mean there is a contrary ideology among the censored. Throughout the history of the Hispanic world, for example, cases of prohibition and punishment have been documented for speaking any language other than Spanish or for using a dialect other than the official one. Carlos III, drawing on written works of a number of Latin American prelates, published a royal decree in 1770 that urged the “extinguishing of other languages” used in his dominions in the Americas, and that “only Spanish be spoken, as is mandated in numerous laws” (Muñoz Machado, 2017, p. 433). For the most part, the people used their indigenous languages not because of ideological opposition to Spanish, but because they did not know Spanish, or simply preferred their mother tongues.

2.1.3

Identity

In accordance with communication accommodation theory, most interactions have intergroup aspects (Giles, 2016). Groups form on the basis of social categories determined by criteria as diverse as age, gender, profession, nationality, one’s favorite sports team, health, or the mere perception of affiliation of one person with another (less social distance), including the perception created at a specific moment in the interaction. In this way, a censor identifies as a member of the ‘in-group,’ and as a result, excludes the person censored, a member of the ‘out-group.’ The censoring group can be an organization, official or not; a social group with no internal hierarchy, or any group that the censor identifies with at any given moment.Trolls who seek to silence their opponents on social media (i.e., force them to opt out) are an example of this. It is possible that these trolls do not even know other members of the group with whom they identify (e.g., Chinese nationalists, white supremacists, pro- or anti-abortion activists) but nevertheless believe that other people share their motives. The identity of a censor can be permanent (e.g., when the censor works in an official capacity; ‘occupational identity’) or it can be only for a given moment in the communicative interaction 240

Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research

(‘discursive identity’). Discursive identity is a dynamic identity presented only in a certain interaction. This proposed theory is based on the studies of spoken interaction by Harvey Sacks (1992) in the 1960s and developed further in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998; Schegloff, 1991). From this perspective, the identity of someone in a particular interaction can be that of a censor (‘censoring discursive identity’). Anyone who imposes censorship has this identity. Going back to Example (1), people who feel that the RAE should not call the person who asks a question an imbecile share a discursive identity based on good manners or good taste, following community norms (see Section 2.1.2).

2.1.4

Coalition

There are proposals within social psychology that argue that one’s identity can reflect, in differing measures, that of another (Aron, Aron, & Norman, 2001).We will consider these variations of identity in our study of censorship. It is possible that a censor does not identify with any of the other participants of an interaction; e.g., when prison officers censure free communication between prisoners and outsiders without identifying themselves to the prisoners or their contacts. Still, it is not unusual for a censor to identify with either the sender or the addressee. In such a case, we have coalition (Bruxelles & Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2004).The coalition of a censor (3) and an addressee (2) is common in the censorship of messages intended for children.The censor identifies with the children in an effort to protect them and suppresses or rewrites messages directed toward them. In the same way, a coalition between the censor (3) and the sender (1) is possible, as in totalitarian states where journalists and writers who have permission to publish can understand their job to be a defense of the ideology they share with the institutional censorship. In these cases, the censor is a collaborator with the writer; both are faithful to the regime, but it is still the job of the censor to make sure the writer complies. During the era of the German Democratic Republic, all publications, including literary ones, had to be approved by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in accordance with an annual plan.The writer would send a text to one or several editors, who could themselves add comments.Afterward, the text and revisions were handed over to an official government institution, where a new and lengthy act of censorship took place. Later, the Department of Culture of the Party could hold up or modify the text further, and even the Secretary General could make corrections in his own handwriting (Darnton, 2014). In this way, the message of the author of the book perfectly reflected the ideology of the censor, thus identifying them both within the same ideological orthodoxy. Note that coalitions between censor and addressee or censor and sender are asymmetric; in both cases, the censors are those with the power to impose their ideology.

2.1.5

Self-censorship

The goal of censorship is usually to effectuate self-censorship (Coetzee, 1996); in other words, to induce senders and addressees alike to impose censorship on themselves, rendering the censor unnecessary.This is, in fact, the most common type of censorship. For example, a report about freedom of expression in Mexico by an international human-rights organization has called certain areas of the country “silenced areas,” or states where journalists not only cannot report on certain issues (they impose self-censorship), but are also forced by criminal organizations to publish certain items (Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, 2018). Self-censorship is possible because, like all human beings, those who wish to communicate something have a spontaneous psychological ability; that of meta-representation of the public 241

Portolés Lázaro

and private representations that are in the minds of others (Sperber, 2000) and that of predicting whatever the censors are going to perceive as a threat to their ideology (Portolés, 2016b).There are three main types of self-censorship: that of the sender, the disseminator, and the receiver. An example of self-censorship by the sender is the case of author Enrique Jardiel Poncela, who made changes to his own comic novel, But . . . ¿were there ever eleven thousand virgins? (published in 1931), in order to adapt it to the post-war conservative Spanish population.At that time, references in opposition to the Catholic Church, to extramarital relationships, or to explicitly sexual matters, were stigmatized.“My first lover became my first husband, as black as a priest’s robe became as black as a frock-coat, I slept with her became I was involved, and sperm became corpuscles” (Abellán, 1980, p. 21). An example of self-censorship by the disseminator is the case of a bookseller from La Plata (Argentina) who, in fear of punishment during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983), rid himself of a great number of leftist-ideology books, even though in reality no one had demanded that he do so (Bossié, 2008). Finally, an example of self-censorship by the receiver is the behavior of the friends of author Elsa Bornemann: as soon as the Argentine dictatorship banned her children’s book, An elephant takes up a lot of space, they cut ties with her in 1977 in fear of retaliation by the military.

2.2

Characteristics of a censurable message

Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, which describes speech acts as face-threatening acts, is useful in pragmatics for analyzing the concept of threat in a message (see Chapter 2 on speech acts, and Chapters 20 and 21 on (im)politeness, this volume). In the study of censorship, we can substitute the concept of ‘face’ for that of ideology; that is, censurable acts are those that, in the opinion of the censor, threaten their ideology.Various authors have argued that this theory of politeness is not universal (Culpeper, Haugh, & Kádár, 2017); however, what is of interest to the study of censorship is not its explanation of politeness, but rather its consideration of the speech act as a threat, since censors understand the messages that they consider censurable to be a threat to their ideology. Just as Brown and Levinson’s theory (1987) concentrates on speech acts, censorship studies indicate that messages can be censored for broader aspects of the speech act than are originally intended. For example, the Spanish Inquisition, in its persecution of Jewish and Muslim religious books, also burned books on law, medicine, science, and literature because they were written in Hebrew or Arabic script (Portolés, 2016a, pp. 147–148). In Argentina, after the takeover of the government by the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos ‘Group of United Officers’ in 1943, everything said in lunfardo argot was censored on the radio because it did not conform to what was considered to be correct Spanish (Kailuweit, 2012). In both cases, a message was censored not for what it said (the speech act), but for how it was said. Brown and Levinson’s theory is useful, nevertheless, because it provides certain criteria for calculating how to measure the level of threat in an utterance: power, social distance, and level of imposition.The weight of a threat to a message for a censor could be calculated by the following equation: Weight = Power (Censored/Censor) + Social Distance (Censor/Censored) + Level of Imposition

2.2.1

Power

In most cases, censorship without power is reduced to mere recrimination. This power can be greater or lesser in relation to the censored, and it can also be lasting or temporary. Great and lasting power allowed the President of Uruguay, Juan María Bordaberry (1971–1976), to condemn 242

Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research

those who sang the national anthem with emphasis on “tyrants tremble” to 18 months to six years of prison (Báez, 2009); temporary and diminished power, on the other hand, could apply to those who take advantage of the fact that no one sees them as they tear a poster off a wall because it offends their ideology.

2.2.2

Social distance

This second criterion of Brown and Levinson’s equation can be illustrated by the greater distance between a boss and a subordinate compared to the lesser distance between two colleagues of the same rank; thus, an identical interaction, such as a joke, can be more threatening to the image of a boss than that of a colleague. This same phenomenon can be found in censorship interaction. In extreme patriarchal societies, such as pan-Hispanic society in the 16th and 17th centuries, the social distance between an official censor, usually a man, and other participants in communicative interaction was greater if one of them was a woman.To reduce distance and, therefore, the weight of the threat of a text required to pass censorship, Catholic nuns who related mystic experiences made it clear that they were writing under the orders of their confessors, who often were credited as authors if the works were published.This practice continued into the 19th century (Poutrin, 1995).

2.2.3

Imposition

There are various levels of imposition in speech acts; e.g., in requests, where asking to borrow a pencil is of lesser gravity than asking to borrow an automobile.We know that in our society, pencils cost less than automobiles, and that more expensive objects are harder to borrow, as there would be greater repercussions if they were lost or ruined. In the same way, depending on ideology, censors can realize a greater or lesser level of imposition in a message, and thus, a greater threat.The Zapata Index of prohibited books (published in 1632) requires that a single line be removed from El Quijote:“and remember, Sancho, that works of charity done in a lukewarm and half-hearted way are without merit and of no avail” (Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Second Part, Chap. XXXVI) (Retrieved from https:// archive.org/details/A295133, 10 June, 2019).This sentence constituted a threat to the ideology of the inquisitor by reflecting an interpretation of charity that did not coincide with the Catholic orthodoxy of the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Senders have a number of resources for lessening the imposition level of a message. One discursive strategy is attenuation, which mitigates the illocutionary force of a message along with its imposition rating (Briz & Albelda, 2013; see also Chapter 22 on mitigation, this volume).The objective of attenuators of a message is that its receivers perceive it as less threatening to their image and, relatedly, their ideology. When his novel, The horns of fear (1958), was initially censored, author Ángel María de Lera substituted attenuated expressions for the prohibited ones. His protagonist bullfighters now said “bad woman” rather than “whore,” or “they’re beasts” instead of “they’re bastards.”With these corrections, the novel was published (Larraz, 2014). Aesopian Writing provides another way to lower the imposition level.This term comes from the use of Aesop’s Fables as allegories of real situations in order to criticize the powers that be (Patterson, 1984, 1991).This is a kind of expression in which readers or spectators and censors themselves acknowledge criticism of power without directly confronting it.Argentine rock star Charly García was able to hide his criticism of the Argentine dictatorship in his song Alicia en el país (‘Alice in the land [of wonders]’) behind the mask of Lewis Carroll’s Alice (Bossié, 2008). To the three classic criteria of Brown and Levinson’s equation (power, social distance, and level of imposition), we add two more to better demonstrate how the weight of a message’s 243

Portolés Lázaro

threat affects a censor: diffusion and occasion.The greater the diffusion of a message, the greater the threat perceived by the censor.To avoid the diffusion of certain books, that same Argentine dictatorship would declare them to be for “limited viewing.” These works could not be seen in the shop windows or on tables inside.They had to be hidden at the back of the bookshops, never with their covers on top of a table, placed on the shelves so that one could see only their spines. Likewise, a type of censorship called Formula 4 allowed a person to be excluded from appearing on public and private radio and television, but to continue publishing in newspapers and magazines (Invernizzi & Gociol, 2003).The censor saw danger only in the diffusion of the new oral, free media, not in that of written, paid-for communication services. Finally, we must consider the occasion (that is, the actual context in which a message is given) to help determine whether it can be considered threatening.A message can be innocuous or censurable, depending on the circumstances. In March of 2019, the producers of the cartoon series The Simpsons blocked the re-publication of an earlier episode (September 19, 1991) because it contained the voice of Michael Jackson, who had just been accused of pederasty in a documentary featuring several of his victims.1,2,3 The voice of a certain person who had been considered innocent, even entertaining, was now considered censurable given the new circumstances. In summary, the new equation for calculating the weight of threat to an ideology by a censor in a message would be: Weightx = Power (Censured/Censor) + Social Distance (Censor/Censured) + Level of Impositionx + Level of Diffusionx + Occasion There are a number of publications in the Hispanic world that concern censure, mostly by historians, jurists, or Communications scholars (e.g., Abellán, 1980; Báez, 2009; Bossié, 2008; Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos ‘Interamerican Committee on Human Rights,’ 2018; Delibes, 1985; Fernández López, 2000; Gómez Álvarez & Tovar de Teresa, 2009; Invernizzi & Gociol, 2003; Jones, 2015; Kailuweit, 2012; Larraz, 2014; Reyes Gómez, 2000; Ruiz Bautista, 2008). There are also studies of specific phenomena, such as linguistic interdiction (e.g., Casas Gómez, 2005) or the imposition of politically correct language (e.g., Reutner & Schafroth, 2012; Zhao, 2018), which are related to censorship as it is understood in this paper. Still, there is a need for more studies that consider cases of censorship as a type of interaction.

3

Methodological considerations

The study of censorship from the point of view of pragmatics must begin with a question: How does the (possible) punishment of a third party condition the formulation and the transmission of messages between senders (1) and their addressees (2)? The simplest answer would be ‘by silencing them,’ but censorship can also require that certain matters be communicated, or that they be communicated in a certain way (Section 3.1). Also important is the comparison of censorship with other communicative phenomena in order to demonstrate how they differ (Section 3.2), as well as how they relate to one another (Section 3.3). Finally, the difficulties involved in obtaining data for the study of censorship (Section 3.4) must be considered.

3.1

Delimiting the study of censorship

If we continue to consider censorship to be an interaction among three participants, even in cases where this accommodation is out of fear of some kind of punishment on the part of the addressee, the accommodation of the sender (1) to the addressee’s (2) ideology would not be 244

Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research

considered a case of self-censorship. Here, the self-censorship is not due to the addressee’s fear, but to that of the censor (3), who could be blamed. Censorship is usually regarded as the suppression of discourse and is related to silence (González Ruiz, 2015; Méndez Guerrero, 2016); nevertheless, censors do not always just eliminate texts or block messages: they can also put restrictions on them or, following André Lefevere (1992), rewrite texts to agree with their own ideology.An example that combines both kinds of censorial acts (suppression and imposition of a message) is the following directive that Franco’s censors sent to newspapers in Spain: In the event of the impending passing of José Ortega y Gasset, the newspaper will limit the announcement to a maximum of two columns and, if desired, only one laudatory article, which should by all means mention his religious and political errors, and avoid referring to him as master. (apud Delibes, 1985, p. 19) This directive not only imposes silence (the philosopher Ortega y Gasset must not be called “master” or widely praised), but also requires certain wording: his “religious and political errors” must be mentioned.This combination of suppression and imposition was common in the Franco era. Rewriting can be common in translations, known as ad usum Delphini (i.e., removing possibly objectionable matter) acts of censorship. Besides suppressing words or parts of works whose original versions are not acceptable to their ideology, censors adapt and slant them to suit their own purposes. Examples of ad usum Delphini censoring acts are often found in children’s literature. In the French version of Pippi Longstocking, the little girl rides a pony, rather than a horse, quite possibly to prevent children’s falls; in the English translation of Sophie’s world, an appointment at four a.m. is changed to eight a.m., a more appropriate hour for a little girl to go down the street; and in the current version of The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, a black child no longer wants to be transformed into a white one with blue eyes (Fernández López, 2000; Gambier & van Doorslaer, 2010). Adding material is another way of censorship without imposing silence.This involves making it difficult to access a message by hiding it within innocuous messages. Chinese universities have voluntary student groups that censor their fellow students’ internet forums without eliminating messages. One of their tasks is to flood the sites with topics they consider politically inoffensive so that forum participants spend their time on acceptable matters (French, 2006). Another example of censorship by addition would be the difference between the education of boys and girls throughout history. In patriarchal societies, girls are only educated to be good wives and mothers, as shown in the Spanish census of 1797, where schools for boys focused on ‘literacy’ and those for girls on ‘learning.’ Girls were made to study catechism and practice domestic skills, but not necessarily to read and write; these skills were not made mandatory until the 1820s (Viñao, 2001). In other words, the time that should have been used for learning to read and write was instead taken up with lessons considered less ‘dangerous’ for the Catholic morality of the era.

3.2

Censorship vs. peripheral communicative phenomena

All prohibitions of messages are not necessarily considered acts of censorship in terms of the criteria we have adopted. Sometimes prohibitions are founded in some other type of criterion, not an ideology.The BBC did not broadcast the news until 1938, not for ideological reasons, but to avoid competition with newspapers.There was a single informative brief, and this was later than 7 p.m., after the newspapers had sold out (Gorman & McLean, 2003). 245

Portolés Lázaro

Style editors who change original texts or translations, mostly concerned with practical matters, are also not considered to be censors; they merely follow guidelines for linguistic, grammatical, and spelling norms deemed by authors to be of suitable quality for their readers (Brunette, 2002). There is no ideology behind their work that exceeds professional norms. In the same way, it would be absurd to consider the parents who make their book-loving daughter turn off the light at night as censors.That is, they are not prohibiting her from reading a particular book because of their ideology; she can continue reading the book later.They only want her to have enough sleep to be ready for school the next day. Our definition of censorship requires the imposition of an ideology; however, it is not clear how imposition differs from frequent recommendation.Those who defend political correctness, for example, put pressure on those in power to regulate language with acceptable norms and laws (Hughes, 2010; Reutner & Schafroth, 2012). Sometimes it is hard to discern if this pressure is a recommendation or a prohibition. In cases of self-censorship, it is also hard to tell if someone is afraid of being punished or is just trying to go along with popular opinion. The following situation illustrates yet another difficulty in the study of censorship. During the 18th Conference of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Beijing, 2012), taxi drivers who transported the delegates were required to keep their car windows closed, as authorities had learned that attendees had been tossing out ping-pong balls filled with censurable messages (McDonald, 2012). The taxi drivers therefore acted as censors, although they may not have identified themselves as such, nor did they necessarily have to share the orthodox ideology of the CCP, even though they recognized it. One way to explain this behavior is to propose the existence of ‘forced censors,’ or those who act as censors at a given moment in fear of punishment by another person or institution.

3.3

Discursive phenomena related to censorship

The study of censorship emphasizes the existence of other related discursive phenomena that can be easily overlooked or analyzed haphazardly.An addressee of a prohibited message in some cases can ask permission from a censor to receive it. For example, the rules of Zapata’s inquisitorial Index (1632) end with number XIV, which expressly maintains that, in order to serve the Holy Church against heresy, any pious, learned man who needs to read a book on the list “will be permitted to have it and read it in the time that seems appropriate.”4 In addition, a receiver of a message can report it to a censor, calling it a threat to an ideology.  In censorial regimes, informing on others is not uncommon and can even involve the ‘denunciation’ of members of one’s own family.The Soviet regime turned Pavlik Morozov into a hero and martyr when he was a child for denouncing his father for counterrevolutionary behavior. His betrayal was taught as an example in USSR schools for other children to follow (Shentalinsky, 1997). ‘Recantation’ is another phenomenon related to censorship that is worthy of further study. Censorious recantation happens when something that was previously said is corrected by its originators, not of their own volition, but because they have been forced to change it by a censor. In such cases, the senders or diffusers must address their receivers anew and inform them that the first message was erroneous.The Superintendency of Information and Communication of the Republic of Ecuador sanctioned the newspaper El Universo for having published a vignette by the humorist Javier Bonilla “Bonil” on May 8, 2014. Part of the sanction was to apologize publicly seven days in a row to the groups who had protested the launching of the first electronic version of the paper.These apologies were signed by the newspaper director (the disseminator) and not by the humorist himself.5 246

Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research

There are also cases where the censor, by means of consignas ‘instructions’ (the term used by the Franco regime in the press), requires an already written text or that a certain message be published according to the terms proposed by the censor himself. Franco’s consignas were sent daily to newspapers and magazines by the Minister in charge.The author of the items written to comply with the consigna, in Goffman’s (1981) terms, was not just the journalist forced to edit the article, but also an employee of the censoring institution who added ideas and, on some occasions, actually edited the text. Still, the reader believed that the journalist who signed the article and the newspaper as an institution were both responsible for their content.Although an article could have one author (the censor) or two authors (the censor and the journalist), the one who was responsible for what was said in the article, in the eyes of the newspaper’s readers, was the journalist alone and not the government censor. Both prohibited discourse and the success of certain types of discourse can be seen through the study of censorship. A ‘self-reproductive system of censorship’ can be found in censoring societies where works that adjust to the innocuous type are encouraged once unthreatening texts are recognized (Andrés de Blas, 2008). The narratives of Maxim Gorky, Andrei Platonov, and Boris Pilnyak exemplify types of literature appreciated by Stalin, who loved to read about great civil engineering projects like canals, dams, and sluices (Westerman, 2011).

3.4 Collection of data Facts concerning censorship are not as easy to obtain or recognize as are other phenomena in communication. One example is how Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich (2017) tells of her difficulties in convincing former female Soviet soldiers to tell her what really happened to them during World War II when she interviewed them. If others were present in her interviews, these women said what had been deemed true by the Soviet orthodoxy. Alexievich could not get them to tell the truth unless she were the only one able to hear their confessions. Again we have three participants in the communicative interaction: the interviewee (1), a former Soviet soldier; the interviewer (2), Svetlana Alexievich; and the public (3), the husband or other members of her family, whom the informant perceives as censors, as they can be critical of her frankness. Even though these familiar censors conditioned the former soldiers’ message, they did not appear on the tape recorded by the journalist. Something similar happens with written texts, where it is nearly impossible to be certain how a text has been changed, both by a censor and through self-censorship. This chapter serves as the first stage of research into censorship from the perspective of pragmatics.We must go further through the study of history, memoirs, biographies, chronicles, and media news in order to construct a theory that will allow the analysis of the data obtained from daily communicative interaction and inspire experimentation.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Pragmatic studies and discourse analysis have generally dealt with communicative interaction in a simplistic manner. It has for the most part been considered dyadic and interpersonal; i.e., two people who communicate with each other as individuals. However, censorship and its history show that communicative interactions are often triadic and intergroupal. This happens even when the censor is not present at the time of interaction. Messages are spoken, written, and interpreted with the knowledge that a third party has the power to punish their perpetrators for what is considered to be a threat to their ideology.This practice, which was already frequent in the age of the printing press and with the rise of other communication technologies, has become 247

Portolés Lázaro

common with digital technology. Most current communication takes place through technologies that allow messages to be viewed publicly and censored by third parties who are not direct addressees, even automatically.6 Future research on censorship must deal with this triadic situation using existing pragmatics theories as well as new ones that consider ongoing developments in communication. Most welcome are studies of self-censorship on the internet (e.g., not sending a censurable message or not opening a web page in order to avoid detection), the use of elusive jargon (even in conversations considered private) for fear of unwanted diffusion of one’s messages, new types of censorship by addition, attempts at anonymity in the expression of opinions, the creation of avatars for sending censurable messages, the justification of censorship to suppress discrimination of social groups, new methods of recantation, and new methods of denunciation.

Notes 1 Retrieved on July 3, 2019, from http://dem.colmex.mx 2 Retrieved on July 3, 2019 from https://archive.org/details/A295133 3 Retrieved on July 3, 2019, from www.wsj.com/articles/simpsons-episode-featuring-michael-jacksonsvoice-to-be-pulled-11552007802 4 Retrieved on July 3, 2019, from https://archive.org/details/A295133/page/n23 5 Retrieved on July 3, 2019 from www.eluniverso.com/2015/02/16/caricatura/4560831/bonil 6 Retrieved on July 3, 2019, from https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2018/risedigital-authoritarianism

Further reading Jones, D. (Ed.). (2015). Censorship.A world encyclopedia. Oxford and New York: Routledge. This is a complete encyclopedia of censorship in four volumes that was first published in 2001. The topics are in alphabetical order, each one written by a specialist. Some are more comprehensive, e.g., the history of censorship in one country or in the press or on the radio. Others are more specific, such as those dedicated to a particular law or literary work.This work shows the importance of censorship in the history of human communication. Portolés, J. (2016). La censura de la palabra. Estudio de pragmática y análisis del discurso.Valencia: Universitat de València. This book studies censorship from the perspective of pragmatics and discourse analysis. The first part analyzes censorship as a specific type of interaction based on the theories of speech acts, politeness, relevance, and conversation analysis. The second part considers censorial behavior; in particular, what is censored and when communicative interaction is censored. Numerous examples of censorship are documented, and the relationship of censorship to different types of verbal interaction is demonstrated.

References Abellán, M. L. (1980). Censura y creación literaria en España (1939–1976). Barcelona: Península. Alexievich, S. (2017). The unwomanly face of war:An oral history of women in World War II. New York: Random House. Andrés de Blas, J. (2008). La censura de libros durante la Guerra Civil española. In E. Ruiz Bautista (Ed.), Tiempo de censura. La represión editorial durante el franquismo (pp. 19–44). Gijón:Trea. Antaki, C., & Widdicombe, S. (Eds.). (1998). Identities in talk. London: Sage. Aron, A., Aron, E. A., & Norman, C. (2001). Self-expansion model of motivation and cognition in close relationship and beyond. In G. J. O. Fletcher & M. S. Clark (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of social psychology: Interpersonal processes (pp. 478–501). Oxford: Blackwell. Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Báez, F. (2008). A universal history of the destruction of books:  From ancient Sumer to modern Iraq. New York: Atlas & Company. 248

Pragmatics and censorship in Spanish research

Báez, F. (2009). El saqueo cultural de América Latina. De la Conquista a la globalización. Barcelona: Random House. Bossié, F. (2008). Recuerdos que resisten: Censuras, autocensuras y exilios en la ciudad de La Plata durante la última Dictadura Militar. In T. Solari & J. Gómez (Eds.), Biblioclastía. Los robos, la represión y sus resistencias en bibliotecas, archivos y museos de Latinoamérica (pp. 23–66). Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Briz, A., & Albelda, M. (2013). Una propuesta teórica y metodológica para el análisis de la atenuación lingüística en español y portugués. La base de un proyecto en común (ES.POR.ATENUACIÓN). Onomázein, 28, 288–319. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness. Some universals in language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brunette, L. (2002). Normes et censure: ne pas confondre. Traduction,Terminologie, Rédaction, 15(2), 223–233. Bruxelles, S., & Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (2004). Coalitions in polylogues. Journal of Pragmatics, 36, 75–113. Casas Gómez, M. (2005). Precisiones conceptuales en el ámbito de la interdicción lingüística. In L. Santos, J. Borrego, J. F. García Santos, J. J. Gómez Asencio, & E. Prieto de los Mozos (Eds.), Palabras, norma, discurso. En memoria de Fernando Lázaro Carreter (pp. 271–290). Salamanca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca. Coetzee, J. (1996). Giving offense. Essays on censorship. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. (2018). Informe especial sobre la situación de la libertad de expresión en México. Informe conjunto del Relator. Especial para la libertad de expresión de la CIDH, Edison Lanza, y el Relator. Especial de las Naciones Unidas sobre la promoción y protección del derecho a la libertad de opinión y de expresión, David Kaye, sobre su misión a México. Retrieved from www.oas. org/es/cidh/expresion/docs/2018_06_18%20CIDH-UN_FINAL_MX_report_SPA.PDF Culpeper, J., Haugh, M., & Kádár, D. Z. (Eds.). (2017). The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Darnton, R. (2014). Censors at work. How states shaped literature. New York: Norton & Company. Delibes, M. (1985). La censura de prensa en los años 40 (y otros ensayos).Valladolid:Ámbito. Fernández López, M. (2000). Comportamientos censores en literatura infantil y juvenil: Traducciones del inglés en la España franquista. In R. Rabadán (Ed.), Traducción y censura inglés-español: 1939–1985 (pp. 227–253). León: Universidad de León. Fitch, K. L., & Sanders, R. E. (Eds.). (2005). Handbook of language and social interaction. Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum. French, H.W. (2006, May 9). As Chinese students go online, Little Sister is watching. The New York Times. Retrieved May 8, 2019, from www.nytimes.com Gambier,Y., & van Doorslaer, L. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of translation studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Giles, H. (Ed.). (2016). Communication accommodation theory. Negotiating personal relationships and social identities across contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gómez Álvarez, C., & Tovar de Teresa, G. (2009). Censura y revolución. Libros prohibidos por la Inquisición de México. Madrid:Trama Editorial. González Ruiz, R. (2015). El silencio en la lengua y en el discurso: Entre las normas y la libertad. In I. Carrasco Cantos, & S. Robles Ávila (Eds.), Pragmática, discurso y norma (pp. 265–296). Madrid: Arco/ Libros. Gorman, L., & McLean, D. (2003). Media and society in the twentieth century. A historical introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Heritage, J., & Clayman, S. (2010). Talk in action. Interaction, identities, and institutions. Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell. Hughes, G. (2010). Political correctness.A history of semantics and culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Infelise, M. (2013). I libri proibiti. Da Gutenberg all’Encyclopédie. Roma: Laterza. Invernizzi, H., & Gociol, J. (2003). Un golpe a los libros. Represión a la cultura durante la última dictadura militar. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Jones, D. (Ed.). (2015). Censorship.A world encyclopedia. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Kailuweit, R. (2012). Entre represión y populismo. Tango, lunfardo y censura en la radiofonía argentina (1933–1953). In U. Reutner, & E. Schafroth (Eds.), Political correctness.Aspectos políticos, sociales, literarios y mediáticos de la censura lingüística (pp. 275–298). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Larraz, F. (2014). Letricidio español. Censura y novela durante el franquismo. Gijón: Trea. Lefevere,A.(1992).Translation, rewriting, and the manipulation of literary fame. London and NewYork: Routledge. McDonald, M. (2012, November 2).As Party Congress nears, Beijing fears subversive ping-pong balls. International Herald Tribune. Retrieved May 8, 2019, from http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com 249

Portolés Lázaro

Méndez Guerrero, B. (2016). La interpretación del silencio en la interacción. Principios pragmáticos, cognitivos y dinámicos. Pragmalingüística, 24, 170–186. Muñoz Machado, S. (2017). Hablamos la misma lengua. Historia política del español en América, desde la Conquista a las Independencias. Barcelona: Crítica. Patterson, A. (1984). Censorship and interpretation.The conditions of writing and reading in Early Modern England. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Patterson, A. (1991). Fables of power:Aesopian writing and political history. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pérez García, R. M. (2006). La imprenta y la literatura espiritual castellana en la España del Renacimiento, 1470– 1560. Historia y estructura de una emisión cultural. Gijón: Trea. Portolés, J. (2016a). La censura de la palabra. Estudio de pragmática y análisis del discurso.Valencia: Universitat de València. Portolés, J. (2016b). La autocensura como fenómeno pragmático. In J. Wilk-Racięska, A. Szyndler, & C. Tatoj (Eds.), Relecturas y nuevos horizontes en los estudios hispánicos (pp. 136–152). Katowice:Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego. Poutrin, I. (1995). Le voile et la plume.Autobiographie et sainteté féminine dans l’Espagne moderne. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. Reutner, U., & Schafroth, E. (Eds.). (2012). Political correctness.Aspectos políticos, sociales, literarios y mediáticos de la censura lingüística. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Reyes Gómez, F. de los. (2000). El libro en España y América. Legislación y censura (siglos XV-XVIII). Madrid: Arco/Libros. Ruiz Bautista, E. (Ed.). (2008). Tiempo de censura. La represión editorial durante el franquismo. Gijón: Trea. Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation (Ed. by G. Jefferson, with an introduction by E.A. Schegloff). Oxford: Blackwell. Schegloff, E. A. (1991). Reflections on talk and social structure. In D. Boden & D. H. Zimmerman (Eds.), Talk and social structure: Studies in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (pp. 44–70). Oxford: Polity Press. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts:  An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shentalinsky,V. (1997). The KGB’s literary archive. London: Harvill. Sperber, D. (Ed.). (2000). Metarepresentations.A multidisciplinary perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suolahti, J. (1963). The Roman censors.A study of social structure. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. van Dijk,T.A. (1997). Discourse as interaction in society. In T.A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as social interaction. Discourse studies:A multidisciplinary introduction (Vol. 2, pp. 1–37).Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Viñao,A. (2001). Las prácticas escolares de la lectura y su aprendizaje. In J.A. Martínez Martín (Ed.), Historia de la edición en España (1836–1936) (pp. 417–429). Madrid: Marcial Pons. Westerman, F. (2011). Engineers of the soul: In the footsteps of Stalin’s writers. London:Vintage Books. Zhao, X. (2018). El lenguaje no discriminatorio y la traducción entre el chino y el español. Madrid: UAM Ediciones.

250

14 Pragmatics and medical discourse in Spanish Karol Hardin

1

Introduction

Medical discourse can be defined as “discourse in and about healing, curing, or therapy; expressions of suffering; and relevant language ideologies” (Wilce, 2009, p. 199). It comprises a wide range of communication settings from the obvious—doctor-patient conversations and interpreted medical interviews in a variety of clinical contexts—to illness narratives and written texts. Medical discourse, like pragmatics, is an interdisciplinary area of inquiry, encompassing sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, as well as communication studies, translation, interpretation, sociology, psychology, medical anthropology, and health-related fields. Pragmatics can be broadly defined as “a branch of linguistics that focuses on the use of language in social contexts and the ways in which people produce and comprehend meanings through language” (Kecskes, 2014, p. 6).The combination of pragmatics and medical discourse, therefore, entails a wide range of theoretical frameworks and methods. This chapter focuses on how the Spanish language is used in specific healthcare-related contexts. Research on medical discourse in English is extensive (e.g., Candlin & Candlin, 2003; Heritage & Maynard, 2006; Roter & Hall, 2006), yet Spanish studies offer important contributions in this growing field of inquiry. Although the topic is important in light of U.S. Latino healthcare demographics, interest in pragmatics and medical discourse extends far beyond U.S. boundaries and has important ramifications for the way healthcare is communicated on a daily basis. Indeed, various studies cited in this chapter demonstrate how language can wield power and asymmetry as well as affiliation and cooperation. Key notions include roles that participants play in a healthcare interaction (e.g., Cordella, 2004a), how interlocutors use language to communicate and connect with one another (e.g., Flores-Ferrán, 2010a; Hernández López, 2011), and how they transmit underlying assumptions about culture and power structures (e.g., Erzinger, 1991). Furthermore, discourse analysis of medical interviews and health-related texts offer insights into the ways Spanish speakers conceptualize and represent their concepts of health (e.g., Magaña & Matlock, 2018). Research comprises monolingual Spanish, bilingual, and multilingual settings, including both dyadic and triadic studies (with interpreters). Interpretation presents a particular challenge for communication as a number of studies in this chapter illustrate (e.g.,Allison & Hardin, 2019; Davidson, 2002).Additionally, health discourse data provide applications for training providers and interpreters (e.g., 251

Hardin

Martínez & San Martín, 2018). Consequently, studies of Spanish pragmatics in medical discourse can potentially improve actual patient health outcomes. The chapter specifically examines medical discourse in the Spanish language, first examining three themes in the literature: interlocutor roles in consultations, communication strategies, and specific pragmalinguistic devices. Next, it explores particular genres. Finally, applications are identified for interpreter training and medical Spanish education, as well as future avenues of research.

2

Review of existing research

In many ways, the pragmatic analysis of medical discourse is an emerging area of inquiry. Published studies are somewhat scattered with significant gaps and little replication, resulting in many isolated instances of interesting research. Three overarching strands emerge from the literature: interlocutor roles in medical consultations, communication strategies, and specific pragmalinguistic devices.

2.1 2.1.1

Three overarching themes Interlocutor roles in consultations

Logically, pragmatic approaches focus on different types of participants and the ways they co-construct the medical consultation, the dynamics between speakers. The following studies describe doctor, patient, companion, interpreter, and computer roles. Cordella (2004a) provides one of the most extensive, data-driven discourse analyses. Her investigation of shifting interlocutor roles or “voices” in monolingual Chilean doctor-patient consultations includes a demographic questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and videotaped medical consultations. By combining Cohen-Cole’s (1991) psychological/sociological framework and a conversation analysis method (discussed later in this chapter), Cordella observes three principal physician functions, which she calls the Doctor, Educator, and Fellow Human voices. The Doctor voice gathers, assesses, and reviews information about a patient’s health and expresses an alignment with authority. The Educator voice communicates and explains medical facts and treatment, educates about adherence to recommendations, and responds to patient discomfort. The Fellow Human voice facilitates patients’ stories, creates empathy and attentiveness, and asks questions unrelated to patients’ health. Within each voice, she observes strategies, leading to a taxonomy of roles and their connections to the macro-level discourse. Cordella’s research particularly benefits researchers in Spanish pragmatics because the method is replicable and data-driven with numerous excerpts from conversations in a Chilean hospital context. In a complementary study focusing instead on patients, Cordella (2004b) extends this notion of ‘voices’ to health-related storytelling, competence, social communication, and initiation in interactions with doctors. Again, based on a corpus from outpatient clinics in Chile, she suggests how patient-centered conversational practices can help develop patients’ discourse and also improve their understanding of illness. A third focus is on companions in the medical encounter. Cordella (2011) examines seven participatory roles of companions in medical visits at a private cancer clinic in Santiago, Chile. She demonstrates that, although there may be drawbacks to their presence, companions can be vital in oncological visits because their conversational involvement can relieve patients of some demands of their illness. Cross-cultural studies provide another avenue for studying interlocutor roles. For example, Hernández López (2011) examines the role of both doctors and patients in 40 interactions about 252

Pragmatics and medical discourse

minor illnesses to focus on differences in negotiation strategies and empowerment by both Spanish and British interlocutors. Speakers from these two cultures varied in their tolerance to conflict and disagreement. Spanish speakers negotiated by explicitly expressing their opinions and tolerated more disagreement than their British counterparts, who preferred discussing alternative solutions. Spanish patients showed a significantly higher involvement in the decision-making process compared to British patients, who preferred strategies indicating consensus.This research underscores how cross-cultural pragmatics can be relevant for improving patient satisfaction and avoiding pragmatic failure in medical consultations. Some yet-unpublished graduate theses and dissertations offer extensive data on interlocutor roles in triadic (interpreted) discourse. For instance, Blumenthal’s (2018) research uniquely focuses on nurse-interpreters (the same interlocutor serving as both nurse and untrained interpreter in a clinic setting). She applies Cordella’s (2004a) methodology, extending the notion of voices to nurses who also worked as untrained nurse-interpreters at a clinic in Texas. The majority of interpretation errors occurred when nurse-interpreters shifted out of their nurse role into another function.The study suggests targeted training for nurse-interpreters to avoid certain types of errors. Although Spanish for Specific Purposes is not always highly esteemed in academic language programs (Martínez & San Martín, 2018), this type of research has the potential to benefit patient care. A growing body of research has examined interpreted discourse, focusing on their institutional roles, such as the interpreter as “gatekeeper” (Davidson, 2000) or epistemic brokering (Raymond, 2014). Davidson highlights the social roles that hospital interpreters play. Instead of being neutral conduits, they shape and create messages. His data reveal ways they function as informational “gatekeepers” for the institution, keeping the interview short and on track, rather than being patient advocates. Raymond (2014) illustrates how “epistemic brokering,” the bidirectional reframing that interpreters do on a moment-by-moment basis, reflects both the doctor’s and patient’s knowledge. He argues that epistemic brokering may promote patient participation and also facilitate patient-provider relationships. More recently, the exam-room computer has come to be viewed as a type of “interactant” in the medical consultation, whether as an ‘interpreter’ or simply a tool for entering and obtaining information. Goble and Vickers (2015) suggest that medical providers orient their communication toward the computer in patterned ways through lowered volume, minimal responses, bureaucratic side talk, and code-switching to English, thereby stripping the Spanish-speaking patient of power. In sum, the various roles of doctors are described in the literature; however, patients, interpreters, companions, and the computer-as-interactant remain areas of emphasis for pragmatics research in Spanish.

2.1.2

Communication strategies

Pragmatics research in healthcare discourse has also focused on varying communication strategies, especially relating to the notion of rapport.This section first discusses monolingual Spanish settings before turning to cross-cultural and intercultural contexts. Studies relating to rapport in monolingual settings include the cultural values of power and simpatía (Cordella, 1999) and politeness strategies (Latter, 2016). Instead of focusing on errors, Cordella’s (1999) study is one of very few to examine effective communication. She used 155 semi-structured interviews with Chilean patients and a recorded medical consultation to ascertain their most predominant linguistic features as well as use of power and simpatía. Patients emphasized that they appreciated sympathetic, clear, familiar, and competent communication, all of which were demonstrated 253

Hardin

in the sample interaction. At the same time, the doctor also exercised power; for example, by preventing the patient from continuing to talk until he had developed his medical topic. The preliminary findings suggest both concepts are at work and are dependent on both institutional and contextual factors. Focusing on clinicians, Latter (2016) examines politeness strategies in palliative care interviews in Spain, finding that experienced healthcare providers had significantly higher scores for use of politeness strategies and were more cautious about performing face-threatening acts than medical students (see Chapters 20 and 21 on in/politeness, this volume). Communication strategies also include negotiation of cancer treatment between a doctor and a religious patient (Cordella, 2012) and face-saving in the three different voices (roles) used by Bolivian doctors in discourse about abortion that conflicted with governmental requirements and cultural norms (Rance, 2005). In a cross-cultural analysis comparing Spanish and British medical interactions, Hernández López (2008) examines the three aspects of rapport: face, rights/obligations, and interactional goals. She emphasizes the complexity of communication and the “multiplicity of variables” included in rapport-management theory (p. 23). Indeed, she touches on small talk, disagreement, humor, initiation of turns, emotions, the interaction of voices, institutional versus individual rights/obligations, and power. Ultimately, she argues that Spanish medical consultations develop in a less structured way. The study is extended in another cross-cultural analysis examining affiliative uses of humor in the medical consultation (Hernández López, 2010), where humor is oriented from doctor to patient in British English but is directed from the patient to doctor in Spanish interviews. Also related to rapport, Hernández López (2012) demonstrates how patients display emotion in another cross-cultural comparison of British and English medical consultations. Exploring the two variables of genre and culture, she argues that emotional expression relates to the genre itself, rather than cultural expectations. Even though British patients traditionally are seen as restrained and implicit, both groups had a similar frequency of expression. Valero Garcés’ (2008) intercultural analysis is of particular interest, emphasizing the use of small talk in medical consultations in Spain. It contrasts two different types of consultations: between Spanish doctors and both Spanish and non-Spanish patients. Small talk covers a variety of different functions, depending on the speaker and portion of the interview. For example, ¿Qué pasa? ‘What’s happening?’ can have either a phatic (social) or an informational function depending on its speaker and context. Small talk and informational talk are therefore difficult to separate in this type of institutional discourse and often relate to colloquial style. Although speech acts are a central focus in pragmatics and applied linguistics research in general, their study in medical discourse is uncommon. Pounds and de Pablos Ortega (2015) present a cross-cultural analysis of patient-centered communication and advice-giving in online ask-the-expert healthcare websites. Also, Hardin (2013) identifies implicit messages in complaints and folk wisdom in Ecuador where “patients generally conveyed pragmatic meaning by either appealing to or violating Grice’s Maxim of Relation (for complaints) and Quantity (folk wisdom)” (p. 587). She notes overlapping contextual variables that complicate the inferential process: biomedical versus folk, native Spanish-speaking versus nonnative Spanish speaking, indigenous beliefs about health, and cultural assumptions. At the same time, she suggests an inferential process that physicians use to work out pragmatic meanings of conversational implicatures so they can provide patients with a culturally congruent treatment. Research on communication strategies in intercultural settings includes the use of stance in medical interviews with nonnative Spanish-speaking providers, where English is normative and 254

Pragmatics and medical discourse

Spanish is marked (Vickers, Deckert, & Goble, 2014). Finally, Allison and Hardin (2019) highlight how a lack of interpretation by untrained employee-interpreters can result in missed opportunities for family physicians to establish rapport with Spanish-speaking patients. Both studies hint at how data might inform future training. Research on effective Spanish communication can potentially guide appropriate clinical interaction; however, less information is available on how Spanish-speaking patients interpret rapport and other communication strategies. It is important to discover more about patients’ pragmatic perceptions of treatment and providers.These works contribute to the growing body of empirical data on rapport-related strategies; however, further research could articulate how rapport is achieved in medical consultations and whether observations can be generalized to other regions in the Spanish-speaking world.

2.1.3

Specific pragmalinguistic devices

Turning to pragmalinguistic devices, linguistic structures used to form utterances (Pinto & De Pablos-Ortega, 2014), research has focused on mechanisms for mitigating such as downgraders and topic negotiation, turn-taking, and repetition. For example, in participant observation during monolingual discussions with HIV/AIDs patients in Uruguay, Delbene (2004) found that directness was infrequently used and that mitigation was a tool for deception rather than politeness. Physicians used mitigation to lessen responsibility, and patients employed mitigation to avoid accountability. Two further studies illustrate pragmalinguistic devices in bilingual (intercultural) settings in the U.S. First, Davidson (2002) examines turn-taking in the construction of common ground when interpreting, arguing that the interpreter is never merely a “voicebox.” Instead, the interpreter has to be involved in constructing and reconstructing contextually relevant information. Davidson provides a model to account for all types of turns, stressing the collaborative nature of interpreter-mediated discourse.Vickers, Lindfelt, and Dodd-Butera (2016) explore the function of repetition while obtaining a patient history in Spanish-language consultations. The setting included bilingual nurses and monolingual patients in California with data obtained from audio recordings, field notes, and transcribed post-consultation interviews.The researchers found that, although repetition can facilitate understanding in health assessment interviews (clarifying a patient’s primary complaint or relaying important information to another clinician), it can also result in wasted time, particularly when the information does not easily fit a category prompted by the computer. Since repetition was frequent in the data, the study has implications for achieving effective teamwork when co-constructing meaning and confirming information already entered in the computer. The use of discourse markers, while not prominent, appears in a few studies on medical Spanish discourse. To better understand the social organization of monolingual chemotherapy treatment consultations in Spain, Díaz (2000) analyzed three types of exchanges: “How are you?,” “How are you tolerating the treatment?,” and “The tests are fine.” In an intercultural setting,Vickers and Goble (2011) analyzed the role of English discourse markers such as “well,” “now,” and “okey dokey” in Spanish-language medical consultations. They argue that use of these markers “serves to exacerbate the power relationship between providers and patients” because it identifies with the dominant societal language (p. 536). In contrast, Magaña (2013) suggests that use of “okay” (even in English) during interviews with U.S. Spanish-speaking patients shows the provider is listening and is considered to be an attentiveness strategy showing respect. Pragmalinguistic devices offer a wide array of variables yet to be explored. 255

Hardin

2.2

Particular genres

To date, the literature on Spanish medical discourse has focused primarily on four genres: therapeutic discourse, clinical discourse (language-impaired discourse), illness narratives, and written varieties of medical texts.

2.2.1

Therapeutic discourse

In general, pragmatic approaches to Spanish data are not extensive; however, they occur in monolingual conversations with therapists and psychiatrists from different dialects of Spanish. For instance, in the first study of both mitigation and therapeutic discourse in Spanish, FloresFerrán (2010a) explores politeness and mitigating devices used between a Cuban psychotherapist and a Puerto Rican client during sessions about depression and adherence to medication.The therapist used more shields and hedges than the client, who produced more redundant forms. In particular, shifts in the use of the null subject and uno ‘one’ (as opposed to yo ‘I’), certain cultural expressions (el qué dirán ‘what others might say’ and guardar las apariencias ‘keeping up appearances’), and use of proverb-like sayings helped to create indirect speech acts (see Chapter 2 on speech acts, this volume). Shifts in subject served to express stance, cultural expressions were devices for conforming to social norms, and proverb-like or metaphorical sayings allowed for indirectness. Not all mitigation was face-saving, but the devices used by the therapist were motivated by a desire to encourage the patient to continue treatment. Another analysis of mitigating devices and indirectness illustrates pragmatic variation in therapeutic discourse between a Cuban therapist and Dominican patient involved in conflictsensitive topics (Flores-Ferrán, 2012).The two interlocutors expressed themselves in pragmatically different ways, including shifts from formal to informal address and use of overt subject pronouns to achieve individual goals in the consultation. Flores-Ferrán (2010b) also examined verb types and contexts, finding that as therapeutic sessions progressed, patients employed fewer conflict-related narratives and moved from talking about past conflict to speaking about a future with less conflict. Using systemic functional linguistics, a theory of systematic choices speakers make (Halliday & Hassan, 1985), Magaña (2016) observes the use of mood at intake interviews with psychiatric patients, where both the doctor and patient speak Spanish and share a Mexican heritage.Among other findings, modalization can be a mitigation strategy to display deference to the psychiatrist. The study shows culturally informed choices doctors make when adapting interviews to patients of a similar ethnic background.

2.2.2

Clinical discourse

Clinical pragmatics is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics concerned with communication impairment (Perkins & Howard, 2011); hence, clinical discourse contains interactions where at least one speaker demonstrates some type of linguistic or pragmatic failure. The explicit study of such discourse in Spanish is scarce, and little has been written about its distinctive characteristics when contrasted with other languages. Existing research in particular relates to Autism Spectrum Disorder and speech therapy. For instance, Rodríguez Muñoz (2015) explores the discourse of Spanish patients with Asperger Syndrome, including interruptions and overlapping, where speakers demonstrate patterns lacking cooperation and relevance. Other studies include a comparison of pragmatic performance in Latino ESL and bilingual students receiving speechlanguage therapy in California and Florida (Brice & Montgomery, 1996) and language-specific 256

Pragmatics and medical discourse

impairment (Buiza, Rodríguez-Parra, & Adrián, 2015). Valles-González (2010) also examines conversational repair, discourse cohesion, and coherence for dementia patients in Venezuela.

2.2.3

Illness narratives

Illness narratives have long been of interest for discourse analysis, although not necessarily from a pragmatics theoretical perspective. Pragmatic analysis is most prevalent for narratives about cancer and Alzheimer’s disease (e.g., Schrauf, Iris, Navarro, & Smotrova, 2014). Magaña and Matlock’s (2018) recent analysis shows how cancer victims communicate among themselves and the metaphors they use, particularly those of combat and journey. In general, Spanish and English speakers are seen as conceptualizing cancer in similar ways. In another study, Cordella (2007) reveals how personal stories validate the patient’s self-identity as another way of fighting the cancer illness stereotype and how they provide the doctor with a better understanding of their experience. Narratives on diabetes (Antón & Goering, 2015) and eating disorders (Bates, 2018) also offer insights into the way people talk about their illness in Spanish. Nevertheless, cross-cultural pragmatics in disease narratives are not yet fully explored.

2.2.4

Texts

Written medical texts offer a wide spectrum for analysis. A few pragmatics studies in Spanish include an analysis of popular recommendations in health sections of Argentine newspapers and strategies (such as empathy) used to obtain reader acceptance (Gallardo, 2005) as well as some exploration of academic medical writing (e.g., Oliver del Olmo, 2006). Due to the availability of online material, however, cross-cultural analyses comprise an expanding range of topics.They include, for example, a description of cancer treatment metaphors in the Spanish and English press showing how medicine is popularized to be persuasive, evaluative, and personalized (Camus, 2016) and a comparison of English and Spanish online support groups (Pérez-Sabater, 2015). In sum, therapeutic discourse, clinical discourse, illness narratives, and health-related texts offer an area for increased study since they have the potential to inform educational and clinical interactions with caregivers and improve our understanding of ways people discuss health.

3

Methodological considerations

Current research encompasses contexts that are cross-cultural (e.g., Spanish versus British English), intercultural (e.g., nonnative Spanish-speaking physicians and Spanish-speaking patients), and variational (different dialects of Spanish). To date, limited work has been done on interlanguage contexts (e.g., second-language or heritage Spanish learners). In terms of region, the majority of studies on medical discourse originate from just a few geographical areas: the U.S. (especially Mexican/ Mexican-American Spanish), Spain, and Chile. Although underrepresented, dialects from Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela also receive brief mention in the literature.

3.1 Theoretical paradigms The vast majority of medical discourse studies in Spanish represent three theoretical paradigms (Tannen, Hamilton, & Schiffrin, 2015): conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis. A few others include mixed methods (e.g., ethnographic study plus discourse analysis), as well as occasional interdisciplinary approaches in communication studies or clinical research. 257

Hardin

3.1.1

Conversation analysis

Conversation analysis (CA) is a micro-analytic method for studying a single ongoing conversational event by examining details such as turn-taking, interruptions, overlapping, pauses, and adjacency pairs/consecutive utterances (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). CA is particularly useful for understanding the development and intricacies of social interaction in institutions such as hospitals and clinics. Proponents note that it is objective; there is no a priori hypothesis. Instead, CA offers a systematic way of observing minute details and repeated features of medical talk. Because of the detail and time required for transcription, however, CA can be difficult to use for a large corpus. CA research already mentioned includes Goble and Vickers (2015) and Vickers et al. (2016). Estrada, Reynolds, and Hilfinger Messias (2015) have used CA to analyze and describe the interpreter’s role as a collaborative communicator and co-constructor of conversation in primary care encounters.They identify ‘trouble spots’ such as repairing a misstatement, silence, laughter, or colloquialisms; however, instead of merely noting these points as interpretation errors, they propose that these issues should actually be viewed as a normal part of the communication process. Often CA is used in conjunction with ethnography-based techniques, where the researcher is a participant observer who actively takes notes and interviews people from another culture or group. In an early study of Spanish medical discourse, Erzinger (1991) used ethnography and CA, showing how language and culture interact in cross-cultural medical conversations between providers and patients in Spanish. Her research illustrates conversational cooperation and non-cooperation and the role of underlying cultural values such as respeto (‘respect’), simpatía (‘sympathy’), and personalismo, defined as “formal friendliness,” following Perez-Stable (1987). Similarly, as part of a larger ethnographic study, Angelelli (2011) analyzed power differentials between interlocutors in conversations about chronic diseases and medical history based on both face-to-face and telephonic interpretation for Spanish-speaking patients in California. She found that the interpreter operated as a key power broker who altered or perpetuated power differences between patients and doctors.

3.1.2

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis (DA) spans multiple disciplines, involving both macro- and micro-analyses. It is “the analysis of language ‘beyond the sentence,’” including how larger portions of language work together (Tannen, 2012). Institutional discourse analyses are found in Valero-Garcés’ (2007) cross-cultural examination of dyadic and triadic exchanges between doctors and patients in Spain and Minnesota and in an analysis of effective Spanish communication between doctors and patients (Magaña, 2013). Again, drawing on systemic functional linguistics, Magaña analyzed Spanish psychiatric interviews in the U.S. to reveal strategies providers use to accommodate patients’ language and culture. Some accommodation strategies included allowing patients to hold the floor, interrupting gently, displaying solidarity by code-switching or using colloquial terms, and showing acceptance for the patient’s language variety. Magaña also discusses the importance of confianza (‘frankness’) and respeto in the doctor-patient relationship, drawing applications for students of medical Spanish. Discourse analytic methods are also becoming more prominent in medical journals, such as the frequently quoted article by Elderkin-Thompson, Cohen Silver, and Waitzkin (2001) about types of errors produced by nurses who double as interpreters. Similarly, Pope et al. (2016) studied relationships and errors in pediatric visits with community interpreters at a Latino clinic. They noted that patient-centered communication practices, such as shared decision-making, 258

Pragmatics and medical discourse

expressions of empathy, and “teachback” (a method where patients tell what they understood from a medical visit) are less common in tetradic interpreted discourse because of shifting alliances during the course of talk. Because DA is so broadly defined, it is highly flexible and can be implemented in many different disciplines, offering a variety of perspectives on medical texts and talk.

3.1.3

Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) seeks to reveal “norms, values, interests, positions and perspectives embedded in discourse” (Cutting, 2015). It is grounded in sociological constructs, focusing on implicit ideologies, especially on how power is wielded through language. Proponents of CDA argue that it enables social action against oppression, inequality, and injustice (Fairclough, 2003). CDA has also been criticized for having an a priori political agenda that keeps it from being an objective form of analysis (Cutting, 2015). Madfes (2002) contrasts two types of medical conversations in Uruguayan Spanish at a cardiology clinic: the classical biomedical model, which she calls an “allopathic model” (p. 176), and a “biopsychosocial model.”The “allopathic model” is the existing norm for medical interactions, where the doctor holds a superior and authoritative position compared to the patient. In contrast, Madfes views the biopsychosocial model as symmetrical, where both doctor and patient are equal allies in treating an illness. She specifically examines institutional authoritarianism as it is manifested in sequences of dialogue, arguing that unlike traditional cardiologists in her study, providers from the biopsychosocial model provided opportunities for saving face, symmetry, affiliation, and the cooperative construction of conversation. CDA can also play a valuable role as a data-driven tool in the diagnosis of psychosis, where language is viewed on a continuum from health to pathology. For example, Pardo (2011) used a corpus of life-stories from 120 homeless people in Argentina and Chile to examine a small subset of delusional discourse. She examined five dimensions: (a) argumentation, (b) discursive consciousness of delusion, (c) metaphor, (d) lexicon, and (e) deixis. Some characteristics particular to delusional discourse included: little evidence to support speakers’ argument structure, frequent use of first person, absence of cooperation, invented terms, neutral deixis, non-referential terms, words with multiple meanings, and an absence of connectors. In general, speakers used ambiguity to conceal information that might not be right, might put them in an awkward position, or might keep listeners from believing them. One surprising finding from the patients’ life stories was that people living in shelters and hospitals evidenced major communicative deterioration compared with those living on the street, suggesting that homeless people must socialize and use language to survive, whereas those staying in institutions have basic needs met and are not encouraged to use language in the same way.The study therefore argues that institutions play a role in limiting rather than stimulating discursive practices. Studies already mentioned applying CDA, such as Davidson (2002), examined the interpreter’s role as an interlocutor and the lack of neutrality. Davidson argued for establishing common ground (joint understanding) in interpreted discourse. His dissertation and subsequent articles on an outpatient clinic setting in California elucidate the socio-political role of the hospital-based professional interpreter. He suggested that medical interviews involving interpreters become somewhat dysfunctional in that the normal same-language creation of common ground is broken in interpreted discourse and considerable confusion arises. In his view, talk is both a reflection of social inequalities and a mechanism for their creation because interpreters are never neutral. Vickers, Goble, and Deckert (2015) explore code-switching and the co-construction of power by third-party family members in Spanish language-concordant interviews. They argue that 259

Hardin

monolingual Spanish-speaking patients are stripped of control by bilingual third-party participants whose use of English indexes membership in the dominant larger society and where Spanish is ideologically subordinate. The monolingual Spanish-speaking patient therefore becomes disempowered in the supposedly language-concordant medical consultation.

3.1.4

Methodology

Questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and corpus analysis can also be used in studying medical discourse. Research even draws from unrelated fields, such as business, as with the application of situation analysis (analysis of factors or capabilities in an organization) in Estrada et al. (2015). The latter examines how Spanish-speaking patients, nurse practitioners, and language interpreters conceptualize and enact their personal roles, perceive each other’s roles, and respond to communication styles when there are three interlocutors.Additionally, the author explores how structural, cultural, linguistic, and other factors interact in triadic communication. Pragmatic interpretations of medical discourse also occur incidentally in non-linguistic sources without any particular theoretical underpinning or methodology, such as the provider’s anecdotal perspective on the non-literal meanings of “Sí, doctora” and potential misperceptions by physicians (Candib, 2006).This brief overview illustrates specific ways that theoretical frameworks and methodologies can be used to analyze discourse pragmatically in a variety of settings.

3.2 3.2.1

Applications and extensions Interpreted encounters

As we have seen, the vast majority of Spanish medical discourse studies pertain to conversational interactions; however, a large portion of this research also comprises interpreted encounters and their various complexities. Such studies can provide extensions for training students and healthcare personnel.The body of suggestions for interpreters is considerable, based on both empirical evidence and hypothetical extensions. Research on interpreted medical interactions include those previously mentioned (e.g., Raymond, 2014; Davidson, 2000), among others. Patient-centeredness is a predominant focus in most current studies on health communication. For example, fewer offers and comments take place in interpreted encounters with Spanish-speaking patients than with English-speaking patients (Rivadeneyra, Elderkin-Thompson, Cohen Silver, & Waitzkin, 2000). Another central focus is interpreter errors (e.g., Elderkin-Thompson et al., 2001; Pope et al., 2016). Error studies are commonly discussed in medical journals, such as Aranguri, Davidson, and Ramirez (2006), who study how a lack of small talk obscures doctors’ efforts at rapport and how it results in conversational loss. Medical discourse findings can apply to pragmatic interpreter training in Spanish, such as teaching verbal and nonverbal rapport for interpreters from the field of translation studies (Iglesias Fernández, 2010) or applying implications from interpreted oncologist-patient communication (Hsieh & Terui, 2015).

3.2.2

Training for healthcare personnel

Provider, nurse, and interpreter training can be enriched by discussing the communicative roles (voices) each member holds, based on Cordella’s (2004a) research. Studies outlined in this chapter can additionally inform medical Spanish education because they offer empirical evidence that may be useful when creating training curricula. For example, students can be taught pragmatic 260

Pragmatics and medical discourse

and intercultural competence when giving advice (Belpoliti & Pérez, 2016) or ways to mitigate sensitive topics and requests (Gancedo Ruiz, 2017). Naturally occurring doctor-patient communication can be used to model pragmatic concepts, negotiation of meaning, and culturally implied information, such as the classroom video example in Hardin (2017). Additionally, Martínez and San Martín (2018) suggest how illness narrative training can be effective in a heritage learners’ medical Spanish course. In sum, pragmatic analysis can potentially inform existing interpreter standards of practice and ethics based on actual data and offers important insights for teaching Spanish for Health Professions.

4

Future directions and conclusion

4.1 Gaps in the literature 4.1.1

Gaps in content

There is surprisingly little research in medical discourse on discourse markers or speech acts, two staples of pragmatics research. Furthermore, the role of gender and impoliteness in Spanish medical interaction is virtually nonexistent.Whereas speaker intentions are well represented, empirical studies of patient inference and understanding might prove to be a fruitful area of research, especially with the current emphasis in hospitals on patient-centeredness and patient satisfaction. Future studies might also examine the role bilingualism plays in interpreted interactions as well as with heritage speaker interpreters. Allied health professionals are also underrepresented in the medical discourse literature, e.g., studies could address the roles (voices) of receptionists and aides. Pragmatics research also holds many applications for teaching Spanish and culture in medical school and residency, an area of growing interest in the U.S.

4.2.2

Gaps in genre

Since pragmatic analyses in the genres mentioned are still limited, they offer a continuing source of investigation, as do contexts outside of primary care, such as dentistry, pharmacy, physical and occupational therapy, or non-traditional medicine. Future investigation might include conversations between Latinos and nutritionists, gynecologists, emergency doctors, or promotoras (e.g., Magaña, 2013; Martínez, 2015). Palliative care, gerontology, drug rehabilitation, and complex conversations such as post-partum counseling would be interesting and complex areas for pragmatics research. Conversations with Spanish-speaking parents in pediatrics and speech pathology likely will continue to provide sources of data that can inform healthcare. Finally, pragmatics comparisons of video, telephonic, and face-to-face interpreting would be helpful to understand the benefits and drawbacks to each type of interpreted discourse.

4.2.3

Gaps in methodology

Pragmatics studies seldom include mixed-methods research or multimodal analysis. Furthermore, variational pragmatics approaches to medical discourse are almost nonexistent; only a handful of Spanish dialects have been examined, and many varieties have yet to be included (e.g., Peru and Central America) (see Chapter 15 on pragmatic variation, this volume). Even though Gricean and relevance theories are prominent in pragmatics literature, they are seldom used in the research on medical discourse. It remains to be seen how they can account for the process 261

Hardin

of inference and understanding. Finally, the role of culture and context are also yet to be well articulated across genres.

4.3 4.3.1

Future research Interdisciplinary research

Some work on pragmatics occurs in disciplines that do not necessarily use the same terminology; e.g., “verbal immediacy” (rapport) in communication studies, “alterations/errors” (pragmatic failure) in medical articles on communication, or “grounded theory” (systematically generated, data-driven analyses) in biomedical research. It is important to publish in fields outside of linguistics to reach a larger audience that also works on similar or complementary topics with interactional data. Like applied linguists, pragmatics linguists “would do well . . . to look outside their own professional literature for studies that direct themselves at healthcare communication, especially where this involves issues of intercultural communication” (Candlin & Candlin, 2003, p. 134). Interdisciplinary approaches are likely to yield a more comprehensive understanding of naturally occurring medical discourse (e.g.,Antón & Goering, 2015).

4.3.2

Practical outcomes

Candlin and Candlin’s (2003) call also applies to pragmatics research on medical discourse in Spanish. They suggest that we can “adopt a more open methodological stance; we can avoid using healthcare data merely to serve refinements to our theories; we can learn to code our results conceptually and in terms of language understandable to our professional colleagues and to the end-users.” (p. 146). Not coincidentally, research on Spanish pragmatics in medical discourse can actually produce practical benefits. Describing the deficits in communication does not go far enough. We ought to provide thorough and nuanced examples of good communication (e.g., Cordella, 1999) and integrate these into training at all levels, both on the medical and language side of education. Research on patient understanding of implied information might be attained by performing a 360-degree evaluation of data, where the third-party linguistic observer is not the only evaluator. Such assessment would inform our understanding of pragmatic inference, and it would likely provide evidence leading to organizational change in medical institutions. Research should also incorporate more variational research and avoid treating Spanish as a homogeneous ideal. In particular, dialects and registers of U.S. Spanish-speaking patient populations should be considered, as well as regional variation, by studying Spanish medical discourse in other countries to better understand specific Spanish-speaking populations. While it may seem too idealistic, variational research is fundamental to our attempts at better understanding the global diversity of the Spanish-speaking population.

4.3.3

Medical Spanish education

The role of heritage speakers in medical Spanish education has yet to be fully articulated (e.g., Magaña, 2013). Martínez and San Martín (2018) suggest integrating Spanish with undergraduate and graduate healthcare-related coursework (e.g., public health or social work). Pragmatics also must be included in Spanish textbooks, both in Spanish linguistics and medical Spanish and, ideally, fully integrated in medical Spanish curricula. In sum, Spanish language research has been undervalued, particularly with regard to pragmatics, yet it provides insights for patient care that have yet to be fully recognized or acknowledged. Of note, very few clinical journals or books 262

Pragmatics and medical discourse

on public health give more than a mere nod to the impact of language concordant, sociolinguistically appropriate patient care. Even Farmer, Kleinman, Kim, and Basilico’s (2013) highly esteemed book on global health, which mentions almost every possible disciplinary connection, fails to note anything about the importance of language when determining healthcare outcomes. This chapter has provided a critical survey focusing on prominent themes, genres, and methods as well as applications. The intersection of pragmatics and medical discourse continues to offer a rich area of inquiry; however, further study is required to articulate fully the contributions of pragmatics research in healthcare interactions.

Further reading Cordella, M. (2004a). The dynamic consultation:A discourse analytical study of doctor-patient communication. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cordella’s book provides extensive examples of shifting “voices” (roles) in Chilean doctor-patient consultations, focusing on three physician functions: the Doctor, Educator, and Fellow Human voice.The Doctor voice assesses information about a patient’s health and expresses authority, whereas the Educator voice explains medical facts and treatment. In contrast, the Fellow Human voice facilitates patients’ stories, creates empathy, and asks questions unrelated to patient health. Davidson, B. (2002). A model for the construction of conversational common ground in interpreted discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(9), 1273–1300. Davidson argues that the interpreter cannot be a neutral “voicebox” because the interpreter must participate in the process of constructing contextually relevant meaning. His data reveal the collaborative nature of interpreted discourse and how interpreters shape and create messages. Vickers, C. H., Goble, R., & Deckert, S. K. (2015).Third party interaction in the medical context: Codeswitching and control. Journal of Pragmatics, 84, 154–171. The authors analyze how monolingual Spanish-speaking patients are stripped of control when bilingual third-party participants use English to index their membership in the dominant larger society where Spanish is ideologically subordinate.

References Allison,A., & Hardin, K. (2020). Missed opportunities to build rapport:A pragmalinguistic analysis of interpreted medical conversations with Spanish-speaking patients. Healthcare Communication, 35(4), 494–501. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2019.1567446 Angelelli, C. (2011). Can you ask her about chronic illnesses, diabetes and all that? In C. Alvstad, A. Hild, & E. Tiselius (Eds.),Methods and strategies of process research: Integrative approaches in translation studies (pp. 231–256). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Antón, M., & Goering, E. M. (2015). Understanding patients’ voices:A multi-method approach to health discourse. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Aranguri, C., Davidson, B., & Ramirez, R. (2006). Patterns of communication through interpreters: A detailed sociolinguistics analysis. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 21(6), 623–629. Bates, C. F. (2018). Performing the self in illness narratives. In C. F. Bates & A. Cabedo (Eds.), Perspectives on evidentiality in Spanish: Explorations across genres (pp. 73–106). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Belpoliti, F., & Pérez, M. E. (2016). Giving advice in medical Spanish: Pragmatic and intercultural competence in the Spanish for the health professions curriculum. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 127–142. Blumenthal,T. G. (2018). The relationship between role-shifting and errors in nurse-interpreter dialogue with Spanishspeaking patients (Unpublished master’s thesis). Baylor University,Waco. Brice,A., & Montgomery, J. (1996).Adolescent pragmatic skills:A comparison of Latino students in English as a Second Language and speech and language programs. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 27(1), 68–81. Buiza, J. J., Rodríguez-Parra, M. J., & Adrián, J. A. (2015). Trastorno específico del lenguaje: marcadores psicolingüísticos en semántica y pragmática en niños españoles. Anales de psicología, 31(3), 879–889. 263

Hardin

Camus, J. T. W. (2016). Get the metaphor right! Cancer treatment metaphors in the Spanish and English press. Alfinge, 28, 109–138. Candib, L. M. (2006). Sí, Doctora. Annals of Family Medicine, 4(5), 460–462. Candlin, C. N., & Candlin, S. (2003). Healthcare communication: A problematic site for applied linguistics research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23, 134–154. Cohen-Cole, S.A. (1991). The medical interview:The three functional approach. St. Louis: Mosby Year Book. Cordella, M. (1999). Medical discourse in a Hispanic environment: Power and simpatía under investigation. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 22(2), 35–50. Cordella, M. (2004a). The dynamic consultation:A discourse analytical study of doctor patient communication. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cordella, M. (2004b). You know Doctor, I need to tell you something: A discourse analytical study of patients’ voices in the medical consultation. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 27(2), 92–109. Cordella, M. (2007). Unveiling stories to the oncologist: A matter of sharing and healing. Panace@, 8(26), 230–238. Cordella, M. (2011). A triangle that may work well: Looking through the angles of a three-way exchange in cancer medical encounters. Discourse & Communication, 5(4), 337–353. Cordella, M. (2012). Negotiating religious beliefs in a medical setting. Journal of Religion and Health, 51, 837–853. Cutting, J. (2015). Pragmatics:A resource book for students (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge. Davidson, B. (2000).The interpreter as institutional gatekeeper:The social-linguistic role of interpreters in Spanish-English medical discourse. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(3), 379–405. Davidson, B. (2002). A model for the construction of conversational common ground in interpreted discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(9), 1273–1300. Delbene, R. (2004).The function of mitigation in the context of a socially stigmatized disease:A case study in a public hospital in Montevideo, Uruguay. Spanish in Context, 1, 241–267. Díaz, F. (2000).The social organization of chemotherapy treatment consultations. Sociology of Health & Illness, 22(3), 364–389. Elderkin-Thompson,V., Cohen Silver, R., & Waitzkin, H. (2001). When nurses double as interpreters: A study of Spanish-speaking patients in a U.S. primary care setting. Social Science & Medicine, 52, 1343–1358. Erzinger, S. (1991). Communication between Spanish-speaking patients and their doctors in medical encounters. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 15, 91–110. Estrada, R. D., Reynolds, J. F., & Hilfinger Messias, D. K. (2015).A conversational analysis of verbal interactions and social processes in interpreter-mediated primary care encounters. Research in Nursing & Health, 38, 278–288. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse:Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. Farmer, P., Kleinman, A., Kim, J., & Basilico, M. (2013). Reimagining global health. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2010a). An examination of mitigation strategies used in Spanish psychotherapeutic discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 1964–1981. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2010b). Letting go of the past in Spanish therapeutic discourse:An examination of verbs and discursive variables. Pragmatics, 20(1), 43–70. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2012). Pragmatic variation in therapeutic discourse:An examination of mitigating devices employed by Dominican female clients and a Cuban American therapist. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts (pp. 81–112). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gallardo, S. (2005). Pragmatic support of medical recommendations in popularized texts. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 813–835. Gancedo Ruiz, M. (2017). La atenuación pragmática como estrategia de acercamiento en el Español de la Salud: propuesta didáctica. Foro de Profesores de E/LE, 13, 85–95. Goble, G., & Vickers, C. (2015).‘Shift’‘n ‘control’:The computer as a third interactant in Spanish-language medical consultations. Communication & Medicine, 12(2–3), 171–185. Halliday, M. A. K., & Hassan, R. (1985). Language, text and context. Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press. Hardin, K. (2013).What goes unsaid: Expression of complaints and advice about health in Eastern Ecuador. Intercultural Pragmatics, 10(4), 569–591. Hardin, K. (2017). Exploring the relationship between authentic dialogue and Spanish for healthcare professionals. Journal of Language for Specific Purposes, 4(1), 41–51. Heritage, J., & Maynard, D.W. (2006). Communication in medical care. New York: Cambridge University Press. 264

Pragmatics and medical discourse

Hernández López, M. de la O. (2008). Rapport management under examination in the context of medical consultation in Spain and Britain. Revista alicantina de estudios ingleses, 21, 57–86. Hernández López, M. de la O. (2010). El humor como lengua de contacto ¿estrategia afiliativa o de autoafirmación? Estudio comparativo inglés-español del discurso institucional. Odisea, 11, 285–299. Hernández López, M. de la O. (2011). Negotiation strategies and patient empowerment in Spanish and British medical consultations. Communication & Medicine, 8(2), 169–180. Hernández López, M. de la O. (2012).When health matters:The display of emotions as relational practice in genre-based cross-cultural contexts. Revista de Filología Inglesa, 33, 115–141. Hsieh, E., & Terui, S. (2015). Inherent tensions and challenges of oncologist-patient communication: Implications for interpreter training in health settings. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 43(2), 141–162. Iglesias Fernández, E. (2010). Verbal and nonverbal concomitants of rapport in health care encounters: Implications for interpreters. The Journal of Specialised Translation, 14, 216–227. Kecskes, I. (2014). Intercultural pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press. Latter, R. (2016). Pragmatic corpus analysis of patient interviews in palliative care (Unpublished master’s thesis). Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Madfes, I. (2002). La confrontación de imágenes en una interacción asimétrica: ¿Médico y paciente: Afiliación o conflicto? In D. Bravo (Ed.), Actas del Primer Coloquio del Programa EDICE (pp.  172–185). Stockholm: Stockholm University. Magaña, D. A. (2013). Language, Latinos, and healthcare: Discourse analysis of the Spanish psychiatric interview (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of California, Davis. Magaña, D. A. (2016). Modality resources in Spanish during psychiatric interviews with Mexican patients. Communication & Medicine, 13(3), 291–305. Magaña, D.A., & Matlock,T. (2018). How Spanish speakers use metaphor to describe their experiences with cancer. Discourse & Communication, 12(6), 627–644. Martínez, G.A. (2015). La lengua española en el sistema sanitaria de los Estados Unidos. Informes del Observatorio. doi:10.15427/OR013-09/2015SP Martínez, G.A., & San Martín, K. (2018). Language and power in a Spanish for Heritage Learners program: A learning by design program. In G. C. Zapata & M. Lacorte (Eds.), Multiliteracies, pedagogy and language learning:Teaching Spanish to heritage speakers (pp. 107–128). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Oliver del Olmo, S. (2006).The role of passive voice in hedging medical discourse:A corpus-based study on English and Spanish research articles. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, 11&12, 205–218. Pardo, M. L. (2011). Discourse as a tool for the diagnosis of psychosis: A linguistic and psychiatric study of communication decline. In N. Lorenzo-Dus (Ed.), Spanish at work: Analyzing institutional discourse across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 227–251). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Pérez-Sabater, C. (2015).The rhetoric of online support groups:A socio-pragmatic analysis English-Spanish. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada, 28(2), 465–485. Perez-Stable, E. (1987). Issues in Latino health care. Western Journal of Medicine, 146, 213–218. Perkins, M. R., & Howard, S. (2011). Clinical linguistics. In J. Simpson (Ed.), Routledge handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 111–123). New York: Routledge. Pinto, D., & De Pablos-Ortega, C. (2014). Seamos pragmáticos: introducción a la pragmática española. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Pope, C.A., Escobar-Gómez, M., Davis, B. H., Roberts, J. R., O’Brien, E. S., & Hinton, E. (2016).The challenge of tetradic relationships in medically interpreted pediatric primary care visits:A descriptive study of communication practices. Patient Education and Counseling, 99, 542–548. Pounds, G., & De Pablos Ortega, C. (2015). Patient-centered communication in British, Italian, and Spanish ‘Ask-the-Expert’ healthcare websites. Communication & Medicine, 12(2–3), 225–241. Rance, S. (2005). Abortion discourse in Bolivian hospital contexts: Doctor’s repertoire conflicts and the saving women device. Sociology of Health & Illness, 27(2), 188–214. Raymond, C. W. (2014). Epistemic brokering in the interpreter-mediated medical visit: Negotiating “patient’s side” and “doctor’s side” knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 47(4), 426–446. Rivadeneyra, R., Elderkin-Thompson,V., Cohen Silver, R., & Waitzkin, H. (2000). Patient centeredness in medical encounters requiring an interpreter. The American Journal of Medicine, 108, 470–474. Rodríguez Muñoz, F. J. (2015). Interrupciones y solapamientos en el discurso oral de hablantes con y sin síndrome de Asperger. Revista de lingüística teórica y aplicada, 53(1), 13–34. Roter, D. L., & Hall, J.A. (2006). Doctors talking with patients/patients talking with doctors: Improving communication in medical visits (2nd ed.).Westport, CT: Praeger. 265

Hardin

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974).A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696–735. Schrauf, R.W., Iris, M., Navarro, E., & Smotrova,T. (2014). How to construct a case of Alzheimer’s disease in three languages: Case-based reasoning in narrative gerontology. Ageing & Society, 34, 280–309. Tannen, D. (2012). Discourse analysis—what speakers do in conversation. Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved November 9, 2018, from www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/discourse-analysis-what-speakers-doconversation Tannen, D., Hamilton, H. E., & Schiffrin, D. (2015). The handbook of discourse analysis (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Valero Garcés, C. (2007). Doctor-patient consultations in dyadic and triadic exchanges. In F. Pöchhacker & M. Shlesinger (Eds.),Healthcare interpreting: Discourse and interaction (pp. 35–51). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Valero Garcés, C. (2008). La conversación de contacto en contextos institucionales: la consulta médica. Oralia, 11, 107–131. Valles-González, B. (2010). A discourse analysis of Alzheimer-type dementia in personal conversations. In D. A. Koike & L. Rodríguez-Alfano. Dialogue in Spanish: Studies in functions and contexts (pp. 221–226). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vickers, C. H., Deckert, S. K., & Goble, R. (2014). Constructing language normativity through the animation of stance in Spanish-language medical consultations. Health Communication, 29, 707–716. Vickers, C. H., & Goble, R. (2011).Well, now, okey dokey: English discourse markers in Spanish language consultations. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 67(4), 536–567. Vickers, C. H., Goble, R., & Deckert, S. K. (2015).Third party interaction in the medical context: Codeswitching and control. Journal of Pragmatics, 84, 154–171. Vickers, C. H., Lindfelt, C., & Dodd-Butera,T. (2016). Repetition in the health history segment of Spanish language clinical consultations:A conversation analysis. Nursing Research, 65(4), 306–317. Wilce, J. (2009). Medical discourse. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38, 199–215.

266

Part IV

Pragmatic variation; culture and interculture

15 Pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish J. César Félix-Brasdefer

1

Introduction

Linguistic variation can be analyzed from two perspectives: one that takes a “local” perspective, known as ‘synchronic intralingual variation’ (i.e., variation within a single language or across dialects of a language), and one that adopts a “global” perspective, known as ‘interlingual variation’ (i.e., variation across languages or cross-linguistic variation) (Fried, 2010, p. 8). In this chapter, I employ the local perspective to examine pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish. Pragmatic variation involves the study of pragmatic features of language use in action and how these features vary according to linguistic, situational, and macrosocial factors (e.g., region, gender, age, socioeconomic status) across languages and across varieties of a language. For example, pragmatic variation can be observed in speech acts, interpretations of directness and indirectness, politeness and impoliteness, implicature, forms of address such as vocatives and pronominal forms, and discourse markers. Pragmatic variation also analyzes discourse variation at the sequential level (e.g., openings and closings, request-response sequence) and discourse level (e.g., turn-taking, overlap, topic management in conversation). Regional pragmatic variation, a subfield of variational pragmatics, focuses on the influence of macrosocial factors (e.g., region, gender, age, ethnic, socioeconomic status) on language use (Schneider & Barron, 2008, pp. 16–17). This chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 defines fundamental concepts of pragmatic variation. It includes two predominant frameworks for the analysis of pragmatic variation: variationist sociolinguistics and variational pragmatics. It provides an integrated approach for the analysis of pragmatic variation, followed by a selective review of research on regional pragmatic variation from 2009–2019. Section 3 raises methodological considerations for the analysis of pragmatic variation, and, finally, Section 4 provides future directions and conclusions.

2

Review of existing research

2.1 Pragmatic meaning and variation According to Thomas (1995), I view pragmatics as the study of meaning in interaction. Pragmatics can be broadly defined as the study of language use in context (e.g., oral or written texts, virtual communication such as email, Facebook, or chat) according to the contributions of the 269

Félix-Brasdefer

user, and the interpretation that the interlocutor makes of those utterances in order to negotiate meaning in social interaction. It includes what is considered appropriate according to our sociocultural expectations (social context), mutual knowledge and shared background information (cognitive context), and the situational context that emerges during the interaction (situational context) (Félix-Brasdefer, 2019a, p. 9, 2019b). I adopt Levinson’s (1995, 2000) tripartite distinction of meaning for the analysis of pragmatic variation. Following Grice (1975), Levinson distinguished three levels of meaning: (1) ‘sentencetype meaning,’ which refers to semantic meaning; (2) ‘utterance-type meaning,’ which includes meaning that is interpreted by pragmatic inference and is based on our expectations of how language is normally used, echoing Grice’s generalized conversational implicature (see Chapter 1, this volume); and (3) ‘utterance-token,’ which refers to Grice’s particularized implicature, pragmatic inferences, and how language is used appropriately in particular circumstances. Utterance-type meaning is the level of “systematic pragmatic inference based not on direct computations about speaker-intentions, but rather on general expectations about how language is normally used” (Levinson, 1995, p. 93, emphasis in original).These expectations give rise to how language is used and interpreted in everyday communication in speech acts, conversational pre-sequences, preference organization, and other pragmatic routines such as conventional expressions or formulaic sequences that are accepted by members of a community of practice (e.g., ¡Hola!—¿Qué tal? ‘Hi!—How’s it going?,’ Está lloviendo a cántaros ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’).According to Levinson, this is the level where we can expect regularity and systematicity of inference. According to Terkourafi (2012), this is the level where pragmatic variation occurs, especially when conditioned by macrosocial (e.g., gender, age, region, socioeconomic status) and microsocial (or situational) factors (e.g., social power, distance). Utterance-type meaning, therefore, is the level where conventional meaning, habits, regularity, social practices, and pragmatic inferences occur at the interlingual (i.e., crosscultural pragmatics) and intralingual levels (i.e., pragmatic variation across varieties of a language).

2.2

Pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic variation

Researchers in pragmatic variation examine features of language use using two levels of analysis: pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge (Leech, 1983;Thomas, 1983). Pragmalinguistic knowledge refers to knowledge about and performance of the conventions of language use or the linguistic resources available in a given language that convey “particular illocutions” in contextually appropriate situations (Leech, 1983, p. 11). It includes knowledge of strategies (e.g., directness, conventional indirectness) as well as the linguistic and non-linguistic resources (e.g., prosody) used to convey pragmatic meaning, such as the various linguistic resources employed to express an apology: Lo siento mucho/ muchísimo/ terriblemente ‘I’m [so, very, awfully, terribly] sorry,’ discúlpeme/discúlpame ‘I apologize,’ (using informal tú (T) or formal usted (V)), perdóname ‘forgive me.’This distinction applies to one of the eight levels of pragmatic analysis; namely, the actional level (Section 2.5.2). Pragmalinguistic speech act variation in Spanish has been analyzed in cross-cultural (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2008a, 2015a; Márquez Reiter, 2000; Placencia, 2005), intercultural (Félix-Brasdefer, 2017a), and interlanguage pragmatic contexts (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2008b, 2017b, 2019b; Hasler-Barker, 2016; Shively, 2011). In contrast, sociopragmatic knowledge refers to knowledge about and performance consistent with social norms in specific situations in a given society, as well as familiarity with assessments of (im)politeness and variables of social power and social distance. For example, the form No puedo ‘I can’t’ can be used in Spanish to express a refusal to an invitation. But when refusing an invitation to a birthday party, a speaker can select from a variety of other linguistic forms to convey the refusal, including: Gracias, pero en verdad no puedo ‘Thanks, but I really can’t”; Lo siento, pero ya tengo planes ‘I’m sorry, but I already have plans”; No sé, lo voy a pensar ‘I don’t know, I’ll think 270

Pragmatic variation

about it.’ Sociopragmatic knowledge includes knowledge of what expressions are appropriate to use in an L2 situation when refusing a professor’s advice to take a class or apologizing to a friend for damaging her car over the weekend. Sociopragmatic variation has also been analyzed in cross-cultural (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2008a), intercultural (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2017a), and interlanguage pragmatic contexts (e.g., Hasler-Barker, 2016; Shively, 2011).

2.3 Frameworks used to examine pragmatic variation Pragmatic and discourse variation has received attention from sociolinguists, who examine linguistic variation based on linguistic and social factors, and from pragmaticians who are interested in the analysis of language use in context according to micro- (e.g., situation, social distance and power) and macrosocial factors (e.g., region, gender, age, socioeconomic status).This section reviews the fundamental tenets of two frameworks that have been used to examine different dimensions of pragmatic variation; namely, variationist sociolinguistics (Cameron & Schwenter, 2013;Tagliamonte, 2012; Terkourafi, 2012) and variational pragmatics (Barron, 2017; Schneider, 2010; Schneider & Barron, 2008, also see Schneider (2019) for a revised framework of variational pragmatics).

2.3.1

Sociolinguistic variation and the linguistic variable

Unlike the original conceptualization of the linguistic variable, which requires that variants represent “alternate ways of saying ‘the same’ thing” (Labov, 1972, p. 188) based on truth-conditional terms, the analysis of pragmatic features under the sociolinguistic model is mainly applied to morphosyntactic and discourse variation (Cameron & Schwenter, 2013; Serrano, 2011; Tagliamonte, 2012 (Chapter 9)). According to Cameron and Schwenter (2013), the analysis of linguistic variation consists of five stages: (1) identification of a variable and its variants; (2) identification of the contexts in which variation does not occur as well as those in which the variable could potentially occur; that is, the identification of the ‘variable context’ or the ‘envelope of variation’; (3) coding and analysis of the data; (4) statistical analysis; and (5) interpretation of the results. Under this methodology, the focus is on the variants of a linguistic variable (and social variation of the variants), without an analysis of the sequential context and discourse structure in which the variants occur. Under the variationist sociolinguistic model, the variants of a pragmatic variable yield different meanings; that is, different pragmatic functions. Under this framework, two or more variants of a pragmatic variable are not alternate ways of saying the same thing. For example, researchers have analyzed the pragmatic meaning of the preposition de used in dequeísmo; in other words, the inclusion of de in contexts that are not required by the verb (e.g., Creo que vs. Creo de que: ‘I believe that’ vs.‘I believe de that’) (Schwenter, 1999; Serrano, 2011). Results of these studies show that the presence or absence of de triggers different interpretations.According to previous work (e.g., Serrano, 2011, p. 190), dequeísmo occurs more frequently with verbal forms expressing mental activity (e.g., pensar ‘to think,’ resultar ‘to turn out that’).The pragmatic function of the preposition de, then, is to serve as a deictic marker of evidentiality (e.g., Yo creo de que es la incultura de la gente ‘I think it is people’s ignorance,’cited in Serrano,2011,p. 190).In addition to the linguistic context that requires the preposition de, it has been shown that dequeísmo is more common among men and intermediate social classes (Serrano, 2011, p. 190). Other pragmatic variables with different variants include the future: cantaré ‘I will sing,’ voy a cantar ‘I’m going to sing,’ mañana canto ‘tomorrow, I sing,’ and the progressive Mañana estoy cantando ‘Tomorrow, I am singing.’ Of these, only the synthetic form (cantaré) is interpreted as a marker of epistemic modality (Cameron & Schwenter, 2013, pp. 467–468). Overall, under the sociolinguistic variationist approach, pragmatic variants are conditioned by linguistic (e.g., verb type, grammatical person, verb tense) and social factors (e.g., age, gender, social class, region), as well as change over time. For additional examples of variants of pragmatic 271

Félix-Brasdefer

variables conditioned by pragmatic and discourse factors (e.g., new/old information, textual genre, epistemic modality, etc.), see Cameron and Schwenter (2013), Serrano (2011, 2017), and Chapter 9 on pragmatics and sociolinguistics, this volume).

2.3.2

Variational pragmatics: An approach to regional pragmatic variation

Although Schlieben-Lange and Weydt (1978) represents one of the first studies on dialectology from a pragmatic perspective, the field of pragmatic variation with a focus on regional varieties was formally introduced in 2005 at the 9th International Pragmatics Conference in Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of a panel organized by Klaus Schneider and Anne Barron.These scholars later published an edited volume (2008), entitled Variational pragmatics:A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages, which comprised 10 papers on different aspects of pragmatics across varieties of Dutch, English, French, German, and Spanish.Variational Pragmatics (VP) focuses on synchronic intralingual variation by looking at the intersection of pragmatics and dialectology according to macrosocial factors as well as microsocial and situational factors such as social distance and power. The focus of VP is on intralingual pragmatic variation across languages, including pluricentric and national varieties, at various levels.According to Clyne (1992, as introduced by Kloss, 1978),‘pluricentric’ refers to languages with “several interacting centers, each providing a national variety with at least some of its own (codified) norms” (Clyne, 1992, p. 1). Examples of Spanish as a pluricentric language include 21 regions where Spanish is spoken as an official language, including 19 in Latin American (e.g., Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America), as well as Spain and Equatorial Guinea, where Spanish is an official (national) language along with Portuguese and French. Recent examples of studies of pragmatic variation in pluricentric languages (e.g., at the national level) include Félix-Brasdefer and Yates (2019, Mexico City, Mexico; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Seville, Spain) and Placencia and García (2019, Ecuador and Venezuela). VP also examines pragmatic variation at the subnational level, such as variation occurring in two or more regions where the same language is spoken, such as in Mexico (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015a, Mexico City and Guanajuato), Ecuador (Placencia, 2008, Quito and Manta), and Spain (Bataller, 2015, Valencia and Granada). Compliment responses have also been examined across five regions in Spain (Lázaro Ruiz & Ramajo Cuesta, 2015: Madrid,Valencia, Catalonia, Andalusia, and Castile-Leon). Furthermore, according to Schneider and Barron (2008, p. 17), pragmatic variation can be analyzed at the sub-local level.This includes analyses of particular locations within cities, as in Escalona Torres’ (2019) study of service encounter interactions in two districts of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Under the VP framework, the pragmatic variable is reanalyzed to include variants according to micro- and macrosocial factors across varieties of the same language. Pragmatics is not only about form (i.e., two or more choices with the same propositional meaning), but also function, illocutionary force, and context. Instead of the one-form-one-function criterion, the pragmatic variable should be defined in terms of functional equivalence (e.g., illocutionary force), the discourse context (e.g., sequential position), and the speaker’s intentions (i.e., cognitive context) (see Section 3 for examples of pragmatic variables and variants).

2.4

Levels of pragmatic analysis

Researchers who focus on pragmatic variation employ different frameworks to examine different levels (or domains) of analysis ranging from individual micro-units to discourse activities. Table 15.1 shows the levels of pragmatic analysis commonly used in three frameworks:VP for the study of regional pragmatic variation (Schneider, 2010; Schneider & Barron, 2008), rapport management for the analysis of interpersonal relationships (Spencer-Oatey, 2000, 2008), and pragmatic-conversational analysis of pragmatic units (Jucker & Taavitsainen, 2012): 272

Pragmatic variation Table 15.1 Levels of analysis for pragmatic variation Levels of pragmatic analysis: Schneider and Barron (2008)

Levels of pragmatic-conversational analysis: Jucker and Taavitsainen (2012)

Domains of analysis: Spencer-Oatey (2000, 2008)

1 2 3 4 5

1 2 3 4  

1 2 3 4 5

Formal Actional Interactional Topic Organizational

Expression Utterance Conversation Discourse

Illocutionary Discourse Participation Stylistic Non-verbal

While the three frameworks analyze similar pragmatic targets at each level, they differ in their scope of analysis.

2.4.1

Variational pragmatics

Schneider and Barron’s (2008) five levels focus on synchronic intralingual pragmatic variation across varieties of the same language.These levels (i.e., formal, actional, interactional, topic, and organizational) are influenced by macro- and microsocial factors. Macrosocial factors interact with microsocial factors, such as the degree of social distance and power between the interlocutors. Placencia, Fuentes Rodríguez, and Palma-Fahey (2015) used this framework to examine the interaction of gender and situational variation. Subsequently, Schneider (2019) proposed modifications and extensions of the two components of VP, namely, the variational and the pragmatic, with a particular focus on the levels of pragmatic analysis.The author advocates for the interdependence of all levels of analysis, such as formal, actional, interactional, topic, and organizational (Schneider & Barron, 2008). Furthermore, a top-down approach is promoted for considering the discourse position of speech acts in a communicative event, the respective subtype of this act with its specific realization, along with the discourse history, such as previous events, and the relationship between interlocutors.

2.4.2

Pragmatic variation and rapport management

Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2008) model of rapport management proposed five domains of discourse for the appropriate management of face to analyze pragmatic features of communicative language use at the discourse level. In addition to the first four domains (i.e., illocutionary, discourse, participation, and stylistic), which are similar to those proposed by Schneider and Barron (2008), it includes a non-verbal domain to examine pragmatic meaning realized through gesture, body movements, and eye contact.

2.4.3

Synchronic and diachronic variation

Jucker and Taavitsainen (2012) proposed four units of pragmatic analysis (i.e., expression, utterance, conversation, and discourse domain) to examine pragmatic features of conversation.These units are influenced by various socio-demographic factors such as social class. While both Schneider and Barron’s (2008) levels and Jucker and Taavitsainen’s units can be used to examine synchronic and diachronic variation, Jucker and Taavitsainen’s units are predominantly used to examine diachronic variation of pragmatic features, such as in Shakespeare’s plays, among Romantic heroines in Gothic novels, in the analysis of speech act studies in Early and Late 273

Félix-Brasdefer

Modern English, or changes in politeness realization across time. Schneider and Barron’s (2008) levels, on the other hand, focus on present-day intralingual regional variation. In the next section, I propose an integrated model, originally described in Félix-Brasdefer (2015a, Section 1.4.6) for the study of pragmatic variation at different levels of analysis. These levels of pragmatic analysis can be used to examine variation at the local (i.e., intralingual variation) and global levels (i.e., cross-cultural and intercultural variation).

2.5

Integrated model for the analysis of pragmatic variation

Most approaches to social action (e.g., Clark, 1996; Schiffrin, 1987) adopt an integrated approach, because a combination of congruent theoretical and methodological research traditions yields a broader understanding of language use in social interaction than just one approach.The proposed framework is influenced by the two perspectives of social interaction discussed earlier, namely, VP (Schneider & Barron, 2008, pp.  19–21) and rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2000, pp. 19–21). The current framework includes eight levels. These eight levels for the analysis of pragmatic features of language use across languages (i.e., cross-linguistic) and across varieties of a language (i.e., intralingual) include: formal, actional, interactional, stylistic, topic, organizational, non-verbal, and prosodic.

2.5.1

The formal level

This level refers to the formal analysis of linguistic expressions with regard to form, function, and force in specific contexts (Schneider & Barron, 2008). It includes the analysis of discourse markers, mitigators, epistemic expressions, and backchannels. This level corresponds to Jucker and Taavitsainen’s (2012) expression as the smallest unit of analysis. For example, previous studies have considered this level by analyzing regional variation of the discourse marker pues (Fuentes-Rodríguez, Placencia, & Palma-Fahey, 2016) or the use of mitigating devices between a Dominican client and a Cuban therapist (e.g., hedges, tag questions, diminutives, and epistemic disclaimers (Flores-Ferrán, 2012)).

2.5.2

The actional level

This level is concerned with the analysis of the pragmalinguistic strategies used in speech acts (e.g., requests, offers, greetings).The actional level (Schneider & Barron, 2008) is equivalent to SpencerOatey’s (2000, 2008) illocutionary level and Jucker and Taavitsainen’s (2012) utterance level. It includes levels of directness and indirectness, and the internal elements used to modify speech acts to downgrade or upgrade the illocutionary force of the speech act (e.g., lexical and syntactic mitigators). For example, Félix-Brasdefer and Yates (2019) identified intralinguistic variation in the pragmalinguistic expressions used to express a request for service in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Seville, Spain.The aim at the actional level is to analyze the pragmalinguistic expressions used to convey the illocutionary force of the action. An example of research focused on this level of pragmatic analysis is Fink and Félix-Brasdefer (2015), who examined sociopragmatic variation and the pragmalinguistics of requests for service and their perceived degree of politeness in U.S. cafés.

2.5.3

The interactional level

This level centers on the analysis of speech act sequences and joint-social actions (e.g., compliment-response, invitation-acceptance/refusal). The interactional level (Schneider & 274

Pragmatic variation

Barron, 2008) is similar to Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2008) discourse domain, which highlights the organization and sequencing of information, such as greetings and closings. This level corresponds to Jucker and Taavitsainen’s (2012) conversation unit with regard to sequencing and exchanges in conversation. It employs tools of conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 2007) to examine the sequential patterns for the organization of speech actions jointly produced by interlocutors. For example, Félix-Brasdefer (2015a) examined the sequential organization of service encounter interactions in different regions of Mexican Spanish (chapters 3, 4, 5). Also, speech act sequences have been analyzed from a cross-cultural perspective, among U.S. and Mexican students in invitation-refusal sequences (Félix-Brasdefer, 2008a) and among British and Uruguayan students in apologies and requests (Márquez Reiter, 2000).

2.5.4

The stylistic level

This level focuses on the stylistic aspects of an interchange. It includes choice of tone (e.g., serious or joking), shifting from business talk (e.g., buying and selling) to a friendly tone (e.g., joking or small talk), and the appropriate selection of address forms to open, close, and negotiate a colloquial or business transaction.The stylistic level (Spencer-Oatey, 2000) is similar to Jucker and Taavitsainen’s (2012) discourse level, with regard to the repertoire of discourse domains of texts and genres (e.g., openings and closings in service encounters, colloquial conversation, or political discourse). For example, Murillo Medrano (2019) analyzed the pronominal selection of vocatives as well as vos (T) and usted (V) forms in Costa Rica in institutional and commercial interactions.

2.5.5

The Topic level

This level is concerned with discourse content throughout the interaction. It includes topic selection, topic management, topic abandonment, topic shift, and the re-introduction of topics. It focuses on knowing which topics are appropriate or inappropriate to bring up in a conversation, as well as the choice and management of sensitive topics.The topic level (Schneider & Barron, 2008) is part of Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) discourse domain (topic choice and topic management). For instance, in the context of supermarket sites (i.e., commercial) and a visitor information center (i.e., non-commercial), Félix-Brasdefer (2015a, Chapter 7) looked at the management of topic choice and topic development during the negotiation of service from transactional and relational talk.

2.5.6

The organizational level

This level centers on the organization of turn-taking in conversation and is influenced by conversation analysis (e.g., Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 2007). It addresses aspects of turn-taking, overlap, interruption, silence, and preference organization. The organizational level (Schneider & Barron, 2008) is equivalent to Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2008) participation domain (e.g., turntaking and turn-taking mechanisms such as listener responses), and resembles, to some extent, Jucker and Taavitsainen’s (2012) conversation level with regard to the conversational structure of dialogues. Studies at this level, concerned with turn-taking procedures in openings, closings, and request-response sequences, have analyzed service encounter interactions in Mexico (FélixBrasdefer, 2015a) and Ecuador (Placencia, 2005). 275

Félix-Brasdefer

2.5.7

The non-verbal level

This level (Spencer-Oatey, 2000) consists of social actions performed through gesture. Kendon refers to gestures as “visible acts” when uttering actions (2010, p. 1), such as body movement, hand movement, or gaze direction. Gesture is used to show what kinds of actions we are taking with our utterances; with gestures we can show, among other things, agreement or disagreement, afrmation or denial, we can show that we are asking a question or begging another’s indulgence, that we are doubtful of something or that what we are saying is hypothetical. (Kendon, 2010, p. 1) For example, Dorai and Webster (2015) ofered a conceptual model of non-verbal communication in service encounter contexts. The model shows that both verbal and non-verbal elements between the service provider and the service seeker infuence the service seeker’s afect or subjective feelings, which, at the same time, impact the evaluation of the service encounter. In institutional service encounters (e.g., doctor-patient, attorney-client), nodding, smiling, and frequent eye contact show understanding, empathy, and friendliness.These non-verbal features can vary across languages and across varieties of the same language.

2.5.8

The prosodic level

Prosody is a pragmatic resource used to express interpersonal or marked meaning. This level focuses on pragmatic meaning that is conveyed through prosodic information: intonation (e.g., low or high pitch), stress, loudness, duration, and timing (e.g., rhythm and rate of speech) (see Chapter 8 on pragmatics and prosody, this volume).These prosodic resources function as “contextualization cues” (Gumperz, 1982, 2015): signals that allow the interlocutor to draw an inference from the speaker’s message. For example, Félix-Brasdefer (2015a, Chapter 6) examined prosodic resources used during the realization of requests for service with a falling tone or rising intonation that signaled polite requests.The interpretation of social action (e.g., requests for service, offers, greetings, clarification requests, payment sequence, or closing, etc.) is frequently contingent upon the interlocutor’s understanding of the prosodic cues that accompany the utterances. Taken together, the levels of pragmatic analysis presented here aim to provide a comprehensive examination of pragmatic variation from the local and global perspectives (Fried, 2010). This includes an analysis of intralingual variation (i.e., pragmatic variation across varieties of a language), cross-cultural variation (e.g., refusing in Spanish and English), and intercultural variation (e.g., negotiation of service between NSs and NNSs, or between two NNSs who communicate in a language different from their first language). Similar to VP (Barron & Schneider, 2009; Schneider, 2010) or sociopragmatic variation (Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005), the present approach to pragmatic variation is contrastive, as it aims to examine two or more (sub)varieties of a language in intercultural encounters, or two or more languages in cross-cultural contexts. See also Félix-Brasdefer and Koike (2012) for selected contributions on pragmatic variation in first- and second-language contexts.

2.6

Research on pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish

Previous research on regional pragmatic variation in Spanish has looked at different aspects of pragmatic features of language use since the early 1990s. For example, Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2005, chapter 5) provided an overview of research on sociopragmatic variation across 276

Pragmatic variation

varieties on Spanish with attention to politeness and conversational interaction. Placencia (2011) offered an account of studies that contrasted two or three national varieties of Spanish from 1994 to 2009 (10 varieties, including Spanish spoken in the U.S.). Only two studies contrasted two varieties of Spanish at the subnational level (de los Heros, 2001, Peruvian Spanish; Placencia, 2008, Ecuadorian Spanish). Of the 27 studies reviewed by Placencia (2011), 19 contrasted a variety of Peninsular Spanish with a variety from Latin America.The majority focused on the actional level by looking at the pragmalinguistic variation of one speech act; specifically, requests. For more recent research on pragmatic variation, Schneider and Placencia (2017) offer a review of studies in Spanish from the perspective of (im)politeness. Table 15.2 provides a selective account of research on regional pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish from 2009–2019. The table shows the author and year of publication, the focus of the study, the method used to collect the data, and the varieties analyzed. I consider only studies on regional pragmatic variation that contrasted two or more varieties of Spanish, including varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States. Table 15.2 presents 20 studies that contrasted pragmatic features in 13 national varieties of Spanish, including those spoken in Spain and 12 countries in the Americas (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, El Salvador, and Venezuela).Two studies compared stylistic variation in pronominal forms in varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States: Sorenson (2016, Salvadorans in Washington, DC/ Houston and Argentines in Miami), and López Alonso (2016, pronominal variation among Nicaraguans residing in Miami).The results were contrasted with pronominal variation among monolinguals in Nicaragua using a binomial system (vos, usted) and Nicaraguans in Miami using a tripartite pronominal system (tú, vos, usted). Of the 20 studies displayed in Table 15.2, the majority compared two or three varieties of Spanish spoken in Latin America (11/20) and fewer compared one region of Peninsular Spanish to a variety of Latin American Spanish (7/20).While most studies contrasted pragmatic features of two regions, four compared similarities and differences among three regions: Félix-Brasdefer (2009, requests in Costa Rica (San José), Mexico City, and Dominican Spanish (Santiago)), Placencia et al. (2015, nominal address in Chile (Santiago), Ecuador (Quito), and Spain (Seville)), and Fuentes Rodríguez et al. (2016, discourse marker pues in Chile (Santiago), Ecuador (Quito), and Spain (Seville)).Together, the studies in Table 15.2 compared and contrasted different pragmatic features in 21 (sub)varieties of Spanish. The majority of the studies focused on a variety of speech acts (i.e., the actional level), including requests, apologies, reprimands, compliments, compliment responses, and refusals; of these, most analyzed requests (5/20). Six of the studies focused on variation at the stylistic level, such as nominal forms (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2015a, 2015b; Jørgensen & Aarli, 2011; Placencia et al., 2015). Only two studies focused on variation at the discourse level in Mexico and Spain in television advertisements, including the analysis of interpersonal contributions such as polite and impolite responses or apologies (Martínez Camino, 2011) and pragmatic and discourse functions of the discourse marker pues in Chile (Santiago), Ecuador (Quito), and Spain (Seville) (Fuentes Rodríguez et al., 2016).While most of the studies in Table 15.2 analyzed the pragmalinguistic features of speech acts (Félix-Brasdefer, 2009; Placencia & García, 2019; Wagner & Roebuck, 2010), some focused on two or more levels of analysis, including the interactional level (FélixBrasdefer, 2010), the stylistic level (Félix-Brasdefer & Yates, 2019), and the organizational and stylistic levels (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015a). Regional variation at the national level predominated in the majority of the studies (14/20) included in Table 15.2. For example, most researchers contrasted two or three Latin American varieties of Spanish such as Costa Rican, Dominican, and Mexican Spanish (Félix-Brasdefer, 277

278

2010

2011

2011

2011

2011

2015

2015a

2015

2015

FélixBrasdefer

FélixBrasdefer

Martínez Camino

Hernández Toribio

Jørgensen & Aarli

Bataller

FélixBrasdefer

Placencia, Fuentes Rodríguez, & Palma-Fahey

Lázaro Ruiz & Ramajo Cuesta

Compliment responses

Nominal address

Requests for service

Requests for service and T/V selection

Vocatives

Compliments

Interpersonal contributions

Requests

Requests (females)

Apologies

Reprimands

2009

2010

García

Wagner & Roebuck

Requests (males)

2009

FélixBrasdefer

Focus

Year

Author(s)

Natural conversations

Role play

Natural face-to-face interactions in service encounters

Natural face-to-face interactions in service encounters

Corpus COLA

Advertisements personal ads

TV advertisement

Role play

Role play

Field notes

Role play

Role play

Data



A





Ch

C

Varieties of Spanish

Table 15.2 Research on regional pragmatic variation in Spanish (2009–2019)





CR





Do



E

 2 subvs.











Mx

N



P

 several subvs.



 2 subvs.







Pn



Pv

S

US



V

Félix-Brasdefer

2015

2015b

2016

2016

2016

2019

2019

2019

Lower & Placencia

Félix-Brasdefer

FuentesRodríguez, Placencia, & Palma-Fahey

Sorenson

López-Alonso

Bataller

Félix-Brasdefer & Yates

Placencia & García

Refusal of bargaining offers

Requests for service and pronominal selection

Requests for service

Tú, vos, usted

Tuteo & voseo

Discourse marker pues

Pronominal forms

Nominal forms

Focus

online market through mobile phones

Natural face-to-face interactions in service encounters

Natural face-to-face interactions in service encounters

Questionnaire & oral speech

Questionnaire & oral speech

Role play

Natural face-to-face interactions in service encounters

Online Facebook data

Data



A



Ch

 2 subvs.

C

Varieties of Spanish CR

Do







E



 2 subvs.

Mx



N

P







Pn

Pv

S



 2 vars.

US

Types of Spanish: A (Argentinean); Ch (Chilean), C (Colombian), CR (Costa Rican), Do (Dominican), E (Ecuadorian), Mx (Mexican), N (Nicaraguan), P (Panama), Pn (Peninsular), Pv (Peruvian), S (Salvadoran), US (United States), V (Venezuelan)

Year

Author(s)



V

Pragmatic variation

279

Félix-Brasdefer

2009), Costa Rican and Mexican Spanish (Félix-Brasdefer, 2010), Peruvian and Venezuelan Spanish (García, 2009), Ecuadorian and Venezuelan Spanish (Placencia & García, 2019), or Mexican and Panamanian Spanish (Wagner & Roebuck, 2010). Other studies contrasted a Peninsular variety with a variety (or varieties) of Latin American Spanish, such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Seville, Spain (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer & Yates, 2019), Santiago, Chile and Madrid (Jørgensen & Aarli, 2011), or Seville, Santiago, and Quito (Ecuador) (Fuentes Rodríguez et al., 2016). Pragmatic variation at the subnational level was examined in five of the 20 studies. Three studies contrasted the pragmatic features of two regions of a Latin American variety of Spanish. For example, Félix-Brasdefer (2015a) contrasted the realization of requests for service in small shops in Mexico City and Guanajuato (i.e., the actional level) and the request-response sequence (i.e., the interactional level), including the analysis of transactional and relational talk. FélixBrasdefer (2015b) focused on two different regions in Mexico (Tlaxcala & Mérida,Yucatán) to examine stylistic variation (tú/usted variation) during the realization of service encounters in open-air markets. Bataller (2015) analyzed the negotiation of requests for service in cafeterias in two regions of Spain; one in Valencia and one in Granada. Further, using field notes and audio recordings, Bataller (2019) contrasted the negotiation of requests in two regions of Colombia, Cartagena de Indias (Caribbean coast) and Bucaramanga (eastern Andean region).The data were analyzed at the illocutionary (e.g., request variants) and stylistic levels (e.g., tú/usted variation). Finally, using audio-recorded conversations, Lázaro Ruiz and Ramajo Cuesta (2015) examined intralingual variation in compliments produced by women in five regions of Spain (Madrid, Valencia, Catalonia, Andalusia, and Castile-Leon). Overall, women from Madrid and Andalusia frequently used downgrading strategies, whereas women from Catalonia displayed more accepting responses.Women from Valencia and Castile-Leon used a similar percentage of downgrading and diverting strategies. One study examined stylistic variation of the tú/vos/usted forms in a U.S. Nicaraguan community in Miami and the results were compared with those of monolinguals in Nicaragua (López Alonso, 2016).While vos and usted (as a marker of familiarity and respect) are the unmarked forms among monolingual Nicaraguans, a tripartite system (tú/vos/usted) is used by Nicaraguans in Miami, as a result of their contact with tuteante dialects. Finally, the studies in Table 15.2 used different theoretical and methodological frameworks to analyze the data. For the analysis of intralingual variation, two frameworks are frequently used:VP for the analysis of macro- and microsocial factors (Schneider & Barron, 2008; see also Schneider, 2019, for extensions) and Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2008) rapport management for the negotiation of face and (im)politeness. Brown and Levinson’s (1987 [1978]) universal model of linguistic politeness and Scollon and Scollon’s (2001) politeness systems (i.e., solidarity, deferential, hierarchical) have also been used to analyze politeness across varieties of Spanish. Other studies use speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969, 1976) and Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper’s (1989) taxonomy of requests and apologies to examine variation at the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic levels. Still other taxonomies have examined pragmalinguistic variation of refusals (Beebe, Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz, 1990; see also Félix-Brasdefer, 2008b; Placencia & García, 2019), compliments (Wolfson, 1981), compliment responses (Herbert, 1989; see also Lázaro Ruiz & Ramajo Cuesta, 2015 for a study of intralingual variation across five varieties of Peninsular Spanish), and apologies (Olshtain & Cohen, 1983; see also Wagner & Roebuck, 2010, for a study on regional variation in Mexico and Panama). Finally, Culpeper’s framework of impoliteness (2011; also Culpeper & Hardaker, 2017, and Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness issues, this volume) has been used to examine cross-cultural variation (Culpeper, Marti, Mei, Nevala, & Schauer, 2010) and perceptions of impoliteness among second language learners in different regions of Spain and Latin America (Félix-Brasdefer & McKinnon, 2017).To date,VP 280

Pragmatic variation

and rapport management represent the predominant frameworks for examining pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish.

3

Methodological considerations

Research on pragmatic variation employs different methods for collecting data based on the theoretical framework employed. With regard to the methods used to collect pragmatic data, natural data predominate in the majority of the studies in Table 15.2 (12/20). Researchers chose a variety of methods, ranging from naturally occurring (e.g., field methods, corpus data) to experimental data using role plays, written questionnaires (e.g., Discourse Completion Tests), TV advertisements, and rating scales to measure perceptions of (im)politeness, degrees of social distance, or degrees of imposition (Félix-Brasdefer, 2019a, Chapter 10; Félix-Brasdefer & HaslerBarker, 2017). Electronic corpora have been used to examine vocatives in Chile and Madrid (e.g., Jørgensen & Aarli, 2011), e-commerce sites in Argentina (Powell & Placencia, 2019), and Facebook pages in Spain (Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2019) and Mexico (Merino Hernández, 2019).The field-note method was also used to collect data on apologies in Mexican and Panamanian Spanish (Wagner & Roebuck, 2010), and requests for service in two regions in Colombia (Bataller, 2019). Audio-recordings of face-to-face conversations are also commonly used to examine different dimensions of transactional and non-transactional talk (FélixBrasdefer, 2012, 2015b; Félix-Brasdefer & Yates, 2019; Michno, 2019) (see also Chapter 33 on research methods, this volume). According to Schneider (2014), a pragmatic variable can be analyzed in terms of variations or the choices that are used to express pragmatic intent. For instance, at the actional level, the pragmatic variable ‘request for service’ represents a constitutive element of the service encounter genre.This variable is realized in different ways (i.e., variants) in order to convey the same illocutionary force; namely, a request for service (e.g., deme ‘give me,’ me da ‘give me,’ me pone ‘give me,’ me puede dar ‘can you give me,’ or quiero/necesito ‘I want/need’). At the interactional level, the pragmatic variable is more complex than the analysis of individual speech acts, and can be defined according to the choices of particular speech acts within a speech act sequence that is part of the entire interaction (or joint activity, as in a service encounter). For example, greetings and farewells are joint actions that require the co-participation of the interlocutors. The pragmatic variable ‘greeting’ or ‘farewell’ is realized by means of various linguistic conventions to express a greeting (e.g., Hola ‘hi,’ Buenas tardes ‘Good afternoon,’ ¿Hola, cómo está? ‘Hello, how are you?’) or a farewell (e.g., Gracias, que tenga un fin de semana maravilloso ‘Thank you, have a wonderful weekend’).These joint actions occur in specific positions within the opening or closing sequences; thus, this variable is defined with regard to its sequential position within the opening (greetings) or closing sequence (farewell). For additional information regarding the pragmatic variable, see Schneider (2010, 2014), Barron (2017), and also Terkourafi (2012) for a different analysis that is more in line with variationist sociolinguistic principles. Finally, with respect to ethical issues in data collection, Schneider (2018, pp. 74–80) reviews four principles that researchers need to consider prior to and during data collection in controlled and uncontrolled settings: (a) the principle of welfare (i.e., protect participants’ well-being, do no harm); (b) the principle of autonomy (i.e., respect and protect the autonomy of participants, obtaining consent when researchers wish to collect data by observation or by participation); (c) the principle of privacy (i.e.,“Surreptitious recording is considered unethical because it impinges on participants’ basic rights of freedom and autonomy,” p. 79); and, (d) the principle of indebtedness (i.e., the researcher’s ethical responsibility to return the favor in some way that benefits the participant or the community). For additional information regarding data collection of natural 281

Félix-Brasdefer

interactional data and online data, see Félix-Brasdefer and Placencia (2019, Introduction), and Chapter 33 on research methods, this volume. Overall, it is imperative that researchers abide by these research principles to protect the rights of the participants who consent to the use of their data provided their anonymity is respected.

4

Future directions and conclusion

The analysis of regional pragmatic variation is a research desideratum to further our understanding of intralingual regional variation across under-examined varieties of a language. The selection of the framework for analyzing pragmatic variation depends on the research question(s) and the level of analysis (i.e., formal, actional, interactional, organizational, topic, prosodic, or nonverbal). If the focus is on the analysis of a pragmatic variable within two or more varieties of the same language conditioned by micro- and macrosocial factors,VP can be used to examine intralingual pragmatic variation at the national and subnational levels. If the researcher focuses on topics related to (im)politeness, face, and rapport management, Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2008) framework offers an alternative. Further, research on intralingual variation should continue to examine the role of non-verbal and prosodic cues during the negotiation of meaning in two or more varieties of a language. Analysis of the pragmatic variable (and its variants) requires further investigation in order to account for the envelope of variation and to provide a better understanding of functional equivalence. Such an analysis should include an extended version of variationist sociolinguistics (Cameron & Schwenter, 2013) and procedural meaning interpretation (Terkourafi, 2011, 2012) to arrive at a more comprehensive analysis of variation at both the pragmatic and discourse levels. However, see Barron (2017) for a recent analysis of the pragmatic variable from a variational pragmatics perspective. This author refers to methodological considerations such as the use of elicited and naturally occurring data in order to use “speech act identification criteria, such as those of uptake, propositional content and further context, in the identification of illocutionary sameness” (p. 95). Future research should examine intralingual variation in under-explored regions of the Caribbean (e.g., Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic) and Central America (e.g., Belize, Guatemala, Panama, El Salvador) at one or more levels of analysis, Latin American regions/varieties (e.g., Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile), as well as varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States. In addition to the levels of analysis that are most frequently studied (e.g., the actional, interactional, or organizational levels), researchers should look at pragmatic variation at the nonverbal and prosodic levels. Finally, future studies in pragmatic variation should triangulate data from two or more methods of analysis to provide a comprehensive account of how language is used (e.g., the negotiation of meaning and social interaction) and how it is perceived in formal and informal contexts (i.e., sociopragmatic variation).

Further reading Cameron, R., & Schwenter, S. (2013). Pragmatics and variationist sociolinguistics. In R. Bayley, R. Cameron, & C. Lucas (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 464–483). Oxford: Oxford University Press. This article examines the interface of pragmatic and sociolinguistic variation from a variationist perspective with regard to the linguistic variable and social factors (e.g., gender, age, social class, ethnicity). It describes the framework for the analysis of the linguistic variable and offers an overview of morphosyntactic variation of topics in individual varieties of Spanish. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Koike, D. (Eds.). (2012). Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 282

Pragmatic variation

This volume includes 11 chapters that address different aspects of pragmatic variation in first- and second-language contexts. Some of these chapters reexamine the variationist sociolinguistic framework to explore variation at the pragmatic and discourse methods.The last two chapters address theoretical and methodological issues on pragmatic variation. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Placencia, M. E. (Eds.). (2019). Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world. Oxford and New York: Routledge. This edited volume includes 14 chapters that examine pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions in new face-to-face and digital contexts, as well as in new (sub)varieties of Spanish.The chapters examine pragmatic variation in a range of contexts, representing 10 countries and 12 (sub)varieties of Spanish. Ten chapters look at macrosocial factors (e.g., region, gender, age, and social class), two analyze microsocial and situational factors, and the last two chapters conclude the volume with theoretical and methodological contributions to the field.

References Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barron, A. (2017).Variational pragmatics. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 91–104). London and New York: Routledge. Barron,A., & Schneider, K. (2009).Variational pragmatics: Studying the impact of social factors on language use in interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6, 425–442. Bataller, R. (2015). Pragmatic variation in the performance of requests: A comparative study of service encounters in Valencia and Granada (Spain). In M. Hernández-López & L. Fernández-Amaya (Eds.), A multidisciplinary approach to service encounters (pp. 113–137). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Bataller, R. (2019). Corner-store interactions in Cartagena and Bucaramanga:A variational pragmatics study. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 35–54). Oxon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Beebe, L. M., Takahashi, T., & Uliss-Weltz, R. (1990). Pragmatic transfer in ESL refusals. In R. Scarcella, E. Andersen, & D. Krashen (Eds.), On the development of communicative competence in a second language (pp. 55–73). Cambridge, MA: Newbury House. Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.). (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2019). Socioeconomic variation and conflict in Spanish retailer-consumer interactions on Facebook. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 189–206). Oxon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987/1978). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, R., & Schwenter, S. (2013). Pragmatics and variationist sociolinguistics. In R. Bayley, R. Cameron, & C. Lucas (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 464–483). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Clyne, M. (1992). Pluricentric languages: Introduction. In M. Clyne (Ed.), Pluricentric languages: Differing norms in different nations (pp. 1–9). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, J., & Hardaker, C. (2017). Impoliteness. In J. Culpeper, D. Haugh, & D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 199–225). London: Palgrave MacMillan. Culpeper, J., Marti, L., Mei, M., Nevala, M., & Schauer, G. (2010). Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness: A study of impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany, and Turkey. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(4), 597–624. de los Heros, S. (2001). Discurso, identidad y género en el castellano peruano. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú/Fondo Editorial. Dorai, S., & Webster, C. (2015).The role of nonverbal communication in service encounters. In M. Hernández López & L. Fernández Amaya (Eds.), A multidisciplinary approach to service encounters (pp. 215–233). Leiden: Brill. Escalona Torres, J. (2019).The effects of social distance in service encounters in Puerto Rican panaderías. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 230–247). Oxon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. 283

Félix-Brasdefer

Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008a). Politeness in Mexico and the United States:A contrastive study of the realization and perception of refusals.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008b). Perceptions of refusals to invitations: Exploring the minds of foreign language learners. Language Awareness, 17, 195–211. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2009). Pragmatic variation across Spanish(es): Requesting in Mexican, Costa Rican, and Dominican Spanish. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6, 473–515. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2010). Intra-lingual pragmatic variation in Mexico City and San José, Costa Rica: A focus on regional differences in female requests. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 2992–3011. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2011). Cortesía, prosodia y variación pragmática en las peticiones de estudiantes universitarios mexicanos y dominicanos. In C. García Fernández & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Estudios de variación pragmática [Studies of Pragmatic Variation] (pp. 57–86). Buenos Aires: Dunken. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2012). Pragmatic variation by gender in market service encounters in Mexico. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D.A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues (pp. 17–48). Series: IMPACT.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015a). The language of service encounters:A pragmatic-discursive approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015b, March). Pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish: Forms of address, stylistic variation, and languages in contact. Delivered at the 25th Conference on Spanish in the United States and 10th Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages.The City College of the City University of New York. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2017a). The intercultural speaker abroad. In R. Giora & M. Haugh (Eds.), Papers in honor of Istvan Kecskes (pp. 353–370). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2017b). Interlanguage pragmatics. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 416–434). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019a). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. Oxford and New York: Routledge Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019b). El componente pragmático. In F. Jiménez Calderón & A. Rufat Sánchez (Eds.), Manual de formación inicial para profesores de español (pp. 189–209). Madrid: SGEL. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2017). Elicited data. In A. Barron (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 27–40). Oxon, Oxford: Mouton de Gruyter. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Koike, D. (Eds.). (2012). Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & McKinnon, S. (2017). Perceptions of impolite behavior in study abroad contexts and the teaching of impoliteness in L2 Spanish. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3, 99–113. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Placencia, M. E. (Eds.). (2019). Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Yates,A. (2019). Regional pragmatic variation in small shops in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, & Seville, Spain. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 15–34). Oxford and New York: Routledge. Fink, L., & Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). Pragmalinguistic and gender variation in U.S. café service encounters. In K. Beeching & H.Woodfield (Eds.), Researching sociopragmatic variability: Perspectives from variational, interlanguage and contrastive pragmatics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2012). Pragmatic variation in therapeutic discourse:An examination of mitigating devices employed by Dominican female clients and a Cuban American therapist. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues (pp. 81–112). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fried, M. (2010). Introduction: From instances of change to explanations of change. In M. Fried, J-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Variation and change (pp.  1–16.). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fuentes-Rodríguez, C., Placencia, M. E., & Palma-Fahey, M. (2016). Regional pragmatic variation in the use of the discourse marker pues in informal talk among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile) and Seville (Spain). Journal of Pragmatics, 97, 74–92. García, C. (2009). Intra-lingual pragmatic variation in the performance of reprimanding. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6, 443–472. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York:Academic Press. Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 284

Pragmatic variation

Gumperz, J. (2015). Interactional sociolinguistics:A personal perspective. In D.Tannen, H. E. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 309–322). Malden, MA:Wiley Blackwell. Hasler-Barker, M. (2016). Effects of metapragmatic instruction on the production of compliments and compliment responses: Learner-learner role-plays in the foreign language (FL) classroom. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 14, 125–152. Herbert, R. (1989). The ethnography of English compliments and compliment responses: A contrastive sketch. In W. Oleksy (Ed.), Contrastive pragmatics (pp. 3–35).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hernández Toribio, M. I. (2011). Los ‘cumplidos’ como estrategias de persuasión emocional en la publicidad española y argentina. In C. García & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Estudios de variación pragmática en español (pp. 113–140). Buenos Aires: Dunken. Jørgensen, A. M., & Aarli, G. (2011). Los vocativos en el lenguaje juvenil de Santiago de Chile y Madrid. In C. García & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Estudios de variación pragmática en español (pp. 141–166). Buenos Aires: Dunken. Jucker, A. H., & Taavitsainen, I. (2012). Pragmatic variables. In J. M. Hernández-Campoy & J. C. CondeSilvestre (Eds.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics (pp. 293–306). Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell. Kendon,A. (2010). Some topics in gesture studies. In A. Esposito, M. Bratanic, E. Keller, & M. Marinaro (Eds.), Fundamentals of verbal and nonverbal communication and the biometric issue (pp. 3–19).Amsterdam: IOS Press. Kloss, H. (1978). Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lázaro Ruiz, H., & Ramajo Cuesta,A. (2015). Compliment responses in peninsular Spanish: Exploratory and contrastive study conducted on women from Madrid,Valencia, Catalonia,Andalusia and Castile-Leon. Retrieved from www.researchgate.net/publication/286523909_Compliment_Responses_in_Peninsular_Spanish_ Exploratory_and_Contrastive_Study_Conducted_on_Women_from_Madrid_Valencia_Catalonia_ Andalusia_and_Castile-Leon Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. New York: Longman. Levinson, S. C. (1995).Three levels of meaning. In F. R. Palmer (Ed.), Grammar and meaning: Essays in honor of Sir John Lyons (pp. 90–115). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. López Alonso, K. (2016). Use and perception of the pronominal trio vos, tú, usted in a Nicaraguan community in Miami, Florida. In M. Irene Moyna & S. Rivera-Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 197–232).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lower, A., & Placencia, M. E. (2015, October 9–10). Addressing among young Ecuadorian and Spanish women on Facebook. Paper presented at the International Network on Address Research Conference,Texas A&M University, Texas. Márquez Reiter, R. (2000). Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A contrastive analysis of requests and apologies.Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins. Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish pragmatics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Martínez Camino, G. (2011).Análisis contrastivo del uso de las contribuciones interpersonales en los diálogos ficticios de la publicidad mexicana y de la española. In C. García & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Estudios de variación pragmática en español (pp. 87–112). Buenos Aires: Dunken. Merino Hernández, L. M. (2019).The role of gender in Mexican e-service encounters. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 115–129). Oxon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Michno, J. (2019). Gender variation in address form selection in corner-store interactions in a Nicaraguan community. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 77–98). Oxon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Murillo Medrano, J. (2019). Forms of address and gender in Costa Rican service encounters. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 130–149). Oxon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Olshtain, E., & Cohen,A. D. (1983).Apology:A speech act set. In N.Wolfson & E. Judd (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language acquisition (pp. 18–35). Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Placencia, M. E. (2005). Pragmatic variation in corner store interactions in Quito and Madrid. Hispania, 88, 583–598. Placencia, M. E. (2008). Pragmatic variation in corner shop transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and Coastal Spanish. In K. P. Schneider & A. Barron (Eds.), Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages (pp. 307–332).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 285

Félix-Brasdefer

Placencia, M. E. (2011). Regional pragmatic variation. In G.Andersen & K.Aijmer (Eds.), Pragmatics of society (Handbook of Pragmatics 5) (pp. 79–113). Berlin: Mouton de Mouton. Placencia, M. E., Fuentes Rodríguez, C., & Palma-Fahey, M. (2015). Nominal address and rapport management in informal interactions among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile), and Seville (Spain). Multilingua, 34(4), 547–575. Placencia, M. E., & García, C. (2019).‘No gracias amigo’: Refusals of bargaining offers in e-service encounters in Mercado Libre Ecuador and Mercado Libre Venezuela. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 55–76). Oxon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Powell, H., & Placencia, M. E. (2019). Interpersonal work in service encounters in Mercado Libre Argentina: A comparison between buyer and vendor patterns across two market domains. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 209–229). Oxon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974).A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language, 50, 96–735. Schegloff, E. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis I. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schlieben-Lange, B., & Weydt, H. (1978). Für eine Pragmatisierung der Dialektologie [For a pragmaticization of dialectology]. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik [Journal of German Linguistics], 6(3), 257–282 [pp. 257–260 are given twice in this volume, each time with different content]. Schneider, K. P. (2010).Variational pragmatics. In M. Fried (Ed.), Variation and change: Pragmatic perspectives (pp. 239–267).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schneider, K. P. (2014). Comparability and sameness in variational pragmatics. In S. Mengenthal & R. M. Nischik (Eds.), Anglistentag 2013 Konstanz: Proceedings (pp. 361–372).Trier, Germany:Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Schneider, K. P. (2018). Methods and ethics of data collection. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 37–93). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Schneider, K. P. (2019). Rethinking pragmatic variation: The case of service encounters from a modified variational pragmatics perspective. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp.  251–264). Oxford and New York: Routledge. Schneider, K., & Barron, A. (Eds.). (2008). Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schneider, K., & Placencia, M. E. (2017). (Im)politeness and regional variation. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp.  539–570). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schwenter, S. (1999). Evidentiality in Spanish morphosyntax: A reanalysis of (de)queísmo. In M. J. Serrano (Ed.), Estudios de variación sintáctica (Studies of syntactic variation) (pp.  65–88). Madrid-Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (2001). Intercultural communication (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. R. (1976).A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5, 1–23. Serrano, M. J. (2011). Morphosyntactic variation in Spain. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics (pp. 187–204). Malden, MA:Wiley-Blackwell. Serrano, M. J. (2017). Going beyond address forms: Variation and style in the use of the second-person pronouns tú and usted. Pragmatics, 27(1), 87–114. Shively, R. L. (2011). L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A longitudinal study of Spanish service encounters. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1818–1835. Sorenson, T. (2016). ¿De dónde sos? Differences between Argentine and Salvadoran voseo to tuteo accommodation in the United States. In M. Irene Moyna & S. Rivera-Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 171–196).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000). Rapport management: A framework for analysis. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 11–46). London: Continuum. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008). Face, (im)politeness, and rapport. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Culture, communication and politeness theory (pp. 11–47). London: Continuum. Tagliamonte, S. (2012). Variationist sociolinguistics: Change, observation, interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 286

Pragmatic variation

Terkourafi, M. (2011).The pragmatic variable:Toward a procedural interpretation. Language in Society, 40, 343–372. Terkourafi, M. (2012). Between pragmatics and sociolinguistics. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D.A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues (pp. 295–318). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4, 91–112. Thomas, J. (1995). Meaning in interaction. Essex, England: Longman. Wagner, L. C., & Roebuck, R. (2010). Apologizing in Cuernavaca, Mexico and Panama City, Panama: A cross-cultural comparison of positive- and negative-politeness strategies. Spanish in Context, 7(2), 254–278. Wolfson, N. (1981). Invitations, compliments and the competence of the native speakers. International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 25, 7–22.

287

16 Pragmatic variation and forms of address María Irene Moyna and José Luis Blas Arroyo

1

Introduction

Forms of address (known in Spanish as formas de tratamiento, fórmulas de tratamiento, and sometimes simply, tratamientos) are “words or linguistic expressions that speakers use to appeal directly to their addressee” (Jucker & Taavitsainen, 2003, p. 1). In Spanish, they can be pronominal (tú, usted, vos, vosotros, ustedes ‘you’), verbal (e.g., hablas ‘speak-2sg-presT’ vs. hablás ‘speak-2sg-presvos’), and nominal (e.g., papá ‘dad,’ chicos ‘kids,’ doctor).While some are distinguishable from others in their meaning (e.g., singular usted vs. plural ustedes), others are not. In other words, there is no difference in truth value or grammaticality between Aquí tiene mi documento ‘Here [you] haveSG FML my ID’ and Aquí tienes mi documento ‘id. SG INFL.’ However, a competent speaker of Spanish knows that the first statement should be used to address a police officer during a traffic stop, while the second is typical when addressing a young vendor. Choosing appropriate address is a central aspect of communicative competence, requiring mastery of the constellation of social and contextual variables that determine the choice. Spanish is among the most complex Romance languages when it comes to its address system, with several competing normative patterns linked to divergent historical evolutions (Table 16.1) (de Jonge & Nieuwenhuijsen, 2009; Penny, 1993, pp. 123–125). Old Spanish inherited a Late Latin system that opposed a singular familiar tú to a polyfunctional vos.The ambiguity of vos was increased when it became close in value to tú, as several polite honorifics were developed (especially Vuestra Merced). Non-deferential tú~vos variation ensued, until the latter finally disappeared from Peninsular Spanish around the 18th century, and the plural became unambiguous through the addition of otros to vos (> vosotros). The address system that arrived in the Americas, which combined some features of the late medieval and early modern periods, spread over the vast colonial empire, where it continued to evolve (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1993).The five centuries since have seen further divergence and the consolidation of local prestige norms (Bertolotti, 2016; Fontanella de Weinberg, 1999). Table 16.2 presents some representative normative dialects from this complex picture, which can be contrasted with the Peninsular variety in Table 16.1. Contemporary Peninsular Spanish (Table 16.1, right column) distinguishes informal and formal address in the singular and plural, while Latin American dialects (Table 16.2) have retained 289

Moyna and Blas Arroyo Table 16.1 Evolution of Peninsular Spanish pronominal address (Penny, 1993, pp. 123–125) Address Systems

Old Spanish

Golden Age

Modern Peninsular

Singular familiar

tú

tú

Singular deferential Plural familiar Plural deferential

vos 

tú vos vuestra merced vos+otros vuestras mercedes

usted vosotros ustedes

Table 16.2 Four systems of subject pronoun address in contemporary Latin American Spanish Address Systems

Mexico City

Bogotá

Buenos Aires

Montevideo

Singular familiar

tú

vos

Singular deferential Plural

usted ustedes

usted tú usted ustedes

vos tú usted ustedes

usted ustedes

the formal/informal distinction only in the singular (see also Chapter 9 on pragmatics and sociolinguistics, this volume). On the other hand, in Hispanic America the singular informal exponent varies geographically between tú and vos, used exclusively or in combination. In some dialects, such as Colombian, usted is ambiguous in value, and may be both respectful and intimate, in opposition to an intermediate tú (Uber, 1985). Pronominal declensions, verbal conjugations, and mismatches in subject-verb agreement complicate the picture further. For example, in most voseante dialects (such as Salvadoran or Argentinian), subject vos combines with forms of the tú paradigm (te oblique and tu/tuyo possessives; e.g., Vos te fuiste con tu madre ‘Youvos left yourselfT with yourT mother’). While most voseo dialects opted for non-diphthongized conjugations (hablás ‘talk-2sg-presvos,’ comás ‘eat-2sg-subjvos’), some opted for diphthongized forms instead (Chilean hablái ‘talk-2sg-presvos’; comái ‘eat-2sg-subjvos’). Finally, in several varieties, second person subjects of one paradigm can be matched with a verb corresponding to the other (e.g., Montevideo, tú tenés ‘youT have-presvos’; La Paz, vos tienes ‘youvos have-presT’).

2

Review of existing research

Given the complexity of the history of address in Spanish and its current social and regional diversity, it should come as no surprise that second-person pronouns and verbs have been a central concern of Hispanists from the earliest times (Pla Cárceles, 1923), and consistently for at least half a century (Bertolotti, 2016; Hummel, Kluge, & Vázquez-Laslop, 2010; Moyna & RiveraMills, 2016; Páez Urdaneta, 1981; Rona, 1967). In fact, address in Spanish constitutes one of the main parameters by which dialects are classified (Rona, 1967; Zamora & Guitart, 1988). That said, the lion’s share of studies has focused on variation based on stable social categories such as speaker national/regional provenance, age, gender, and class affiliation, rather than the more variable contextual aspects of interest to pragmatics. Studies at the intersection between pragmatics and Spanish address have shown that this relationship is a two-way street.We begin by considering the ways in which address forms have been described as pragmatic strategies in human interaction. Later, we discuss pragmatic notions 290

Pragmatic variation and address

that have been brought to bear to explain aspects of the evolution, meaning, and structure of address paradigms.We provide examples of research that have explored both sides of this issue.

2.1 Address, power, and solidarity The publication of Brown and Gilman (1960) linked binary (formal/informal) address systems systematically to the pragmatic constructs of power and solidarity, which systematized central aspects of human interaction. Power is defined on the basis of the position of speakers in a social hierarchy (superior/inferior), whereas solidarity is related to affiliation (distance/intimacy). These two dimensions combine to create a matrix of possibilities. For example, the relationship between a grandparent and a grandchild remains within the realm of solidarity, but it involves a difference in power due to age. By contrast, the relationship between two friends is solidary and on an equal footing, since the two typically do not differ in rank. Finally, two strangers sitting next to each other on a plane are not separated by differences in power, but they feel no emotional closeness. If we apply Brown and Gilman’s binary address model to most dialects of Spanish, tú or vos occupy the informal (T) slot, and usted the formal (V) slot.Typically, usted is used with addressees of higher rank (i.e., power semantics), and with distant equals (i.e., solidarity semantics). Tú can be chosen to address a subordinate (power semantics) and also those perceived as close (solidarity semantics). Both dimensions may converge on the address form required (e.g., an intern addressing an older supervisor), but in many relationships, the pronouns required by the power dimension and the solidarity dimension clash, which gives the speaker options. For example, if a grandchild uses power as a criterion, they might address their grandparent using usted; if the choice is based on solidarity, it is likely to be tú. One of the most generalized cross-dialectal observations about the Spanish-speaking world is that over the last century, solidarity has grown at the expense of power, with the consequence that informal pronouns are now exchanged between speakers in more and more contexts (Calderón Campos & Medina Morales, 2010; Moyna, 2019). Applying the binary model of address across all Spanish varieties is complicated by the variation presented in Section 1; in particular, the presence of several dialectal areas where there are three, not two, second-person singular pronouns. Another complication is posed by systems where one of the address pronouns is ambiguous in value, such as the aforementioned intimate/ distant usted.

2.2 Address and politeness It has been noted that a model that attributes a priori politeness values to each pronoun (e.g., usted as deferential, tú as non-deferential) is a simplification, because it fails to consider their significance in the context of utterance (Blas Arroyo, 1994).To understand how a single address form can be polite in certain contexts and impolite in others, we can revisit the notions of negative and positive politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). For these authors, politeness is based on minimizing the risk that a communicative event will fail by threatening the interlocutor’s ‘face’ or self-image.The strategies employed are of two main types: positive politeness, linked to a person’s desire for connection with others through approval, and negative politeness, related to the wish for autonomy and freedom from imposition (see Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness issues, this volume). Thus, the deployment of tú/vos on the one hand, and usted, on the other, can be considered as polite or not within the context of a specific politeness strategy (Blas Arroyo, 2005). If ¡Aprende a manejar! ‘LearnT to drive!’ is yelled at a driver from a nearby car, the familiar tú is part of an 291

Moyna and Blas Arroyo

unwarranted infringement of personal distance, and as such, a breach of negative politeness. But if the same address is exchanged among new acquaintances at a party (¿Cómo te llamas? ‘What’s your name?’ lit.‘What do you callT yourselfT?’), it is in fact the polite choice, given the context of utterance, where closeness is desirable. It is this wish for intergenerational closeness that motivates older addressees to invite younger speakers to use tuteo or voseo with them, as manifested in the oft-heard plea that otherwise, me haces sentir vieja ‘you make me feel old.’The negative reaction is motivated by the unwanted distance, i.e., a breach of positive politeness. By contrast, usted is congruent with a conservative negative politeness strategy that is on the retreat in the Spanishspeaking world, but by no means completely gone.The clichéd Spanish question Joven, ¿cuándo hemos comido usted y yo en el mismo plato? ‘Young man, when have youV and I eaten out of the same bowl?,’ is an act of rebellion against positive politeness, perceived by the older speaker as a threat to negative face (Bravo, 1999). The role of personal choice in address can sometimes be limited by what Watts (2008, p. 43) has called “politic verbal behavior,” in reference to a set of social and linguistic conventions designed to preserve social harmony in a community.Thus, the use of tú/vos or usted may be regulated in different communicative situations by a set of cultural norms that are learned and accepted semiautomatically, and often override individual choice. For example, two classmates who have studied together in law school may address each other using informal variants, but if they appear before a judge as adversaries, they will use the formal address appropriate to that context. The uses of address discussed in this section assumed that, under normal circumstances, speakers seek to protect each other’s face to accomplish certain overall communicative goals, only attainable through cooperation. In the next section, we explore micro-strategies where the deployment of address accomplishes specific in-the-moment objectives.

2.3

Address as discourse strategy

A big obstacle to applying Brown and Gilman’s model is the fact that in many languages, in a single speech event between two speakers whose social characteristics remain stable, there can be address shifts; Spanish is one such language. For example, tú/vos (T) can be used to show a breakdown in the relationship with the interlocutor (e.g., to express anger). By contrast, usted can be deployed when the speaker wishes to underscore status differences (e.g., to comfort a child or to refuse approaches from older suitors).This back-and-forth is possible because Spanish address is retractable; i.e., it can shift in response to emotional changes and pragmatic shifts within a single conversation (Jucker & Taavitsainen, 2003, p. 14). In those cases, it is the shift from one address to another that encodes interactional meaning, rather than the form itself. Alternation between address forms can be used strategically as a condition of contextual factors such as type of interaction, the participant roles, speech act, and situational cues (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015, p. 219). For example, in an analysis of marketplace interactions between vendors and customers in Mexico, Félix-Brasdefer shows that address shifts are often systematically matched to different portions of the highly structured transactional exchanges that lead to a successful sale. Consider, for example, the exchange in (1), which illustrates the shift from usted (V) to tú (T) in a single conversation in a street market. In this example, the vendor opens the interaction with deferential verbal usted and the vocative caballero ‘gentleman,’ but after the transaction is successfully completed, he switches to tuteo and the matching friendly vocative papi ‘daddy.’ (1)

292

V → T switch:

Market in Yucatán, Mexico (males) (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015, p. 220)

01 V(endor):

¿Qué busca caballero? ‘What are youV looking for, gentleman?’

Pragmatic variation and address

02 C(ustomer): ¿a cómo está el ajo? ‘how much is the garlic?’ 03 V: el kilo vale 40 ‘40 (pesos) a kilo’ 04 V: seis pesitos, caballero ‘six pesosD, sir’ 05 V: catorce el cambio ‘fourteen (pesos) change’ 06 C: OK, muchas gracias ‘OK, thanks very much’ → toma la bolsa, papi 07 V: ‘takeT the bag, daddy’ 08 V: toma ‘takeT it’ 09 C: ah, OK, muchas gracias ‘oh, OK, thanks very much.’ The analysis of longer and less scripted conversational interactions shows the potential complexity of these communicative events where context itself is negotiated as speakers co-construct the interaction. In this ‘yellow brick road theory,’ forms of address are no longer predetermined, but are now resources that speakers can deploy to define their mutual identities in interaction (Raymond, 2016). Raymond shows what this co-construction looks like in a detailed analysis of a television interview where a female Peruvian journalist and a male mayoral candidate negotiate their on-screen relationship, shifting address forms as they reposition themselves with respect to each other. For example, the journalist first introduces her interviewee as a former classmate in law school, and the ensuing pleasantries are exchanged in the informal tú. However, as soon as she begins the interview, she takes on her professional role and shifts to usted, while the interviewee continues to use tú with her. But when the female interviewer confronts the male interviewee about his incorrect claims, the latter momentarily addresses the former as usted, and in so doing, recognizes her greater expertise, and mitigates his own loss of face. Raymond emphasizes that, while the speakers work within the constraints of their specific varieties and their linguistic inventories (including their address forms), they also use them as resources to fulfill their communicative goals. His analysis recognizes that different aspects of an individual’s complex identity may be relevant and salient at a specific point in an interaction, as speakers attempt to accomplish their “sequentially motivated communicative goals” (Raymond, 2016, p. 282).

2.4 Pragmatics and the structure and evolution of address If address is an important explanatory tool for pragmatic analysis, the reverse is also true. In what follows, we present illustrative, but by no means exhaustive, examples of ways in which variation and change in address forms can be fruitfully accounted for by invoking pragmatic principles. We focus specifically on three changes in the address paradigm of Spanish: (a) one general to all dialects—changes in deference value over time; (b) one common to most voseo dialects—the replacement of etymological voseo pronominal forms with tuteo forms; and (c) one restricted to the Río de la Plata area—the specialization of negative command forms to express different kinds of prohibition. 293

Moyna and Blas Arroyo

Politeness theory can explain diachronic change in the deference value of second-person pronouns.Thus, for example, the shift of vos from a plural to a singular polite form, which is an evolution common to many Indo-European languages, can be explained as the use of pluralization as a mitigation strategy (Brown & Levinson, 1987).That is, instead of addressing the interlocutor individually and directly, the plural spreads the address figuratively over a ‘group’ that just happens to have a single member. Once singular vos routinized and generalized as a singular to the emergent urban bourgeoisie, this renewed the need for a deferential form.At this point, two additional strategies of mitigation were deployed, both based on depersonalization; i.e.,“the use of a fictional third person which replaces the authentic [addressee] as a sign of politeness and respect” (Bello, 1902 [1847], p. 64, § 251, our translation). Some varieties briefly opted for the third-singular pronoun (él/ ella) to address interlocutors as if they were in fact not participants in the speech act (a non-person) (for Judeo-Spanish, see Malinowski, 1983, p. 26; for colonial Spanish, see Fontanella de Weinberg, 1993, p. 145). An alternative strategy went one step further and employed metonymy for additional distancing. In this case, rather than referring to the interlocutor as if s/he were not there, the speaker selects a salient positive feature of the addressee to create a third-person honorific formula (Vuestra Merced ‘Your Mercy’ > usted; Vuestra Señoría > usía, and so on) (Koch, 2008).The common goal of these replacements throughout history has been to dissipate the face-threatening potential of second-person address; the specific mechanisms have varied depending on the forms available. These findings have a corollary in the plural.While politeness strategies are needed in singular address, where the use of the second person may be perceived as a face threat, in the plural they are not, precisely because the meaning of the latter diffuses its power to impose. This explains the lack of parallelism between singular and plural address in familiar/deferential forms. Indeed, most Spanish dialects have one plural address variant, and even in dialects that have two, such as the Peninsular, these are not exact counterparts of their putative singulars (in spite of the Real Academia’s equating vosotros with tú+tú . . . +tú, and ustedes with usted+usted . . . +usted). Indeed, Schwenter and Morgan (2016) have shown that vosotros is in fact the unmarked plural for both tú and usted in Peninsular Spanish.The reason for this lack of parallelism is that by virtue of being plural, vosotros is already diffuse enough to mitigate any potential impoliteness. A second example of the value of pragmatics to account for aspects of address variation and change is presented in Díaz Collazos (2016).This author employs speech act theory and face to explain why os was replaced by te as the oblique form of singular vos after the 18th century in voseante dialects. Using documentary evidence from colonial Hispanic America, she shows that the most frequent accusative/dative form of vos was os until 1706, and te after that.The only previous attempt to explain this replacement (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1977) invoked analogic levelling; i.e., te replaced os because it fit better in the singular pronominal paradigm (me, te, se vs. me, os, se). Rather than looking at forms in isolation, Díaz Collazos focused on the socio-pragmatic context of each occurrence, to shed new light on the effect of language use on language change. The author considered texts containing both te and os in familiar address to a single interlocutor, to determine the type of speech act in which each variant appears. She found that in potentially face-threatening speech acts, te was employed to mitigate pragmatic force in the supporting move of directives such as requests (2a), while os was retained in impolite speech, such as insults (2b) (see Chapter 2 on speech act research in Spanish, this volume). (2)

294

Díaz Collazos (2016, pp. 50–51) a. Peru, 1615. Unspecified speakers or source (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1989, p. 530, quoting Boyd-Bowman) Los pobres halagarés y le ayudarés porque Dios te ayude. ‘You will pampervos the poor and helpvos them so that God helps youT.’

Pragmatic variation and address

b. Rural Buenos Aires,Argentina, ca. 1787 (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1989, p. 524) Mirá, mujer porfiada, siempre habéis de ser mañera; no me seás respondona que os abriré la moyera. ‘Lookvos, stubborn woman, always you will bevos tricky; do not bevos mouthy with me or else I will break youvos the head in two parts.’ Our final example of the benefits of looking at address systems through a pragmatic lens comes from the analysis of negative commands in contemporary Argentinian Spanish. In these varieties, tuteo and voseo verbal paradigms have merged into a single set of second person forms, so that voseo forms appear in the present indicative (hablás ‘talk-2sg-presvos) and imperative (¡hablá! ‘talkvos!’), while tuteo forms were selected in the future (hablarás ‘talk-2sg-futT’). In the present subjunctive, two forms coexist in variation; tuteo (hables ‘talk-2sg-subjT’) is prescriptively preferred, and there is evidence that voseo (hablés ‘talk-2sg-subjvos’) has receded over time (Siracusa, 1972). However, instead of disappearing completely, voseo forms carved out their own specialized meaning, a process that was first documented by Fontanella de Weinberg (1979). In a study that elicited opinions on the politeness of negative commands, she linked the difference to (im) politeness, noting that commands presented in voseo (no cantés ‘don’t sing!vos) were considered ‘harsh’ and ‘peremptory,’ while their tuteo counterparts were perceived as ‘courteous.’ Later work by Johnson (2016) has shown that, in fact, the politeness/impoliteness dichotomy does not present the whole picture. Instead, the key is the type of prohibition that each verb form can elicit.The distinction is based on dividing prohibitives into cessatives and preventives. Cessatives attempt to change a current state of events (¡No cantes! ‘Don’t sing!’; i.e.,‘Stop singing!’), while preventives ask the addressee to refrain from starting an action (¡No vayas! ‘Don’t go!’; i.e., ‘Don’t begin the journey!’). Cessatives and preventives have different presuppositions. The former presupposes that the addressee is currently performing or has performed the unwanted action, while the latter presupposes the unwanted action has not been initiated. Through a forced-choice survey, Johnson showed that voseo negative commands were almost twice as likely in immediate contexts (i.e., more likely to be cessative) than in neutral contexts (more likely to be preventives). The previous examples show that various pragmatic aspects of the context as diverse as politeness and facework, speech act type, and speaker presuppositions can be deployed to elucidate the changing structure and semantics of address paradigms. In the next section, we show how formal and pragmatic aspects influence each other in the development of methodologies to study address.

3

Methodological considerations

Address researchers in Spanish have employed a battery of different methodologies to tackle their interdisciplinary subject matter.These include written surveys, discourse completion tasks, matched-guise tests, analysis of authentic speech in everyday interactions and media (television, radio, digital platforms), as well as the analysis of the representation of speech in film and advertisements. To this should be added the literary and documentary sources used for the study of address from a historical perspective. A broad classification of methods can be drawn by considering data collection, on the one hand, and data analysis, on the other (Felix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 2017; Koike & FélixBrasdefer, 2012, Chapter 11).Among the data collection methods, the basic distinction is between information elicited experimentally and naturally occurring data. In terms of the data analysis, the methodologies can be (a) quantitative (i.e., the computation of frequencies, in an attempt 295

Moyna and Blas Arroyo

to connect these with variables that may determine them); (b) qualitative (i.e., a description of individual events in as much meaningful contextual detail as possible); and (c) mixed (i.e., a combination of both). In what follows, we exemplify and describe these different approaches, and discuss their advantages and challenges (see also Chapter 33 on research methods, this volume) Experimental elicitation techniques, such as surveys and discourse completion tasks, were the earliest used to ascertain address practices in Spanish. Early studies such as Rona (1967), and many others since then (e.g., Molina Martos, 1993; Sorenson, 2013) have sought to obtain data through surveys that inquire about reported use of or attitudes toward specific forms. In these surveys, participants are given a list of interlocutors, situations, or statements, and asked to choose their preferred response among several options.The advantage of those questionnaires is that they are brief and can be administered quickly and cheaply over a large sample. One disadvantage is that responses are filtered by participants’ opinions and attitudes, rather than reflecting exactly their spontaneous choices.This is especially problematic when attempting to study non-standard or stigmatized forms, which tend to go underreported.An additional problem is that brief survey items cannot provide much context, and unless they are well designed, respondents are likely to respond with the canonical pronominal usage for a specific relationship (vos/tú for brother, usted for doctor), thus eliminating the very type of contextual variation of interest in pragmatics.That said, studies such as Johnson (2016) show that a well-designed survey can take pragmatic context into consideration and quantify subtle address preferences by speech act. An alternative to the survey, meant to capture more spontaneous production, is the discourse completion task (DCT), which can be done in writing or orally (Baumel-Schreffler, 1995; Newall, 2016; Ogiermann, 2018). In a DCT, participants are given a prompt, such as a description of a situation, and must respond as they would normally in conversation.When the prompt and response are given in writing, then the data collection is as economical and simple as in a survey, but it gives the respondents time to self-monitor, creating the same problems. By contrast, the oral DCT is more time-consuming, since it requires recording sessions followed by transcriptions, but it can produce more spontaneous discourse as long as the respondents can sustain the fiction of speaking to an absent addressee and are comfortable being recorded. Some of this artificiality can be overcome if the DCT pairs up participants who are given a task and then recorded as they perform it (Sorenson, 2013;Woods & Shin, 2016). On the other hand, we have studies where the data are not elicited but obtained from spontaneous conversation, either between habitual interlocutors with whom the topics and speech acts are likely to be diverse (Moser, 2008), or between speakers in more narrowly defined contexts, such as marketplace or service transactions (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015; Félix-Brasdefer & Placencia, 2019; Placencia, 2005), radio call-in shows (Rivadeneira & Clua, 2011), and televised interviews (Raymond, 2016). One advantage of these natural data is that pragmatic aspects of address usage can be studied in all their situational, stylistic, and interpersonal complexity. This includes, for example, co-occurrence of phenomena, such as pronouns of address and their accompanying vocative forms (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015). Consideration of all these factors is especially crucial if address shifts strategically during the conversation (Raymond, 2016). Most challenges associated with using naturally occurring data stem from the researcher’s lack of control over the situation in which the data collection happens (Koike & Félix-Brasdefer, 2012, p. 324).This includes some obvious technical aspects, such as noise-levels and conversational overlaps, which deteriorate the quality of the data. Other factors that cannot be controlled completely are the macrosocial features of the sample, e.g., age, gender, and social class of customers that come to a shop during the time of the recording. An additional complication of using authentic conversational data is the need for careful transcription of speech and paralinguistic features, which requires fieldnotes and video as well as audio to interpret the utterance accurately 296

Pragmatic variation and address

with important contextual clues. Some authentic data avoid these complications; namely, those obtained from computer-mediated communication, which allows for the harvesting of large datasets in a short time and obviates the need for transcription. In addition, as noted by Jaime Jiménez (2018, p.  71), these preexisting, naturally occurring data are uncontaminated by the observer’s paradox. In terms of data analysis, the methods can be quantitative, qualitative, or mixed. In quantitative analysis, responses are compared across participants to determine the influence of various independent social variables of the speaker (e.g., age, gender, provenance) on the address choices or attitudes proffered. If the sample is large and diverse enough, the results can be statistically significant and allow for generalizations. Data collected using experimental designs are typically the most amenable to quantitative analysis, since the sample can be controlled so that it represents the various macro-social features of interest.That said, whenever respondents have freedom to create their own responses (e.g., in DCTs), the responses may need to be categorized and interpreted after the fact; indeed, it is possible that some answers will be unusable because they lack the target structure. But even data collected from naturalistic contexts can be analyzed using quantitative methods, if sufficient target data can be obtained and all independent variables of interest can be ascertained (e.g., Michno, 2019). We can illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of different methodologies in the analysis of address forms and pragmatics with two recent studies.The first, Jaime Jiménez (2018), is based on a large digital corpus (see Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse, and Chapter 32 on corpus pragmatics, this volume). Her study explored variation in plural address in Central and Western Andalusia (subject: ustedes/vosotros coméis; and verb: vosotros coméis/comen), by using as one of her datasets nearly 8,000 tokens from Twitter, online fora, and the corpus of PRESEEA (Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y de América). In addition, she capitalized on the semi-conversational tone of Twitter data and the possibility of ascertaining speaker affect through typographical features and online symbols such as emojis. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of analyzing the pragmatics of address, the Twitter data included different speech acts, such as insults, apologies, congratulations, etc. One drawback of Twitter in particular is that sociolinguistic factors such as age, gender, and education are unavailable. Another issue is that, for all their immediacy, tweets are not face-to-face communication, so any parallels have to be counterbalanced with the consideration of the unique characteristics of the medium. Another recent example of research on forms of address and pragmatics is provided by Michno’s (2019) study of shopkeeper/customer interactions in a small town in Nicaragua. His focus was on pronouns and vocatives in the spontaneous conversations between a single shopkeeper and his clientele, which included both men and women, foreign and local.The data were obtained through recorded conversations at the counter, accompanied by field notes taken during the same interactions.The first part of the analysis was quantitative and meant to determine whether sociodemographic variables of the speakers (gender, age, and their role as shopkeeper or customer) could account for the address used (vos, tú, usted). Data analysis with R determined that gender indeed mattered in address choice: the male shopkeeper used more vos with his male customers and more usted with females, who reciprocated in kind.While the customers all used tuteo sparingly and at low rates with the shopkeeper, the latter used this form almost twice as frequently with the women. Regarding the analysis of vocatives, the high quantity and diversity of forms led to a qualitative treatment of the variation, which showed that vocatives were more common among males. A final methodological concern for all researchers of address, but especially for those collecting naturally occurring data, is the ethical treatment of subjects.This includes both being as 297

Moyna and Blas Arroyo

unobtrusive as possible so as not to impinge on the autonomy of the participants being observed as they go about their daily routines, and also guaranteeing that they have a say in whether their data may be collected and used at all. In the case of stores, the typical protocol involves obtaining permission from the shopkeeper to record, and then informing clients so that they may opt out of the study. In the case of online public sources, the data can be collected more freely, but confidentiality must be preserved by anonymizing the data (Félix-Brasdefer & Placencia, 2019, pp. 4–5). Rather than espouse one type of data-gathering as better than others, address researchers must choose their methodology based on the specific questions they attempt to answer, as well as practical considerations such as access to informants, time, and financial resources. The field has benefitted from triangulating findings obtained through different methods, since they all have strengths and weaknesses. Apart from expanding our knowledge about the usage and value of address through different sources and analytical tools, it is important to expand the coverage of what is typically included under the category of address itself. Indeed, of the three manifestations of address mentioned in the Introduction to this chapter, most sociopragmatic studies have focused on second person pronouns and verbs, while nominal address is covered less frequently (Medina Morales, 2010, p. 44).This is in part because lexical address is an optional open class, and as such, it is less amenable to classification and systematic treatment. However, a holistic approach to address must include vocatives as a significant component of discourse.This is especially true in address systems that eschew the formal pronoun, and where speakers have to rely on additional cues for interactional information. ‘Vocatives’ (or nominal address) are structures whose purpose is to invite a person “to assume the role of addressee” (Lyons, 1977; Zwicky, 1974). In his detailed study, Andersen (2012) includes three types of ‘conative vocatives’: (1) ‘openers,’ which invite the addressee to be an interlocutor (‘John, I’d like to hear your opinion.’); (2) ‘summons,’ which request the addressee’s presence (‘Yo! Over here!’); and (3) ‘calls,’ which seek to find the addressee through verbal contact (‘Hello?! Is anyone home?’). Additionally, he describes phatic vocatives, whose overall purpose is to continue the communication by creating an atmosphere of solidarity and empathy; i.e., speaker and addressee identity formation.Vocatives can be distinguished from the referential use of the corresponding nominal expression by virtue of their structural and prosodic features. For example, they are not assigned a thematic role by the verb of the sentence, and they are separated from the utterance by a prosodic pause (¿Qué querí, #huevón? ‘What do you wantvos, #dude?’). Recent efforts to study Spanish vocatives have focused on categorizing this vast class (FélixBrasdefer, 2019, p. 236).Two large structural subclasses of vocative expressions have been identified; namely, proper and common names. Among the former, there are denotatives (Señor Pérez ‘Mr. Pérez’) and nicknames (Pepe), while among the common expressions used to address, there are kinship terms (mami ‘mom’), general social terms (joven ‘young man’), occupational terms (doctor), terms of endearment and friendship (corazón ‘sweetheart,’ lit.‘heart’), and honorifics (Su Alteza ‘Your Highness’).While most vocatives in Spanish derive from nominals (tío, macho, causa ‘dude’), they can also be etymologically related to pronouns (Uruguayan Sp. bo ‘hey, you’ < vos) (Moyna, 2017). The study of vocatives in Spanish has considered these forms in isolation as a manifestation of a specific variety (e.g.,Alba-Juez, 2009, for Peninsular youth slang), or in combination with other strategies of second-person address (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015, Chapter 8).While it is interesting to see the diversity and identity marking value of these appellatives, it would be of even greater value to ascertain whether they are subject to cross-dialectal trends. A question worth exploring is whether different varieties choose similar lexical items as vocatives. Another apparent tendency worth confirming is the social trajectory of vocatives, which tend to start out as markers of male affiliation from whence they expand to other groups. 298

Pragmatic variation and address

All in all, a great deal has been accomplished in connecting the fields of address research and pragmatics, but much remains to be done.The final section describes some methodologies that could be employed, as well as some topics that have received less attention and should be the focus of future research.

4

Future directions and conclusion

There is much to be learned about the address system of world Spanish and its relationship with pragmatics, both by innovating methodologically and by applying current techniques to lessstudied linguistic phenomena. Some quantitative and qualitative methodologies have already been used to study aspects of address research, but not specifically pragmatic variation (see Chapter 15 on regional pragmatic variation, this volume). One quantitative technique with potential is the matched guise test (MGT), which has been used only sporadically to study implicit attitudes toward address choice in Spanish, with an emphasis on social and dialectal variation (Moyna & Loureiro-Rodríguez, 2017; Stevenson, 2007). In these tests, participants listen to recordings with identical content, altered in such a way that very subtle differences in address can be compared in terms of the effect they have on raters’ evaluation. For example, in Moyna and LoureiroRodríguez (2017), women from Montevideo were asked to rate speakers as they said the same content using tuteo, voseo, and hybrid (T pronoun-V verb) variants (e.g., tráelas tú ‘bring them yourself ’ (T pronoun-T verb) vs. traelas vos ‘id.’ (V pronoun-V verb) vs. traelas tú ‘id.’ (T pronounV verb)). Unbeknownst to the raters, each speaker had produced more than one of the versions, so responses could be contrasted purely on the basis of the variant employed. It was found that the raters considered voseo typical of Montevideo and associated it with Uruguayan identity.The TV hybrid was evaluated positively in the speech of men and women, especially in the personal appeal dimension, while tuteo was associated with conservative values. It is possible to adapt the MGT to incorporate pragmatic aspects to its experimental design, such as speech act and communicative context.The unconscious beliefs that may be uncovered through the application of this technique can corroborate the interpretations of naturally occurring data. Several researchers have been experimenting with modifications to the traditional DCT technique. In one such innovation, piloted in Finnish, the written scenario was replaced by visual stimuli (Lappalainen, 2019).The experimenter altered contextual information by manipulating the visual cues, such as the sartorial choices of the hypothetical addressee, which led to different address selection and provided evidence of the importance of context. A qualitative methodology employed infrequently in the study of Spanish address is the focus group.The usefulness of this type of data gathering is apparent from Clyne, Norrby, and Warren’s (2009) analysis of French, German, English, and Swedish, and may offer additional clues about perceptions of address choice and address shifting, and the pragmatic appropriacy of address forms in different contexts. Finally, promising methodologies focus on digital media, with an emphasis on naturally occurring data from Twitter, Facebook, the commercial platform Mercado Libre, and others.As shown in the previous section, these sources can give access to millions of tokens, and while the systems for data collection, filtering, and manipulation are complex and imperfect, the payoffs can be enormous. These techniques allow us to scale up the findings of previous micro-level analyses by capitalizing on the massive scale of their data sets.The possibilities seem numerous and could include pragmatic variables such as the speech act by looking specifically for certain conversational patterns of interest. The topics covered by address research from a pragmatic perspective can expand in many directions.An area in which more data are needed is address systems in contact, and in particular, 299

Moyna and Blas Arroyo

the resulting perceptions of (im)politeness. Most research dealing with contact between Spanish varieties with different address systems focuses on the identity value speakers attach to their use of a given address form, and to accommodation to tuteo, seen as a harbinger of intergenerational loss (Sorenson, 2013).Very few studies investigate the perceptions of (im)politeness of interlocutors on the basis of their address choices (but see Sinner, 2010; Molina Martos, 2010). It has been suggested that speakers and varieties that rely heavily on informal address, such as Nicaraguans and voseo, can be misunderstood and evaluated negatively (Lipski, 2008, p. 173), but the extent of inter-group prejudice has not been studied systematically or on a large scale. Finally, even though the main objective of this chapter has been to discuss theoretical aspects, it behooves us to consider how this research may have implications in the context of Spanish L2 acquisition.There is growing interest in the acquisition of address forms (van Compernolle & Williams, 2012; van Compernolle,Weber, & Gómez-Laich, 2016), and several studies have observed the implicit bias of teaching materials that present Peninsular forms (such as vosotros) and yet ignore Latin American forms of much wider use (such as vos) (Mason & Nicely, 1995; Shenk, 2014). Still, we know of no study that focuses specifically on developing students’ awareness of the communicative functions of address shifting in conversation, a process that is common across dialects of Spanish. Most often, instruction implies that there is a single correct form for each situation, which leaves students ill equipped to understand the complexities of the pragmatics of address. To conclude, we have come a long way since Rona mailed his surveys to every corner of Latin America, but many questions remain. In fact, the recognition of the importance of pragmatic factors and the incorporation of nominal address to the mix have made the enterprise even more complex. In this chapter we have shown the benefits of using forms of address as a tool in the study of pragmatics, as well as of bringing pragmatics to bear on the study of address.The notions of power, solidarity, positive and negative politeness, speech act theory, and relational identity (re) negotiation help understand the interplay between nominal, pronominal, and verbal second person exponents in grammar and their multilevel, dynamic pragmatic and communicative effects. As the study of Spanish varieties expands to cover new contact situations and new contexts of use, so do our research opportunities.

Further reading Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). The language of service encounters: A pragmatic-discursive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This study on the pragmatics of commercial and non-commercial service encounters includes intra-cultural and cross-cultural examples of relational talk in the United States and Mexico, based on naturally occurring discourse. It features an entire chapter devoted to forms of address, including pronouns and vocatives, which are woven into the discussion of politeness in interaction. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Placencia, M. E. (Eds.). (2019). Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world. London and New York: Routledge. This collection contains fourteen papers on the pragmatics of service encounters in Spanish-speaking areas. Most focus on variation along macrosocial factors such as region, gender, age, and socioeconomic status, while others analyze microsocial factors such as patterns of pragmatic variation between buyers and vendors, online and in person, and two contributions examine theoretical and methodological aspects.The collection is comprehensive in its coverage of types of service encounter (hotels, small stores, call centers, cafés), and has broad geographical coverage, including Peninsular Spanish, Colombia, Ecuador,Venezuela, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, and the Río de la Plata area.Address is a prominent stylistic aspect of in-person or online encounters in a large subset of the contributions. Hummel, M., Kluge, B., & Vázquez-Laslop, M. E. (Eds.). (2010). Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico. Mexico City and Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. 300

Pragmatic variation and address

This comprehensive collection includes 46 contributions on different aspects of interest, including: (a) theory and methodology; (b) individual regional descriptions; (c) history of address; (d) social variation; and (e) pragmatics.The last section includes descriptions of speaker and addressee identity construction, strategic address alternation, the use of address in publicity, textbooks, and workplaces, nicknaming, and address in impersonal contexts. Moyna, M. I., & Rivera-Mills, S. (Eds.). (2016). Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. This collection gathers twelve articles in Spanish address research, from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, and covers several Latin American dialects.The articles are organized in three sections: (a) diachrony and regional variation; (b) pragmatics and dialects in contact; and (c) address, attitudes, and identity.The contributions are contextualized through an introduction, a conclusion, and short responses by three experts. Several of them focus on pragmatic aspects of address.

References Alba-Juez, L. (2009). “Little words” in small talk: Some considerations on the use of the pragmatic markers man in English and macho/tío in Peninsular Spanish. In D. Lardière (Ed.), Little words (pp. 171–181). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Andersen, H. (2012).The new Russian vocative: Synchrony, diachrony, typology.Scando-Slavica,58(1), 122–167. Baumel-Schreffler, S. (1995).The voseo: Second person singular pronouns in Guatemalan speech. Language Quarterly, 33(1–2), 33–44. Bello, A. (1902 [1847]). Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos (7th ed.). Paris: Roger & Chernoviz. Bertolotti,V. (2016). A mí de vos no me trata ni usted ni nadie: Sistema e historia de las formas de tratamiento en la lengua española en América. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Universidad de la República. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (1994). De nuevo sobre el poder y la solidaridad.Apuntes para un análisis interaccional de la alternancia tú/usted. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 42(2), 385–414. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2005). Sociolingüística del español. Madrid: Cátedra. Bravo, D. (1999). ¿Imagen “positiva” vs. imagen “negativa”? Pragmática socio-cultural y componentes de face. Oralia, 2, 155–184. Brown, R., & Gilman,A. (1960).The pronouns of power and solidarity. American Anthropologist, 4(6), 24–39. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calderón Campos, M., & Medina Morales, F. (2010). Historia y situación actual de los pronombres de tratamiento en el español peninsular. In M. Hummel, B. Kluge, & M. E.Vázquez-Laslop (Eds.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico (pp. 195–222). Mexico City and Graz: El Colegio de México/ Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. Clyne, M., Norrby, C., & Warren, J. (2009). Language and human relations: Style of address in contemporary languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Jonge, B., & Nieuwenhuijsen, D. (2009). Formación del paradigma pronominal de las formas de tratamiento. In C. Company Company (dir.), Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española. Segunda parte: La frase nominal (Vol. 2, pp. 1595–1671). Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Fondo de Cultura Económica. Díaz Collazos, A. M. (2016). Pragmatic forces in the evolution of voseo object pronouns from os to te in colonial Spanish. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera-Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 35–61). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). The language of service encounters: A pragmatic-discursive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. London and New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. & Hasler-Barker, M. (2017). Elicited data. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 27–40). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Placencia, M. E. (Eds.). (2019). Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world. London and New York: Routledge. Fontanella de Weinberg, M. B. (1977). La constitución del paradigma pronominal del voseo. Thesaurus, 32, 227–241. 301

Moyna and Blas Arroyo

Fontanella de Weinberg, M. B. (1979). La oposición “cantes/cantés” en el español de Buenos Aires. Thesaurus, 34, 72–83. Fontanella de Weinberg, M. B. (1989). Avances y rectificaciones en el estudio del voseo americano. Thesaurus, 44, 521–543. Fontanella de Weinberg, M. B. (1993). Usos americanos y peninsulares de segunda persona singular. In A. M. Barrenechea, L. Martínez Cuitiño, & E. Lois (Eds.), Actas del III Congreso Argentino de Hispanistas (pp. 144–153). Buenos Aires: Asociación Argentina de Hispanistas. Fontanella de Weinberg, M. B. (1999). Sistemas pronominales de tratamiento usados en el mundo hispánico. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española: Sintaxis básica de las clases de palabras (Vol. 1, pp. 1401–1425). Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Hummel, M., Kluge, B., & Vázquez-Laslop, M. E. (Eds.). (2010). Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico. Mexico City and Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. Jaime Jiménez, E. (2018). Variable use of plural address forms in Andalusian Spanish (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Johnson, M. (2016). Pragmatic variation in voseo and tuteo negative commands in Argentinian Spanish. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera-Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 127–148). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker,A. H., & Taavitsainen, I. (2003). Introduction. In I.Taavitsainen & A. H. Jucker (Eds.), Diachronic perspectives on address term systems (pp. 1–26).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koch, P. (2008). Tradiciones discursivas y cambio lingüístico: El ejemplo del tratamiento vuestra merced en español. In J. Kabatek (Ed.), Sintaxis histórica del español y cambio lingüístico: Nuevas perspectivas desde las tradiciones discursivas (pp. 53–88). Frankfurt and Madrid:Vervuert/Iberoamericana. Koike, D., & Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2012). Chapter 11: Conclusions: Methodological issues in pragmatic variation. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts (pp. 319–336).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lappalainen, H. (2019). Imaginary customers and public figures: Visual material as stimuli in studies of address practices. In B. Kluge & M. I. Moyna (Eds.), It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research (pp. 99–121).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lipski, J. (2008). Varieties of Spanish in the United States.Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malinowski, A. (1983).The pronouns of address in contemporary Judeo-Spanish. Romance Philology, 37(1), 20–35. Mason, K., & Nicely, K. (1995). Pronouns of address in Spanish-language textbooks: The case of “vos.” Foreign Language Annals, 28(3), 360–370. Medina Morales, F. M. (2010). La metodología en los estudios sobre formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en español. In M. Hummel, B. Kluge, & M. E.Vázquez-Laslop (Eds.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico (pp. 21–56). Mexico City and Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. Michno, J. (2019). Gender variation in address selection in corner-store interactions in a Nicaraguan community. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 77–98). London and New York: Routledge. Molina Martos, I. (1993). Las fórmulas de tratamiento de los jóvenes madrileños. Estudio sociolingüístico. Lingüística Española Actual, 15(2), 249–263. Molina Martos, I. (2010). Inmigración latinoamericana en Madrid: Actitudes lingüísticas y convergencia pronominal. In M. Hummel, B. Kluge, & M. E.Vázquez-Laslop (Eds.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico (pp.  857–885). Mexico City and Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl-FranzensUniversität Graz. Moser, K. (2008).Tres hipótesis acerca de la (des)cortesía en el tratamiento diádico informal-familiar de San José, Costa Rica. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Ibeoramericana, 6.1(11), 129–145. Moyna, M. I. (2017). Voseo vocatives and interjections in Montevideo Spanish. In J. J. Colomina Almiñana (Ed.), Contemporary advances in theoretical and applied Spanish linguistic variation (pp. 124–147). Columbus, OH:The Ohio State University Press. Moyna, M. I. (2019).Variation in polite address in contemporary Uruguayan Spanish. In B. Kluge & M. I. Moyna (Eds.), It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research (pp. 191–219). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Moyna, M. I., & Loureiro-Rodríguez,V. (2017). La técnica de máscaras emparejadas para evaluar actitudes hacia formas de tratamiento en el español de Montevideo. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 15(1) (#30), 47–82. 302

Pragmatic variation and address

Moyna, M. I., & Rivera-Mills, S. (Eds.). (2016). Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Newall, G. M. (2016). Second person singular forms in Cali Colombian Spanish: Enhancing the envelope of variation. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera-Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 149–169).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. H. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 229–255). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton. Páez Urdaneta, I. (1981). Historia y geografía hispanoamericana del voseo. Caracas: La Casa de Bello. Penny, R. (1993). A history of the Spanish language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pla Cárceles, J. (1923). La evolución del tratamiento vuestra-merced. Revista de Filología Española, 10(1), 245–280. Placencia, M. E. (2005). Pragmatic variation in corner store interactions in Quito and Madrid. Hispania, 88(3), 583–598. Raymond, C. W. (2016). Reconceptualizing identity and context in the deployment of forms of address. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera-Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 267–288). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rivadeneira, M., & Clua, E. (2011). Una visión desde el análisis de la variación dialectal y funcional en medios de comunicación. Hispania, 94(4), 680–703. Rona, J. P. (1967). Geografía y morfología del voseo. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Pontifícia Universidade Católica. Schwenter, S.A., & Morgan,T.A. (2016). Vosotros, ustedes, and the myth of the symmetrical Castilian pronoun system. In A. Cuza, L. Czerwionka, & D. Olson (Eds.), Inquiries in Hispanic linguistics: From theory to empirical evidence (pp. 263–280).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Shenk, E. M. (2014). Teaching sociolinguistic variation in the intermediate language classroom: Voseo in Latin America. Hispania, 97(3), 368–381. Sinner, C. (2010). ¿Cómo te hablé, de vos o de tú? Uso y acomodación de las formas de tratamiento por emigrantes y turistas argentinos en España y Alemania. In M. Hummel, B. Kluge, & M. E.Vázquez-Laslop (Eds.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico (pp. 829–855). Mexico City and Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. Siracusa, M. I. (1972). Morfología verbal del voseo en el habla culta de Buenos Aires. Filología, 16, 201–213. Sorenson,T. (2013). Voseo to tuteo accommodation among Salvadorans in the United States. Hispania, 96(4), 763–781. Stevenson, J. (2007). The sociolinguistic variables of Chilean voseo (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Washington, Seattle,Washington, DC. Uber, D. R. (1985). The dual function of usted: Forms of address in Bogotá, Colombia. Hispania, 62(2), 388–392. van Compernolle, R. A., Weber, A., & Gómez-Laich, M. P. (2016). Teaching L2 Spanish sociopragmatics through concepts:A classroom-based study. The Modern Language Journal, 100(1), 341–361. van Compernolle, R.A., & Williams, L. (2012).Variationist sociolinguistics, L2 sociopragmatic competence, and corpus analysis of classroom-based synchronous computer-mediated discourse. In J. C. FélixBrasdefer & D. A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts (pp.  239–269). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Watts, R. J. (2008). Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behavior: Reconsidering claims for universality. In R. J.Watts, S. Ide, & K. Ehrlich (Eds.), Politeness in language. Studies in its history, theory and practice (2nd rev. and expanded ed.) (pp. 43–70). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Woods, M., & Shin, N. (2016).“Fijáte . . . . Sabes que le digo yo”: Salvadoran voseo and tuteo in Oregon. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera-Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 305–324). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Zamora, J. C., & Guitart, J. (1988). Dialectología hispanoamericana (2nd ed.). Salamanca:Alm. Zwicky, A. (1974). Hey,Whatsyourname! In M. La Galy, R. A. Fox, & A. Bruck (Eds.), Papers from the tenth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (pp. 787–801). Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistics Society.

303

17 Intercultural communication in a globalized world Rosina Márquez Reiter and Raquel Hidalgo Downing

1

Introduction

Intercultural communication in Spanish, as in many other languages, has primarily received attention in educational settings, especially in the language classroom where issues of cultural misunderstanding have been generally attributed to insufficient pragmatic competence in a foreign or second language (see, for example, Michaels & Collins, 1984;Thomas, 1983; cf. Heath, 1983). In this sense, intercultural communication has been generally associated with intercultural competence and questions of language learning and teaching, with an emphasis on research on the use of English as a foreign language (see, for example, Byram, 2003; Kramsch, 2014; Kramsch & Uryu, 2011; Liddicoat, Papademetre, Scarino, & Koller, 2003; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Risager, 2006). Questions of intercultural communication beyond the language classroom have received significantly less attention and have been tangentially approached by scholars working on Spanish cross-cultural pragmatics, language contact, and, more recently, by those interested in transnational contexts resulting from globalization where speakers from different Spanish-speaking cultural backgrounds are brought together (e.g., call centers, ethnic migrant businesses). Intercultural communication beyond the educational sphere has been relatively neglected by pragmatics researchers, which may be a result of the fact that communication between speakers of the same (basic) language is mostly seen as unproblematic.This results from the implicit assumption often made between the national language spoken by native speakers and the lack of diversity with which national languages and their speakers have been generally understood (cf. Gumperz, 1983, on communicative repertoires; Blommaert, 2010). In addition, the general availability of the internet has enabled (local) businesses to operationalize their services across the globe (e.g., call centers), leading to the observed standardization of some communicative practices (e.g., Cameron, 2000, on the feminization of the workforce) and to the commodification of certain languages (e.g., Heller, 2003, on French in Quebec). It has resulted in the assumption that intercultural salient phenomena may be less likely to occur in globalized settings (Sifianou, 2013, on politeness patterns). However, research on the political economies of language (see, for example, Duchêne & Heller, 2012) and on intercultural communication between speakers of Spanishes in globalized communicative settings (Márquez Reiter, 2011) have shown that this is not necessarily 305

Márquez-Reiter and Hidalgo Downing

the case, especially when one or both interactional parties resists other-ascribed categorizations (see Example (3)). It is the findings of these studies that the current chapter addresses, with special attention to those that concentrate on Spanish. Before proceeding to do so, we clarify our definition of intercultural communication relative to cross-cultural communication and briefly discuss the methods that these studies have employed. Studies on Spanish intercultural communication are scarce and have, until now, mainly entailed the examination of cross-cultural pragmatic phenomena. In Section 2.1 we provide a brief discussion of contrastive pragmatic studies (see Chapter 18 on cross-cultural pragmatics, this volume) and address the indistinct way in which the terms ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘intercultural’ have been deployed in the literature.We then offer a definition of intercultural communication (Section 2.2), including a review of research on Spanish that has touched upon this issue in its quest to understand other linguistic phenomena. This is then followed by a discussion of the salient findings of research, which had as a primary objective the examination of intercultural communication in Spanish and the analysis of previously unexamined intercultural material (Section 3), followed by directions for future research (Section 4).

2 2.1

Review of existing research On the distinction between cross-cultural and intercultural communication

As pointed by Gudykunst (2003), the terms ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘intercultural’ have often been used interchangeably (see also Kecskes, 2017). A broadly shared view, and one we concur with, posits that cross-cultural pragmatics examines phenomena in two different languages and cultures that are contrasted with one another and analyzed through native speakers’ productions. Native speakers’ performances are used to establish the pragmalinguistic forms of certain activities (i.e., speech acts) in given languages and provide insight into the cultural values, norms, and representations related to such forms. Cross-cultural pragmatics has proved to be a fruitful area of interest in Spanish. Studies have examined cultural norms, politeness strategies, and style choices in the realization of speech acts by means of different degrees of elicitation procedures, from discourse completion tests to open role plays (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2008, 2018; Hickey, 1991; Márquez Reiter, 2000, Maíz Arévalo, 2012, on Spanish and English; Siebold, 2008, on Spanish and German; Ruiz de Zarobe, 2004, on Spanish and French). One of the common denominators among these studies is a focus on the realization of given speech acts to ascertain the extent to which the pragmalinguistic formulations of the acts, particularly their level of (in) directness, indicate differences in politeness orientations. In this sense, these studies, much in line with the research in other linguacultures at that time, have been informed by the quest for universality that characterized the pragmatics enterprise (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Leech, 1983). This is evident in the connection that most of these studies make between patterns of (in)directness and politeness orientations of the linguacultures of the native speakers who participated in them.1 Cross-cultural pragmatics research has also employed naturalistic and quasi-naturalistic interactions. For instance, Fernández-Amaya (2013) examined simultaneous speech in mundane telephone closings in American English and Peninsular Spanish. She maintained that simultaneous speech in Spanish may not be perceived as a violation of the turn-taking principles, but rather as a positive politeness strategy (Brown & Levinson, 1987) aimed at creating a bond between speakers who are relatives and friends (see also Placencia, 1992, on patterns of politeness in everyday telephone conversations in Ecuadorian Spanish and British English). A similar interactional orientation of the cross-cultural venture was used by studies on sociopragmatics 306

Intercultural communication

(e.g.,  Márquez-Reiter & Placencia, 2005). In these, the overall organization of interactional activities (e.g., service encounters) and their specific characteristics (e.g., discursive strategies), including their associated speech acts, are examined, and interpersonal orientations and cultural values are identified. For instance, Curcó (1998) compared Peninsular and Mexican Spanish and observed that, while requests in both varieties are indirect, they were internally modified in Mexican Spanish, especially by means of diminutives that were virtually absent from Peninsular Spanish. Similarly, Fant (1996) examined conversational regulation in negotiation interactions in Mexico and Spain, and reported that Spaniards not only uttered more words and intervened on more occasions than Mexicans, but also showed more instances of speech overlap and interruption. Mexican speakers, on the other hand, were reported to use lateral sequences more often than Spaniards.The differences in conversational style were attributed to higher cohesion among the Mexican participants, and a higher tolerance for confrontation in negotiation among the Spaniards. Bravo (1998) explored negotiations between Swedes, Spaniards, and Mexicans with a focus on the role of laughter. She found that Spaniards, unlike their counterparts, used laughter in thematic negotiating activities in order to mitigate expressions of disapproval. García (2004) observed that Venezuelan speakers approached their employees as if they were in symmetrical relationships, unlike the Peruvian Spanish speakers who participated in her study whose linguistic behavior stressed the asymmetry of the relationship. Overall, the findings from the aforementioned studies indicated that linguacultures differ by degrees rather than in absolute terms. In view of this, Márquez Reiter (2002) examined conventional indirectness (e.g.,“Can/could/ will/would you do X for me, please?,”“Can/may I ask you to do X for me, please?”), which is the most preferred strategy for requesting in Spanish, as well as in all other languages that have so far been examined.The author showed that the Uruguayan Spanish-speaking participants of her study used more internal and external request modifications than the Spaniards. She thus argued that the observed difference in request padding resided in tentativeness rather than in indirectness differences (understood as the correlation between sentence surface meaning and illocutionary force). This illustrative and non-exhaustive list of contrastive pragmatic studies focused on two varieties of Spanish, from a geographical or regional perspective (see also Placencia, 1994, on Quito and Guayaquil, Ecuador; Chapters 15 and 16 on pragmatic variation, this volume) and applied a similar analytic toolkit to the previously mentioned cross-cultural studies between Spanish in contrast with another language (i.e., the study of speech act realization and differences in style or politeness strategies in discourse practices, considering the roles of social variables such as social distance and power in the way interpersonal relations are managed). Findings from studies where two varieties of Spanish are first analyzed independently and then compared to one another have been valuable to language learning, translation, business communication, and mediation in general to better understand and advise on the adequacy of language use in line with expected cultural norms. Overall, they have brought the relative explicitness that characterizes Peninsular compared to Latin American varieties of Spanish to the fore, and offered a platform for the development of (socio)pragmatic variation (Placencia, 1998; Márquez-Reiter & Placencia, 2005).

2.2 On intercultural communication and interculturality Broadly speaking, intercultural pragmatics “is concerned with the way the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different first languages, communicate in a common language, and usually, represent different cultures” (Kecskes, 2014, p. 14). In our view, however, intercultural pragmatics also encompasses interactions between speakers who do not share the same language/language variety or cultural ways, creating an interactive space 307

Márquez-Reiter and Hidalgo Downing

where diverse and potentially unfamiliar communicative repertoires and styles come in contact with one another, creating ‘interculture’ through interaction. Intercultural pragmatics and, more specifically, intercultural communication may also include speakers of the same language who come from different backgrounds with different educational backgrounds, income, or occupations who rarely interact with one another, especially in contexts of inequality (consider Shaw’s Pygmalion). In this sense, intercultural communication needs to divorce itself from the nativespeaker model from which it developed. Intercultural communication started in 1946 when the U.S. launched the Foreign Service Act. Culture was then equated with nation, and it was the behavior of the middle-class within that nation that constituted the main focus of attention. It has been difficult since then for the field to depart from its homogenic and hegemonic2 roots. Let us consider Example (1), taken from a televised interview between Spanish citizens and politicians, where a citizen asks Josep Lluis Carod3 a question. Example (1) [Original televised interview between citizens and politicians] (RTVE,4 October 17, 2009) 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212

Reporter: Hola/ buenas noches/ Carod: bona nit/ Citizen: don José Luis Carod: Perdón/ yo me llamo Josep Lluis Citizen: Bueno, es que yo no entiendo catalán Carod: y no Carod: [No/ no/] es que no hace falta entender catalán// Yo me llamo como me llamo aquí y en la China popular// Citizen: [yo/ yo] Carod: y usted no tiene/ perdone que se lo diga/ ningún derecho a modificar mi nombre// Yo me llamo Josep Lluis/ No me llamo de otra forma//

[English translation of the televised interview between citizens and politicians] 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212

‘Reporter: Hello/ good evening/ Carod: Good evening (Catalan)/ Citizen: don José Luis/ Carod: Excuse me/ my name is Josep Lluis/ Citizen:Well/ the thing is/ I don’t understand Catalan/ Carod:And no Carod: No/ no/ It’s just that you don’t need to understand Catalan//my name is the same here and in China Citizen: I/ I. . . . Carod: and you have no/ I’m sorry to say/But you have no right to change my name//my name is Josep Lluis/I have no other name than that//’

In Example (1), despite the deference with which the citizen addresses Carod (i.e., note the insertion of the title ‘Don’ in line 204), upon hearing his name in Spanish, especially after offering a second pair part to the Spanish greeting in Catalan, the politician utters a repair, albeit prefaced by an apologetic formula (‘perdón’), thus in keeping with the deference conveyed so far to assert his Catalan identity. Beyond this being an appropriate setting to do so (i.e., an interview between citizens and politicians in which political issues regarding the Spanish State are discussed), the repair offers Carod a legitimate opportunity to challenge what he sees as a hegemonic view 308

Intercultural communication

of Spanish culture where diversity is erased (Urciuoli, 2011). Carod’s repair leads the citizen to attempt to remedy damage to her face (i.e., not knowing the name of the politician she addresses) by offering a justification (line 206).The justification, however, adds insult to injury, as observed by Carod’s reaction (lines 208–209). It is successfully countered by invoking the individual’s rights to self-identity claims in any society, including faraway cultures with a different political system (line 209). This example captures how interculturality is constructed within the same nation-state by locals, and is not necessarily a communicative phenomenon among speakers who are not proficient in one of the official languages of the said nation; in this case, Spanish. Intercultural communication does not entail just the contact between different groups of speakers who may or may not speak the same language variety: it is located at the level of interaction (written and spoken). Potential differences between groups of speakers are not necessarily understood in terms of their belonging to a given national culture (Márquez Reiter, 2011). As far as Spanish is concerned, intercultural communication has mainly focused on interactions in situations of language contact. Schrader-Kniffki (1995, 2004) examined interactions between Mexican Spanish and Zapotec speakers from Mexico. She observed the emergence of mixed forms of politeness, which do not occur in natural native-speaking practices in either language, but are the result of intercultural interaction. Having a long experience of contact with Hispanophone speakers, Zapotec speakers have adapted certain Zapotec politeness strategies used during in-group interactions, such as the avoidance of refusals to requests, in order to interact with those who are not part of their in-group and to avoid misunderstandings.5 Steckbauer (1997) examined Spanish as lingua franca in Lima (Peru), where indigenous immigrants coming to the capital do not share the same language or the same variety of Quechua, and communicate in Spanish even if mastery of this language varies considerably depending on previous instruction. Also, Gugenberger (1997) focused on language contact between speakers of Aymara and different varieties of Quechua.The author analyzed interviews with members of the indigenous communities where negative attitudes toward varieties of Quechua emerged, showing asymmetries between speakers who share a basic language (Spanish) but do not have common cultural norms. Of note within the long list of studies on language contact is Henze’s (1997) work on code-switching by New York City Puerto Rican speakers that assumes an intercultural angle. Henze found that Puerto Rican speakers’ use of English or Spanish reflect two different, even opposite, cultural worlds and models of identity. As Zimmermann (1999) points out, intercultural communication has occurred throughout history in many contexts where language contact and multilingualism have been common; spread phenomena and lingua franca (e.g., Latin) have played an important role in bridging gaps between speakers from different cultural contexts and backgrounds. However, the possibilities of intercultural encounters have increased exponentially in the past century, as a result of the evolution of capitalism and its pervasive effects on mobility, internationalization, migration, and globalization processes. Although in smaller numbers, the Spanish language has undergone processes of dissemination and diversity similar to English (Garrido, 2010; Moreno Fernández, 2013), making it impossible to hold to traditional views of language with clear identifications and distinctions between speakers’ language varieties and national, regional, or geographical identifications (Mar-Molinero, 2008).

2.3 Research on interculturality in globalized settings In this new context of globalization and transnational structures (e.g., services offered by outsourced companies), intercultural communication has focused on interactions between speakers who have different linguistic and cultural characteristics and have had, in most cases, little contact 309

Márquez-Reiter and Hidalgo Downing

with one another (Márquez Reiter, 2011). Following this perspective, Márquez Reiter (2011) analyzed interactions in service calls to/from an outsourced call center between speakers of different varieties of Spanish. She observed, among other things, that a lack of shared formulaic language comprising socially recognized expressions (Coulmas, 1981) led to extended telephone closings, as the participants attempted to coordinate interactional cessation without causing offense. As a case in point, sí señor/a/ita ‘yes Miss/Madam’ was used as a putative pre-closing device by speakers of Colombian Spanish after the confirmation of a service arrangement, seen in the database collected by the author but not previously analyzed (Example (2)).The expression was often interpreted by speakers of River Plate Spanish as an acknowledgement token, but not necessarily as projecting a next action; in this case, the exchange of farewells. This allowed the latter to reiterate the arrangement until an expression of thanks (gracias ‘thanks’ at line 162) was uttered with final intonation, indicating that the speaker had nothing else to add. Example (2) [C = client,A = telephone agent] 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

C: A: C: A: C: A: C: A: C: A: C: A: C: A: C:

Sí señor. Hablamos con el hotel y nos volvemos a poner en contacto con usted. Sí señor. Le avisamos en cuanto antes, aquí figura que hay wifi en las habitaciones. Ajá. =Pero vamos a aclararlo antes no sea cosa [que: [Muy bien. No sea así en la práctica =Excelente, gracias. Por favor, (.) a las órdenes señor [Carlos [Gracias pues. Hasta luego. Adiós. Que pase bien. Y usted también.

English Translation

310

154 155 156 157

C: A: C: A:

158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

C: A: C: A: C: A: C: A: C: A: C:

‘Yes sir. We will talk to the hotel and we’ll contact you again. Yes sir. We will contact you as soon as possible, here it says that the rooms have Wifi. Yes. But let’s make sure beforehand, just in [case: [Fine. It is not like that. Excellent, thank you. Please, I’m at your service Mr. [Carlos [Thank you, then. See you later. Good-bye. Best wishes. To you, too.

Intercultural communication

In addition to the ways in which the participants’ differing formulaic expressions may affect the trajectory of the encounters, different social expectancies are also sometimes verbalized by means of metapragmatic comments and thus oriented to as marked behavior, as illustrated in Example (3). This intercultural episode was taken from fieldnotes conducted during silent listening at the same call center. The agent, Mariana, a speaker of River Plate Spanish who worked at the call center to fund her postgraduate studies, was in the middle of a call with a Mexican client. Following institutional procedures on answering calls, she proffered her first name to the client (e.g., Vacaciones Inolvidables. Buenos días habla Mariana en qué le puedo ayudar ‘Unforgettable Holidays. Good morning, Mariana speaking, how can I help you?’) and the client remembered it. Example (3) Fieldnotes—[ 3:4-/15/04/12—Mexican island] 1

Mariana:

2 3 4 5

Client: Mariana: Client: Mariana:

Señor González de la Peña tenemos lugar en la Maya Grand para [cuatro personas] [Licenciado ]6 González de la Peña, Mariana Doctora Mariana Pérez (0.8) Señor Licenciado González de la Peña, ¿sigue usted en línea?

English translation 1

Mariana:

2 3 4 5

Client: Mariana: Client: Mariana:

‘Mr. González de la Peña, we have vacancies at the Grand Maya for [four people] [Licenciado] González de la Peña, Mariana Dr. Mariana Pérez (0.8) Mr. Licenciado González de la Peña, are you still online?’

Example (3) showcases differences in the participants’ cultural expectations of what constitutes an appropriate degree of deference in a business environment where the interactional parties are unfamiliar with one another and the agent’s role is to service the client’s needs. While Mariana, in line with her experience of working with Mexican clients, had addressed the caller deferentially by means of usted and her use of vocatives was preceded by a title (‘Señor González de la Peña’), the title was considered inappropriate by the client.The perceived lack of deference from the agent to the client is constructed as a sort of ‘anomaly’ (line 2) by the client (Wolf, 2015), as observed in the client’s repair in line 2.The agent reacts with a counter: she repairs the vocative used by the client to address her. In so doing, she resists what she perceives as unequal treatment, while nonetheless respecting the client’s wishes (line 5). In keeping with Example (1), the client and agent in Example (3) both claim self-identity in light of what they interpret as an unwarranted categorization of themselves by others. Similar perspectives emerged in interviews with employees from the call center. In these, participants reflected on their lived experience working with other Spanish-speaking Latin Americans.When considering interculturally significant episodes, the participants reported the difficulties that Colombian and Venezuelan employees had vis à vis the Argentine clientele to decline service offers or express their lack of interest in sales pitches in a direct manner. Some of Márquez Reiter’s analysis dwelled, therefore, on the ambivalent meaning of sí and no, and on observed patterns of informality that were evaluated by Colombian, Mexican, and Venezuelan 311

Márquez-Reiter and Hidalgo Downing

employees as indicative of a lack of respect. A case in point is offered in the words of the Venezuelan call center supervisor in (4): Example (4) No vas a creerme pero hay veces, en realidad pasa muy a menudo que cuando los agentes están en línea me llaman la atención para que los ayude tronando los dedos. Es insólito. No se les ocurre poner al cliente en espera y venir a hablarme directamente. ¿Qué piensan, que soy? ¡¿Un perro?! ‘You won’t believe me, but at times, actually it happens quite often, when the agents are online, they get my attention to ask for help by snapping their fingers. It’s unbelievable. It doesn’t occur to them to put the client on hold and come and talk to me directly.What do they think I am? A dog?!’ Besides these assessments that indicate differences in what may be culturally appropriate in a given context, both agents and supervisors explained that clients from different parts of the Spanish-speaking world used different strategies to obtain better service (Márquez Reiter, 2013, on fabricated ignorance). Their intercultural perceptions were informed by their lived experience of contact with one another at the call center. Indeed, experiential knowledge of living with different cultures has been shown to be particularly relevant in contexts of transnationalism such as migration and tourism as well as healthcare settings (see, for example, Raga Gimeno, 2006; Valero Garcés, 2012).The notion of knowledge was recently evoked by PatiñoSantos & Márquez Reiter (2018) in their study of Latin Americans in a multicultural district in London. Their ethnographic study shows the ways in which a group of culturally diverse Spanish-speaking Latin Americans categorize each other on the basis of the knowledge of one another’s behavior that circulates among members of this social group. Such knowledge is often ‘hearsay’ based on stereotypes of each other. Patiño-Santos and Márquez Reiter note that “[T]hose who construct themselves as ‘knowledgeable’ subjects spread ideas and beliefs about the ‘others,’ based on their everyday encounters with other Latin American migrants who do not share the same linguistic or migratory trajectories or cultural experiences” (2018, p. 4). In view of this, the authors put forward the notion of ‘banal interculturalism’ to refer to the type of stereotypical knowledge that emerges in the discourses that circulate among migrants about other migrants in diaspora. The notion of banality has also proved useful in analyzing transnational contexts, such as those resulting from tourism (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2011, for sociolinguistic studies on tourism with a focus on English).Within Spanish, the language of tourism and issues of politeness have received some attention (e.g., Calvi, 2012; Fernández-Amaya, Hernández López, & GarcésConejos Blitvich, 2014, respectively); however, interculturality in contexts of tourism remains unexplored. Recent studies on globalization processes have examined the cultural practices by which tourism is organized and experienced, as well as identified some of its communicative practices. According to Thurlow and Jaworski (2011), “tourism is a key site for the study of human communicative processes—most obviously with regards to intercultural contact and exchange, but also in terms of the circulation of linguistic ‘material’” (p. 4).The way knowledge about culture and its representations is transmitted plays a key role in shaping the traveler and tourist experiences, since they tend to form around ideas of the landscapes and cultures that will be visited before traveling.Thurlow and Jaworski (2011) analyzed instances of tourism discourse, such as TV travelers’ programs, guidebooks, and the greeting game in tourist tours. In the words of the authors, “The experience in tourism is semiotic in nature, since the tourist prepares the knowledge before travelling and then travels to collect the memories, in form of images mostly, 312

Intercultural communication

of the experience which was recalled and confirmed by his experience” (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2011, p. 5).The knowledge of the visited landscapes and cultures is thus based on images featured in advertising and brochures and enacts instances of banal globalization. A case in point from our own database, which comprises over 120 travelers’ Trip Advisor reviews and responses for hotel stays in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Spain, reveals the banal knowledge of the tourist destination that the traveler has acquired vis à vis their lived experience therein. As shown in Example (5), travelers’ tourist experiences are often juxtaposed against their knowledge of the chosen destination and their identity as global, and therefore knowledgeable (English translation in Appendix). Example (5) [Tripadvisor review and response, Hotel XXX, City, Cuba] XXX (reviewer’s nickname and photo not shown here) 148 Opinión escrita hace 2 días mediante dispositivo móvil (23/10/2018) Decepción Estuvimos 4 noches en este hotel, como parte del combinado Habana/Hotel XX contratado en la agencia de viajes. Independientemente de que el clima no nos acompañó, he de decir que este hotel es lo peor que he encontrado en mis múltiples viajes al Caribe. El hotel se ve nuevo, con habitaciones bonitas e instalaciones a priori adecuadas. Hay que caminar un poquito y cruzar un puente para llegar a la playa, ya que ésta se encuentra al otro lado de la carretera. Lo peor, con diferencia es el buffet; yo entiendo que hay restricciones en la comida, pero nunca jamás había estado en un buffet libre de un resort 5 estrellas y me había quedado con hambre. Nunca. Las personas alojadas allá teníamos todas la misma queja.Variedad nula (papas fritas congeladas, hamburguesas de burguer barato, y puntualmente arroz y frijoles), calidad nefasta, presentación inexistente. Cómo puede ser que no hubiera fruta, ni zumo en el desayuno.A veces había yogur líquido en una jarra . . . un desastre absoluto. No puedo hablar mal de la calidad de los tragos, puesto que sólo bebo ron, cerveza y agua, y eso es rico, en Cuba, pero de nuevo, la presentación deja mucho que desear.Y agua para la habitación, también en vaso de plástico???? En resumen, no recomendaría este hotel, no entiendo cómo la cadena [XXX]permite estos estándares de calidad en sus hoteles. XXX, Community Manager en Hotel [XXX], respondió a esta opinión (Respondido: ayer) Estimado XXX: Sentimos enormemente que su experiencia con nosotros no haya sido satisfactoria. Todo el equipo se esfuerza al máximo para poder ofrecer una estancia de ensueño a nuestros huéspedes y nos entristece saber que en su caso no lo hemos conseguido. Sabemos que el clima es un punto muy relevante durante las vacaciones de cualquier cliente en un resort de playa y teniendo en cuenta que en este sentido no tuvieron suerte, podemos entender hayan tenido un mal comienzo. Sin embargo nos ha sorprendido mucho su comentario acerca del buffet y queremos hacerle saber algunos detalles al respecto. Siguiendo precisamente los estándares correspondientes contamos invariablemente con tres tipos de carnes: cerdo, pollo y res y a ello se adicionan tres tipos más de carnes que alternan entre conejo, pavo y cordero. De la misma manera se encuentran siempre tres variedades de pescado, cinco variedades de embutidos y cuatro de queso. Las modalidades de cocción de estos alimentos también varían y permanece unido a ello la plancha para aquellas personas que así lo prefieran. No obstante a ello rogamos acepte nuestras disculpas por no haber conseguido alcanzar sus expectativas La opinión de nuestros huéspedes es fundamental para nosotros y nos ayuda a conocer 313

Márquez-Reiter and Hidalgo Downing

sus impresiones y valoraciones, siendo la mejor manera para determinar dónde debemos concentrar nuestros esfuerzos para superarnos cada día. Esperamos tener otra oportunidad para demostrarle que sí podemos cumplir con sus expectativas y hacerle pasar unas vacaciones inolvidables con nosotros. Sinceramente XXX Community Manager The reviewer presents him or herself as an experienced traveler who is an expert on the Caribbean (el peor que he encontrado en mis múltiples viajes al Caribe ‘the worst I have encountered in my numerous trips to the Caribbean’) and understands what qualifies a hotel as rated with five stars. It is the frequency and supposed range of traveling within the area, as well as this person’s past experience at other hotels of this chain, that has vested the traveler with the epistemic authority to evaluate the service received as substandard. Interestingly, the traveler’s misgivings indicate, on the one hand, an awareness of the local environment (e.g., the shortage of consumer goods in a country with economic restrictions such as Cuba) and, on the other, the global expectations of a five star hotel experience, regardless of local structural conditions (yo entiendo que hay restricciones en la comida, pero nunca jamás había estado en un buffet libre de un resort 5 estrellas y me había quedado con hambre ‘I understand that there are food restrictions, but I had never been to a 5-star resort buffet and left feeling hungry’). It is the image and lived experience of the latter, coupled with the traveler’s constructed image of the country, culture, and stereotypical habits (ron, cerveza y agua ‘rum, beer and water’) (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011), that make this person’s on-the-ground experience difficult to understand and unacceptable. Global expectations are invoked to legitimize the critical assessment of the service received, resulting thus in the erasure of the lived, local cultural circumstances as valid. As Thurlow and Jaworski (2011) point out, a key part of the tourist experience are the expectations projected over the visited site; in this case, the hotel’s website and the brand by which the hotel chain is known, and how they conform with reality or not. “Tourism seldom merely represents cultural difference or reflects existing socioeconomic relations within and between countries; instead, it is instrumental in producing the very culture that tourists set out to know, and in (re)organizing relations between groups, communities and entire nations” (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2011, p.  4). The intercultural experience and, more specifically, the creation of an ‘interculture space’ is resisted and challenged in favour of expected homogeneity. The hotel’s response, unlike the customer’s review, is constructed from a local rather than a global perspective (i.e., a branch of this chain of hotels).The range of four different types of meat offered (i.e., pork, chicken, beef, and an alternate fourth one), along with fish and dairy products, was seen to represent a good spread, contrary to what the customer claimed. Example 5 thus illustrates how globalization and its multinational corporations reshape the potentiality of intercultural exchange and participants’ expectations.

3

Methodological considerations

To different degrees, studies of intercultural communication in Spanish, as in other languages, have drawn from questions and methods in associated human and social sciences; from anthropology (patterns of behavior and cultural meaning), sociolinguistics (the role of language in society), pragmatics (language in use and the contexts in which it is used) to cross-cultural psychology (human behavior and its (in)variability in diverse cultural conditions). 314

Intercultural communication

Pragmatically informed intercultural communication research has employed ethnography to understand the discursive practices of given social groups in specific (institutional) contexts (e.g., Márquez Reiter, 2011, on the normative expectations of interactions between speakers of different varieties of Spanish in call center communications; Schrader-Kniffi, 2004, on promises between Zapotec and Spanish speakers). Similarly, sociolinguistically inspired studies have deployed methods usually associated with linguistic ethnography to examine intercultural communication (e.g., Patiño-Santos & Márquez Reiter, 2018 on life-story interviews based on previously conducted and ongoing fieldwork observations) in order to understand the broader context in which observed intercultural encounters are embedded. The cross-cultural pragmatics venture that has, rightly or wrongly, informed much of our current understanding of intercultural communication in Spanish, as in other languages (e.g. comparison of speech acts across lingua-cultures), has drawn upon methods typically employed in cross-cultural psychology, with special attention to questionnaires (e.g. discourse completion tests) whose results are often subjected to statistical analysis.The discourse production of a given speech act, albeit elicited and essentially metapragmatic insofar as it offers a reflection on discourse production, is then typically linked to a given cultural value and the degree to which the value is valid or not in other cultures. Cultural values have often been analyzed with reference to psychology frameworks, such as Hoftstede’s (1980) cultural dimension theory (e.g., Raga Gimeno, 2003).As useful as these kinds of studies have been, they constitute a sign of the times, since the data entail a reflection of how questionnaire participants would actually interact in their own lingua-culture and, on this basis, predictions of how they would interact with different lingua-cultures were made. Inadvertently, these studies have, to a great extent, contributed to a homogenizing view of the complex and diverse lingua-cultures they sought to understand (see Chapter 18 on cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics, this volume).

4

Future directions and conclusion

In this chapter, we have offered a discussion of studies that have (in)directly examined intercultural communication in Spanish-speaking contexts. We did this by presenting a review of research that has tangentially focused on Spanish—contrastive pragmatic studies—and demonstrated that cross-cultural patterns observed cannot necessarily predict the communicative patterns that may emerge in intercultural contact. In so doing, we distinguished between crosscultural and intercultural communication and offered a definition of the latter that departs from the accepted view that intercultural communication entails an encounter between speakers who do not share the same language. Instead, we showed that interculturality is constructed through interaction, and that it can entail contact between speakers who share the same basic language but come from varied backgrounds.We have demonstrated this with the aid of examples, which have illustrated that, when potential differences emerge in intercultural exchanges, these cannot necessarily be attributed to questions of belonging to a given national culture. Continuing research in the pragmatics of Spanish, as well as in other languages, has focused on national cultures as represented by national languages, especially in the light of the rise of globalization and transnational mobility. However, in our view, the traditional understanding of language as having clear distinctions between speakers’ language varieties and national, regional, or geographic identifications is flawed.We contend that, in our modern, interconnected world, where Spanish occupies an international and arguably a global role, interculturality is often informed by the lived experience that individuals from different backgrounds have from contact with each other.This is especially relevant in transnational settings. Contact between people who were previously separated by physical borders is now an everyday reality. Direct knowledge of 315

Márquez-Reiter and Hidalgo Downing

other cultures, either by way of lived physical or virtual experiences, informs much of our daily exchanges with others. In spite of this knowledge, intercultural experiences are often challenged in favor of artificial homogeneity grounded in banalism. Further research into intercultural communication could explore the connection between global expectations and lived experiences of interculturality in contemporary communicative contexts, such as those provided by ethnic businesses, tourism, or multinational corporations with a multicultural workforce. In addition, intercultural communication skills are essential in establishing and maintaining relationships in an interconnected world, can be highly beneficial in health care settings (e.g., Roberts, 2007) and are a useful sensitization tool to fight discrimination. In short, intercultural communication is not a question of “beam me up,” but one that requires the self-consciousness of understanding that we “are all astronauts on . . . some kind of [journey]” (Star Trek).

Notes 1 Research in this area has, nonetheless, pointed out that indirectness does not necessarily equate with politeness (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1987; Márquez Reiter, 2000;Thomas, 1983). 2 Intercultural communication is rarely an encounter between equals. 3 Josep Lluis Carod was then leader of the political party Esquerra Republicana, which supports the independence of Catalonia from the Spanish State.The interviews had an innovative format within the genre of the political interview, as the questions were formulated by ordinary citizens, and therefore reflected the ‘common people’s’ concerns and opinions. 4 Radio Televisión Española. 5 See also Calvo Pérez (2001) for studies on language contact between Spanish and indigenous languages. These studies, however, are primarily concerned with the sociolinguistics of language contact. See Zimmermann (1999) and Zimmermann and Bierbach (1997), who explore intercultural encounters in Latin American contexts, where there is language contact between Spanish and indigenous languages. 6 The term licenciado technically refers to anyone who has a degree in any discipline. It is commonly used by Mexican Spanish speakers as a title for lawyers, as well as a deferential form of address.

Further reading Kotthoff, H., & Spencer-Oatey, H. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of intercultural communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. This edited collection brings together research by scholars in a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.The handbook provides some of the most salient approaches to intercultural communication, including topics that have received the most attention in the literature. Márquez Reiter, R. (2011). Mediated business interactions. Intercultural communication between speakers of Spanish. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. This monograph offers a nuanced analysis of naturalistic transactions between speakers of Spanish from varied cultural backgrounds. It provides insight into conversational dynamics as a site for intercultural communication. Chapter 6, in particular, offers a thorough examination of the way in which interculturality is constructed and strategically deployed between speakers of the same basic language.

References Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blum-Kulka, S. (1987). Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different? Journal of Pragmatics, 11(1), 131–146. Bravo, D. (1998). ¿Reírse juntos? un estudio de las imágenes sociales de hablantes españoles, mexicanos, y suecos. In H. Havertake, G. Mulde, & C. F. Maldonado (Eds.), La pragmática lingüística del español: recientes desarrollos (pp. 315–364).Amsterdam: Rodopi. 316

Intercultural communication

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byram, M. (Ed.). (2003). Intercultural competence. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Calvi, M.V. (Ed.). (2012). Palabras y cultura en la lengua del turismo. Pasos: Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 10(4), 1–4. Calvo Pérez, J. (Ed.). (2001). Contacto interlingüístico e intercultural en el ámbito hispánico. Valencia: Universitat de València. Cameron, D. (2000). Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture. London: Sage. Coulmas, F. (Ed.). (1981). Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech.The Hague: Mouton. Curcó, C. (1998).“¿No me harías un favorcito?”: Reflexiones en torno a la expresión de la cortesía verbal en el español de México y el español peninsular. In H. Haverkate, G. Mulder, & C. Fraile (Eds.), La pragmática lingüística del español. Recientes desarrollos [Diálogos Hispánicos 22] (pp. 129–171).Amsterdam: Rodopi. Duchêne,A., & Heller, M. (Eds.). (2012). Language in late capitalism. Pride and profit. London: Routledge. Fant, L. (1996). Regulación conversacional en la negociación: Una comparación entre pautas mexicanas y peninsulares. In T. Kotschi,W. Oesterreicher, & K. Zimmermann (Eds.), El español hablado y la cultura oral en España e Hispanoamérica (pp. 147–185). Frankfurt:Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2018). Role plays. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W.Wolfram (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 305–332). Germany: Mouton De Gruyter. Fernández-Amaya, L. (2013). Simultaneous speech in American English and Spanish telephone closings. In J. Romero-Trillo & I. Kecskes (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 164–180). Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Fernández-Amaya, L., Hernández López, M. O., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2014). Spanish travelers’ expectations of service encounters in domestic and international settings. Tourism, Culture and Communication, 14, 117–134. García, C. (2004). Reprendiendo y respondiendo a una reprimenda: similitudes y diferencias entre peruanos y venezolanos. Spanish in Context, 1, 113–147. Garrido, J. (2010). Lengua y globalización: inglés global y español pluricéntrico. Historia y Comunicación Social, 15, 63–95. Gudykunst,W. (Ed.). (2003). Cross-cultural and intercultural communication. London: Sage. Gugenberger, E. (1997). Incomunicación y discriminación lingüística en el contexto intercultural (Perú). In K. Zimmermann & C. Bierbach (Eds.), Lenguaje y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispánico (pp. 131–147). Frankfurt:Vervuert/Madrid: Iberoamericana. Gumperz, J. (1983). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, S. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7, 473–498. Henze, K. (1997). Comunicación intercultural y code-switching. Hacia una diferenciación de discursos distintos. In K. Zimmermann & C. Bierbach (Eds.), Lenguaje y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispánico (pp. 87–104). Frankfurt:Vervuert/Madrid: Iberoamericana. Hickey, L. (1991). Comparatively polite people in Spain and Britain. Association for Contemporary Iberian Studies, 4, 2–7. Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences. Beverly Hills: Sage. Jaworski,A., & Thurlow, C. (2011). Making contact: Language, tourism and globalization. London: Routledge. Kecskes, I. (2014). Intercultural pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press. Kecskes, I. (2017). Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 400–415). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (2014). Language and culture. AILA Review, 27, 30–55. Kramsch, C., & Uryu, M. (2011). Intercultural contact, hybridity, and third space. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (pp. 211–227).Abingdon: Routledge. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of politeness. London: Longman. Liddicoat,A., Papademetre, L., Scarino,A., & Koller, M. (2003). Report on intercultural language learning. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Liddicoat,A., & Scarino,A. (2013). Intercultural language learning and teaching. Oxford:Wiley Blackwell. Maíz Arévalo, C. (2012). Was that a compliment? Implicit compliments in English and Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 980–996. 317

Márquez-Reiter and Hidalgo Downing

Mar-Molinero, C. (2008). Subverting Cervantes: Language authority in global Spanish, International Multilingual Research Journal, 2(1–2), 27–47. Márquez Reiter, R. (2000). Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Márquez Reiter, R. (2002). A contrastive study of indirectness in Spanish: Evidence from Peninsular Uruguayan Spanish. Pragmatics, 12, 135–151. Márquez Reiter, R. (2011). Mediated business interactions. Intercultural communication between speakers of Spanish. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Márquez Reiter, R. (2013). Fabricated ignorance: The search for good value for money. Pragmatics, 23, 661–684. Márquez-Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish pragmatics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Michaels, S., & Collins, C. (1984). Oral discourse styles: Classroom interaction and the acquisition of literacy. In D.Tannen (Ed.), Coherence in spoken and written discourse (pp. 219–244). Norwood, NJ:Ablex. Moreno Fernández, F. (2013). Lingüística y migraciones hispánicas. Lengua y Migración, 5, 67–89. Patiño-Santos, A., & Márquez Reiter, R. (2018). Banal interculturalism. Latin Americans in Elephant & Castle. Language and Intercultural Communication, 19(3), 227–241. Placencia, M. E. (1992). Politeness in mediated telephone conversations in Ecuadorian Spanish and British English. Language Learning Journal, 6, 80–82. Placencia, M. E. (1994). Pragmatics across varieties of Spanish. Donaire, 2, 65–77. Placencia, M. E. (1998). Pragmatic variation: Ecuadorian Spanish vs. Peninsular Spanish. Spanish Applied Linguistics, 2(1), 71–106. Raga Gimeno, F. (2006). Comunicación intercultural y mediación en el ámbito sanitario. In Retos del siglo XXI en comunicación intercultural: nuevo mapa lingüístico y cultural de España. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (RESLA), 1, 217–230. Raga Gimeno, F. (2003). Para un análisis empírico de las interacciones comunicativas interculturales. In Grupo CRIT, Claves para la comunicación intercultural (pp. 37–87). Castellón: Universitat Jaume I, Servei de Comunicació i Publicacions. Risager, K. (2006). Language and culture. Global flows and local complexity.Abingdon: Multilingual Matters. Roberts, C. (2007). Cross-cultural communication in healthcare settings. In H. Kotthoff & H. SpencerOatey (Eds.), Handbook of intercultural communication (pp. 243–263). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruiz de Zarobe, L. (2004). El acto de habla de “invitación” en español y en francés: análisis comparativo de la cortesía. Revista Española de Lingüística, 34, 421–454. Schrader-Kniffki, M. (1995). Pragmática y contacto lingüístico. Sistemas de tratamiento zapoteco y español y su uso por zapotecos bilingües (México). In K. Zimmermann (Ed.), Lenguas en contacto. Nuevos enfoques (pp. 73–79). Frankfurt:Vervuert. Schrader-Kniffki, M. (2004). Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning. Requests and promises in intercultural communication in Oaxaca. In M. E. Placencia, & R. Márquez Reiter (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish (pp. 157–174).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Siebold, K. (2008). Actos de habla y cortesía verbal en alemán y español. Estudio pragmalingüístico e intercultural. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Sifianou, M. (2013). The impact of globalization on politeness and impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 55, 86–102. Steckbauer, S. M. (1997). El español como lingua franca de los inmigrantes indígenas en Lima. In K. Zimmermann & C. Bierbach (Eds.), Lenguaje y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispánico (pp. 147–169). Frankfurt:Vervuert/ Madrid: Iberoamericana. Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4(2), 91–112. Thurlow, C., & Jaworski,A. (2011).Tourism discourse. Languages and banal globalization. Applied Linguistics Review, 2, 285–312. Urciuoli, B. (2011). Discussion essay: Semiotic properties of racializing discourses. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 21(1), E113–E122. Valero Garcés, C. (2012). “Deme algo, doctor.” Estrategias de gestión interrelacional en consultas médicas interculturales. In M. E. Placencia & C. García (Eds.), Pragmática y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispanohablante (pp. 67–93).Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Wolf, H. G. (2015). Language and culture in intercultural communication. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of cultural linguistics. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Zimmermann, K. (1999). Política del lenguaje y planificación para los pueblos amerindios. Ensayos de ecología lingüística. Frankfurt:Vervuert/ Madrid: Iberoamericana. Zimmermann, K., & Bierbach, C. (Eds.). (1997). Lenguaje y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispánico. Frankfurt:Vervuert/ Madrid: Iberoamericana. 318

Appendix

Translation of Example (5) [Tripadvisor review and response, Hotel XX, Cuba] XXX (reviewer’s nickname and photo not shown here) (21/10/2018) Disappointment

We stayed 4 nights in this hotel, as part of the combined Havana/Hotel XX set up by the travel agency. Regardless of the fact that we didn’t enjoy good weather, I must say that this hotel is the worst I have found in my multiple trips to the Caribbean. The hotel looks new, with nice rooms and adequate facilities a priori.You have to walk a little and cross a bridge to get to the beach, since it is on the other side of the road. The worst, by and far, is the buffet; I understand that there are restrictions on the food available in Cuba, but I had never ever been to a buffet at a 5-star resort that left me hungry. Never. All the people staying there had the same complaint. No variety (frozen French fries, cheap burgers, and occasionally rice and beans), terrible quality, nonexistent presentation. How could there be no fruit or juice at breakfast? Sometimes there was liquid yogurt in a jar . . . an absolute disaster. . . . I cannot speak ill of the quality of the drinks, since I only drink rum, beer, and water, and these are good in Cuba, but again, the presentation leaves much to be desired.And water for the room, also in plastic cups???? In summary, I would not recommend this hotel, I do not understand how the hotel XX chain allows these standards of quality in its hotels. [Name], Community Manager at Hotel [XX], responded to this review (Responded: 22/10/2018) Dear XXX: We greatly regret that your experience with us has not been satisfactory.The whole team tries its best to offer a dream stay to our guests and it saddens us to know that in this case we have not succeeded.

319

Márquez-Reiter and Hidalgo Downing

We know that the weather is a very relevant point during the vacations of any client in a beach resort and taking into account that in this sense you did not have any luck, we can understand you had a bad start. However, we were very surprised by your comment about the buffet and we want to let you know some details about it. Following precisely the corresponding standards, we invariably provide three types of meat: pork, chicken, and beef, in addition to three other types of meats that alternate between rabbit, turkey, and lamb. In the same way, there are always three varieties of fish, five varieties of sausages, and four varieties of cheese.The cooking methods for these foods also vary, and the grill is always available to those clients who prefer it. However, please accept our apologies for not having met your expectations.The opinion of our guests is essential to us, and it helps us to know their impressions and evaluations, being the best way to determine where we should concentrate our efforts to improve ourselves every day. We hope to have another opportunity to show you that we can meet your expectations and help you spend an unforgettable vacation with us. Sincerely, XXX Community Manager

320

18 Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics research in Spanish Gerrard Mugford

1

Introduction

Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics represent two different approaches toward understanding how nonnative speakers or learners of second languages (L2) construct and interact in a target language.‘Cross-cultural pragmatics,’ as can be seen in Márquez Reiter (2000) and FélixBrasdefer (2019, Chapter 7) compares and contrasts norms, choices, and availability of similar communicative resources across languages (e.g., Spanish and English). In contrast, ‘intercultural pragmatics’ studies how interactants who are not first language (L1) speakers of the target language achieve meaning, understanding, and intelligibility through the use of an array of discursive and communicative resources. Cross-cultural pragmatics reflects a sociolinguistic approach to language use and “takes the view that individuals from different societies or communities interact according to their own pragmatic norms” (O’Keeffe, Clancy, & Adolphs, 2011, p. 103). Emphasizing the discursive and cognitive use of language, intercultural pragmatics reflects how “the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different L1s, but communicate in a common language, and usually, represent different cultures” (Kecskes & Assimakopoulos, 2017a, p. 1).The central focus of cross-cultural pragmatics reflects different communicative norms, practices, and patterns of use, while intercultural pragmatics studies interlocutors’ attempts to achieve cooperative and interactive understandings.The difference between the two concepts is more a matter of emphasis than of definition. When focusing specifically on the use of the Spanish language, cross-cultural pragmatics research has examined differences and similarities, particularly with regard to politeness, speech acts, implicature, deixis, between Spanish and other languages, notably English, and to a lesser extent, between varieties of Spanish (Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, Chapter 7; Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2004).A broad range of investigations has examined differences between linguistic communities (e.g., Uruguay-Britain; Spain-Britain) with research themes comparing the use of speech acts, directness/indirectness, politeness, mitigation, and conversational patterns (intralingual [regional] pragmatic variation is dealt with in Chapter 15 on pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish, this volume). In the same vein, Spanish intercultural pragmatics research has largely centered on both spoken and written discursive practices between members of different speech communities (e.g., Spain-Poland; Spain-United States) and the use of interactional 321

Mugford

strategies in different intercultural domains (e.g., university students in Spain and Latin America or retailers and customer service interaction in Spain and the United Kingdom). Little research seems to have been carried out on Spanish as a possible lingua franca. However, as will be discussed in the following, Godenzzi (2006) carried out a wide-ranging review of colonial, bilingual, and globalization aspects of Spanish as a lingua franca and Hurley (1995) examined mutually influencing contact languages (Quichua and Spanish) in Ecuador. In this chapter, I examine fundamental concepts regarding cross-cultural pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics (Section 2) with a focus on pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics (Section 2.1), differences between cross-cultural pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics (Section 2.2), studies in Spanish cross-cultural pragmatics (Section 2.3), and studies in Spanish intercultural pragmatics (Section 2.4). In Section 3, I review current methodological considerations with respect to cross-cultural pragmatics (Section 3.1) and intercultural pragmatics (Section 3.2). Section 4 examines future directions and conclusions, followed by suggestions for further reading (Section 5).

2

Review of existing literature

In this section, I examine the key concepts of pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics that provide insights into how nonnative speakers or L2 learners build and develop foreign language competence.Then I clarify differences between cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics, since there is no clear-cut division and current understandings are in a state of flux. I then examine each approach in terms of the insights they provide in promoting pragmatic understanding.

2.1

Pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics

Anglo-American pragmatics, with its focus on speech acts and linguistic components (See Introduction, this volume) identifies and describes the available resources for carrying out a given interaction, which can be analyzed through the concept of ‘pragmalinguistics’ (Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1985).This concept focuses on the “linguistic tools for performing communicative acts in the target language” (Taguchi & Roever, 2017, p. 7). Kasper and Rose (2001) argue that “Pragmalinguistics refers to the resources for conveying communicative acts, and relational and interpersonal meanings. Such resources include pragmatic strategies such as directness and indirectness, routines, and a large range of linguistic forms which can intensify or soften communicative acts” (2001, p. 2, authors’ italics). The more functional Continental approach is more easily understood through ‘sociopragmatics’ (Leech, 1983;Thomas, 1985). Sociopragmatic knowledge requires assessing social conditions and “refers to the knowledge of how to select an appropriate choice given a particular goal in a particular setting” (O’Keeffe et al., 2011, p. 137).With a strong emphasis on language in use, sociopragmatic resources embrace “knowledge of cultural rules and norms, role expectations, and appropriate conduct” (Taguchi & Roever, 2017, p. 7). The Anglo-American school with its focus on pragmalinguistics is reflected in Spanish crosscultural pragmatics research as it compares and contrasts the use of speech acts and linguistic politeness between different speech communities. Meanwhile, the Continental school approach is noticeable in studies of Spanish intercultural pragmatics as it identifies and understands factors that promote or hinder successful interactional and interpersonal communication.The line of argument pursued here is not that cross-cultural pragmatics only reflects pragmalinguistic knowledge or that intercultural pragmatics is reflected through sociopragmatics but that these branches of pragmatics research in Spanish reflect contrasting degrees of pragmatic emphasis. 322

Cross-cultural, intercultural pragmatics

2.2 Cross-cultural vs. intercultural pragmatics While cross-cultural pragmatics has been well established in pragmatics research since the 1980s (Cogo & House, 2017), intercultural pragmatics is seen as a relative newcomer (Kecskes, 2017a; Kecskes & Assimakopoulos, 2017b). Cross-cultural pragmatics has clearly defined, established concerns focusing on and comparing language norms, structures, and accepted patterns and practices between different languages. On the other hand, intercultural pragmatics covers emerging and evolving interaction between native speakers and nonnative speakers, lingua franca communication, multilingual discourse, and “language use and development of individuals who speak more than one language” (Kecskes, 2014, p.  14). Emphasizing differences between the two approaches to pragmatics, Cohen says “cross-cultural pragmatics refers to the comparison of pragmatic behavior across two separate cultures, whereas intercultural pragmatics refers to pragmatic behavior where the two cultures are in constant contact” (2018, p. 242, author’s italics). Meanwhile, Kecskes contrasts the ‘cultural’ focus of cross-cultural pragmatics with the ‘interactional’ dimension of intercultural pragmatics:“While cross-cultural pragmatics compares different cultures, based on the investigation of certain aspects of language use, such as speech acts, behavior patterns, and language behavior, intercultural pragmatics focuses on interactions among people from different cultures, speaking different languages” (Kecskes, 2017a, p. 400). Kecskes argues that intercultural pragmatics “is concerned with the way the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different first languages, communicate in a common language, and, usually, represent different cultures (Kecskes, 2004, 2010)” (2014, p.  14, author’s emphasis). Furthermore, in intercultural pragmatics, interactants “need to co-construct and develop emergent common ground” (Kecskes, 2017b, p. 27). Spanish intercultural pragmatics has been concerned with spoken and written pragmatic-discursive practices and strategies over a range of speech communities and domains, including study abroad programs (e.g., Cohen & Shively, 2007). This section on cross-cultural pragmatics contrasts studies in Spanish with a different language as it reflects “data obtained independently from two different cultural groups” (Spencer-Oatey, 2008, p. 6). Cross-cultural pragmatics in Spanish language pragmatics has focused on variation and comparison and contrast. For instance, Félix-Brasdefer, in his study of United States-Mexican service encounters, asserts that “[c]ross-cultural variation is generally analyzed from a global perspective (Fried, 2010) by contrasting some aspect of the linguistic system—for example, the phonology, morphology, syntax, or pragmatics—of two or more languages” (2015, p. 83). Meanwhile, Márquez-Reiter (2000) adapted Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper’s (1989) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) to compare and contrast the speech acts of requests and apologies between British English and Uruguayan Spanish with an emphasis on identifying such cross-cultural regularities as the use of mitigation and indirectness. Spanish cross-cultural pragmatics research has compared and contrasted different languages in terms of speech acts and studied regional variation with a strong focus on discursive practices. While English has been a strong point of comparison in cross-cultural studies (see for instance Callahan, 2011; Hernández López, 2008; Stenström & Jörgensen, 2008), studies have focused on comparing Spanish from Spain with Latin American Spanish (Fuentes Rodríguez, Placencia, & Palma-Fahe, 2016) and differences within Latin America (see for instance Félix-Brasdefer, 2010; Placencia & García, 2007). Intercultural pragmatics reflects a strong pragmatic-discursive approach to understanding interaction across languages, which includes the use of consultative devices, downtoners, hedges, subjectivizers, appealers, modality, etc. (Ali & Woodfield, 2017). With a focus on interaction, Spencer-Oatey defines intercultural pragmatics as “data obtained when members of two different cultural groups interact with each other” (2008, p. 6). Intercultural pragmatics is further 323

Mugford

defined by Cogo and House (2017) as “a field of research characterized by a concern with language use in (oral or written) discourse between members of different mother tongues and cultures” (p. 168). Kecskes and Romero-Trillo (2013) argue that intercultural pragmatics diverges from a simple structural approach to analyzing language to considering interactants as active sources and resources of social, cultural, and language experiences that emerge in daily interaction. They emphasized the importance of prior experience and emerging and co-constructed intercultures, in that “we, as speakers of a language, can only perform our linguistic activity in the light of the surrounding socio-cultural context but, at the same time, our individual comprehension of language is dependent upon our biographical socio-cultural experience” (2013, p. 1). With an emphasis on cooperative interaction, intercultural pragmatics researchers have examined domains such as political discourse (Grzywna, 2013) and business practices (Guillén Nieto, 2013). Research has also embraced telephone discourse (Fernández-Amaya, 2013) and newspaper discourse (Santaemilia Ruiz & Maruenda Bataller, 2013). Meanwhile, stereotypical cultural perceptions have been studied by Haß and Wächter (2017). Furthermore, Cohen (2018) notes that it is becoming more difficult to define intercultural pragmatics in that its nature “is undergoing a transformation in the current age of Facebook, Skype,Twitter, and other means of social networking in order to stay in touch with the languages and cultures that immigrants have left behind” (p. 244) (see Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse, this volume).

2.3

Studies in Spanish cross-cultural pragmatics

Studies in Spanish cross-cultural pragmatics can be divided into those that compare and contrast speech acts and those that focus on cross-cultural interaction.These will be examined with regard to different linguistic communities (e.g., English and Spanish). In an important study in Spanish cross-cultural pragmatics, Márquez Reiter (2000) focused on the speech acts of requests and apologies between British English and Uruguayan Spanish interactants. She identified “social distance, social power and the total ranking of their imposition” (p. 169) as key social variables to take into consideration and, most importantly, highlighted how they may be understood in different ways by different cultures. Differences between American English and Latin American Spanish speech acts were the focus of Félix-Brasdefer’s (2003) study into ways of declining an invitation. Identifying direct and indirect politeness strategies, Félix-Brasdefer found that English-to-English interactants tended to be more direct than Spanish-to-Spanish speakers and that social status plays a key role in determining an interlocutor’s communicative strategy. An examination of speech acts between English and Peninsular Spanish was also undertaken by de Pablos-Ortega (2010), who highlighted attitudes among United States and United Kingdom university students and native Spanish speakers with regard to thanking practices in Spanish. Examining British and Spanish intentions behind a given speech act, Maíz-Arévalo (2012) identified the pragmatic motives for implicit compliments in English and Spanish. She argued that “implicit compliments are preferred when evaluating someone’s qualities, achievements or personal appearance in order to avoid face-threat, especially when the relationship between the interlocutors is still distant” (p. 980).While these studies examine the use of pragmalinguistic resources (Leech, 1983;Thomas, 1985) across languages, even more crosspragmatic research is needed to examine sociopragmatic considerations when employing speech acts, especially in terms of gender, social class, age, occupations, etc. (Cohen, 2018) in order to increase communicative understandings. Focusing on cross-cultural interaction, Félix-Brasdefer (2015) adopted a discursive-pragmatic approach in order to analyze transactional-relational talk. He examined how opening and closing 324

Cross-cultural, intercultural pragmatics

sequences and requests are made in service encounters in Mexico and the United States. Hernández López (2008), in her study of cross-cultural interaction, explored medical consultations in order to unravel fundamental parallels and contrasts between British and Spanish interactions. Interactional dissimilarities between different nationalities have also been studied by Stenström and Jörgensen (2008), who examined phatic talk among teenagers in London and Madrid.They found that “teenage talk studied . . . is largely void of the formulaic expressions that characterize conversational openings and closings in adult speakers’ casual encounters” (p. 641).All three studies provide important insights into the features of relational talk across languages in transactional and interactional contexts, especially in terms of openings and closings, phatic considerations, and rapport. While current research has focused principally on spoken language, Spanish cross-cultural pragmatics studies have also examined written discourse. For instance, Callahan (2011) compares and contrasts the type and amount of facework in English and Spanish involved in making requests for a letter of recommendation. Her findings question previous studies that maintain more direct strategies are to be found in Spanish. Studying cross-cultural academic communication, Mur-Dueñas (2011) identified metadiscourse features in research articles (RAs) written in English and Spanish. She found that “Spanish business RAs present fewer interactive metadiscourse markers, that is, explicit signals of the relationship between ideas and the organisation and clarification of ideational material (especially logical markers and code glosses) than the English RAs” (2011, p.  3075). More research in pragmatic differences in writing needs to center on audience-design in order to raise interactants’ awareness regarding how written communication is being received and interpreted. Studies in Spanish cross-cultural pragmatics have perhaps overemphasized comparing and contrasting speech acts while ignoring other aspects such as implicature and relational work, especially the enactment of impoliteness, rudeness, and hostility.A cross-cultural approach needs to examine similarities and differences at the level of speech communities (Hymes, 1972) and discourse communities (Borg, 2003).As argued by Cohen (2018), cross-cultural pragmatics tends to be predictive, as opposed to intercultural pragmatics, which examines communicative realities.

2.4 Studies in Spanish intercultural pragmatics Studies in Spanish intercultural pragmatics can be categorized into those that examine discursive practices as people of different languages and cultures come in contact with each other (e.g., closings in telephone calls; Fernández-Amaya, 2013), and those that contrast different domains of use (e.g., newspaper texts; Santaemilia & Maruenda Bataller, 2013), and political discourse (Grzywna, 2013). Besides looking at spoken interaction, intercultural pragmatics researchers have also examined written texts (e.g., Guillén Nieto, 2013). However, first consideration will be given to an under-researched area, which is the use of Spanish as a lingua franca (Godenzzi, 2006; Hurley, 1995; Schrader-Kniffki, 2004). Examining Spanish in terms of language contact and bilingualism, Godenzzi (2006) outlines its use in terms of colonialism, border communities, and transnational migration, with a distinct focus on the use of Spanish by indigenous peoples. He surveys the Spanish as a lingua franca with regards to Guarani (Paraguay and Argentina), Mapudungun (Chile), and Nahuatl (Mexico). Godenzzi focuses on border zones, e.g., Brazil and Spanish-speaking countries and globalization that reflect different ways of living together as seen through the use of Spanglish. Furthermore, he examines how Spanish as a lingua franca can be spoken as an L1, L2, or as hybridized forms. In analyzing verb forms in request formation, Hurley (1995) examined how Spanish and Quichua speakers mutually influence each other’s discursive practices in Otavalo (Ecuador). 325

Mugford

Hurley found that language contact had affected the use of (in)directness while making requests. Reflecting a similar line of reasoning, Schrader-Kniffki, in her study of Zapotec speakers in Mexico, argues that “in intercultural communication, in addition to contrasting linguistic behavior, the language-in-contact situation adds a further aspect to the complexity of the interaction and may result in the development of mixed forms of verbal acting, including the expression of politeness (cf. Schrader-Kniffki, 2003)” (Schrader-Kniffki, 2004, p. 158, author’s italics) (see also Chapter 17 on intercultural communication in a globalized world, this volume). Intercultural pragmatics study of discursive practices identifies how interactants co-construct communication, employing previous experiences and prior and evolving knowledge to arrive at mutual understandings and supportiveness.These may reflect a strong cultural emphasis. For both nonnative speakers and L2 learners: the development of intercultural competence is crucial for the intercultural speaker who wishes to engage in critical discussions of culture and language. The intercultural speaker needs not only a knowledge of the grammatical system and vocabulary of the target language, but also pragmatic competence (pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge) and knowledge of the cultural and interactional styles of his/her own culture and other cultures. (Félix-Brasdefer, 2017, p. 353) In examining American English and Spanish (from Spain) telephone closings, Fernández-Amaya builds on earlier studies of simultaneous speech but argues that “its interpretation by conversation participants may vary from one culture to another” (2013, p. 163). Meanwhile, looking at cultural stereotypes, and analyzing discursive responses from university students in Spain and Germany, Haß and Wächter (2017) conducted a comparative qualitative study that examined cultural stereotypes that Germans and Spaniards held in terms of self- and mutual perception within the context of the European debt crisis. Results indicated that the Germans were noticeably more critical of themselves as opposed to their perception of Spaniards and even more critical than how they were perceived by Spaniards (Haß & Wächter, 2017). Both studies run the risk of overgeneralizing regarding cultural behavior and further research needs to examine a much wider social context. For instance, Fernández-Amaya concentrated on American English and Andalusian Spanish while Haß & Wächter studied university students. In studying discursive interaction contrasting domains in Spain and the United Kingdom, Santaemilia and Maruenda Bataller examined “legal measures granting same-sex couples different degrees of recognition and visibility” (2013, p. 439).They sought to record and examine the concepts, discursive practices, ideological pressures, and the negotiation of meaning resulting from fresh legal developments. They argued for the importance of “corpus linguistics and of contrastive/intercultural pragmatics in order to further investigate the legal, sexual or linguistic implications of the term used, in English and in Spanish, to refer to same-sex marriages” (2013, p. 455).A critical dimension can also be found in Guillén Nieto who, from a lingua franca perspective, explores “the problem of mistranslation within a real-life business context by analyzing a critical case involving the translation into English of a specific type of business genre: the business letter of introduction (BLI)” (2013, p. 396).The author contrasts particularly pragmatic variation regarding genres and mistranslations. Examining discursive instructional speech in a bilingual school, Maguire and Romero-Trillo (2017) focus on teacher talk and adaptive talk that “can be described as the linguistic mechanism used by participants in an interaction to prevent misunderstanding and/or establish remedial mechanisms.” (p.  348). In their conclusions they found similarities in commencing topics and attracting attention and it could be expected that 326

Cross-cultural, intercultural pragmatics

classroom discourse would reflect such practices both in bilingual and EFL/ESL contexts, particularly with younger learners.These three studies add a critical dimension to pragmatics since they examine sexual inequality, transactional misunderstandings, and the rarely considered role of developing pragmatic awareness in teacher-training courses. Adopting a critical stance in the public domain, Grzywna (2013) examined political discourse and manipulation by comparing and contrasting a political speech in 2010 by the former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero with one by the former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in 2009. She concludes that [t]he orators in the discourses analyzed use a variety of diferent measures to attract attention, to convince, to manipulate, etc.Among the linguistic tools they used, deictic pronouns and various rhetorical fgures, like climax, hyperbole, pleonasm, etc., can be mentioned, all of which have been applied deliberately in order to achieve the given purpose. (p. 391) Grzywna offers an important argumentative dimension to intercultural pragmatics as she analyzes persuasion and manipulation. Another key area of intercultural pragmatics has been discursive interaction in study abroad programs. In the acquisition of requests and apologies in Spanish and French, Cohen and Shively (2007) examined increases in target-language pragmatic knowledge in study abroad programs through language and culture. They state that “[t]he primary aim of this study was to measure empirically the impact of a largely self-access language and culture strategy intervention on studyabroad students’ target language apology and request performance” (p. 194).They conclude that [p]erhaps because the intervention consisted of only a brief in-person orientation to learning speech acts and a self-study guidebook with only limited focus on strategies for learning speech acts, the intervention itself was not robust enough to yield statistically signifcant fndings for the impact of the intervention on Spanish requests. (p. 203) However, they do argue that a more extensive follow-up study may reveal much more signifcant results. Further study also needs to examine whether mere exposure to pragmatic practices results in ‘acquired’ learning or whether more focused instruction is required (see Chapters 28 and 29 on pragmatics learning and teaching in the study abroad context, this volume). Studies in Spanish intercultural pragmatics have gone beyond merely studying speech acts to examine critical areas, including stereotyping, misunderstanding, manipulation, and discrimination. However, perhaps a greater emphasis needs to be placed on the use, misuse, and abuse of power in pragmatic relations, especially since conflict and hostility often surface in intercultural communication. For instance, Cogo and House (2017) report that intercultural pragmatics has increasingly examined the nature of ‘intercultural’ interactions in terms of how participants understand and react in such circumstances and how this impacts developing and ongoing interaction.

3

Methodological considerations

Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics employ different methods to gather data. Cohen (2012) argues that in cross-cultural pragmatics the focus is on comparing interaction practices between two languages and/or cultures while making note of pragmatic variables such as age 327

Mugford

and gender. In contrast, Cohen argues methodological considerations in intercultural pragmatics do not see a strict division between languages and cultures, especially with regard to immigrant groups, but rather focus on linguistic contact and cultural behavior.

3.1

Cross-cultural pragmatics

As previously stated, current methodological approaches in cross-cultural pragmatics are concerned with speech acts and (im)politeness strategies and practices across languages and varieties of language. Less consideration has been given to the actual range of communicative choices and possibilities that exist within and between languages and how these are enacted. However, these are central and fundamental issues.A simple matching-and-comparing form-and-function exercise between speech acts in Spanish and another language, usually English, often fails to reveal the array of speaker choices, possible addressee response options, motivations for choosing certain forms or structures, and interlocutors’ underlying interactional objectives. A notable exception can be found in Lorenzo-Dus (2001) study of similarities and contrasts in compliment responses in Spanish and English, through which she highlights differences in terms of evaluation, upgrades, irony, and even humor. Normative comparisons and contrasts also reflect choices across languages. For instance, Mexican Spanish compliment responses involve interactive responses from the addressee that may include a la orden/a sus órdenes/cuando gustes (all very loosely meaning, in reference to the object of admiration:‘whenever you want’). Such interactive responses reinforce face and identity as the addressee comes across as a ‘giving’ individual who is willing to share, even if it be only formulaically.These expressions signal wholehearted acceptance of a compliment, while in English, compliments may be received with a cursory ‘thank you’ (Taguchi & Roever, 2017) or predictably and mechanically downgraded with a denial (e.g., no, it’s nothing, or with a deflection; e.g., my wife chose the color;Wolfson, 1983).Therefore, building on the work of such researchers as Lorenzo-Dus, cross-cultural pragmatics needs to examine the underlying nature of speech acts across languages in terms of norms, values, and interactional practices, and subsequently identify available communicative choices that are expressed through speech acts. Cross-cultural pragmatic relational work in the Mexican context has also been a central concern, especially ‘face,’ which has been analyzed in terms of ‘group face’ (Félix-Brasdefer, 2008), ‘national face’ (Mugford, 2019) and the face of the ‘other’ (Curcó, 2007). Classic approaches allow a comparatively straightforward cross-cultural evaluation and assessment of politeness strategies and resources. However, a more profitable and rewarding understanding may come from employing discursive approaches (Linguistic Politeness Research Group, 2011; Locher & Watts, 2005;Watts, 2003) who examine (im)politeness in terms of involvement/commitment, supportiveness/disinterest, or distancing/detachment.This may be especially pertinent when attempting to translate English-language terms such as politeness, courtesy, rudeness, and impoliteness that, in the case of Spanish, may not have a direct equivalence.

3.2

Intercultural pragmatics

The main issues in Spanish-language intercultural pragmatics involve researchers identifying, analyzing, and understanding discursive practices and domains of use. However, there needs to be a much greater emphasis on understanding the creative multilingual and multicultural dimensions to foreign language communication. Interlocutors consistently and constantly employ personal histories, current and developing life experiences, relevant speech community norms, and their own values and attitudes (i.e., Bourdieu’s habitus, 1972), to engage in ever-evolving and 328

Cross-cultural, intercultural pragmatics

dynamic bilingual and multilingual language use. Nonconventional practices, such as translanguaging (Cenoz, 2017;Wei, 2011), hybridity (Blommaert, 2010; Saraceni, 2015) and superdiversity (Blommaert, 2010;Vertovec, 2006) are hallmarks of this vibrant intercultural communication and reflect the Continental school approach to successful interactional and interpersonal communication. These phenomena question “the notion of discrete languages separated by fixed borders” (Saraceni, 2015, p. 184).They highlight both individual and community-based imaginative dimensions to intercultural pragmatics, which go well beyond the current research interest in Spanish into discursive and textual communication.The pragmatic challenge of achieving in situ, spur-of-the moment, unrehearsed, under-pressure cooperative and interactive understandings should be a central concern for intercultural pragmatics research. Within the context of Spanish-language intercultural pragmatics, a methodological framework should explain how bilingual and plurilingual interlocutors engage in two or more languages in order to construct and achieve meaning through translanguaging. In opposition to monolingualism and orthodox foreign-language use, translanguaging responds to the complex and multidirectional processes in the language practices of people and challenges the view of languages as autonomous and pure . . . .Translanguaging, then, is a product of border thinking, of knowledge that is autochthonous and conceived from a bilingual, not monolingual, position. (García & Sylvan, 2011, p. 389, authors’ italics) While examining Seltzer and Collins’s (2016) study of two New York City Latino students who employed both English- and Spanish-language resources, Cohen (2018) argues that this is a productive pragmatic area since translanguaging “would occur at moments when speakers are in an emotional state where their L1 or dominant language is the preferred means for expressing themselves” (p. 192).As argued by Wei (2011), translanguaging embraces a plethora of communicative resources and “includes the full range of linguistic performances of multilingual language users for purposes that transcend the combination of structures, the alternation between systems, the transmission of information and the representation of values, identities and relationships” (p. 1222). The intercultural pragmatics of translanguaging can also be understood through semiotics: “For example, when the beer industry wants to ensure that Latinos drink a certain brand of beer, a translanguaged advertisement that says ‘A Nuevo twist on Refreshment,’ works much better than one conceived in Spanish only or in English only” (García & Wei, 2014, p. 23) (for an overview of translanguaging using Spanish- and English-language resources, see García & Wei, 2014). Spanish intercultural pragmatics researchers are breaking away from current discursive research approaches and studying how interactants display a wide variety of multilingual pragmatic competences, which may include code-switching and translation (Cenoz, 2017; García & Sylvan, 2011). One productive area is anticortesía ‘antinormative politeness’ (Zimmerman, 2002) as interactants, especially in Spain and Mexico (Fuentes Rodríguez & Alcaide Lara, 2008; Mugford, 2013), employ seemingly impolite language resources to express solidarity and closeness. In Mexico, this is often expressed through the word güey [wey] ‘man’ (Mugford & Montes, 2020): güey/wey is a multi-use word that embraces insult, friendship, and solidarity.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Future investigative work needs to critique and build on current approaches adopted by researchers into Spanish cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics.The strong influence of the European tradition needs to be reassessed and offset by a more nuanced perspective that takes 329

Mugford

into consideration possible contributions from the Anglo-American pragmatic tradition. For instance, while the study of speech acts is a strong feature of Spanish cross-cultural pragmatics (e.g., Lorenzo Dus, 2001; Maíz-Arévalo, 2012), research rarely goes beyond comparing and contrasting the structure and use of a given speech act.There should be a deeper understanding between, and within, languages with respect to pragmalinguistic choices and pragmastylistics (Hickey, 1989; Selting, 2009). Pragmastylistics offers a rich research avenue for examining “how the different possible ways of saying ‘the same’ thing (style) depend on the factors which compose the situation (pragmatic factors)” (Hickey, 1989, p. 8). Rather than looking at individual speech acts, identifying cross-cultural practices across turns may underscore contrasting understandings, including the characteristics and functions of (im)politeness, the features and purpose of language play (e.g., double entendre in English vs. sexually motivated double entendre albures in Spanish), the underlying structure and intention of gossip, and conflicting perceptions regarding the seriousness of trolling. For instance, when examining cross-cultural concepts of linguistic (im)politeness, those who work in pragmatics have tried to identify and develop ‘Spanishlanguage’ understandings and concepts such as autonomía and afiliación (Bravo, 2008). However, concepts in Mexican Spanish are often difficult to relate to in English; e.g., urbanidad ‘courtesy,’ civismo ‘social responsibility,’ being servicial ‘attentive and obliging,’ dar su lugar ‘give someone their rightful place,’ and acomedirse ‘to be more than willing to do something.’ Indeed, Watts (2003) has argued that “[a]s in the case of the English lexemes polite and politeness, terms in other languages—if indeed they exist at all—may vary in the meanings and connotations associated with them from one group of speakers (even from one individual speaker) to the next” (p. 14).A more productive approach in examining cross-cultural politeness may be achieved through adopting Watts’ distinction between politic and polite behavior where he argues that linguistic behaviour, which is perceived to be appropriate to the social constraints of the ongoing interaction, i.e. as non-salient, should be called politic behaviour.  .  . . Linguistic behaviour which is perceived to be beyond what is expectable, i.e. salient behaviour, should be called polite or impolite depending on whether the behaviour itself tends towards the negative or positive end of the spectrum of politeness. (2003, p. 19) This approach can highlight what is ‘expected’ politeness (i.e., politic behavior in the two cultures) and what goes beyond what is ‘expectable’ (i.e., polite behavior).Work in Mexican Spanish and American English has already been carried out in this area by Félix-Brasdefer (2003, 2008, 2015), who has examined mitigation, directness and indirectness, and transactional politic norms in terms of interactional patterns and concepts such as respeto. From a cross-cultural perspective, pragmalinguistic resources such as softeners, fllers, hedges, etc., and sociopragmatic knowledge that takes into consideration individual expectations, social norms, and appropriate behavior need to be understood within and across languages and cultures when comparing and contrasting (im)politeness practices. Spanish intercultural pragmatics researchers must break away from seeing mainstream Spanish varieties (e.g., Peninsular Spanish) as the standard by which to judge other languages.As Saraceni (2015) argues regarding new approaches to understanding language: “one crucial aspect seems to remain unchanged.Variation is identified, measured, and described in terms of deviation from a ‘standard’ version of the language which is taken as a universal yardstick” (p. 85). Investigation into Spanish intercultural pragmatics must embrace variation that reflects stance, local identity, and that offers different ways of interacting. Researchers should be more open to interlocutors engaging in intercultural communication for the development of “a ‘third way,’ as a crossing of 330

Cross-cultural, intercultural pragmatics

borders and a sign of an emerging hybrid culture” (House, 2011, p. 608).A possible area of study is the immigrant populations in Spain and Latin American countries who have formed their own speech communities away from that of the dominant community. Intercultural pragmatics researchers cannot limit themselves to separating and differentiating languages but should try to understand everyday tensions between supportive, solidary, and cooperative language use and conflictual, aggressive, hostile utterances (Mugford, 2019) that can emerge in intercultural communication. Of special relevance to the Spanish-speaking intercultural context is ‘superdiversity,’ which Vertovec (2006) argues “is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small, and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socioeconomically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade” (p. 1). Given the plethora of local, ethnic, cultural, and regional repertoires (Blommaert, 2010) in Spanish-speaking countries, superdiversity attempts to understand the experiences, challenges, setbacks, and problems facing intercultural interactants. The Mexican–U.S. border offers a fruitful area for intercultural research as interactants combine caló (slang), north-western Mexican Spanish, standard Spanish, and English-language varieties of the U.S. Related to superdiversity is an under-researched area in intercultural pragmatics in the Latin American context: the relationship between Spanish and indigenous speakers. One notable exception has been the investigation carried out by Schrader-Kniffki (2004), who examined intercultural conflict between bilingual Zapotec-Spanish speakers in Mexican Spanish and a single Spanish speaker. She emphasizes the importance in intercultural communication of “immediate context and the socio-cultural background of the interaction and its participants” (p. 157). In conclusion, future work in cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics must escape from conventional views of comparing and contrasting ‘standard’ mainstream languages and varieties and attempt to understand how interactants are appropriating language for their own use, whether it be in terms of communicative choices such as in expressing particular speech acts, or through linguistic politeness, or by engaging in translanguaging, hybridity, and superdiversity. A broadened research perspective would widen the findings, significance, and implications of Spanish in cross-cultural pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics and adhere to Hickey’s (2004) call for “a Spanish Austin Grice, or Sperber or Wilson to come along and take the ‘Spanish’ out of ‘Spanish pragmatics” (p. 12).

Further reading Dumitrescu, D. (2011). Aspects of Spanish pragmatics. New York: Peter Lang. Cross-cultural speech acts are also examined here in Chapter 1,“Polite speech acts across cultures,” and in Chapter 2,“Gratitude exchange: L1 vs. L2.” Kecskes I., & Assimakopoulos, S. (Eds.). (2017b). Current issues in intercultural pragmatics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. To understand the co-constructed interactional discursive breadth of intercultural pragmatics, this collection explores a wide range of different applications of intercultural research that is relevant to Spanish intercultural pragmatics. Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (Eds.). (2004). Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cross-cultural pragmatics can be further studied in this volume, which offers studies from both Spain and Latin America and has two chapters specifically devoted to cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics: Chapter 7, “Displaying closeness and respectful distance in Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters” (pp. 121–156) and Chapter 8, “Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning. Requests and promises in intercultural communication in Oaxaca, Mexico” (pp. 157–178). 331

Mugford

Romero-Trillo, J., & Kecskes, I. (Eds.). (2013). Research trends in intercultural pragmatics. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. This volume provides a stronger Spanish intercultural focus from a multilayer perspective that examines linguistic and cognitive domains, social and cultural domains, and discourse and stylistics.

References Ali, Z., & Woodfield, G. (2017). A cross-sectional study of Syrian EFL learners’ pragmatic development: Towards a taxonomy of modification in interlanguage requests. In I. Kecskes & A. Assimakopoulos (Eds.), Current issues in intercultural pragmatics (pp.  297–322). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, J. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Borg, E. (2003). Discourse community. ELT Journal, 57(4), 398–400. Bourdieu, P. (1972). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bravo, D. (2008).The implications of studying politeness in Spanish-speaking contexts: A discussion. Pragmatics, 18(4), 577–603. Callahan, L. (2011). Asking for a letter of recommendation in Spanish and English: A pilot study of face strategies. Hispania, 94(1), 171–183. Cenoz, J. (2017). Bilingualism and multilingualism. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 139–150). London and New York: Routledge. Cogo,A., & House, J. (2017). Intercultural pragmatics. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 168–183). London and New York: Routledge. Cohen, A. D. (2012). Research methods for describing variation in intercultural pragmatics for cultures in contact and conflict. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues (pp. 271–294).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cohen, A. D. (2018). Learning pragmatics from native and nonnative language teachers. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Cohen,A. D., & Shively, R. (2007).Acquisition of requests and apologies in Spanish and French: Impact of study abroad and strategy-building intervention. The Modern Language Journal, 91(2), 189–212. Curcó, C. (2007). Positive face, group face, and affiliation: An overview of politeness studies on Mexican Spanish. In M. E. Placencia & C. García (Eds.), Research on politeness in the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 105–120). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. De Pablos-Ortega, C. (2010). Attitudes of English speakers towards thanking in Spanish. Pragmatics, 20(2), 149–170. Dumitrescu, D. (2011). Aspects of Spanish pragmatics. New York: Peter Lang. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2003). Declining an invitation:A cross-cultural study of pragmatic strategies in American English and Latin American Spanish. Multilingua, 22, 225–255. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008). Linguistic politeness in Mexico: Refusal strategies among male speakers of Mexican Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(12), 2158–2187. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2010). Intra-lingual pragmatic variation in Mexico City and San José, Costa Rica: A focus on regional differences in female requests. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(11), 2992–3011. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). The language of service encounters: A pragmatic-discursive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2017).The intercultural speaker abroad. In R. Giora & M. Haugh (Eds.), Papers in honor of Istvan Kecskes (pp. 353–370).The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. London: Routledge. Fernández-Amaya, L. (2013). Simultaneous speech in American English and Spanish telephone closing. In J. Romero-Trillo & I. Kecskes (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 164–180). Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Fried, M. (2010). Introduction: From instances of change to explanations of change. In M. Fried, J-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Variation and change (pp.  1–16). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fuentes Rodríguez, C., & Alcaide Lara, E. (2008). (Des)cortesía, agresividad, y violencia verbal en la sociedad actual. Sevilla: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. 332

Cross-cultural, intercultural pragmatics

Fuentes Rodríguez, C., Placencia, M. E., & Palma-Fahe, M. (2016). Regional pragmatic variation in the use of the discourse marker pues  in informal talk among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile), and Seville (Spain). Journal of Pragmatics, 97, 74–92. García, O., & Sylvan, C. E. (2011). Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 385–400. García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism, and education. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Godenzzi, J. C. (2006). Spanish as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 26, 100–124. Grzywna, A. (2013). Manipulation and pragmatics in political discourse. In J. Romero-Trillo & I. Kecskes (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 367–387). Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Guillén Nieto,V. (2013). Intercultural business pragmatics: The case of the business letter of introduction. In J. Romero-Trillo & I. Kecskes (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 396–420). Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Haß, J., & Wächter, S. (2017). Auto- and hetero-stereotypes in the mutual perceptions of Germans and Spaniards. In I. Kecskes & A.Assimakopoulos (Eds.), Current issues in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 159–179). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hernández López, M. de la O. (2008). Rapport management under examination in the context of medical consultations in Spain and Britain. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 21, 69–98. Hickey, L. (1989). Introduction. In L. Hickey (Ed.), The pragmatics of style (pp. 1–12). London: Routledge. Hickey, L. (2004). Spanish pragmatics:Whence, where, whither? In R. Márquez Reiter & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish (pp. 1–12). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. House, J. (2011). Global and intercultural communication. In G.Andersen & K.Aijmer (Eds.), Pragmatics of society (pp. 607–626). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Hurley, J. K. (1995). Pragmatics in a language contact situation:Verb forms used in re-quests in Ecuadorian Spanish. Hispanic Linguistics, 6–7, 225–264. Hymes, D. H. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics. Selected readings (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kasper, G., & Rose, K. (2001). Pragmatics in language teaching. In K. Rose & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 1–9). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kecskes, I. (2004). Lexical merging, conceptual blending and cultural crossing. Intercultural Pragmatics, 1, 1–21. Kecskes, I. (2010).The paradox of communication: A socio-cognitive approach. Pragmatics and Society, 1(1), 50–73. Kecskes, I. (2014). Intercultural pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press. Kecskes, I. (2017a). Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 400–415). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kecskes, I. (2017b). Context-sensitivity and impoliteness in intercultural communication. Journal of Politeness Research, 13(1), 7–31. Kecskes, I., & Assimakopoulos, S. (2017a). Introduction. In I. Kecskes & S. Assimakopoulos (Eds.), Current issues in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 1–6).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kecskes, I., & Assimakopoulos, S. (2017b). Current issues in intercultural pragmatics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kecskes, I., & Romero-Trillo, J. (2013). Introduction. In J. Romero-Trillo & I. Kecskes (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 1–3). Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. Linguistic Politeness Research Group. (2011). Discursive approaches to politeness. Berlin and Boston, MA: Mouton de Gruyter. Locher, M., & Watts, R. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 9–33. Lorenzo Dus, N. (2001). Compliment responses among British and Spanish university students. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 107–127. Maguire, L., & Romero-Trillo, J. (2017). Adaptive management and bilingual education. In I. Kecskes & S. Assimakopoulos (Eds.), Current issues in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 347–365). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Maíz-Arévalo, C. (2012). “Was that a compliment?” Implicit compliments in English and Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 980–996. Márquez Reiter, R. (2000). Politeness phenomena in British English and Uruguay: A contrastive study of requests and apologies.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 333

Mugford

Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (Eds.). (2004). Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mugford, G. (2013). Foreign-language users confronting anti-normative politeness in a Mexican university. Intercultural Pragmatics, 10, 101–130. Mugford, G. (2019). Addressing difficult situations in foreign-language learning: Confusion, impoliteness, and hostility. New York: Routledge. Mugford, G., & Montes, S. (2020). Anticortesía. In M. E. Placencia & X. Padilla García (Eds.), Guía práctica de pragmática del español. New York and London: Routledge. Mur-Dueñas, P. (2011). An intercultural analysis of metadiscourse features in research articles written in English and in Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(12), 3068–3079. O’Keeffe,A., Clancy, B., & Adolphs, S. (2011). Introducing pragmatics in use. Abingdon: Routledge. Placencia, M. E., & García, C. (Eds.). (2007). Research on politeness in the Spanish-speaking world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Romero-Trillo, J., & Kecskes, I. (Eds.). (2013). Research trends in intercultural pragmatics. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Santaemilia, J., & Maruenda Bataller, S. (2013). Naming practices and negotiation of meaning: A corpusbased analysis of Spanish and English newspaper discourse. In J. Romero-Trillo & I. Kecskes (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 440–457). Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Saraceni, M. (2015). World Englishes:A critical analysis. London: Bloomsbury. Schrader-Kniffki, M. (2003). Spanisch-Zapotekische Bitt- und Dankeshandlungen. Sprachkontakt und Hoflichkeit in Einer Amerindischen Kultur Mexikos. Frankfurt and Madrid:Vervuert, Iberoamericana. Schrader-Kniffki, M. (2004). Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning. Requests and promises in intercultural communication in Oaxaca. In M. E. Placencia & R. Márquez Reiter (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish (pp. 157–174).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Selting, M. (2009). Communicative style. In S. D’hondt, J-O. Östman, & J.Verschueren (Eds.), The pragmatics of interaction (pp. 20–39).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Seltzer, K., Collins, B.A., & Angeles, K. M. (2016). Navigating turbulent waters:Translanguaging to support academic and socioemotional well-being. In O. Garcia & Y. Kleyn (Eds.), Translanguaging with multilingual students: Learning from classroom moments (pp. 140–159). New York: Routledge. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008). Introduction. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Culture, communication, and politeness theory (pp. 1–8). London: Continuum. Stenström,A-B., & Jörgensen,A. (2008).A matter of politeness? Contrastive study of phatic talk in teenage conversation. Pragmatics, 18(4), 635–657. Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second language pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, J. (1985).The language of power. Journal of Pragmatics, 9, 765–783. Vertovec, S. (2006).The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Working Paper 25 (Oxford University). Retrieved from www.compas.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/ WP-2006-025-Vertovec_Super-Diversity_Britain.pdf Watts, R. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wei, L. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1222–1235. Wolfson, N. (1983). Rules of speaking. In J. Richards & R. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and communication (pp. 61–87). Harlow: Longman. Zimmerman, K. (2002). Constitución de la identidad y anticortesía verbal entre jóvenes masculinos hablantes de español. In D. Bravo (Ed.), Estudios del discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 47–59). Stockholm, Sweden: EDICE.

334

19 Pragmatics and multilingualism Holly R. Cashman and Amelia Tseng

1

Introduction

Pragmatics has been understood in various ways, as Félix-Brasdefer (2019) outlines at the outset of Pragmática del español. In this chapter, we take a broad view of pragmatics, generally aligned with the sociocultural-interactional perspective (Horn & Kecskes, 2013, pp. 362–364). Pragmatics interconnects with the topic of multilingualism in that speakers of two or more languages can use a range of resources associated with the languages and dialects in their linguistic repertoires to achieve pragmatic ends. In practice, this depends on speakers’ exposure to and socialization in these language varieties and the communities where they are spoken. In addition, multilinguals are able to use fluid and innovative combinations of their linguistic resources, such as movement between languages, as a means to achieving pragmatic ends that may not be possible, using only one or another of their linguistic channels (Gardner-Chloros, Charles, & Cheshire, 2000). Knowledge of and interaction in more than one language variety is a daily reality in the lives of the majority of the world’s population. Put simply, multilingualism describes proficiency in, or the use of, two or more languages, while ‘bilingualism’ is limited to only two languages.1 Bloomfield (1933) defined bilingualism as the “native-like control of two languages” (p.  56), while Weinreich (1953) offered a more usage-based definition:“the practice of alternately using two languages” (p. 1). Haugen (1953) did so as well for the bilingual person:“the speaker of one language who can produce complete and meaningful utterances in the other language” (p. 6). These definitions mask a fair amount of complexity, due to the imprecision of terms such as “proficiency,” “competence,” “use,” and even “language.” Despite its commonplaceness, however, multilingualism has often been treated as the exception rather than the rule in the field of linguistics. Over the last century, against a backdrop of a presumption of monolingualism as the unmarked condition, an interest in bilingualism and multilingualism emerged. Foundational research comprised longitudinal case studies documenting individuals’ bilingual language acquisition in the early 20th century (Leopold, 1939–1949; Ronjat, 1913). Later, studies of language contact at the community level were developed (Barker, 1947; Haugen, 1953;Weinreich, 1953), and then a body of research into language maintenance and revitalization developed (cf. Fishman, 1999; Fishman & García, 2010), often hand in hand with civil and indigenous rights movements viewing language as a right. Today, this research 335

Cashman and Tseng

continues in a period marked by what has been called ‘superdiversity’ (Budach & de SaintGeorges, 2017;Vertovec, 2007), resulting from migration and globalization (see Chapter 17 on intercultural communication, this volume).This long tradition of research in bilingual and multilingual contexts has uncovered countless important insights into the ways that multilingual people and people in multilingual settings use the language varieties in their repertoires to make meaning in interaction. Given that pragmatics can be understood simply as the study of “the use of language in human communication as determined by the conditions of society” (Mey, 2001, p. 6), or of “language use in context, with actions that are accomplished and negotiated during the course of social interaction” (Félix Brasdefer, 2015, p. 3), it should not be surprising that there is much to be gained from looking closely at the intersection and overlap between research on Spanish pragmatics in multilingual settings. Since the range of multilingual pragmatic behavior is too vast and ever evolving to be comprehensively described, in this chapter we focus on selected key elements.We begin with a brief review of existing research on multilingualism and pragmatics, focusing on important examples of pragmatics in multilingual contexts in the Spanish-speaking world (Section 2).Where appropriate, we call attention to similarities and differences between multilingual and ‘monolingual’ pragmatics. In Section 3, we discuss some main issues and current methodological considerations in the field. We conclude with suggestions for future research directions and further reading (Section 4).

2

Review of existing research

In this section we present fundamental concepts in multilingualism, from foundational work to recent research.We then focus in on the ways in which multilingual practices are mobilized to fulfill pragmatic functions, drawing on examples of Spanish pragmatics in multilingual settings.This is a rich field for inquiry, given that Spanish multilingualism includes historic zones of colonial contact, current Spanish and Latin American migrations, and the extensive reach and diffusion of Spanish as a global second language. Multilingualism in Spanish includes that in Spain (castellano in contact with Euskera, Catalan and Valencian, and Galician, inter alia) and in Latin America (Spanish in contact with hundreds of indigenous languages, other colonial/ colonizer languages such as English and Dutch, and languages of immigrants, from Japanese and Chinese to Arabic and Italian), as well as Spanish in contact with English in the U.S. and other locations, not to mention Spanish in other, less commonly studied contexts (e.g., Philippines, Equatorial Guinea). This complexity and diversity have been examined in a number of booklength works (e.g., Klee & Lynch, 2009; Lipski, 2005; Lynch, 2019; Márquez Reiter & Martín Rojo, 2014; Montrul, 2013; Otheguy & Zentella, 2012; Potowski & Cameron, 2007; Roca & Lipski, 1993; Rothman & Potowski, 2011; Silva- Corvalán, 1995;Thompson & Lamboy, 2012; Turell, 2000, among others).A growing body of literature focused on the political, sociohistorical, and ideological context of Spanish multilingualism (e.g., del Valle, 2013; Mar-Molinero, 2000; Mar-Molinero & Stewart, 2006; Rosa, 2019; Rosa & Flores, 2017) has important implications for multilingual pragmatics since social context is essential to understanding the symbolic nature of language in use in context.

2.1

Multilingual pragmatics

Multilinguals use their full range of pragmalinguistic knowledge and resources to achieve and negotiate contextualized communicative actions. An extensive body of research examines how multilinguals use language in interaction, from borrowing to code-switching to crossing, from 336

Pragmatics and multilingualism

language choice to language negotiation and repair. Building on this work, more recent research has taken the concept of translanguaging out of its original educational setting and used it to encapsulate a variety of multilingual language practices, bringing along with it a deconstruction of the notion of named languages as linguistic realities (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). Multilingual practices are essential to multilingual pragmatics as speakers use the range of linguistic resources in their repertoires to express relationality and related interactional work of (im)politeness, distance and closeness, (in)formality, and power/solidarity, among other things. Regarding pragmatics in particular, the ability to move among and combine multiple languages opens up pragmatic dimensions beyond those available to monolingual speakers. Finally, multilinguals may have higher pragmatic awareness and competence than monolinguals (Safont Jordà, 2005), due to the expanded range of pragmalinguistic resources in their repertoires, acquired through an expanded range of contextualized acquisition and socialization experiences.

2.1.1

The pragmatics of language choice

The symbolic importance of language choice in constructing ethnic identity is well established, beginning with the foundational work on “in-group” (‘we’ code) versus “out-group” (‘they’ code) language alternation (Gumperz, 1982). As Gumperz observed, members of a minoritized ethnolinguistic group tended to use the minoritized language variety in interaction with other in-group members and the majority language when speaking with out-group members. The strong indexical relationship (Silverstein, 2003) between language and group membership allows for pragmatic associations with language choice. For example, language choice can be used pragmatically to express solidarity; LoCastro (2012) demonstrated that Spanish was used among Latino students for solidarity and to distance themselves from non-Latino peers and the teacher (p. 72). Similarly, Cashman (2005) demonstrated that participants with varying degrees of proficiency in Spanish and English used language choice to police boundaries between identities (such as “competent bilingual” and “incompetent bilingual”) and highlight differences between speakers. Cashman (2008) found that language choice and impoliteness functioned both as resources for participants to manage identities in interaction, including building solidarity through alignment or constructing opposition.The bilingual school children used Spanish to avoid being overheard by the teacher when they were collaborating to marginalize one of their classmates. Use of the heritage language with elders is not only a communicative accommodation but a sign of politeness or appropriateness and respect, as has been noted with Spanish in the U.S. (Farruggio, 2010; Zentella, 1997). Research dating from Barker (1947) has demonstrated that Spanish in the U.S. is used more in informal situations, such as with families and intimates. The sociopragmatic functions of language choice can also be mobilized in conversation to indicate preferred and dispreferred responses in order to manage interactional labor and negotiate identities, such as parent/child, in interaction (Li, 1994). Dumitrescu (2014) found that among bilingual interactants, language choice itself can sometimes be a mitigating device; citing, for example,Valdés and Pino’s (1981) finding that U.S. Latinos in their study used English to mitigate face-threatening acts or to avoid self-praise when on the receiving end of face-flattering acts (compliments). Closely connected to language choice is language negotiation (Auer, 1984), a process by which speakers arrive at the language medium for a given interaction in a multilingual context. In the sense that language negotiation is language use in context, accomplishing communicative goals and making meaning in interaction, language negotiation is of interest as a pragmatic phenomenon. Callahan (2006, 2007) noted that individuals in customer service positions accommodated to customers’ use of Spanish in New York City. Raymond (2019) found in a study of 337

Cashman and Tseng

language negotiation in a radio call-in show in Los Angeles that “language selection . . . must be viewed as an interactional achievement that is collaboratively and sequentially constructed between the participants” (p.  422). In a study of emergency service calls, Raymond (2014) found that there was a distinct preference for English over Spanish, which the operators brought about; callers who required an interpreter essentially had to negotiate for access to this resource. Raymond successfully connects the micro-level interactional dynamics of language choice and negotiation to the broader ideological issues around multilingualism in the different contexts of their research.

2.1.2

Code-switching pragmatics

Code-switching (CS) is the alternation between two or more language varieties in interaction. Research has demonstrated that CS is a “sophisticated, rule-governed behavior” (MacSwan, 2017, p. 4), pushing back against the “deficit view” misconception of bilingualism (MacSwan, 2013). While much CS research has focused on these grammatical constraints, other research addresses the pragmatically relevant question of why people codeswitch and for what communicatively relevant purposes (Nilep, 2006). In early research, Blom and Gumperz (1972) distinguished between situational and metaphorical CS.The term ‘situational’ described CS triggered by a change in the constellation of participants or setting, such as the in-group and out-group interactions mentioned earlier in Section 2.1.‘Metaphorical’ CS took place when participants or setting remained constant; this CS was thought to convey a social meaning or to be exploited for interactional purposes. CS was viewed as functioning in the same way as other ‘contextualization cues’ (Gumperz, 1982), thus “contribut[ing] itself in essential ways to the construction of context” (Auer & Di Luzio, 1992, p. 21). For example, Gafaranga (2007) observed the role of Spanish CS in topic management in bilingual Spanish-English encounters in Spain.Auer (1984) and Li (1994) demonstrated how the detailed, turn-by-turn analysis of Conversation Analysis (CA) uncovered how CS was exploited by speakers in interaction to carry out language functions, such as mitigating requests or aggravating disagreement. Gardner-Chloros et al. (2000) noted that CS provides bilinguals more pragmatic strategies (such as for emphasis or indirectness). Tseng´s (2011, 2018) analysis of English-Spanish bilingual radio speech showed pragmatic use of CS for discourse management purposes, such as humor, emphasis, and building audience rapport.Tseng (2020) found that many D.C. Latinos, a highly diverse demographic, reported pragmatic dialect shifting or “downgrading” to less-regional Spanish when talking to speakers of other dialects for reasons of clarity.They also noted pragmatic register-shifting and dialect downgrading depending on context (e.g., church) and interlocutor (e.g,. parents) for reasons of formality and respect, to avoid “slang” and regionalisms, which were used for humor and friendship in casual situations. Muñoa Barredo (2003) found that Basque-Spanish bilinguals use CS for a range of pragmatic functions for: (a) discourse organization, topic introduction, and turn management; (b) emphasizing, reinforcing, or rejecting information; (c) humor, mitigation; and (d) drawing on idiomatic expressions that are language specific. Despite these important pragmatic functions, CS is often misunderstood in the Spanish-speaking world (as in many other contexts); stigmatized as lack of proficiency or sloppiness, or viewed as informal and hence pragmatically impolite. For example, Zentella’s (1997, 2014) research on U.S. Latino language practices has demonstrated the ways in which CS is part of speakers’ normal bilingual repertoires and is used to negotiate identity symbolically and in interaction, but is also stigmatized as incorrect or “broken” language. Hidalgo (1988) found that Mexican-Americans’ CS was negatively viewed in Mexico, and Rangel, Loureiro-Rodríguez, and Moyna (2015) found that Mexican Americans in Texas rated CS less positively than English or Spanish in terms of solidarity, status, and personal appeal. 338

Pragmatics and multilingualism

Multilingual pragmatics involving CS go beyond two or more codes to the pragmatic meanings of switching itself. CS itself can be the multilingual “we-code” (Auer, 2005; Hidalgo, 1988) and be used sociopragmatically to indicate distance/solidarity, informality, rapport, and to achieve other conversational work. Further, the pragmatics of switching via conversational management (turn-taking) are another dimension of pragmatic strategy (e.g., emphasis, creating ambiguity). Moyer (2000) found that use of the Spanish discourse marker “¿no?” in Gibraltar both negotiated (dis)agreement and served as a means of shifting the interaction to informal or friendly relations. Raymond’s (2015) analysis of bilingual (Spanish/English) and monolingual Spanish question and response sequences revealed that bilingual speakers frequently codeswitched in response to questions that were ‘oversupposing”; that is, where the person asking the question asserts or assumes an “access to knowledge that lies firmly in the answerer’s epistemic domain” (p. 65). He also noted that because participants had CS as an option, they did not use other resources that monolinguals used in responding to questions, such as repetitions, to the same degree. In sum, research on CS has demonstrated that it is an intrinsic part of multilingual repertoires and a resource for making meaning in interaction, pragmatics, interactional management, and identity construction. The pragmatics of hybridity are thus an important aspect of language empowerment and marginalization, as well as of communication and social perception.

2.2 Changing pragmatics in multilingual contexts Multilingual pragmatics includes pragmatics available in the two or more languages at speakers’ disposal. However, they also include pragmatic strategies that emerge from language contact, such as pragmatic transfer, and pragmatic strategies that rely on multilingualism itself as a strategy. Pragmatics themselves evolve in contact situations. Extensive research on bilingualism and Andean Spanish shows the influence of Quechua on Spanish pragmatics, and vice versa. For example, Escobar (2001) demonstrates that Andean Spanish has adapted to Quechua discoursepragmatic needs and that this motivation may also make language transfer more probable. It is important to note that this is not a simple case of interference or transfer: these Spanish to Quechua adaptations include structures not found in either language, but that fulfill the sociopragmatic needs of the Andean cultural context. In another example, Zavala (2001) showed that discourse functions of the conjunction pues (the meanings of which encompass ‘well, so, since, then’ in Andean Spanish differ from Standard Spanish norms.While we focus on Spanish in this chapter, Zavala (2001) also notes that the pragmatics of multilingual settings are not a one-way street: the author demonstrates Spanish function words can take on new pragmatic uses as discourse markers in indigenous languages (cf. Brody, 1995). Pragmatic changes in contact situations are often considered the result of interference or incomplete acquisition. For example, the pragmatic OV word order found in Andean Spanish is more common among less-fluent bilinguals (Muntendam, 2010; Ocampo & Klee, 1995). In another example of pragmatics evolving along with language change, U.S. Spanish speakers (both heritage and L2) tend to use the conditional verb form (which fulfills an important pragmatic functions in monolingual varieties of Spanish, such as mitigating requests) less than native Spanish speakers (Pinto & Raschio, 2007), possibly due to less exposure to and hence less acquisition of the form and its sociopragmatic context (Ervin-Tripp & Reyes, 2005). Similarly, Toribio (2004) notes that heritage Spanish speakers have limited exposure to higher/formal speech registers and the grammatical structures associated with them due to their conditions of acquisition, which takes place primarily in intimate and family situations. However, scholars have called for a change in perspective that views multilingual pragmatics as different or “divergent” pragmatic solutions that are appropriate to their local social contexts, 339

Cashman and Tseng

as opposed to “deficient” in comparison to an abstracted Standard Spanish norm (Dumitrescu, 2014, p.  10). For example, U.S. Spanish is different than other Spanishes, including its input varieties, and also has pragmatic differences. Toribio (2004) notes that U.S. Latino pronominal pragmatics align with English norms, but highlights that they are grammatically correct, citing an example of differences in normative discourse-pragmatic use that contradicts the notion of limited grammatical competence. U.S. Spanish tends to prefer tú due to intimate domains being the primary contexts of language acquisition, but also perhaps owing to the influence of English, which does not have two pronominal options.This overextension has led to increased permissibility in situations that would normally call for T/V separation, such as parent-directed conversation or in student-teacher interactions (Dumitrescu, 2015). U.S. Spanish also prefers Anglicized expressions of thanks and American indirect request strategies vs. Latino directness and solidarity (though (in)directness in the Spanish-speaking world also varies; see Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005). Pinto and Raschio (2007) and Pinto and de Pablos-Ortega (2014) found that U.S. Spanish heritage speakers’ requests were more direct than those of native English speakers, but less direct than those of native Spanish (Mexican) speakers, while Elias (2015) found that heritage speakers preferred indirect Spanish refusal strategies. In an example from narrative pragmatics, Carmiol and Sparks (2014) found that U.S. Latino children follow narrative pragmatics common to Spanish-speaking contexts internationally, which differ from (middle-class, white) U.S. narrative norms. In sum, as in other domains of heritage language research, shifting the lens on what we consider ‘correct’ or ‘proficient’ applies to norms in hybrid spaces. Rather than viewing contact pragmatics as deficient, we should view them as different, contextual, and varying within language varieties and speakers. New pragmatic practices also arise that differ from monolingual practices or rely on multilingualism itself for its relevance.Vann (2007) examined bilingual simultaneity in Catalan Spanish as a pragmatic resource that speakers use to construct common ground via shared expression of hybrid language and culture, through strategies such as speech play, narrative, and non-standard, culture-specific use of a particular interrogative (“o qué?”‘or what?’) as a downgrading strategy to mitigate face-threatening acts.Valero-Garcés (2002) found that both Spanish-speaking doctors and non-Spanish-speaking patients in a Peninsular Spanish setting used innovative pragmatic strategies that differed from those used in monolingual interactions. For example, doctors used a higher frequency of certain speech acts, such as directives and commissives, and patients used unexpected politeness strategies, such as introducing questions and not answering those addressed to them, as well as demonstrated a preference for giving more information than requested, and repetition. Finally, sometimes multilingual intercultural pragmatics are politeness preferences irrespective of the language being spoken, as in the case of Schrader-Kniffki´s (2004) study of Spanish-Zapotec bilinguals in Mexico who preserved a preference for Zapotec indirectness in Spanish. Similarly, speakers may accommodate pragmatically but maintain metapragmatic differences, as in Molina Martos’ (2010) finding that Latin American immigrants adapt to pragmatic norms of Madrid, but privately consider them rude.

3

Methodological considerations

We now turn to a discussion of current methodological considerations and main issues in the field. In this section we draw on the previous section’s review of the literature on multilingual pragmatics in the Spanish-speaking world in order to elaborate on several emerging themes and raise questions that relate to the future research directions that we identify in Section 4. Specifically, we discuss how four current issues present methodological challenges for the study of pragmatics in multilingual contexts across the Spanish-speaking world. The first of these 340

Pragmatics and multilingualism

issues includes new approaches to understanding languages and multilingualism, and the second relates to identities.The next issue, related to the first, rejects the deficit model when studying multilingual speakers and contexts. Finally, we discuss the challenges presented by mobility and multimodality.

3.1 New understandings of language and multilingual practices To date, the one area where the intersection of research involving pragmatics and multilingualism has been most productive is, of course, CS (cf. Tseng & Cashman, 2015). However, the future of this research direction is unclear as new understandings of multilingual realities challenge the very notion of codes in CS and move toward embracing the concept of translanguaging. Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) note that [a] recent movement in bi and multilingual studies has been to shift away from a focus on how distinct codes are switched or mixed, in favour of an interest in how boundaries and distinctions are the results of particular language ideologies and how language users manipulate the multilingual resources they have available to them. (p. 241) This comes into work on pragmatics in multilingual context because of how language users’ manipulation of these language resources, ideologies, boundaries, and distinctions make meaning in interaction. Makoni and Pennycook (2007) argued that “[l]anguages do not exist as real entities in the world and neither do they emerge from or represent real environments; they are, by contrast, the inventions of social, cultural and political movements” (p. 2).These positions grew out of ‘translanguaging,’ a term that was coined in the mid-1990s in Welsh and translated into English at the turn of the millennium (Li, 2018).Translanguaging was originally used to describe the use of more than one language by teachers and students in classroom discourse in Welsh language revitalization programs. Use of the term has grown well beyond this original educational context to be applied to everyday social interaction and even institutional, multimodal, and social media discourses. In this broader sense, translanguaging is used to describe speakers’ use of their varied linguistic resources rather than of the divisions between elements that comprise these repertoires. It emphasizes a unified linguistic repertoire at the level where speakers experience multilingualism. Other concepts emerging around the same time, such as ‘polylingualism’ (Jørgensen, 2008) and ‘metrolingualism’ (Maher, 2010; Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010), similarly emphasize hybridity and fluidity, although their meanings, uses, and theoretical repercussions may vary somewhat. Li (2018), proposes translanguaging as a “practical theory of language” that has descriptive adequacy, which offers “interpretations that can be used to observe, interpret, and understand other practices and phenomena” (p.  3), and “ask[s] new and different questions on both the practice under investigation and other existing theories about the practice” (p. 3). For Li, translanguaging does not necessarily invalidate CS or require the denial of the reality of named languages; however, playing with the notion of ‘trans,’ he explains that it does offer a potential to transcend our understanding of language systems, transform how applied linguists understand multilinguals’ competence and repertoires, and allow for productive transdisciplinary explorations of language use. MacSwan (2017) calls for a “multilingual perspective on translanguaging” in order to integrate the original aim of the translanguaging approach. That goal was to promote the maintenance of minoritized languages by validating authentic multilingual practices, with the internal representation of multilingual speakers’ linguistic repertoires, demonstrated by decades of research on CS from a structural perspective. 341

Cashman and Tseng

The heterogeneity of research on multilingualism, as well as its ever-evolving nature, raises new and interesting methodological considerations and challenges for researchers interested in pragmatics in multilingual contexts, just as pragmatics research itself weighs and examines its own methodological challenges and considerations (Koike & Félix-Brasdefer, 2012). It remains to be seen how the evolving understanding of named languages, multilinguals’ linguistic repertoires, and translanguaging will impact research on Spanish pragmatics in multilingual contexts. Tseng (2020) found that dialect translanguaging in an internally diverse Latino community was seen as pragmatically appropriate (i.e., polite) in that it facilitated communication, but retained distinction as an identity marker, and was normalized or rendered ordinary within the local context.

3.2

Identities, interaction, intersubjective realities; power/solidarity

Koike and Félix-Brasdefer (2012, p. 333) call for “research that examines under-studied macrosocial variables on communicative language use (e.g., age, social class, ethnicity, religion)” in varieties of Spanish, including Spanish in contact with other languages. We agree that this is much needed, as is a nuanced approach to these identity categories and more frequently studied categories such as sex/gender and nationality. As the understanding of identities in interaction has taken a sociocultural turn (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), the approach needed is one that moves beyond macro-social categories that speakers may bring into an interaction, but also studies how identities are assigned and constructed in interaction. In other words, the view of identity as an intersubjective achievement, of identity categories as mutable and emergent, is key for a Spanish pragmatics research in multilingual contexts. This approach may bring with it some methodological challenges, particularly for quantitative research, but it allows for a more thorough consideration of the richness and complexity of identities and interaction, as conveyed and understood through pragmatics.

3.3

Language ideologies and deficit model

Research on multilingual language practices has pushed back against the deficit model in which language practices of multilingual, minoritized speakers are seen as deficient in comparison with those of monolingual speakers from non-minoritized identities (MacSwan, 2000).The comparison of the language practices of multilingual speakers, including pragmatic features of contact varieties, with those of monolinguals is sometimes done in a way that does not demonstrate a sensitivity to the relationship between language varieties and their social contexts. For example, the comparison of a given pragmatic feature among bilingual speakers in language contact situations with monolingual speakers of a different language variety or different social class and/or education level can sometimes be problematic.What can often result is the disparaging representation of contact language varieties, particularly when multilingualism interacts with racial and class differences. The variation in monolingual varieties is downplayed and the full repertoires of multilingual speakers are not acknowledged. Furthermore, the use of research methods such as formal interviews, role plays with strangers, and written questionnaires, may discourage or suppress authentic multilingual practices due to the stigma against language mixing or the linguistic insecurity caused by continuous policing of speakers of stigmatized language varieties (Montes-Alcalá, 2000; Zentella, 2014). Therefore, it is important to question monolingual bias in research on Spanish pragmatics in multilingual contexts, as well as the ways methodological choices may ignore the dynamics of language variation and the range of multilingual speakers’ linguistic repertoires, in order not to reproduce linguistic inequality. 342

Pragmatics and multilingualism

3.4 Mobility and multimodality Traditional understandings of community, from cities to nation-states, are changing as mobility is increasingly becoming the norm rather than the exception.As new migrations result in novel contexts of language contact, and new technologies and media lead to novel contexts of interaction, exciting research possibilities and methodological challenges emerge.The growth in the use of the analytic concept of scales has accompanied a growing focus on language and globalization. Achugar and Canale (2014) engaged profitably with the question of scales and re-scaling, comprehensibility, and circulation of discourse in their study of two instances of discriminatory discourse in sports media. Cohen (2012) provided an in-depth example of the methodological choices and challenges one might encounter in trying to research what at first glance might seem like a relatively straightforward question: the pragmatics of doctor-patient interactions in which the doctor is a non-Hispanic, nonnative speaker of Spanish; a language in which the doctor, who may have partial or minimal competence, uses Spanish in interactions with patients in their native language of Spanish. Among all of the issues he addresses, Cohen highlights the challenge presented by speech communities that may be in a state of flux and individuals who may be mobile. Cohen also raises the question of individual variation in terms of the perception of other participants’ language use. The new attention paid to globalization, migration, and multimodality may also impact how we distinguish what does and does not constitute a language learning setting or how we understand language socialization.While there is an impressive and richly diverse body of research on pragmatics, and second language acquisition and intercultural pragmatics, there is significantly less research on pragmatics in multilingual contexts outside what might be broadly described as the language learning setting. However, as we look at the multiple and varied ways that mobile speakers encounter new language varieties and add these to their linguistic repertoires, we may find new language learning settings in which to study pragmatics. There has also been a new focus on multilingual pragmatics in digital/multimodal communication (Georgakopoulou & Spilioti, 2016) and new/virtual and social media, areas of particular interest due to new media’s role in maintaining transnational diasporic social networks in a globalized world (Kramsch, 2011; see also Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse, this volume).Androutsopoulos (2014) has used the term “context collapse” to describe the way networked interaction connects people from different social contexts.While the challenges are apparent, so, too, are the potential benefits.Wading into the complexity and ‘messiness’ of spontaneous interaction and multimodal data, with an interest in how participants make social meaning in multilingual, interconnected global settings—negotiating intention and interpretation—is as exciting as it is potentially rewarding.

4

Future directions and conclusion

The current issues and methodological considerations discussed in the previous section foreshadow the suggestions for future work that are concisely outlined here. Given pragmatics’ central interest in “speaker meaning,”“contextual meaning,”“how more gets communicated than is said,” and “the expression of relative distance” (Yule, 1996, p. 3), there is little doubt that pragmatics and multilingualism will continue to be relevant and of great interest to researchers, even as the way we understand identities and languages may be evolving. Koike and Félix-Brasdefer (2012) argue that “another area for exploration of pragmatic variation is that of languages in contact” (p. 333), and we, of course, could not agree more. In particular, research on multilingual speakers whose repertoires include languages that present opposing preferences in terms 343

Cashman and Tseng

of pragmatics to reveal whether one system dominates over others, or if a hybrid, compromise system emerges, would be of great interest. Research on pragmatics in multilingual contexts has tended to focus on bilingual pragmatics at the expense of ‘trilinguality’ and beyond. One area that we hope to see grow would be the use of a pragmatic lens to study what has been called “networked multilingualism” (Androutsopoulos, 2015).This concept presents us with new modes for interacting and new terrain to study interaction that should be especially able to profit from the intersection of multilingualism and pragmatics because taking seriously the new reality of networked and embedded global mediascapes—or the global circulation of print and electronic media—must include both a focus on multilingual speakers and contexts, as well as the dynamic process of meaning-making.Androutsopoulos describes networked multilingualism as “a cover term for multilingual practices that are shaped by two interrelated processes: being networked, i.e. digitally connected to other individuals and groups, and being in the network, i.e. embedded in the global digital mediascape of the web” (p. 188). In an example from the Spanish-speaking world, Lavender (2017) analyzes the role of code-switching in Twitter hashtags, where the author finds that users of the social media platform may employ CS (between Spanish, English, and Valencian) as a resource for identity work (e.g., English for prestige and to indicate membership in a multilingual community,Valencian to mark solidarity and membership in a local/regional community), thus conveying pragmatic meanings such as the relative social positioning of interactants. Emotions are another area of interest that we believe will continue to grow and that might be productive in multilingual pragmatic research. Rintell (1990) recognized that the expression of emotion—when, how, and to whom to display which emotions—is pragmatic. Pavlenko (2005) noted that emotions are poorly defined and understudied in general in multilingualism literature. Dewaele (2010) has explored how multilinguals feel about their languages and communicate emotions in those languages, and Prior (2015) examined emotion in L2 narratives.The centrality of emotion to human experience and human interaction, we believe, make this a rich area for future research, particularly at the intersection of multilingualism and pragmatics. The social and cognitive advantages of multilingualism have been the focus of a large body of research, ranging from the very young to the elderly language user. Multilingualism also has wellestablished social advantages linked to multilinguals’ mastery of complex pragmatic repertoires, such as an expanded range of interactional strategies (Canagarajah, 2007; Gardner-Chloros et al., 2000; among others), which are also important in navigating encounters and building social cohesion.As the world grows increasingly interconnected and language repertoires of migrant, mobile people grow increasingly multilingual but also partial, specialized, and restricted, the study of how multilingualism impacts multilingual individuals’ pragmatic meaning-making in interaction and how this compares with that of monolinguals, may continue to draw the attention of researchers. Finally, a growing interest in normativity, growing out of queer theory’s concept of heteronormativity, and extending now into sociolinguistic research well beyond any interest in sexuality or queer linguistics, may also have an impact on future research in multilingualism and pragmatics.The pressure to conform to what is considered normative, how normative linguistic behavior comes to be recognized as such, and how norms are resisted and changed, make this area a potentially fruitful direction for future research. In their exploration and complication of the notion of repertoire and competence, Blommaert and Backus (2013) suggest that multilingual language users’ increasingly complex, specialized, and layered repertoires, as well as the growing democratization of access to linguistic resources and markets “raises a variety of issues related to normativity” (p. 15).We agree, and we believe that research that stretches beyond what is considered appropriate in a given context, or what message is communicated by speakers and delves into how and why those notions became normative, and how this normativity is challenged and 344

Pragmatics and multilingualism

enforced in situations of language contact, will be of increasing interest to researchers.Although it does not have a multilingual focus, Hoff ’s (2019) investigation of the perception of mood variation in adverbial clauses with cuando engages with the question of individual variation, norms, and speakers’ communication of pragmatic meanings (epistemic commitment) through mood selection.This careful, detailed analysis acknowledges the realities of language change, questions accounts that rely only on normative descriptions to compare with multilingual data, and points toward an interesting area for future research; namely, how norms related to pragmatic strategies come about, how they are policed, and how they change. It is hoped that the overview of the intersection of pragmatics with multilingualism in the Spanish-speaking world will provide a jumping-off point for future research in this productive topic. While this chapter is necessarily selective in nature due to the limitations of space, it is hoped that it offers those unfamiliar with the research a useful glimpse into the rich complexity of multilingual communities. Much research remains to be done on the subject in general and in the Spanish-speaking world.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the editors of this handbook for inviting us to participate in such an exciting and comprehensive project.We are indebted to them and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on the chapter; all remaining shortcomings are our own.

Note 1 The term ‘multilingualism’ will be used throughout this essay as shorthand for ‘multilingualism and bilingualism.’

Further reading Lynch,A. (Ed.). (2019) The Routledge handbook of Spanish in the global city.Abingdon and NewYork: Routledge. Lynch’s collection brings together fifteen chapters on Spanish in settings as diverse as Lima, Peru, Hong Kong, and Sydney, Australia.The papers are varied in their approaches, but all begin with a description of the sociolinguistic context of the city in question. A thread throughout the chapters is a focus on mobility, or language in motion, through migration and media.The volume is divided into three sections that focus on the following three themes: globality/locality, space and indexicality, and identity. Martin-Jones, M., Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (Eds.). (2012). The Routledge handbook on multilingualism. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. This handbook provides a comprehensive exploration of research on multilingualism, including explorations of multilingualism in institutional contexts, politics and ideologies of multilingualism, multilingual language practices (crossing, code-switching), new and multi- modalities and literacies, and promising new directions in multilingual research.The coeditors’ introduction provides an excellent overview and state-of-the-field, tracing the development of multilingual ideologies, the emergence of a critical and ethnographic approach, and the possibilities afforded by new approaches and lenses. Niño-Murcía, M., & Rothman, J. (Eds.). (2008). Bilingualism and identity: Spanish at the crossroads with other languages.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Identity is the thread that ties the contributions to this volume together, along with the constant of Spanish as the language in contact with other languages in a variety of settings; namely, Spain, Latin America, and the U.S. Individual chapters vary in terms of methodology but, taken together, the contributions offer a broad and valuable perspective on the variety of multilingualism in the Spanish-speaking world. Rothman, J., & Potowski, K. (Eds.). (2011). Bilingual youth: Spanish in English-speaking societies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 345

Cashman and Tseng

This collection examines the language practices of young bilinguals in four English-speaking places: the U.S./ Canada, the U.K., England, and Australia/New Zealand.A variety of approaches are employed to study topics ranging from language attitudes and socialization to the syntactic effects of language contact, from identity construction to language maintenance.The chapters examine how multilingualism happens and the dynamics of how multilingualism is maintained (or not) in contact situations, synthesizing chapters by Romaine at the outset and Klee by way of conclusion to draw out the particular themes of identity and migration.

References Achugar, M., & Canale, G. (2014). Procesos de globalización y circulación del significado en los medios deportivos: Dos casos de polémicas sobre discurso discriminatorio en el fútbol internacional. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 3(1), 1–31. Androutsopoulos, J. (2014). Languaging when contexts collapse:Audience design in social networking. Discourse, Context and Media, 4–5, 62–73. Androutsopoulos, J. (2015). Networked multilingualism: Some language practices on Facebook and their implications. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(2), 185–205. Auer, P. (1984). Bilingual conversation.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Auer, P. (2005). Post-script: Code-switching and social identity. Journal of Pragmatics, 37(3), 403–410. Auer, P., & Di Luzio,A. (Eds.). (1992). The contextualization of language.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barker, G. (1947). Social functions of language in a Mexican-American community. Acta Americana, 5, 185–202. Blom, J-P., & Gumperz, J. J. (1972). Social meaning in linguistic structure: Code-switching in Norway. In J. J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics:The ethnography of communication (pp. 407–434). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Blommaert, J., & Backus, A. (2013). Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. In I. de Saint-Georges & J. J. Weber (Eds.), Multilingualism and multimodality: Current challenges for educational studies (pp. 11–32). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: Holt. Brody, J. (1995). Lending the ‘unborrowable’: Spanish discourse markers in indigenous American languages. In C. Silva-Corvalan (Ed.), Spanish in four continents: Studies in language contact and bilingualism (pp. 132– 148).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction:A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. Budach, G., & de Saint-Georges, I. (2017). Superdiversity and language. In S. Canagarjah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 63–78).Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Callahan, L. (2006). English or Spanish?! Language accommodation in New York City service encounters. Intercultural Pragmatics, 3(1), 29–53. Callahan, L. (2007). Spanish/English codeswitching in service encounters: Accommodation to the customer’s language choice and perceived linguistic affiliation. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 26(2), 1–24. Canagarajah, S. (2007). Lingua franca English, multilingual communities, and language acquisition. The Modern Language Journal, 91, 923–939. Carmiol, A. M., & Sparks, A. (2014). Narrative development across cultural contexts: Finding the pragmatic in parent-child reminiscing. In D. Mathews (Ed.), Pragmatic development in first language acquisition (pp. 279–294).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cashman, H. R. (2005). Identities at play: Language preference and group membership in bilingual talk in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 37(3), 301–315. Cashman, H. R. (2008). Accomplishing marginalization in bilingual interaction: Relational work as a resource for the intersubjective construction of identity. Multilingua, 27, 129–150. Cohen, A. (2012). Research methods for describing variation in intercultural pragmatics for cultures in contact and conflict. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language alternation: Methodological issues (pp. 271–294).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. del Valle, J. (Ed.). (2013). A political history of Spanish:The making of a language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dewaele, J. M. (2010). Emotions in multiple languages. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dumitrescu, D. (2014). La alternancia de lenguas como actividad de imagen en el discurso hispanounidense. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 2(1), 1–34. 346

Pragmatics and multilingualism

Dumitrescu, D. (2015). Pragmatic and discursive aspects of the U.S. Spanish. Informes del Observatorio/ Observatorio Reports. Retrieved from http://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/ 015_reports_pragmatic_discursive_us_spanish_1.pdf Elias,V. (2015). Pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic variation: Refusing among Spanish Heritage Speakers.  IULC Working Papers,  15(1), 1–32. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index. php/iulcwp/article/view/26217/31839 Ervin-Tripp, S., & Reyes, I. (2005). Child codeswitching and adult content contrasts. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9(1), 85–102. Escobar, A. M. (2001). Semantic and pragmatic functions of the Spanish diminutive in Spanish in contact with Quechua. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 20(1), 135–149. Farruggio, P. (2010). Latino immigrant parents’ views of bilingual education as a vehicle for heritage preservation. Journal of Latinos and Education, 9(1), 3–21. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). The language of service encounters: A pragmatic-discursive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: Contexto, uso y variación. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Fishman, J. A. (Ed.). (1999). The handbook of language and ethnic identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Fishman, J. A., & García, O. (Eds.). (2010). The handbook of language and ethnic identity:The success-failure continuum in language and ethnic identity efforts (Vol. 2). New York: Oxford University Press. Gafaranga, J. (2007). Talk in two languages. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gardner-Chloros, P., Charles, R., & Cheshire, J. (2000). Parallel patterns? A comparison of monolingual speech and bilingual codeswitching discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(9), 1305–1341. Georgakopoulou,A., & Spilioti,T. (Eds.). (2016). The Routledge handbook of language and digital communication. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haugen, E. (1953). The Norwegian language in America: A study in bilingual behavior. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hidalgo, M. (1988). Perceptions of Spanish-English code-switching in Juarez, Mexico. Latin American Institute Research Paper Series, 20. Retrieved September 27, 2019, from https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ laii_research/14/ Hoff, M. (2019). Epistemic commitment and mood alternation: A semantic-pragmatic analysis of Spanish future-framed adverbials. Journal of Pragmatics, 139, 97–139. Horn, L., & Kecskes, I. (2013). Pragmatics, discourse, and cognition. In S. R. Anderson, J. Moeschler, & F. Reboul (Eds.), The language-cognition interface (pp. 353–375). Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz. Jørgensen, J. N. (2008). Polylingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3), 161–176.Abington and New York: Routledge. Klee, C. A., & Lynch, A. (2009). El español en contacto con otras lenguas.Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Koike, D. A., & Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2012). Conclusions: Methodological issues in pragmatic variation. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language alternation: Methodological issues (pp. 319–336).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kramsch, C. (2011).The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural. Language Teaching, 44(3), 354–367. Lavender, J. (2017). Cambio de código en los hashtags: Expansión de audiencia y afiliación en una comunidad multilingüe. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 10(2), 297–318. Leopold, W. F. (1939–1949). Speech development of a bilingual child. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Li,W. (1994). Three generations, two languages, one family: Language choice and language shift in a Chinese community in Britain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Li,W. (2018).Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 1–23. Lipski, J. (2005). A history of Afro-Hispanic language: Five centuries, five continents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LoCastro,V. (2012). Pragmatics for language educators:A sociolinguistic perspective. New York: Routledge. Lynch, A. (2019). The Routledge handbook of Spanish in the global city.Abingdon and New York: Routledge. MacSwan, J. (2000).The threshold hypothesis, semilingualism, and other contributions to a deficit view of linguistic minorities. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 22(1), 3–45. 347

Cashman and Tseng

MacSwan, J. (2013). Code switching and linguistic theory. In T. K. Bhatia & W. C. Ritchie (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism and multilingualism (2nd ed., pp. 223–350). Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. MacSwan, J. (2017). A multilingual perspective on translanguaging. American Educational Research Journal, 54(1), 167–201. Maher, J. C. (2010). Metroethnicities and metrolanguages. In N. Coupland (Ed.), The handbook of language and globalization (pp. 575–591). Malden, MA and Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell. Makoni, S. B., & Pennycook, A. (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S. B. Makoni & A. Pennycook (Eds.), Disinventing and reconstituting languages (pp. 1–41). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Mar-Molinero, C. (2000). The politics of language in the Spanish-speaking world: From colonization to globalization. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Mar-Molinero, C., & Stewart, M. (2006). Globalization and language in the Spanish-speaking world. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Márquez Reiter, R., & Martín Rojo, L. (Eds.). (2014). A sociolinguistics of diaspora: Latino practices, identities, and ideologies.Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish pragmatics. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mey, J. (2001). Pragmatics: An introduction (2nd ed.). Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Molina Martos, I. (2010). Procesos de acomodación lingüística de la inmigración latinoamericana en Madrid. Lengua y Migración, 2(2), 27–48. Montes-Alcalá, C. (2000). Attitudes towards oral and written code-switching in Spanish-English bilingual youths. In A. Roca (Ed.), Research on Spanish in the United States (pp. 218–227). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Montrul, S. (2013). Bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante. Malden, MA and Oxford:Wiley. Moyer, M. G. (2000). Negotiating agreement and disagreement in Spanish-English bilingual conversations with ‘no.’ International Journal of Bilingualism, 4(4), 485–504. Muñoa Barredo, I. (2003). Pragmatic functions of code-switching among Basque-Spanish bilinguals. In M. C. Cabeza Pereiro,A. M. Lorenzo Suárez, & X. P. Rodríguez Yáñez (Eds.), Actas do I Simposio Internacional sobre o Bilinguismo (pp. 528–541).Vigo, Spain: Servizo de Publicacións da Universidade de Vigo. Muntendam, A. (2010). Linguistic transfer in Andean Spanish: Syntax or pragmatics? (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Nilep, C. (2006). Code switching in sociocultural linguistics. Colorado Research in Linguistics, 19, 1–22. Ocampo, F., & Klee, C. A. (1995). Spanish OV/VO word-order variation in Spanish-Quechua bilingual speakers. In C. Silva-Corvalán (Ed.), Spanish in four continents: Studies in language contact and bilingualism (pp. 71–82).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Otheguy, R., & Zentella, A. C. (2012). Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialect leveling, and structural continuity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Otsuji, E., & Pennycook,A. (2010). Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 240–254. Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinto, D., & de Pablos-Ortega, C. (2014). Seamos pragmáticos: introducción a la pragmática española. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Pinto, D., & Raschio, R. (2007). A comparative study of requests in heritage speaker Spanish, L1 Spanish, and L1 English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(2), 135–155. Potowski, K., & Cameron, R. (2007). Spanish in contact: Policy, social and linguistic inquiries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Prior, M. (2015). Emotion and discourse in L2 narrative research. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Rangel, N., Loureiro-Rodríguez,V., & Moyna, M. I. (2015). “Is that what I sound like when I speak?”: Attitudes towards Spanish, English, and code-switching in two Texas border towns.  Spanish in Context, 12(2), 177–198. Raymond, C. W. (2014). Negotiating entitlement to language: Calling 911 without English. Language in Society, 43(1), 33–59. Raymond, C. W. (2015). Questions and responses in Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual conversation. Language & Communication, 42, 50–68. Raymond, C.W. (2019). Negotiating languages on the radio in Los Angeles. In A. Lynch (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish in the global city (pp. 406–429).Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Rintell, E. (1990).That’s incredible: Stories of emotion told by second language learners and native speakers. In R. C. Scarcella, E. S. Anderson, & S. D. Krashen (Eds.), Developing communicative competence in a second language (pp. 75–94). New York: Newbury House. 348

Pragmatics and multilingualism

Roca,A., & Lipski, J. (Eds.). (1993). Spanish in the United States: Linguistic contact and diversity. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ronjat, J. (1913). Le développement du langage observé chez un enfant bilingue. Paris: Librairie Ancienne H. Champion. Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of latinidad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46(5), 621–647. Rothman, J., & Potowski, K. (Eds.). (2011). Bilingual youth: Spanish in English-speaking societies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Safont Jordà, M. P. (2005). Third language learners: Pragmatic production and awareness. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Schrader-Kniffki, M. (2004). Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning.  In R. Márquez Reiter & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish (pp. 157–174). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Silva-Corvalán, C. (Ed.). (1995). Spanish in four continents: Studies in language contact and bilingualism.Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life.  Language & Communication, 23(3–4), 193–229. Thompson, G., & Lamboy, E. (2012). Spanish in bilingual and multilingual settings around the world. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Toribio,A. J. (2004). Spanish/English speech practices: Bringing chaos to order. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 7(2–3), 133–154. Tseng, A. (2011). DJ stances, station goals: Performing identity on a bilingual Arizona radio show. Proceedings of the 19th Symposium About Language and Society, Austin (SALSA), Texas Linguistics Forum (TLF), 54, 57–71. Tseng,A. (2018).Abriendo closings in bilingual radio speech: Discourse strategies, code-switching, and the interactive construction of broadcast structures. Text & Talk, 38(4), 481–502. Tseng,A. (2020). Normalization of dialect translinguistics in an internally diverse global-city diasporic community. In J. Won Lee & S. Dovchin (Eds.), Translinguistics: Negotiating innovation and ordinariness. New York and London: Routledge. Tseng, A., & Cashman, H. R. (2015). Code-switching pragmatics. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1–6). Hoboken, NH: John Wiley & Sons. Turell, M.T. (Ed.). (2000). Multilingualism in Spain: Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of linguistic minority groups. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Valdés, G., & Pino, C. (1981).‘Muy a tus órdenes’: Compliment responses among Mexican-American bilinguals. Language in Society, 10, 53–72. Valero-Garcés, C. (2002). Interaction and conversational constrictions in the relationships between suppliers of services and immigrant users. Pragmatics, 12(4), 469–495. Vann, R. E. (2007). Doing Catalan Spanish: Pragmatic resources and discourse strategies in ways of speaking Spanish in Barcelona. In J. Holmquist, A. Lorenzino, & L. Sayahi (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the Third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (pp. 183–192). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054. Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in contact: Findings and problems.The Hague: Mouton. Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zavala,V. (2001). Borrowing evidential functions from Quechua:The role of pues as a discourse marker in Andean Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(7), 999–1023. Zentella,A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Zentella,A. C. (2014).TWB (talking while bilingual): Linguistic profiling of Latina/os, and other linguistic torquemadas. Latino Studies, 12, 620–635.  

349

Part V

(Im)politeness in interaction; humor

20 Politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world Gerrard Mugford and J. César Félix-Brasdefer

1

Introduction

The words ‘polite’ and ‘politeness’ can be traced back to general notions related to cleanliness or to smooth, polished, refined, planned, civilized, or courtly activity.The English word ‘polite’ is derived from the Latinate past participle ‘politus,’ from the verb ‘polire,’ meaning ‘polished’ or ‘smoothed.’The word ‘courtesy,’ in German ‘Hoflichkeit,’ in French ‘courtoisie,’ in Dutch ‘beschaafdheid,’ in Portuguese ‘cortesia,’ or in Spanish ‘cortesía,’ all refer back to its original root, alluding to polite or planned behavior in the court.While still reflecting historical verbiages of prescriptive social conduct, modern-day politeness or courteous behavior has been conceptualized both as an instrument for emphasizing social differences among civilized people and as a strategy for expressing deference, etiquette, affect, courtly manners, and consideration for others. Contemporary interest in politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world can be traced back to Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) seminal work, as researchers have replicated their framework, adapted their schema, or have tried to develop their own theory and/or descriptive model that they consider to be more relevant and responsive to the Spanish-speaking world. Whether followed or reassessed, Brown and Levinson’s work continues to remain a theoretical focal point for Spanish-language politeness studies. Other studies in Spanish-language politeness research have adopted/adapted alternative models, including sociopragmatic approaches (Bravo, 1999, 2004; Márquez Reiter, 2009), politeness and face systems (Scollon & Scollon, 2001), rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2000, 2007, 2008), and conversation analysis for politeness in interaction (Briz, 2004; Briz & Albelda, 2013), to name a few.To examine the post-Brown and Levinson politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world, this chapter is structured in the following way. In Section 2 we review fundamental concepts and selective theoretical models that examine how contemporary politeness research has been analyzed in terms of the three waves of politeness theory, representing theoretical, discursive, and contextual-discursive approaches.We then build on classical politeness work outlined by Placencia and Garcia (2007) and Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2005) while arguing that Spanish language research can also be understood and explained usefully in terms of the three waves. Overall, Spanish-language politeness is generally understood as a sociocultural performance of social practices such as speech act sequences (e.g., agreeing-disagreeing, invitation-response, greetings) that are perceived as polite behavior 353

Mugford and Félix-Brasdefer

by the interlocutor during the negotiation of face in social interaction.We conclude Section 2 with a review of selective research that examines intercultural politeness in call centers in Latin America. Section 3 presents current methodological considerations in examining politeness phenomena in Spanish, followed by concluding remarks and future directions in politeness research (Section 4).

2 2.1

Review of existing research First-order vs. second-order approaches to politeness

The notion of politeness has been approached from two angles: first-order politeness (‘politeness1’) as perceived by members of different sociocultural groups, and second-order politeness (‘politeness2’) as a theoretical construct or the scientific conceptualization of politeness1 (Eelen, 2001;Watts, 2003;Watts, Ide, & Ehlich, 2008). Politeness1 refers to the common notion of the term, i.e., the way politeness manifests itself in communicative interaction, or politeness-aspractice in everyday interaction. Politeness1 comprises three types of politeness: expressive, classificatory, and metapragmatic.‘Expressive politeness1’ refers to politeness encoded in speech reflecting the speaker’s polite intentions and may be realized in specific terms of address, honorifics, conventional formulaic expressions (‘thank you,’ ‘excuse me’), and various linguistic devices, such as those employed to mitigate the direct illocutionary force of a request or to reduce the negative effects of a refusal response (e.g., the use of the word ‘please,’ or the use of the conditional or imperfect to express politeness in situationally appropriate contexts as in Quería pedirle si podría escribirme una carta de recomendación para el programa de doctorado ‘I wanted to ask if you could write a letter of recommendation for the doctoral program’). ‘Classificatory politeness1’ refers to politeness as a categorical tool; it encompasses the hearer’s judgments of others’ polite or impolite behavior (e.g., calling someone polite or impolite). Finally, ‘metapragmatic politeness1’ refers to how people talk about politeness as a concept in everyday interaction, and what people perceive politeness to be in different interactional practices, as in the following examples from San José, Costa Rica (1) and Seville, Spain (2) (Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, p. 154): (1)

Metapragmatic politeness: Male, Costa Rica La cortesía en Costa Rica, yo pienso es tener buenos modales, ser una persona atenta con los demás, ser servicial y tratar de ayudar a los demás en lo que se pueda. Hacer favores. Ser cortés es ayudar a los demás, la amabilidad. ‘Politeness in Costa Rica, I think is to have good manners, to be a caring person with others, to be helpful and try to help others as much as possible. Do favors.To be polite is to help others, kindness.’

(2)

Metapragmatic politeness: Female, Seville, Spain La cortesía en el sur de España se asocia con la hospitalidad y con ser una persona buena. Nosotros llamamos ser buena gente, ser buena gente es lo opuesto a ser malaje. Malaje se refiere a una persona que no tiene gracia, no sonríe, no te trata de igual, sino que a lo mejor puede creerse superior. Eso es lo que es una persona mala gente (mala persona).Y bueno, ser cortés significa si, por ejemplo, un extranjero va a mi ciudad, que yo lo trate de una forma correcta, que si me pregunta dónde está la catedral de Sevilla, yo le guíe. Eso es ser cortés, tratar a las personas de igual, significa no mostrar que tú eres diferente, sino que las personas somos iguales.

354

Politeness research

‘Politeness in southern Spain is associated with hospitality and being a good person. We say being good people, being good people is the opposite of being malaje. Malaje refers to a person who is not funny, does not smile, does not treat you as an equal, but rather may think they are superior.That is what is a person, bad people (a bad person). And well, being polite means if, for example, a foreigner comes to my city, that I treat him in the right way, that if he asks me where the cathedral of Seville is, I will show him.That is being polite, treating people as equals, it means not showing that you are different, but that we as people are all the same.’ Politeness1 has an evaluative character, involves social norms, and covers different aspects of the lay notion of politeness and how politeness is intentionally encoded in language by the speaker in various communicative practices, as well as how politeness is perceived or evaluated by the hearer. Since classic linguistic politeness theory represents one aspect of social interaction, it is recognized as first-order politeness (e.g., Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987) and has been the focus of empirical work carried out mainly in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics (Eelen, 2001). In contrast, politeness2 refers to the scientific conceptualization of politeness1 and to a theory of the universal principles governing human interaction.The construction of a theory of politeness2 may help us envision how politeness1 works in social interaction, what its function is in society, how polite behavior is distinguished from impolite behavior, and what the characteristics of (im)polite behavior are. In addition, it may help establish the existence of linguistic universals in politeness and provide us with a better understanding of what (im)politeness is and is not during various communicative practices. In general, second-order politeness has been presented in various theoretical models that mainly examine politeness as a theoretical construct, as in the universal model of linguistic politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987). While traditional models of politeness that attempt to explain polite behavior have mainly focused on politeness2, their definitions occasionally allude to politeness1, especially when they refer to perceived or evaluative notions of polite behavior. Since the controversy of whether the various models of politeness stress a politeness1 or politeness2 orientation has already been addressed in the literature (Eelen, 2001;Watts, 2003), the objective of the following sections is to provide an overview as well as a critical appraisal of the most influential current models of social interaction that attempt to explain the notion of linguistic politeness, face/facework, socially appropriate behavior, and relational work. The next section reviews the developments of politeness theories in “waves of politeness” and their application to Spanish-language research.

2.2 Three waves in politeness The adoption of the three-wave approach to understanding linguistic politeness (Culpeper & Terkourafi, 2017; Grainger, 2011; Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Ogiermann & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2019) provides a useful framework to chart how research has developed and map out possible new investigative horizons specifically in relation to the Spanish-speaking world.

2.2.1

First wave

Initial interest in politeness research is characterized by positioning the phenomenon within a theoretical and universalistic framework. Ground-breaking work was carried out by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), Lakoff (1973), and Leech (1983) who visualized linguistic politeness in terms of social action and speech-act models (Levinson, 2017; Searle, 1969, 1976) where the focus 355

Mugford and Félix-Brasdefer

is on appeasing the hearer’s face.Their work is so fundamental that contemporary studies often replicate, reassess, or refute their theories as a research starting point. Grice’s theory of meaning (1975, 1989) serves as the foundation of these politeness models, which have been critically reviewed in previous research (e.g., Culpeper & Terkourafi, 2017; Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, Chapter 6; Leech, 2014;Watts, 2003). Félix-Brasdefer (2019, Chapter 6) reviews these politeness models with reference to existing research into Spanish-language politeness. Since we focus on post-Brown and Levinson politeness work in Spanish, the main concepts of this model are described here. Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) universal model of linguistic politeness is founded on the notion of ‘face,’ derived from Goffman (1967), which Brown and Levinson define as “the public self-image that every member [of a society] wants to claim for himself ” (p. 61).The authors distinguish between two aspects of face that they claim to be universal: positive and negative.While positive face refers to the hearer’s desire to be appreciated or approved (e.g., seeking agreement, solidarity, reciprocity), negative face “represents the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction, i.e., freedom of action and freedom from imposition” (Brown & Levinson, 1987, p. 61) (e.g., being indirect, giving deference, being apologetic).According to Brown and Levinson, face is invested, is something that can be lost, and must be constantly tended to in interaction. Brown and Levinson argued that during social interaction a speaker must rationally assess the nature of a face-threatening act (FTA).The assessment of the seriousness of an act involves three independent factors that are culture-sensitive: the social distance (D) and social power (P) between a speaker and a hearer, and the absolute ranking (R) of impositions in a particular culture: Social Distance (D) between the speaker and the hearer (in effect, the degree of familiarity or solidarity they share—a symmetric relation); relative power (P) of the speaker with respect to the hearer (in effect, the degree to which the speakers can impose their will on the hearer—an asymmetric relation); and absolute ranking (R) of impositions in the culture in terms of the expenditure of goods and/or services by the hearer, the right of the speaker to perform the act, and the degree to which the hearer welcomes the imposition. Brown and Levinson’s model has been criticized for its ethnocentric and individualistic approach to examine politeness practices in different languages and across varieties of Spanish (e.g., Bravo, 2004; Culpeper & Terkourafi, 2017; Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, Chapter 6; Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Leech, 2014; Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005, Chapter 4; Mills, 2003).The main criticism of Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness arises from the fact that this model of social interaction is individualistic and subscribes to the notion of a speaker as a rational agent “who is, during the initial phase of generating an utterance at least, unconstrained by social considerations and thus free to choose egocentric, asocial and aggressive intentions” (Werkhofer, 2008, p.  156). Consequently, this model speaker cannot represent the politeness behavior of non-Western cultures, in which a group rather than an individual orientation is the behavioral norm (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2008a; Hernández-Flores, 1999; Placencia, 1996).To highlight one example, Placencia (1996) showed that deference, realized by strategic lexical choices, is an important sociocultural value present in the notion of face in Ecuador.The author states that in Ecuadorian society, deference is not due to the desire to protect one’s individuality or territory (i.e., negative politeness, following Brown and Levinson), but rather to “conform to the social norms of the group . . . and dictate respect to the elderly and parents” (Placencia, 1996, p. 21).

2.2.2

Second wave

Questioning the universalist, ethnocentric, and culturally limited dimension in first-wave politeness theory, Eelen (2001) influenced discursive researchers (e.g.,Arundale, 2006a, 2006b; Locher & Watts, 2005) to reject a one-size-fits-all theory and seek out a more co-constructive approach 356

Politeness research

that reflects contextualized speaker/hearer interaction and that emphasizes localized communicative patterns and practices.This second wave had an impact on the field of politeness studies as it transformed the research focus from not only critiquing Brown and Levinson’s approach but also establishing a discursive framework for examining politeness (van der Bom & Mills, 2015). However, despite its more emic approach, discursive approaches run the danger of positioning all politeness interventions at such a localized level as to make it difficult to make any overall claims about, or garner insights into, politeness in general (Kádár, 2017a).

2.2.3

Third wave

Questioning the underlying local management focus of the second wave, proponents of thirdwave politeness approaches have attempted to reposition politeness research by combining analysts’ viewpoints and understandings with those of participants, which were gained through second-wave discursive approaches (Kádár, 2017a; Kádár & Haugh, 2013).Third-wave approaches combine participant understandings with observer theorizing (Kádár, 2017b; Kádár & Haugh, 2013). Such attempts, for instance, can be seen in the work of Culpeper & Hardaker (2017) who examines lay perceptions of impoliteness within a theoretical framework of strategies and social interaction. In his work, Culpeper adopts Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) model of rapport management to examine impoliteness practices, but her model has also been adopted to examine politeness practices at the discourse level in different varieties of Spanish. Strong criticism of the secondwave discursive approach can also be seen in the following models: frame (Terkourafi, 2005), interaction (Haugh, 2007), and genre (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Lorenzo-Dus, & Bou-Franch, 2010).

2.3 Waves of politeness in the Spanish-speaking world Any survey of politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world needs to refer to two key texts: Placencia and García’s (2007) Research on Politeness in the Spanish-speaking world and Márquez Reiter and Placencia’s (2005) Spanish pragmatics (Ch. 4. Examining linguistic politeness phenomena). To this should be added the important work carried out by, among others, Briz and Albelda (2013) and Bravo and Briz (2004). Placencia and García conducted a regional review of Peninsular, Latin American, and United States Spanish-language politeness practices. Building on the previous work of Escandell Vidal (1993, but see also 2006) and Haverkate (1994), Placencia and García designed the different chapters to reflect different understandings of politeness and how they are practiced. So, for instance, Curcó (2007) argues that Mexican politeness is principally concerned with “safeguarding the positive face of an interlocutor, which, in my view, pervades Mexican verbal interaction” (2008, p. 105). Underscoring Grice’s prominent influence, Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2005) outline the history of Spanish-language politeness research which largely reflects pragmalinguistic (speech act) accounts while also including a reappraisal of Brown and Levinson’s work. They do, however, also include sociocultural and rapport management views of politeness patterns and practices. While Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2005) and Placencia and Garcia (2007) reflect a first-wave approach to politeness, we examine more recent politeness research in the Spanishspeaking world following the three-wave approach. In our study of the three waves, we define politeness as the expression, enactment, and evaluation of everyday interaction, which allows us to examine the multi-faceted aspects of Spanish-language politeness. Given space limitations and the overabundance of current research, only a few representative studies are reviewed. 357

Mugford and Félix-Brasdefer

2.3.1

First-wave politeness research in Spanish

A major focus of Spanish-language politeness research reflects Gricean approaches toward politeness within the Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) framework. Research has largely focused on speech acts, face, and mitigation (see e.g., Briz and Albelda (2013) and Bravo and Briz (2004)). 2.3.1.1 SPEECH ACTS

As seen in Márquez Reiter and Placencia’s (2005) historical survey, we argue that politeness and speech acts still reflect a strong ongoing research interest. For instance, Félix-Brasdefer focused on requests in formal and informal situations and examines “intra-lingual pragmatic variation, in particular, the effect of region on speech act production” (2011, p. 2992). By conducting open role plays, he compares and contrasts request speech acts between Mexican and Costa Rican female interactants in symmetrical and asymmetrical interactions. He concludes that conventional indirectness reflects the principal strategy in both groups for negotiating requests. Researchers have also replicated Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) power, solidarity, and distance dimensions. For example, García (2008) examines invitation speech acts, comparing informal interaction among Venezuelans and Argentineans where there are low social distance and power dimensions. Participants were asked to take part in a role play scenario which involved convincing interactants to accept a party invite.While García noted strategic differences between the two groups, results suggest that expressing solidarity rather than deference to the addressee was a common denominator in trying to achieve acceptance. First-wave researchers have also veered from a well-trodden research path in Spanish-language politeness studies of examining apologizing, refusing, disagreeing, and complimenting speech acts (for a survey, see Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005). For example, in more nonconventional research, Dumitrescu (2011) studied the use of ritual situational wishes such as ¡Que tengas un buen día! (Have a nice day!) over a wide geographical range of Spanish-speaking participants by administering a ‘questionnaire of social habits’ that focused on ritual formulae in different contexts and situations. Her results indicated that the social image of the well-wisher and social affiliation with the addressee are equally important considerations for Spanish-speakers independently of where they live. Research into Spanish-language speech acts continues to draw the attention of politeness researchers, especially in transactional contexts such as corner shops (Placencia, 2008) and media (Fuentes Rodríguez & Placencia, 2013; see also Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse in Spanish research and Chapter 2 on speech act research in Spanish, this volume). 2.3.1.2 FACE

Face has been a key concern in Spanish-language politeness research as studies have been carried out intralingually within individual countries or cross-culturally between countries’ facework strategies; e.g., intercultural service calls (Márquez Reiter, 2009) and the realization of face in Spanish conversation (Hernández-Flores, 1999, 2004, 2014). Our current understanding of politeness concerns the negotiation of face that is co-constructed by two or more participants who negotiate social action in social interaction (Haugh, 2009). With regard to Spanish, scholars have analyzed different aspects of social interaction such as colloquial conversation (Briz, 2004; Briz & Albelda, 2013; Hernández-Flores, 1999, 2014), intercultural encounters (Márquez Reiter, 2009), a sociocultural approach to the analysis of the components of face (e.g., autonomy (independence) and affiliation (group-based, identification with the other)), and the analysis of rapport management in service encounter interactions (Bataller, 358

Politeness research

2019; Escalona-Torres, 2019; Placencia & García, 2019).What these models have in common is their application of methodological tools for the analysis of conversation for the analysis of polite behavior (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 2007), as explained below. Indeed, face is a major concern in Spanish-language politeness research, given the number of studies that reflect first-wave concerns such as respeto and confianza (see e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2008b; Schneider & Placencia, 2017). Face in such studies is seen to be negotiated and coconstructed through social interaction (e.g.,Arundale, 2006a, 2006b). For instance, Curcó (2014) and Félix-Brasdefer (2008a) studied face in the Mexican sociocultural context and emphasized the social need to maintain the imagen positiva ‘positive face.’ In carrying out her research, she reviewed relevant literature (e.g., Curcó, 1998; Curcó & De Fina, 2002) to make her case. She argued that positive face in an important consideration in certain Mexican Spanish speech act categories and conversational styles and practices. While Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) provided the theoretical backbone for a large body of first-wave Spanish-language politeness research, attempts have been made to formulate a framework that is argued to be more pertinent to the Spanish-language context. Notable among these efforts is the work of Bravo (1999, 2004) who has claimed that the categories of autonomía ‘autonomy’ and afiliación ‘affiliation’ better reflect the positive-face concerns of Spanish-language speakers. Autonomía appears to represent an interactant’s self-perception along with the group’s perception of the person as an individual; afiliación reflects the individual’s and the group’s perception as a group member. To explore these categories, Bravo asked Argentinean academics to study a conversational corpus of stereotypes of Argentineans abroad. Bravo argued that the findings support the need for a sociocultural dimension when identifying and understanding politeness patterns and practices. Bravo’s work has influenced and continues to influence investigations into Spanish-language politeness, as seen in the work of the research group Estudios sobre el Discurso de la Cortesía en Español (EDICE). These represent sociopragmatic approaches that examine ‘face’ contexts across varieties of Spanish, as in Hernández-Flores’s (1999) analysis of face among Spaniards from Southern Spain. However, perhaps a stronger case should be made for the distinctiveness of autonomy and affiliation: that they are not merely a reworking of Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) positive and negative politeness, and, subsequently, may be open to the same criticisms of universality and ethnocentrism.

2.3.1.3 MITIGATION

Following the work of Briz (1998) who linked politeness with mitigation (for a review see Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005), attenuation and intensification continue to be strong areas of politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world (e.g.,Albelda Marco, 2010). Current work, for instance, has examined the affective dimension to mitigation, as seen in Czerwionka (2014) who analyzed speakers of Mexican Spanish participating in four role play situations that covered such contexts as asking about a missing car. The author found that “the participant perspectives accounted for not only a cognitive evaluation of the interactions, but also an evaluation using words of emotion” (p. 127). Consequently, she argued that emotion should be seen as an important factor when expressing mitigation. Meanwhile, examining mitigation in social media, Maíz-Arévalo (2018) studied how mitigation was employed in two Peninsular Spanish Facebook groups. Contrasting a fan page with a personal page that reflected online and offline hybrid relationships, she found that mitigation reflected different uses: the use of diminutives is higher in the hybrid corpus, where they are also more versatile and can express afect, closeness, size, reproach and mitigation. In contrast, diminutives are 359

Mugford and Félix-Brasdefer

markedly scarcer in the online corpus, where their function is practically reduced to mitigation. (2018, p. 33) Therefore, Maíz-Arévalo is seen to broaden the scope of mitigation, which is also reflected in Czerwionka (2012), who examines how imposition and uncertainty motivate mitigation, and Flores-Ferrán (2010), who studies Spanish psychotherapeutic discourse since therapists may use mitigation to reach their objectives.

2.3.2

Second-wave politeness research in Spanish

Second-wave research has questioned Brown and Levinson’s applicability to the Spanish-language context or looked for contextual uses of politeness in the Spanish-speaking world.A growing body of work has looked at the negotiation of refusals to invitations, to suggestions, and to requests among Mexican students (Félix-Brasdefer, 2008b), as well as the realization of politeness during the negotiation of service interactions (Félix-Brasdefer, 2012, 2015; Félix-Brasdefer & Placencia, 2019). Additionally, Márquez Reiter (2000) looked at how Uruguayan students negotiate different requests. While most of Spanish-language politeness research still reflects first-wave approaches, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch (2019) adopted an emic approach and explored lay understandings of face in Peninsular Spanish.They argue that “second-order constructs” (2019, p. 301) should be built on emic research. Examining imagen ‘face’ and identity by “conducting two focus group discussions of personal experiences of the construct imagen” (2019, p.  305), they identified first-order (Haugh, 2013a, 2013b) definitions in dictionaries and contrasted them with newspaper corpora and the focus-group interviews. The results indicated that emic and etic concepts of “[f]ace and identity co-constitute each other and are thus hard to separate either theoretically or analytically” (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2019, p. 324).

2.3.3

Third-wave politeness research in Spanish

It is challenging to identify third-wave approaches in Spanish-language politeness research since investigators usually adopt a strong, predetermined theoretical base from the outset. Studying participants’ interactional agenda and goals, Márquez Reiter (2019) is seen to adopt a third-wave approach to Spanish-language politeness as she examined “a corpus of inbound and outbound calls part of a wider study on mediated business interactions” (2019, p. 124). She found that the interactants from different backgrounds (both the call center agent and the client) overcame transactional constraints to achieve interactional goals.Ambiguity, caution, and an apparent lack of preliminary straightforwardness characterized the interactions where research has normally focused only on formulaic responses and routines. Spanish language third-wave approaches have paid special attention to discursive practices in social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. For instance, Placencia (2019a) examined how sellers in a virtual marketplace in Ecuador turn down attempts at bargaining. By constructing a corpus of online refusals, she identified “verbal strategies with a mitigating function (e.g., affiliative address, greetings, apologies, justifications, expressions of thanks)” (Placencia, 2019a, p. 173). Placencia (2019b) also examined social practices on Instagram, focusing on complimenting behavior among Ecuadorian teenage girls. By gaining research access and consent to the teenagers’ Instagram group, Placencia argued that complimenting behavior was influenced by factors such as response times, typing ability, and effectiveness, while there was also a tension between distinctiveness and meaningfulness. She found that high emotional involvement, creativity, and 360

Politeness research

intensification/exaggeration were reflected in complimenting behavior, which was often characterized by multimodality (e.g., the use of emojis). Future work in Spanish-language politeness research would benefit from third-wave approaches as actual politeness practices and patterns are observed and analyzed and related to a theoretical framework rather than the other way around. Future research also needs to focus on collecting emic data and examining the layperson’s understanding and interpretation of politeness. This can be achieved by offering more of a thick description of politeness patterns and practices within a grounded theory.

2.4 Intercultural politeness in call centers Intercultural communication is broadly concerned with language use in oral or written discourse between members of different languages and cultures who share a language in common (Cogo & House, 2017; Kecskes, 2013; Scollon & Scollon, 2001; Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009). The literature in Spanish distinguishes two types of intercultural communication with regard to politeness phenomena: the first includes speakers of Spanish who interact with speakers of a different language/culture, such as requesting and promising among speakers of Mexican Spanish and Zapotec speakers (Schrader-Kniffki, 2007) or service providers in mediated call centers between Mexican agents and U.S. clients (Mugford, 2019). In these studies, politeness is realized in ways in which service providers and service seekers open and close the interaction, and how they complete the request for service with various degrees of interpersonal and deferential politeness. (For additional information on intercultural pragmatics, see Chapter 18 on cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics research, this volume.) The second understanding of intercultural communication is based on Márquez Reiter’s (2011) corpus of institutional telephone service encounters between call centre agents in a Latin American company and a range of clients that employed different varieties of Spanish. These telephone interactions are task-oriented, following the institutional expectations of the company. Further, due to the different Spanish varieties spoken in Spain and across Latin America (FélixBrasdefer, 2019, Chapter 7; Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005), Márquez Reiter (2009, 2010, 2011) analyzed a corpus of call-mediated service encounters with interlocutors of a Spanish variety who are both monolingual and intercultural: monolingual because the interactions are conducted in the interlocutors’ native language (i.e., Spanish) and intercultural because participants come from different sociocultural backgrounds and speak different varieties of Spanish (see Chapter 15 on regional pragmatic variation, this volume). Márquez Reiter (2009) presented two examples of mediated telephone conversations between a Montevidean agent and two clients from different countries in Latin America.According to the Latin American call center company, agents are expected to use deferential politeness, such as the formal address (usted (V)).The author analyzes intercultural interactions between a Bonaerense client (Argentinean) and a Montevidean (Uruguay) service provider.Although speakers from these varieties of Spanish share similar interpersonal sociopragmatic characteristics (e.g., a preference for informality, tú form over usted (T/V), a preference for affiliation, and a conversational egalitarian style), they differ in how each of these participants perceive degrees of (im)politeness. Finally, Márquez Reiter (2011) examined institutional interaction between a Montevidean call centre agent and a Colombian (Bogotano) client in intercultural telephone service encounters.These speakers varied with regard to different conversational styles and politeness expectations: the Montevidean agent preferred an egalitarian style and a lack of formality (preference for solidarity politeness or affiliation over autonomy), while the Bogotano client showed a preference for deferential politeness, such as formality (use of V over T), respect, and use of titles (señor/señora).Thus, in this intercultural communication, Márquez Reiter 361

Mugford and Félix-Brasdefer

showed interactional misfires as a result of different sociopragmatic expectations.The interactional misfires occur as a result of different politeness orientations that have been observed in the literature (Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, Chapters 7 & 8; Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005, Chapter 5). Sociopragmatic variation in the realization of politeness practices happens when speakers prefer deferential politeness or orient to deferential politeness and hierarchical closeness, such as respeto, simpatía, formality, a focus on the transaction (e.g., Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru) and an orientation for interpersonal connectedness and an egalitarian conversational style. Thus, the manifestation of politeness practices in intercultural contexts is best analyzed with regard to different politeness orientations according to the expectations of each sociocultural group, as well as situational and macrosocial factors such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, and institutional or ethnic affiliation. For an in-depth analysis of pragmatic variation and politeness practices across varieties of Spanish in the context of service encounter interactions, see FélixBrasdefer and Placencia (2019).

3

Methodological considerations

Researchers in politeness research have examined whether Brown and Levinson’s Anglocentric approach is applicable to the Spanish-speaking world.Their work has resulted in an assortment of politeness studies that reflect and build on research work from both Spanish and English. Initial efforts at identifying the features of Spanish-language politeness can be traced to Haverkate (1994), Márquez Reiter (2000) and Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2005), which represent conventional methodological approaches to studying politeness: institution-based and researchbased studies. Since 2008, other means of carrying out research have come to the forefront, including interactional studies, corpus-based research, and social media investigation.To examine current methodological approaches, first, we examine key methodological challenges when undertaking Spanish-language politeness research. Subsequently we divide research methods into the following categories: instinctive, laboratory, and field approaches (Jucker & Staley, 2017) and studies based on elicited data (Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, Chapter 10; Félix-Brasdefer & HaslerBarker, 2017). Then, we briefly survey data collection methods employed in Spanish-language politeness studies. Finally, we outline possible future developments in second- and third-wave discursive research methods to understand politeness patterns and practices in the Spanishspeaking world (see also Chapter 33 on research methods in pragmatics, this volume).

3.1

Methodological approaches

In identifying and selecting an appropriate or productive method/methodology that facilitates greater understanding of Spanish-language politeness phenomena or practices, researchers need to define their concept and understanding of cortesía fully.They need to establish whether they are: (a) adhering to first-wave theoretical and universalistic frameworks; (b) following discursive, co-constructive second-wave approaches; or (c) combining analysts’ viewpoints and understandings with those of participants that lead to a theoretically based as well as a locally discursive thirdwave perspective. Consequently, the selected method should provide key implicatory insights and findings should clearly advance an awareness and understanding of Spanish-language politeness. Furthermore, as argued by Jucker and Staley (2017), researchers need to clarify whether their insights are: derived from personal beliefs, experiences, and suppositions and/or the views and opinions of other language users; result from controlled elicitation that involve answering questionnaires, acting out role plays, and responding to discourse completion tasks (DCTs); or reflect direct observation from field work and insights as to how politeness is actually performed. 362

Politeness research

First-wave approaches are reflected in Haverkate (1994), who theorized his own understandings that subsequently played a fundamental role in initially identifying politeness practices and patterns in the Spanish-speaking world. However, his findings were not supported by research data and he concluded by saying “Esta investigación, desde luego, tendría que verificarse a base de corpus representativos del español, tanto hablado como escrito” ‘This research, of course, would have to be verified on the basis of a corpus representative of Spanish, both spoken and written’ (1994, p. 224). Contemporary research should be carried out on a more verifiable and confirmable basis rather than employing ‘armchair’ aspects (Jucker & Staley, 2017). First, as Jucker and Staley (2017) argue, research work carried out by Brown and Levinson (1987), Lakoff (1973), and Leech (1983) all contain strong intuitional elements. Consequently, this aspect must be considered when, for instance, employing Brown and Levinson’s framework (e.g., García, 2008, who examines solidarity politeness). Secondly, while key features of Spanish language politeness have been identified (e.g., respeto and confianza, as in Félix-Brasdefer, 2008b; Schneider & Placencia, 2017), insufficient research has examined the exact nature of these concepts (e.g., confianza in Mugford, 2013; Mugford & Montes, 2020). As mentioned in Félix-Brasdefer (2008a), confianza reflects a “sense of deep familiarity” (p. 20). Jucker and Staley (2017) argue,“every approach includes some element of the researcher’s intuitional interpretation” (p. 414), which must be fully considered by researchers in constructing their investigative frameworks.

3.2 Research-based studies First-wave approaches are also reflected in research-based studies that attempt to establish and confirm politeness patterns and practices within and between speech and discourse communities.To achieve this objective in Spanish-language politeness research, a wide range of methods have been employed, perhaps beginning with Márquez Reiter (2000) who used the open role play technique to examine request and apology speech acts. Role-plays have been a strong feature of politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world. For instance, Félix-Brasdefer (2010) employed role plays to examine female requests between interactants from Mexico City and San José, Costa Rica. Félix-Brasdefer (2011) also used open role plays to examine request sequences among Mexican and Dominican Republic university students. García (2008), likewise, used role plays to examine how Venezuelan and Argentinean interactants engage in solidarity politeness when turning down an invitation to a birthday party. Questionnaires have also been a strong research feature, as seen in Dumitrescu (2011) who used cuestionarios de hábitos sociales ‘questionnaires of social habits’ to understand how interactants from a range of Spanish-speaking countries express ritualized wishes. Meanwhile, face-to-face interaction investigation was carried out by Félix-Brasdefer (2008b), who examined sociopragmatic variation between Mexican and Dominican Republic participants in formulating requests. DCTs have also been widely employed, as seen in Schneider and Placencia (2017) who analyzed rapport management behavior in service encounters in Quito, Ecuador, and Madrid, Spain. Participants were asked to construct an interpersonal interaction with a shopkeeper they supposedly knew well. In conclusion, research-based studies have been widely employed in the Spanish-speaking world to compare and contrast national and regional politeness practices.

3.3 Field work Second-wave discursive approaches attempt to identify naturally occurring transactional and relational communication in which participants’ explicit or implicit understandings/orientations regarding what is polite is researched. In this way, analysts can base their own assessments about politeness on participants’ views.This process involves time-consuming data collection methods 363

Mugford and Félix-Brasdefer

that principally entail recording real-life interactions and often constructing and searching large linguistic corpora. In politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world, interactional data collection methods have been employed to examine specific interactional domains, such as corner shop transactions (Félix-Brasdefer & Placencia, 2019; Placencia, 2008), service encounters (FélixBrasdefer, 2012, 2015), call center interactions (Márquez Reiter, 2009, 2019), and national and international tourism (Fernández-Amaya, Hernández-López, & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014; Hernández-López & Fernández-Amaya, 2019). In order to gather authentic data that reveal anticipated politeness patterns or practices and to ascertain participants’ orientations to politeness, researchers may have to amass and categorize vast quantities of data. For instance, in corner shop interactions, Placencia (2008), identified intralingual variation by examining 171 exchanges recorded in Quito and Manta, Ecuador. Meanwhile, employing a pragmatic-discursive approach to collecting transactional and relational data in service encounters, Félix-Brasdefer (2015) audio-recorded 147 hours in different settings of service encounters in Mexico and the United States: 85 hours in supermarkets, 35 hours in open-air markets, 22 hours in Mexican small shops, and 5 hours in a U.S. visitor information center. Meanwhile, Márquez Reiter (2009) used a 200hour service-call database that included informal interviews with call center representatives, a call center agent, and (non)participant observational field notes. Corpus-based research methods have enabled Spanish-language politeness researchers “to perform automated searches” (Jucker & Staley, 2017, p. 415) with large amounts of data. In investigating politeness in the Spanish-speaking world, researchers have often combined methods. For instance, employing “a three-pronged methodology” to examine Peninsular Spanish understandings of face, Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2019) used “monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, the analysis of a sizeable corpus of Spanish newspapers and the analysis of data from focus groups(2020, p. 18).This multi-faceted approach allowed them to conclude that face and identity are co-constructed and difficult to separate from one another. Contemporary researchers are showing increased interest in investigating online politeness practices, especially regarding online sales (Placencia, 2019c) and on social media sites (MaízArévalo, 2019; Placencia, 2019b). By examining a corpus of 227 buyer-vendor exchanges, Placencia (2019c) examined how refusals are enacted in internet transactions, particularly in terms of relational work and politeness. In the context of Facebook interaction, Maíz-Arévalo (2019) examined face-repairing strategies and corrective facework. Using a participant-observer approach, Maíz-Arévalo was a member of the on-line community and focused on the role of supportiveness. In a study of complimenting behavior on Instagram, Placencia (2019b) examined the accounts of seven teenage girls and highlighted both the routine and creative aspects of online compliments. Social media should continue to be an area of growing interest for politeness researchers since it is a sphere in which new politeness practices and patterns may emerge.

4

Future directions and conclusion

First-wave approaches that emphasized instinctive and reason-based research characterized earlier politeness research in the Spanish-speaking world. However, this wave is now gradually being replaced by a second-wave discursive method that examines stretches of relational interaction as opposed to a single, stand-alone speech act. However, politeness research still needs to investigate and understand the fundamental nature of politeness in the Spanish-speaking world, especially regarding second- and third-wave approaches that match local discursive patterns and practices and analysts’ understandings of politeness. Future research should focus on the realization of polite practices from a discursive perspective in order to analyze the negotiation of face through the co-construction of meaning in social interaction. Finally, given the importance of prosodic 364

Politeness research

cues (e.g., intonation, duration, stress, voice quality), future studies should further examine how prosodic cues affect the understanding of polite practices in formal and non-formal contexts that have not been discussed in this chapter.

Further reading Culpeper, J., Haugh, M., & Kádár, D. Z. (Eds.). (2017). The Palgrave handbook of linguistics (im)politeness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. This handbook contains 30 articles on topics related to politeness and impoliteness. Chapters 2–8 provide the fundamental concepts of politeness theory. Chapter 19 offers a critical account of (im)politeness theories in second language pragmatic learning and teaching. Dumitrescu, D., & Andueza, P. L. (2018). L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to teaching. London and New York: Routledge. Focusing on L2 Spanish research and teaching, this book examines L2 Spanish pragmatics research (Chapters 1–6) and L2 Spanish pragmatics instruction (Chapters 7–12). Chapter 7 examines face-work, politeness and impoliteness. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. Oxford and New York: Routledge Press. Chapter 6 provides an overview of politeness models that have been used to examine politeness practices in different varieties of Spanish. It includes examples at the discourse level to show how face is co-constructed to convey different degrees of politeness.

References Albelda Marco, M. (2010). ¿Cómo se reconoce la atenuación? Una aproximación metodológica basada en el español peninsular hablado. In F. Orletti & L. Mariottini (Eds.), (Des)cortesía en español. Espacios teóricos y metodológicos para su estudio (pp. 41–70). Roma, Italia: Università degli Studi Roma Tre-Edice. Arundale, R. B. (2006a). Face as relational and interactional: A communication framework for research on face, facework, and politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 2, 193–216. Arundale, R. B. (2006b). Face as emergent in interpersonal communication: An alternative to Goffman, In F. Bargiela-Chiappini & M. Haugh (Eds.), Face, communication and social interaction (pp. 33–50) London: Equinox. Bataller, R. (2019). Corner-store interactions in Cartagena and Bucaramanga:A variational pragmatics study. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 35–54). Oxford and New York: Routledge. Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2019). Socioeconomic variation and conflict in Spanish retailer-consumer interactions on Facebook. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 189–206). Oxford and New York: Routledge. Bravo, D. (1999). ¿Imagen positiva vs imagen negativa? Pragmática sociocultural y componentes de face. Oralia, 2, 155–184. Bravo, D. (2004).Tensión entre universalidad y relatividad en las teorías de cortesía. In D. Bravo & A. Briz (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: estudios del discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 15–33). Barcelona:Ariel. Bravo, D., & Briz,A. (Eds.). (2004). Pragmática sociocultural: estudios del discurso de cortesía en español. Barcelona:Ariel. Briz, A. (1998). El español coloquial en la conversación. Esbozo de pragmalingiiística. Barcelona: Ariel. Briz,A. (2004). Cortesía verbal codificada y cortesía interpretada en la conversación. In D. Bravo & A. Briz (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: Estudios del discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 67–93). Barcelona:Ariel. Briz, A., & Albelda, M. (2013). Una propuesta teórica y metodológica para el análisis de la atenuación lingüística en español y portugués. La base de un proyecto en común (es.por.atenuación). Onomázein, 28, 288–319. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1978). Universals in language usage: politeness phenomenon. In E. Goody (Ed.), Questions and politeness strategies in social interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 365

Mugford and Félix-Brasdefer

Cogo,A., & House, J. (2017). Intercultural pragmatics. In A. Barron,Y. Gu., & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 168–183). London: Routledge. Culpeper, J., & Hardaker, C. (2017). Impoliteness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 199–225). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Culpeper, J., & Terkourafi, M. (2017). Pragmatic approaches (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 11–39). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Curcó, C. (1998). ¿No me harías un favorcito? Reflexiones en torno a la expresión de la cortesía verbal en el español de México y el español peninsular. In H. Haverkate, G. Mulder, & C. Fraile Maldonado (Eds.), La pragmática lingüística del español: recientes desarrollos, Diálogos Hispánicos (pp. 129–171).Amsterdam: Rodopi. Curcó, C. (2007). Positive face, group face, and Affiliation: An overview of politeness studies on Mexican Spanish. In M. E. Placencia & C. Garcia (Eds.), Research on politeness in the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 105–120). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Curcó, C. (2014). Un comentario en torno a la noción de imagen. In M. E. Flores & J. M. Infante (Eds.), La (des)cortesía en el discurso: perspectivas interdisciplinarias (imagen, actos de habla y atenuación (pp. 19–51). Monterrey-Estocolmo: UANL-EDICE. Curcó, C., & De Fina, A. (2002). Modo imperativo, negación y diminutivos en la expresión de la cortesía en español: El contraste entre México y España In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 107–140) Munich: Lincom. Czerwionka, L. (2012). Mitigation:The combined effects of imposition and certitude. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(10), 1163–1182. Czerwionka, L. (2014). Participant perspectives on mitigated interactions: The impact of imposition and uncertainty. Journal of Pragmatics, 67, 112–130. Dumitrescu, D. (2011). Face-work in Sociolinguistic interviews. In D. Dumitrescu (Ed.), Aspects of Spanish pragmatics (pp. 109–137) New York: Peter Lang. Eelen, G. (2001). A Critique of politeness theories, Manchester: St. Jerome. Escalona Torres, J. (2019).The effects of social distance in service encounters in Puerto Rican panaderías. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 230–247). Oxford and New York: Routledge. Escandell Vidal, M. J. (1993). Introducción a la pragmática. Barcelona: Ariel. Escandell Vidal, M. J. (2006). Introducción a la pragmática (2ª Edición). Barcelona:Ariel. Félix-Brasdefer J. C. (2008a). Politeness in Mexico and the United States:A contrastive study of the realization and perception of refusals.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008b). Sociopragmatic variation: Dispreferred responses in Mexican and Dominican Spanish. Journal of Politeness Research, 4(1), 81–110. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2010). Intra-lingual pragmatic variation in Mexico City and San José, Costa Rica: A focus on regional differences in female requests. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(11), 2992–3011. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2011). Cortesía, prosodia y variación pragmática en las peticiones de estudiantes universitarios mexicanos y dominicanos. In C. García Fernández & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Estudios de variación pragmática en español (pp. 57–86). Buenos Aires: Dunken. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2012). Pragmatic variation by gender in market service encounters in Mexico. In J. César Félix-Brasdeferr & D. A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues (pp. 17–48).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). The language of service encounters: A pragmatic-discursive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. Oxford and New York: Routledge Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2017). Elicited data. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 27–40).Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Placencia, M. E. (2019). Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Fernández-Amaya, L., Hernández-López, M. de la O., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2014). Spanish travelers’ expectations of service encounters in domestic and international settings. Tourism Culture & Communication, 14(2), 117–134. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2010). An examination of mitigation strategies used in Spanish psychotherapeutic discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(7), 1964–1981. Fuentes Rodríguez, C., & Placencia, M. E. (2013). La función del presentador y la mitigación del enfrentamiento en camos con todo (Ecuador). Oralia, 16, 111–142. 366

Politeness research

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., & Bou-Franch, P. (2019). Emic conceptualizations of face (Imagen) in Peninsula Spanish. In E. Ogiermann & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: Multilingual and multicultural perspectives (pp. 301–327). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Bou-Franch, P. (2010). A genre approach to impoliteness in a Spanish television talk show: Evidence from corpus-based analysis, questionnaires and focus groups. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7–4(2010), 689–723. García, C. (2008). Different realizations of solidarity politeness: Comparing Venezuelan and Argentinean invitations. In K. P. Schneider & A. Barron (Eds.), Variational pragmatics:A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages (pp. 269–305). Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual. Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York:Anchor Books. Grainger, K. (2011). “First Order” and “Second Order” Politeness: Institutional and intercultural contexts. In Linguistic Politeness Research Group (Eds.), Discursive approaches to politeness (pp. 167–188). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Grice, H. P. (1975). Language and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York:Academic Press. Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haugh, M. (2007). The discursive challenge to politeness research: An interactional alternative. Journal of Politeness Research, 3, 295–317. Haugh, M. (2009). Face and interaction. In F. Bargiela-Chiappini & M. Haugh (Eds.), Face, communication and social interaction (pp. 1–30). Oakville, CT: Equinox. Haugh, M. (2013a). Disentangling face, facework and im/politeness. Sociocultural pragmatics, 1, 46–73. Haugh, M. (2013b). Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(8), 52–72. Haverkate, H. (1994). La cortesía verbal. Estudio pragmalingüístico. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Hernández-Flores, N. (1999). Politeness ideology in Spanish colloquial conversations: The case of advice. Pragmatics, 9, 37–49. Hernández Flores, N. (2004). La cortesía como búsqueda del equilibrio de la imagen social. In D. Bravo & A. Briz (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: Estudios del discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 95–108). Barcelona: Ariel. Hernández-Flores, N. (2014). Rasgos fónicos en críticas, reproches y sus respuestas en la conversación coloquial española: ¿Muestras de cortesía, descortesía o de actividades de autoimagen? In Y. Congosto, M. L. Montero Curiel, & A. Salvador Plans (Eds.), Fonética Experimentae, educación superior e investigación (Vol. 3, pp. 429–436). Madrid: Arco/Libros. Hernández-López, M. de la O., & Fernández-Amaya, L. (2019).What makes (im) politeness for travellers? Spanish tourists’ perceptions at national and international hotels. Journal of Politeness Research, 15(2), 195–222. Jucker, A. H., & Staley, L. (2017). (Im)politeness and developments in methodology. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 403–429). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kádár, D. Z. (2017a). Politeness, impoliteness and ritual: Maintaining the moral order in interpersonal interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kádár, D. Z. (2017b). Politeness in pragmatics. In The Oxford research encyclopedias: Linguistics (pp.  1–27). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kádár, D. Z., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kecskes, I. (2013). Intercultural pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, R. (1973).The logic of politeness; or, minding your Ps and Qs.’ In Papers from the 9th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 292–305). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. Leech, G. (2014). Pragmatics of politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, S. (2017). Speech acts. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 199–216). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Locher, M. A., & Watts, R. J. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 9–33. Maíz Arévalo, C. (2018). “Sólo un poquito” El uso y funciones del diminutivo en español peninsular en dos grupos de Facebook.Volumen monográfico La atenuación en los discursos digitales en español (Vol. 73, pp. 33–52). Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación (CLAC). 367

Mugford and Félix-Brasdefer

Maíz Arévalo, C. (2019). Losing Face on Facebook: Linguistic strategies to repair face in a Spanish common interest group. In P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & P. Bou-Franch (Eds.), Approaches to digital discourse analysis (pp. 283–309). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Márquez Reiter, R. (2000). Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Márquez Reiter, R. (2009). How to get rid of a telemarketing agent? Facework strategies in an intercultural service call. In F. Bargiela-Chiappini & M. Haugh (Eds.), Face, Communication and social interaction (pp. 55–77). London: Equinox. Márquez Reiter, R. (2010). A ella no le gusta que le digan María y a mí que me traten de tú.A window into Latin American diversity? Sociolinguistic Studies, 4(2) pp. 371–412. Márquez Reiter, R. (2011). Mediated business interactions: Intercultural communication between speakers of Spanish. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Márquez Reiter, R. (2019). Navigating commercial constraints in a service call. In Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. L. Fernández-Amaya, & María de la O. Hernández-López (Eds.), Technology mediated service encounters (pp. 121–144).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish Pragmatics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mills, S. (2003). Gender and politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mugford, G. (2013). Foreign-language users confronting anti-normative politeness in a Mexican university. Intercultural Pragmatics, 10, 101–130. Mugford, G. (2019). Call centre service encounters: Second-language users, conversationalisation, (im) politeness and discursive practices. In P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, L. Fernández-Amaya, & M. de la O. Hernández-López (Eds.), Technology mediated service encounters (pp. 145–169). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mugford, G., & Montes, S. (2020). La anticortesía. In M. Placencia & X. A. Padilla (Eds.), Guía práctica de pragmática del español (pp. 105–114). London and New York: Routledge. Ogiermann, E., & Garcés-Conejos-Blitvich, P. (2019). Introduction. In Speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: Multilingual and multicultural perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Placencia, M. E. (1996). Politeness in Ecuadorian Spanish. Multilingua, 15(1), 13–34. Placencia, M. E. (2008). Requests in corner shop transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and coastal Spanish. In K. P. Schneider & A. Barron (Eds.), Variational pragmatics:A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages (pp. 307–332).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Placencia, M. E. (2019a). Responding to bargaining moves in a digital era: Refusals of offers on Mercado Libre Ecuador. In P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, L. Fernández-Amaya, & M. de la O. Hernández-López (Eds.), Technology mediated service encounters (pp. 173–197).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Placencia, M. E. (2019b). Qué perfección: Complimenting behaviour among Ecuadorian teenage girls on instagram. In E. Ogiermann & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: Multilingual and multicultural perspectives (pp. 93–116). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Placencia, M. E. (2019c). Responding to bargaining moves in a digital era: Refusals of offers on Mercado Libre Ecuador. In P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, L. Fernández Amaya, & M. de la O Hernández López (Eds.), Technology mediated service encounters (pp. 173–197).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Placencia, M. E., & Garcia, C. (Eds.). (2007). Research on politeness in the Spanish-speaking world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Placencia, M. E., & García, C. (2019).‘No gracias amigo’: Refusals of bargaining offers in e-service encounters in Mercado Libre Ecuador and Mercado Libre Venezuela. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 55–76). Oxford and New York: Routledge. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974).A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language, 50, 96–735. Schegloff, E. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, K. P., & Placencia, M. E. (2017). (Im)politeness and regional variation. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp.  539–570). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schrader-Kniffki, M. (2007). Silence and politeness in Spanish and Zapotec interactions (Oaxaca, Mexico). In M. E. Placencia & C. García (Eds.), Research on politeness in the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 305–332). London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S.W. (2001). Intercultural communication (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. 368

Politeness research

Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. R. (1976).A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 1–23. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000). Rapport management:A framework for analysis. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 11–46). London: Continuum. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2007).Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 639–656. Spencer-Oatey, H. (Ed.). (2008). Culturally speaking: Culture, communication and politeness theory (2nd ed.). New York and London: Continuum. Spencer-Oatey, H., & Franklin, P. (2009). Intercultural interaction: A multidisciplinary approach to intercultural communication. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Terkourafi, M. (2005). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(2), 237–262. van der Bom, I., & Mills, S. (2015).A discursive approach to the analysis of politeness data. Journal of Politeness Research, 11(2), 179–206. Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, R. J., Ide, S., & Ehlich, K. (Eds.). (2008). Politeness in language: Studies in its history, theory, and practice (2nd ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Werkhofer, K. T. (2008). Traditional and modern views: The social constitution and the power of politeness. In R. J.Watts, S. Ide, & K. Ehlich (Eds.), Politeness in language: Studies in its history, theory, and practice (pp. 155–199).). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

369

21 Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

1

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of impoliteness research in Spanish, assess it critically, and suggest new areas of possible development for the field. Impoliteness research is a relatively recent development in the field of politeness. It started in the late 1990s with Culpeper’s (1996) and Kienpointner’s (1997) positioning papers and came to fruition in the mid2000s (Culpeper, 2011; Locher & Bousfield, 2008). Sifianou (2010), for instance, commented that 2008 could be dubbed “The Year of Impoliteness” (p. 119). More recently, Sinkeviciute (2015) claimed that impoliteness has become one of the most researched topics in pragmatics in the 21st century.This interest in impoliteness and language aggression is also evidenced by the publication, since 2013, of the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, fully devoted to related topics. A number of review papers (see Culpeper, 2013; Dynel, 2015; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010b) on impoliteness also suggest that the field has come of age (Culpeper & Hardaker, 2017). These comprehensive review papers, however, seldom mention research on impoliteness based specifically on Spanish data.This is clearly a significant gap in the literature, especially because Spanish impoliteness research is a productive and established field that this chapter seeks to help elucidate.To that end, the chapter is structured as follows: in Section 2, I review the extant literature on Spanish impoliteness, organized according to main goals and themes. Due to space constraints, I have not included contrastive studies (of Spanish with another language), Spanish as L2, or (with few exceptions) studies focusing on both politeness and impoliteness. Due to its prevalence, I partly focus my review on impoliteness manifestations in traditional and digital media, although there is interesting research on conflictual forms of interaction in Spanish in other domains (e.g., Márquez Reiter, 2010, 2013). In Section 3, I identify and discuss four main issues (both theoretical and methodological) that relate to the bulk of the research reviewed. Section 4 offers some concluding remarks and identifies seven possible areas of research that can help advance the field.

371

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

2 2.1

Review of existing research Theorizing impoliteness

Researchers in Spanish impoliteness draw from established models such as those proposed by Culpeper (1996, 2005) and, to a lesser degree, Kienpointner (1997) and Bousfield (2008). Some, however, have proposed variations to those or have developed their own models and approaches. Most in the latter group, however, make claims regarding impoliteness and how to study it that are not necessarily circumscribed to Spanish but rather to impoliteness phenomena in general, even if those claims are based on Spanish data. For example, while many Spanish politeness researchers use Bravo’s (1999) reformulation of Brown and Levinson’s concepts (affiliation, autonomy face/politeness), others resort to the author’s characterization of impoliteness (Bravo, 2005). This definition, in Bernal’s (2007, 2008a) view, offers a more nuanced definition than Culpeper’s (1996), as it includes the shared knowledge between speaker and hearer that allows the latter to interpret the former’s intended meaning. For her part, Hernández Flores (2013) proposed a distinction between strategies (e.g., mitigation, irony, insult, intensification) and social effects (politeness, impoliteness, and self-image); she argued that using a specific strategy does not entail that a given social effect will ensue and, further, that socio-cultural and contextual factors need to be considered. Among those social effects, anti-politeness (rapport established through insults or other types of linguistic aggression), formulated by Zimmerman (2003), was also included. Anti-politeness is relevant as a concept in Spanish impoliteness scholarship and is often studied (e.g., Hernández Flores, 2014; Mugford, Sergio, & Vázquez, 2013). In this respect, also relevant is Bernal’s (2007, 2008b) distinction between genuine and non-genuine impoliteness that she formulated regarding the functionality of insults (for more relevant work on insults, see also Bolívar, 2001; Moreno, 2011). Further, whereas scholars working on and around the Val.Es.Co. corpus (Briz & Grupo Val. Es.Co., 2002) have focused mostly on mitigation, traditionally related to politeness, another focus on intensification has also been associated with impoliteness (see Chapter 22 on mitigation, this volume). In this vein, Briz and Albelda (2019) argued that intensifiers are used in Spanish to contradict interlocutors’ arguments or conclusions forcefully and to strengthen disagreements, and are common in directive speech acts or in responses to them.The authors claimed intensification is used differently depending on how (in)formal a situation is, how the norms of a given genre work, and how, crucially, its realizations are also culturally sensitive. Among those researchers who have made specific claims and devised taxonomies for impoliteness phenomena in Spanish is Kaul de Marlangeon (2008, 2017; see also Kaul de Marlangeon & Alba, 2012). In 2008, she presented a definition of impoliteness that included eleven instances/possibilities for impolite behavior and proposed a typology of verbal impoliteness for the Spanish-speaking cultures. One of those is what the author calls “fustigation” (from ‘whipping somebody’) impoliteness, defined as verbal aggression whose main aim is to damage the interlocutor’s face. Fustigation impoliteness is important as it is often used by Kaul de Marlangeon and other scholars as a descriptive category. In a later study, coauthored with Alba, Kaul de Marlangeon applied the taxonomy of strategies to a corpus of English data to test its validity in English-speaking “cultures.”Their analysis confirmed that this taxonomy could also account for impoliteness manifestations in English. More recently, Kaul de Marlangeon (2017) aimed to unveil the relationship between language, impoliteness, and emotions in Spanish-speaking cultural contexts. Based on the analysis of different varieties of Spanish, Kaul de Marlangeon argued that the rapport/closeness-oriented nature of the Spanish-speaking cultures results in

372

Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish

(a) reducing social distance within the group, (b) increasing personal distance, and for those who are more powerful, (c) being verbally aggressive and expressing their negative emotions openly. Relevant as well, in the sense of conceptualizing and describing the realization of impoliteness in Spanish, is work on the interconnections between prosody and (im)politeness by scholars such as Albelda (2012), Álvarez, Blondet, and Rojas (2011), Briz and Hidalgo (2008), Félix-Brasdefer (2011), Hernández Flores (2012), Hidalgo (2009), and Hidalgo and Martínez (2013). Using data extracted from Spanish conversational corpora, the goal of this body of research is to give phonic elements the place they deserve in oral realizations of Spanish and describe the role they play in conveying (im)politeness. For example, Hidalgo (2009) saw modifications in intonation as conveying overt impoliteness (conveyed through pitch, tone, or intonation) or covert impoliteness (conveyed through more subtle prosodic features such as those used in irony and sarcasm). Prosodic features also emerge as connected to impoliteness in questionnaires as reported by Bernal (2007), who reported that yelling and informing reluctantly in Peninsular Spanish are interpreted as impolite and that it is tone rather than meaning that renders a given lexical item as impolite. Looking at Colombian data, Álvarez et al. (2011) found that impoliteness presented the same features regarding melody and tempo as politeness and that both were realized by intensifying temporal and melodic patterns, which results in (im)politeness being realized like a “song,” as it is more melodic and rhythmic. However, like impoliteness in general, prosodic features that may be interpreted as conveying impoliteness need to be contextually assessed, as discussed by Hernández Flores (2014) in that what may come across as paraverbal features denoting impoliteness are, instead, sanctioned by the close relationship among interlocutors (family) and the expectations associated with one particular identity (mother).

2.2 Approaches Research in (im)politeness can be broadly subsumed into three waves of thought (Grainger, 2011, p. 168).The first wave originated particularly in the work of Brown and Levinson (1987), whose politeness theory inspired a vast amount of research across languages and cultures (see Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness issues, this volume). Research stemming from this tradition usually takes an etic, second-order approach; i.e., what counts as (im)politeness is based on the analyst’s views largely in pairing linguistic forms with (im)polite meanings. The second wave, which coincided with the advent of the discursive turn (Eelen, 2001;Watts, 2003), rejected the premises underlying first wave politeness theories. Within this new tradition, (im)politeness research was geared toward participants’ first-order, emic interpretations of (im)politeness; thus discarding the analyst’s prominent role and the belief that linguistic structures carried intrinsic (im)polite meanings. Lay views of (im)politeness then took center stage.The second wave was not without problems. The shift toward a first-order approach and what this implied for the role of the analyst was at the core of the discussion, as well as the repercussions for the field of abandoning any attempts at theorizing and predicting (im)polite behavior (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010b; Haugh, 2007; Terkourafi, 2005). A way to deal with this criticism propitiated the advent of the third wave, which sought to combine the participants’ and the analyst’s perspectives to provide a combined etic/emic approach, taking participants’ views into account but retaining “a technical, ‘second order’ conception of politeness as a way of accounting for language-in-interaction” (Grainger, 2011, p. 172). Initial impoliteness models were inspired by Brown and Levinson’s theory and were thus top-down (based on the perceptions of the analyst), speaker-centered, and intention-based. However, impoliteness research has evolved to fit into

373

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

an “Integrative pragmatics” that seeks to conflate both etic and emic perspectives (Culpeper & Haugh, 2014). Despite this evolution in the field, with few exceptions (e.g., Albelda, 2012; Bernal, 2008a; Hernández, 2014; Moreno, 2009), most research on impoliteness in Spanish is still firmly anchored in a second-order approach as espoused by the first wave. That means that what is considered impolite is based on the analyst’s views.Adopting a second-order approach is a viable option; however, one needs to be explicitly reflective about this choice, as it also may be problematic: impoliteness may be presented as being quite homogeneous when, in truth, what counts as impolite may vary widely from practice to practice and even among participants within the same social practice. Indeed, as the second wave of (im)politeness research showed, impoliteness is often subject to “discursive struggle” (Eelen, 2001;Watts, 2003).This is evidenced, for example, in postings on social media where assessments regarding what counts as impolite behavior differ significantly depending on ideology, the identity of the person whose perceived “offense” they are judging, etc. (Kaul de Marlangeon & Cordisco, 2014) Although Spanish (im)politeness researchers (see Bernal, 2008a; Hernández-Flores, 2009; Mugford & Arias, 2017) have used ethnographic tools, such as questionnaires, to elicit lay understandings, these are not often used to triangulate analysts’ assessments of what counts as impolite, at least in the bulk of the literature reviewed for this chapter (but see del Valle, 2018). Interestingly, data obtained from questionnaires also show variations regarding assessments on impoliteness, discussed previously.

2.3 2.3.1

Mediated impoliteness: Traditional and digital media Traditional media

In reviewing impoliteness in traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers), I also refer to scholarship on impoliteness in political discourse.Although political discourse is not necessarily always mediated, most lay people (and researchers) typically have access to it when it is broadcast. In addition, some political genres (press conferences, debates) are meant to be broadcast.With the advent of digital technologies, political discourse is also accessible through specialized webpages, media organization webpages, and social media, among others. Electoral debate is a prime example of adversarial discourse. Hence, it is not surprising that it has been the object of study by researchers interested in impoliteness. Blas Arroyo’s (2001, 2003) pioneering work on Spanish face-to-face debates is a case in point. Regarding the influence of the media on political discourse, Blas Arroyo (2003, p. 397) argued that televised debates are presented as a true battleground, and even at times, as a boxing ring, where the ability to ‘knock out’ an adversary dialectally is far more important than logical argumentation. Among others, Blas Arroyo (2003) concluded that resources some see as polite are systematically exploited to benefit the speaker (not the hearer) and that, despite their combative nature, debates are regulated by conventional norms of behavior that force participants to use good manners. Blas Arroyo (2001) is especially interesting not only for his insightful analysis of political debates but also because of his critique of Culpeper’s (1996) taxonomy of impoliteness strategies, to which Culpeper responded (2016). More recently, Fernández (2009) looked at political face-to-face debate also within the context of Spanish parliamentary elections and described how normative politeness disappears as aggression while interruptions, likewise, increase. Important work is also found in Vázquez Laslop (2019), who looks at pronominal reference in presidential debates in México. Parliamentary debate, another adversarial genre, has also received the attention of impoliteness scholars. Brenes (2012), Fuentes Rodríguez (2013a), and López (2012) looked at gender, 374

Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish

impoliteness strategies and questions in the Andalusian parliament.Whereas, Fuentes Rodríguez found that both men and women use the same impoliteness strategies and that parliamentary discourse is characterized by intensification, Brenes Peña concluded that women are more impolite than men. For his part, López analyzed quotations within questions as an argumentative strategy and argued that women deployed more complex and indirect structures in their use of quotations. A different genre, also involving debate (i.e., audience-participation debates on TV shows like the Spanish Carta Blanca), was analyzed by Lorenzo-Dus (2007), who reported instances of impoliteness when participants perceived that their private face had been deliberately and maximally threatened. Regarding interviews, Brenes (2013a, 2014) investigated whether the new genre of political interviews,“news as confrontation” (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2009), was present in the Spanish context and concluded that indeed it was. She found that some interviewers had abandoned their neutralistic stance, becoming adversarial toward the interviewee, and that the questionanswer adjacency pair typical of the genre had mutated into statement-statement. As a result, the interviewee had to resort to some novel (within the interview genre) face-saving strategies. Brenes and Fuentes Rodríguez (2017) compared politicians’ and celebrities’ television interviews in Spain and the impolite, argumentative strategies used in both.They concluded that politician interviews remain closer to the traditional interview generic expectations, whereas celebrity interviews are characterized by a colloquial register and a pervasive use of impoliteness.A different genre, the “citizen interview” (i.e., members of the general public gather in a TV studio to ask questions to a politician, motivating conflictual interactions) was researched by Lorenzo-Dus (2011), who observed that citizens deployed hostile political interviewing techniques mostly related to positive impoliteness (Culpeper, 1996) in order to hold politicians accountable. Talk shows (political/current affairs and entertainment) have also received attention from impoliteness scholars. Regarding the first type, Brenes (2007) and Brenes and González (2013) looked at the identity of the aggressive contributor (both in political and entertainment talk shows) and how its evolution is tied to an increase in the deployment of impoliteness, especially in entertainment talk shows. Impoliteness is also present in political talk shows, albeit in a more indirect way, and is seen by the authors as an attention-catching technique with an entertainment function. Brenes (2010) studied the role of the talk show host and how it left impartiality and neutral stance behind, becoming a “provocateur” who seeks to incite outrage and impoliteness. For their part, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Bou Franch, and Lorenzo-Dus (2010) explored impoliteness manifestations in La Noria, a Spanish talk show.Their analysis revealed that (a) descortesía ‘impoliteness’ may not be the most appropriate term to refer to the phenomena under scrutiny, (b) assessments of panelists’ behaviors were variable and far from homogeneous, and (c) ideology and emotions played an important role in assessments of (im)politeness as did participants’ co-constructed identities. More recently, González (2017) analyzed impoliteness in relation to gender and role in political TV and radio talk shows in Spain.The author found that disagreements, interruptions, and disqualifications were frequent. In addition, female contributors used more impoliteness than their male counterparts and, regarding role, contributors more than the moderator. However, the fact that the latter also used impoliteness shows that it is now pervasive in this genre. Regarding the second type of talk show that focuses on the entertainment industry and celebrities, Ortiz and Fernández (2014) analyzed impoliteness as spectacle in Sálvame Diario; the authors described the prevalent use of impoliteness strategies to indicate that other contributors are seen to be in the wrong. Offering a contrastive analysis of the functionality of impoliteness, Placencia and Fuentes Rodríguez (2013) analyzed impoliteness manifestations in two talk shows, from Spain (Sálvame Diario) and from Ecuador (Vamos con todo). Results showed that controversy 375

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

and impoliteness were used as attention-catching mechanisms and significant differences in the degree to which impoliteness was deployed. It was much higher in the Spanish than in the Ecuadorian shows. Combining traditional and digital data, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2013) looked at YouTube posts regarding Sálvame to ascertain how and on what criteria posters evaluated impoliteness within the show. Similarly, blending traditional and digital media, Kaul de Marlangeon (2018) analyzed the interconnections between fustigation impoliteness emotions and “extimacy” (i.e., the sharing of experiences or thoughts usually considered private) and how impoliteness is used for promotional purposes regarding Argentinian celebrities. All genres of reality TV are characterized by their use of impoliteness (Lorenzo-Dus & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2013). Within the Spanish-speaking context, the interconnections between reality TV and impoliteness have been investigated by Blas Arroyo (2010, 2013, 2014 among others), García (2012), and Brenes (2013b). Brenes focuses on the figure of the aggressive judge in reality contest shows, more specifically on Operación Triunfo (the Spanish version of Britain/America’s, etc. Got Talent franchise) and Risto Mejide, the first Spanish instantiation of the aggressive judge à la Simon Cowell, whose main aim in using impoliteness, according to Brenes, is to gain the audience’s favor. Although impoliteness in these talent shows is usually associated with judges’ behavior, Blas Arroyo reports interesting findings regarding the show Mujeres, hombres y viceversa, where a substantial amount of impoliteness is found in response turns when those who have been the target of impoliteness respond to criticism. García (2012) analyzed the Spanish version of Wife Swap and focused on conflictual exchanges between swap mothers and daughters.The analysis showed how the latter display strategies that are tied up with “laddish” (i.e., characteristics of a young man who behaves in a boisterously macho way) verbal behavior as they constantly challenge “swap mothers,” who, in turn, display an instrumental view of aggression geared toward attempts at persuasion. To finalize this section on traditional media and impoliteness, I refer briefly to the use of impoliteness in advertising, a less researched area, explored by Márquez Guerrero (2007) and Alcaide (2009). Alcaide argues that the use of language aggression can be justified in ads whose aim is to eradicate antisocial behavior, but not in those whose only aim is to market a product. She also warns of how the constant use of impoliteness in the media may desensitize audiences and create a new “normal.”

2.3.2

Digital media

Impoliteness on digital media has often been related to the anonymity afforded by the internet.Within the Peninsular Spanish context, Fuentes Rodríguez (2009) explored relationships in listserv messages and argued that impoliteness is common, since posters experience no repercussions. Other scholars have looked at impoliteness in comments posted to digital fora and blogs. Responses to blogs in Peninsular Spanish were researched by Castro (2017), who argued that addressees do not experience serious face-threat and thus tend not to respond unless the offense is perceived as severe.Working on digital fora, Mancera (2009) examined six different newspapers and concluded that anonymity and the affordances of the medium that allow for an immediate response facilitate the pervasiveness of impoliteness. Comments on newspaper fora have also been studied regarding impoliteness and social issues, such as depicting xenophobic views on immigration (Gómez & Guerra, 2012) or discussing rare diseases (Bañón, 2010). Other social issues such as gender violence and its relation to impoliteness have been researched in the context of YouTube (Bou Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014a) and Twitter (del Valle, 2018). Del Valle (2018) analyzed impoliteness regarding gender views in Argentina and looked at the role 376

Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish

of fustigation impoliteness therein. Bou Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2014b) revealed that three patriarchal strategies of abuse were enacted in online discourse and showed how, at the micro-level of interaction, these strategies related to social identity and gender ideology through processes of positive in-group versus negative out-group presentation. Also looking at YouTube comments, in response to a public service announcement on teen homosexuality posted by a Spanish LGBTQ association, Bou Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2014a) examined how conflict begins, unfolds, and ends in a massive, digital media polylogue (see Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse, this volume). Impoliteness on Facebook has also been analyzed by researchers working on Spanish.Vivas and Ridao (2015) studied two sets of Facebook accounts: those with their privacy settings set to public and those set to private. They found that impoliteness was present in public profiles and uncommon in private ones.They also reflected on polarization online and how (im)politeness is used strategically to (dis)align with the in/out group (see also Mancera & Pano, 2013). Focusing on the Facebook pages of two Spanish stores of different socioeconomic status, Bou Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2019) investigated impolite interactions therein. Their goal was to examine the possible differences in the microlevel management of impoliteness that could be related to socioeconomic status.With this work, they aimed to expand the framework for variational pragmatics to include studies of impoliteness in online networked interactions. Facebook was also the focus of Bou Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2018).They argued that the notion of relational work (Locher & Watts, 2005) should be expanded to account for sociability in networked interactions. Further, by applying a multimodal framework to the analysis of a Facebook wall event, the authors showed how key sociability functions were carried out by semiotic modes other than language and how relational behaviors (such as politeness and impoliteness) are highly intertwined and should not be compartmentalized. Impoliteness manifestations on Facebook were contrasted with those on Twitter by Vivas and Ridao (2015). Results showed a higher incidence of impoliteness on Facebook when compared to a similar sample (in number and topic) from Twitter. Twitter has been studied by Díaz (2014) regarding linguistic procedures for lexical creation, such as neological derivation and composition and portmanteau words (e.g.,’ brunch,’ from breakfast and lunch). The author argued that stylized forms of creative impoliteness ensure, among others, the loyal following of Twitter accounts. For her part, Mancera (2017) studied fake profiles of public figures created on Twitter with parodic purposes.The analysis showed that these accounts had a threatening effect on the public figure’s face and created strong community ties among the account followers. This section has offered an overview of the analysis of impoliteness phenomena in Spanish digital data. Importantly, the overview showed how most authors focused their attention on how the affordances of the medium impact impoliteness realizations and crucially interpretations.

3

Methodological considerations

This section assesses critically four main issues regarding Spanish impoliteness scholarship and tackles both theoretical and methodological issues.

3.1 Units of analysis Determining what counts as impolite necessarily leads to a discussion of units of analysis.When we evaluate a behavior as impolite, the question is: impolite following what criteria? The answer has been: according to the expectations and constraints of the activity type (Culpeper, 2005), or 377

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

the norms of a certain community of practice (Locher & Watts, 2005). Although activity types have not been often used by Spanish (im)politeness researchers, a few of them mentioned communities of practice as guidelines for assessment of impoliteness (e.g., del Valle-Núñez, 2018; Kaul de Marlangeon, 2017; Mancera Rueda, 2017). However, both activity types and communities of practice have been problematized as useful units of analysis.This criticism stems from a view of (im)politeness as discursive (in the sense of being realized and negotiated in discourse rather than at the utterance level). If (im)politeness is seen as discursive, it follows that its study needs to be anchored in a solid model of discourse that takes into consideration the ‘macro/ meso/ micro’ levels of sociological enquiry. In sociolinguistic/ discourse analysis, ‘macro’ refers to belief systems, ideologies, social structure, institutions. ‘Meso’ units of communication are employed by groups and communities of practice, such as specific types of discourse or genres; whereas ‘micro’ refers to specific, local interactions among participants with special attention to the syntactic, interactional, phonological or lexical resources deployed. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou (2019) have argued that activity types, as conceptualized by Levinson, are tied to the meso and micro levels of analysis, but not to the macro level. The usefulness of communities of practice as analytical units has also been criticized for not being clearly defined and imbued with structuralist notions.The difficulty to demarcate what constitutes a community has increased with the digital age (Tagg, 2015; Zappavigna, 2011). Further, a certain community of practice (say a church) may engage in different practices, each of them involving different norms (attending service, organizing fundraisers, getting together for fish fries). Likewise, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2010a) and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou (2019) have argued that it is genres (or discourse types) and the norms associated with them that guide expectations of (im)politeness and the evaluations associated with those. Further, genres are meso level units of analysis clearly connected to both the macro level (discourse ideologies) and the micro-level of linguistic realization instantiated in texts (see also Briz & Albelda, 2019). For example, changes in the ideologies of education discourse (macro-level) have had an impact on different education genres (meso level) such as the academic lecture, and on it becoming more interactive, conversational, and informal (micro level). As we saw in Section 2, many scholars have analyzed impoliteness manifestations in different genres (reality contests, talk shows, interviews, political debate, etc.). However, more explicit connections are needed between ideologies, norms, and linguistic realizations that can be evaluated as impolite. In this respect, and although consensus has not been reached regarding what constitutes impoliteness (Haugh, 2019), most scholars would agree that making overarching claims regarding what impoliteness is for a language and culture group, such as ‘Spaniards,’ ‘Latin Americans,’ or ‘Spanish-speaking cultures,’ is not necessarily feasible (but see Kaul de Marlangeon, 2017).Assessments regarding impoliteness are genre/practice-based; e.g., the expectations for (im)politeness may be different for a service encounter at a corner bar than they are during an interaction at a hotel reception, a health consultation at a doctor’s office, or during a lecture or a trial, to name a few. Even within those genre practices, different participants may not share, across the board, the exact same conception regarding impoliteness. Thus, claims regarding identified trends in impoliteness use for a language/ culture group need always to be followed by disclaimers.

3.2

Data

As is the case in impoliteness research and can also be gleaned from the review of extant literature, scholars working on Spanish manifestations of impoliteness have focused on exploitative television shows, adversarial genres of political discourse, and different online genres, which 378

Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish

display a pervasive use of conflictual forms of interaction. However, concentrating on these kinds of data has actually oversimplified the task of locating impoliteness, which is not necessarily so clear-cut and evident in real interaction. Far from it, impoliteness occurrences are subtle and often require an in-depth knowledge of participants and relationships to be understood (Dobs & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2013). Therefore, although expanding the scope of impoliteness research to encompass unelicited, naturally occurring interaction presents challenges related to both data collection and analysis, it can also lead to new insights into the everyday, often more understated, manifestations of impoliteness (see Chapter 33 on research methods for pragmatics study, this volume). Within the context of Spanish impoliteness, some studies have examined naturally occurring instances of impoliteness. For example, scholars have drawn from the Val.Es.Co. corpus of colloquial Spanish, providing valuable insights into conversational impoliteness (Bernal, 2008a; Briz & Albelda, 2019; Hernández Flores, 2014). More recently, other scholars have looked at conflict in domestic contexts by different Spanish-speaking groups (see Bravo & Placencia, 2018). For instance, Kaiser (2018) analyzed refusals in Uruguayan couples talk and found that the female partners neither shied away from conflict nor went to lengths to save face. Kalbermatten (2018) analyzed the role of verbal irony in conflict talk among relatives and friends in Argentina. Her data analysis illustrated how irony can be employed to initiate, extend, defuse, or end a dispute among relatives and friends. For her part, Fernández-Amaya (2019), analyzing data from Southern Spain, looked at how impoliteness begins/unfolds/ends in a family group on WhatsApp.

3.3 Reflexivity As discussed, a significant part of research on Spanish impoliteness has focused on different types of media. Since the affordances/constraints of the medium have an impact on interaction, and thus what can be considered impolite and by whom, it is useful for scholars to be more reflective regarding the interconnections between medium and impoliteness. Although anonymity and immediacy of response have been discussed (Fuentes Rodríguez, 2009), obtaining a more nuanced understanding of the medium and establishing a conversation with related fields of enquiry would be desirable. Interesting in this respect is work by Kádár and Haugh (2013), who problematize the first/ second order distinction and extend evaluations of politeness by resorting to Goffman’s (1981) participatory status. Relevant especially for mediated impoliteness is their concept of metaparticipants; i.e., “people whose evaluation of politeness arise through vicariously taking part in the interaction by viewing it on television or the internet” (p. 84). However, as the authors argue, the line between participants and metaparticipants is becoming blurred, especially because digital forms of communication involve direct participation by metaparticipants in the form of texts, postings, etc. Participation statuses have become increasingly more complex and, therefore, caution is needed when applying theories and models that were developed for face-to-face communication and the dyad to (massively) polylogal forms of interaction (mostly digital). In that respect, we must ask ourselves as researchers whether models that are not digitally native (i.e., developed for digital data) work when they are digitized, since, without exception, impoliteness models are not digitally native. This is the question that Bou Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2014a) asked themselves upon applying models developed to account for conflict beginnings, middles, and ends to a massive, digital YouTube polylogue. Their analysis showed that digitized models appear not to be supported when they are applied to such new media polylogues. Importantly, digital data require a view of impoliteness that is not only synchronic but also diachronic. Further, what have been 379

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

taken as clear-cut categories—such as face-threat recipient and witness, and offensive and defensive strategies—become blurred and indistinguishable. In addition, concepts like ‘beginnings/ middles/ ends’ appear to be “reified constructs that cannot fully account for the multifunctionality of utterances, the multi-sequentiality of conflict in polylogal, mediated interaction, and the undeniable, though seldom tested fact, that conflict is often not resolved” (2014a, p. 33).

3.4

Interdisciplinarity

The need to have more interfaces between (im)politeness studies and media research is evident in the relevance of concepts such as ‘context collapse’ (Marwick & boyd, 2010). Context collapse refers to the infinite number of audiences that are possible online, as opposed to the limited groups a person normally interacts with face-to-face. Context collapse has a major impact on (im)politeness considerations and evaluations. Usually, in face-to-face contexts, we deal with just one type of audience (e.g., a family member or business associates), and construct our messages, including (im)politeness, accordingly. However, when we post on our Facebook profiles, all those groups, formerly separate, can be included in our audience. How do posters take the face needs of such disparate groups into consideration? How is impoliteness evaluated by said groups?

4

Future directions and conclusion

Moving forward, these are some of the areas that, in my view, could help advance research on Spanish impoliteness: (a) Developing the study of the metapragmatics of impoliteness. Metapragmatics can be defined as “the study of the awareness on the part of ordinary or lay observers about the ways in which they use language to interact and communicate with others” (Kádár & Haugh, 2013, p. 181).This entails a more in-depth, emic,/first-order understanding of impoliteness in Spanish, both through elicited data (such as with questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups) and non-elicited data (such as comments on blogs, newspapers’ postings, social media in general or books on etiquette or appropriate social behavior). The practices by which such metapragmatic evaluations emerge in interaction have become an increasingly important locus of study for politeness researchers.These insights can be used to triangulate data (obtained through the analyst’s own intuitions) and to develop second-order concepts and models (Sifianou, 2016;Watts, 2003). In this sense,Watts (2003) has bewailed the fact that scholars have constructed “pseudo-scientific” politeness theories (so-called ‘politeness2’) that seem remote from lay users’ understandings of (im)politeness. (b) Researching the metapragmatics of concepts semantically related to “impolite,” such as descortés, desatento, descomedido, grosero, malcriado, irrespetuoso among others (see Culpeper, Haugh, & Johnson, 2017). (c) Delving into issues of nomenclature.Working with lay participants involves using their own terms as they do to refer to impoliteness-related phenomena rather than imposing secondorder terms that may not resonate with them. For example, Garcés-Conejos et al. (2010) found that descortés/descortesía are not necessarily the terms of choice for related phenomena in Peninsular Spanish. (d) Researching the use of conventionalized impoliteness formulae in different varieties of Spanish. For Terkourafi (2015) it is conventionalization, rather than indirectness, that lies at the heart of (im)politeness.Therefore, finding out more about conventionalization in Spanish may lead to a better understanding of impoliteness. 380

Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish

(e) Investigating the connections between morality and impoliteness (see Kádár, Parvaresh, & Ning, 2019).The (im)politeness field is experiencing a “moral turn.” Still, we know little about how moral judgments intersect with impolite evaluations in the Spanish-speaking world. (f) Drawing from corpus pragmatics tools to investigate impoliteness. Corpus pragmatics (see Romero-Trillo, 2017, and Chapter 32 on corpus pragmatics, this volume) refers to studies of language use that employ large, computer-readable collections of language. Quantitative approaches can shed new light on impoliteness phenomena (see Culpeper, O’Driscoll, & Hardaker, 2019) and more research is needed in this area, especially regarding Spanish data. (g) Having ethical considerations in mind when collecting, storing, and analyzing data. Ethical considerations are especially relevant when protecting the privacy of participants (even those posting information on publicly accessible platforms). Following the guidelines of the Association of Internet Researchers may be useful (https://aoir.org/ethics/) (see also Locher & Bolander’s, 2019, discussion of ethics within pragmatics). My review of the literature has unveiled two main areas of interest: studies that sought to theorize impoliteness, either in general terms or, more specifically, for Spanish-speaking language and culture groups. In addition, within this first area, there was an important strand of studies that have looked at phono-(im)politeness, an under-researched area in (im)politeness research in general (but see Culpeper, Bousfield, & Wichmann, 2003).The second area of interest for Spanish impoliteness researchers, and indeed the one on which the majority of research focuses, involves mediated cases of impoliteness, either via traditional or digital media. In this area, research on Spanish impoliteness coincides with that of mainstream research on impoliteness that has also paid significant attention to adversarial genres and exploitative TV shows on different social media platforms and genres. In sum, I have identified and assessed critically four main issues, both theoretical and methodological, in Spanish impoliteness; namely, units of analysis, data, and reflexivity and interdisciplinarity. Regarding units of analysis, I have argued that a refocusing on genres as meso-level units, connecting the macro and micro levels, seems a promising way moving forward. Concerning data, it seems that the field of impoliteness (including research on Spanish) needs to analyze more subtle occurrences of this phenomenon that constitute the essence of impoliteness in everyday life. Further, looking into reflexivity and interdisciplinarity, the mediated, and thus highly complex from a participatory point of view, nature of the cases of impoliteness would require researchers to be aware of the limitations of models that were developed for dyadic, face-to-face communication and to question their validity, as non-digitally native, for digital data. In addition, understanding the medium and its influence on communication and what counts as impolite would require more interfaces between impoliteness and media studies.

Further reading Evans, M., Jeffries, L., & O’Driscoll, J. (2019).The Routledge handbook of language in conflict. London: Routledge. A must-read for scholars interested in conflictual communication and language aggression.This handbook will be very helpful to impoliteness scholars looking to widen their perspective by gaining an understanding of how conflict is approached from different language-based approaches. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., & Bou Franch, P. (2019). Emic conceptualizations of face (imagen) in Peninsular Spanish. In E. Ogiermann & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness (pp. 301–327). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This chapter uses a number of qualitative and quantitative tools to assist in the unveiling of emic conceptualizations of imagen1/face1.These include the examination of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, 381

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

the analysis of a sizeable corpus of Spanish newspapers from a corpus linguistics perspective, and the analysis of data from focus groups discussing situated experiences of imagen1. It can be of help to researchers interested in conducting research on the metapragmatics of impoliteness. Haugh, M., & Culpeper, J. (2018). Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory. In C. Ilie & N. Norrick (Eds.), Pragmatics and its interfaces (pp. 213–239).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. This chapter advocates for an approach to pragmatic phenomena that combines etic and emic views and offers an up-to-date, comprehensive review of research on pragmatics and (im)politeness. It describes and assesses a variety of extant theoretical models developed within the third wave of (im)politeness research, useful to researchers seeking to advance to a more integrative view (first/second order) of impoliteness-related phenomena.

References Albelda Marco, M. (2012). Recursos fónicos descorteses: Datos acústicos y metodología para su identificación. In J. Escamilla-Morales & G. Henry-Vega (Eds.), Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 520–544). Stockholm: Universidad del Atlántico y Programa EDICE. Alcaide Lara, E. (2009). Lo importante es vender: Lenguaje agresivo y publicidad. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez & E. Alcaide-Lara (Eds.), Manifestaciones textuales de la agresividad verbal en diversos ámbitos comunicativos (pp. 161–187). Sevilla: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. Álvarez,A., Blondet, M.A., & Rojas, D. (2011). (Des)cortesía y prosodia: Una relación necesaria. Oralia, 14, 437–449. Bañón Hernández, A. (2010). Comunicación destructiva y agresividad verbal en la Red. Notas en torno al discurso sobre las enfermedades raras. Discurso & Sociedad, 4(4), 649–673. Bernal, M. (2007). Categorización sociopragmática de la cortesía y de la descortesía. Un estudio de la conversación coloquial española. Estocolmo: Universidad de Estocolmo. Bernal, M. (2008a). Do insults always insult? Genuine impoliteness versus non-genuine impoliteness in colloquial Spanish. Pragmatics, 18(4), 775–802. Bernal, M. (2008b). El test de hábitos sociales aplicado al estudio de la descortesía. In A. Briz, A. Hidalgo, M. Albelda, J. Contreras, & N. Hernández Flores (Eds.), Cortesía y conversación: De lo escrito a lo oral (pp. 623–641).Valencia: Universitat de València & Programa EDICE. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2001).“No diga chorradas . . .” La descortesía del debate político cara a cara: Una aproximación pragma-variacionista. Oralia, 4, 9–45. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2003).‘Perdóneme que se lo diga, pero vuelve usted a faltar a la verdad, señor González’: Form and function of politic verbal behaviour in face-to-face Spanish political debates. Discourse & Society, 14(4), 395–423. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2010). Niveles en la caracterización de las estrategias discursivas. Aplicaciones al estudio de la descortesía en un corpus mediático. Pragmatics, 39, 1360–1370. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2013).‘No eres inteligente ni para tener amigos . . . Pues anda que tú’[‘You are not even clever enough to have any friends . . . Look who’s talking!’]: A quantitative analysis of the production and reception of impoliteness in present-day Spanish reality television. In N. Lorenzo-Dus & P. GarcesConejos Blitvich (Eds.), Real talk: Reality television and discourse analysis in action (pp. 218–244). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2014). Factores condicionantes en la producción y recepción de la descortesía en un reality show. Revista de Filología de La Universidad de La Laguna, 32, 17–43. Bolívar,A. (2001). El insulto como estrategia en el diálogo político venezolano. Oralia, 4, 47–74. Bou Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2014a). Conflict management in massive polylogues:A case study from YouTube. Journal of Pragmatics, 73, 19–36. Bou Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2014b) Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 2(2), 226–248. Bou Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2018). Relational work in multimodal networked interactions on Facebook. Internet Pragmatics, 1(1), 134–160. Bou Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2019). Socioeconomic variation and conflict in Spanish retailer-consumer interactions on Facebook. In J. C. Félix-Brasdesfer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 189–206). London: Routledge.

382

Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish

Bousfield, D. (2008). Impoliteness in interaction.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Boxer, D., & Placencia, M. E. (2018). Introduction: Closeness and conflict. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 6(2), 167–177. Bravo, D. (1999). ¿Imagen ‘positiva’ vs. imagen ‘negativa’? Pragmática sociocultural y componentes de fase. Oralia, 2, 155–184. Bravo, D. (2005). Categorías, tipologías y aplicaciones: hacia una redefinición de la cortesía comunicativa. In D. Bravo (Ed.), Estudios de la (des)cortesía en español. Categorías conceptuales y aplicaciones a córpora orales y escritos (pp. 21–52). Buenos Aires: Dunken. Brenes Peña, E. (2007). Estrategias descorteses y agresivas en la figura del tertuliano televisivo: ¿trasgresión o norma? Lingüística en la red. Retrieved from www.linred.es/ Brenes Peña, E. (2010).Violencia verbal y discurso televisivo. Discurso & Sociedad, 4(4), 706–730. Brenes Peña, E. (2012). Género, discurso político y descortesía verbal.Análisis de la influencia de la variante sexo en el Parlamento Andaluz. Philologia Hispalensis, 26(1–2), 59–77. Brenes Peña, E. (2013a). Interviews as confrontation. El nuevo entrevistador televisivo. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez (Ed.), Imagen social y medios de comunicación (pp. 25–52). Madrid:Arco Libros. Brenes Peña, E. (2013b). La descortesía mediático-lúdica en los programas de entretenimiento. El rol del jurado agresivo. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez (Ed.), Imagen social y medios de comunicación (pp.  145–165). Madrid: Arco Libros. Brenes Peña, E. (2014). La imagen del político en los medios de comunicación. Identificación y análisis de las estrategias (des)corteses utilizadas en la entrevista televisiva no acomodaticia. Revista de Filología, 32, 63–80. Brenes Peña, E., & Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2017). Impoliteness and thematic variation in Spanish television interviews. Studies in Media and Communication. Retrieved from www.redfame.com/journal/index.php/ smc/article/view/2332 Brenes Peña, E., & González-Sanz, M. (2013). El tertuliano agresivo. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez (Ed.), Imagen social y medios de comunicación (pp. 121–144). Madrid:Arco Libros. Briz-Gómez,A., & Albelda-Marco, M. (2019). La atenuación y la intensificación en la expresión de la (des) cortesía en la conversación coloquial In M. E. Placencia & X.A. Padilla (Eds.), Guía práctica de pragmática del español. London: Routledge. Briz-Gómez, A., & Grupo Val.Es.Co. (2002). Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales. Anejo de la revista Oralia. Madrid: Arco Libros. Briz-Gómez,A., & Hidalgo-Navarro,A. (2008). Marcadores discursivos y prosodia: Observaciones sobre su papel moralizador atenuante. In A. Briz Gómez, A. Hidalgo, M. Albelda, J. Contreras, & N. Hernández Flores (Eds.), Cortesía y conversación: de lo escrito a lo oral (pp. 390–409).Valencia and Estocolmo: Universitat de València & Programa EDICE. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness. Some universals in language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castro-Cruz, M. (2017).Ataque a la imagen y descortesía en los comentarios de blogs en español peninsular. Philologia Hispalensis, 31(1), 37–63. Culpeper, J. (1996).Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 25, 349–367. Culpeper, J. (2005). Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show. The Weakest Link. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 35–72. Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, J. (2013). Impoliteness: Questions and answers. In D. Jamet & M. Jobert (Eds.), Aspects of impoliteness (pp. 2–15). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Culpeper, J. (2016). Impoliteness strategies. In A. Capone & J. L. Mey (Eds.), Interdisciplinary studies in pragmatics, culture and society (pp. 421–443). Heidelberg: Springer. Culpeper, J., Bousfield, D., & Wichmann,A. (2003). Impoliteness revisited:With special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(10–11), 1545–1579. Culpeper, J., & Hardaker, C. (2017). Impoliteness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Kadar (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 199–225). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Culpeper, J., & Haugh, M. (2014). Pragmatics and the English language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Culpeper, J., Haugh, M., & Johnson, D. (2017). (Im)politeness: Metalinguistic labels and concepts in English. In R. Giora & M. Haugh (Eds.), Doing pragmatics interculturally. Cognitive, philosophical and sociopragmatic perspectives (pp. 135–147). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Culpeper, J., O’Driscoll, J., & Hardaker, C. (2019). Notions of politeness in Britain and North America. In E. Ogiermann & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness (pp. 177–200). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 383

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

del Valle Núñez, C. (2018). Tuits: Una respuesta descortés que reproduce la violencia de género. Oxímora. Retrieved June 24, 2019, from http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/oximora/article/view/22440 Díaz Pérez, J. C. (2014). Creatividad léxica y descortesía en los medios de comunicación virtual. Revista de Filología, 32, 81–97. Dobs,A., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2013). Impoliteness in interaction:Accounting for face-threat witness’s responses. Journal of Pragmatics, 53, 112–130. Dynel, M. (2015).The landscape of impoliteness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 11(2), 329–354. Eelen, G. (2001). A critique of politeness theories. Manchester: St. Jerome. Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2011). Cortesía, prosodia y variación pragmática en las peticiones de estudiantes universitarios mexicanos y dominicanos. In M. E. Placencia & C. García (Eds.), Estudios de variación pragmática en español (pp. 57–86). Buenos Aires: Dunken. Fernández-Amaya, L. (2019). Feminism as a source of conflict among family members: A case study from WhatsApp interaction. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. Published online: December 17. https:// doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00032.fer Fernández García, F. (2009). (Des)cortesía y pugna dialéctica en el debate político-electoral. Oralia, 12, 267–304. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2009). Descortesía y agresividad bajo el anonimato: Internet. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez & E. Alcaide-Lara (Eds.), Manifestaciones textuales de la agresividad verbal en diversos ámbitos (pp. 188–210). Sevilla: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2013a). Argumentación, (des)cortesía y género en el discurso parlamentario. Tonos Digital: Revista de Estudios Filológicos, 23. Retrieved from www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum25/secciones/ estudios-11c-catalina_fuentes,_(2013,_tonos_25).htm Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2013b). Los comentarios en la prensa digital. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez (Ed.), Imagen social y medios de comunicación (pp. 197–247). Madrid:Arco Libros. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2009). Impoliteness and identity in the American news media: The culture wars. Journal of Politeness Research, 5, 273–304. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2010a). A genre approach to the study of im-politeness. International Review of Pragmatics, 2(1), 46–94. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2010b). The status quo and quo-vadis of impoliteness research.  Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(4), 535–559. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2013). El modelo del género y la des/cortesía clasificatoria en las evaluaciones de Sálvame por parte de la audiencia. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez (Ed.), (Des)cortesía para el espectáculo: Estudios de pragmática variacionista (pp. 167–196). Madrid:Arco Libros. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., Bou Franch, P., & Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2010).A genre-approach to im-politeness in a Spanish TV talk show: Evidence from corpus-based analysis, questionnaires, and focus groups. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(4), 689–723. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., & Sifianou, M. (2019). Im/politeness and discursive pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 91–101. García Gómez,A. (2012). Perceptions of assertiveness among women.Triggering and managing conflict in reality television. Discourse & Society, 6(4), 379–399. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelpia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gómez Sánchez, M. E., & Guerra Salas, L. (2012). Exclusión e integración: Manifestaciones (des)corteses en la construcción de la inmigración en la prensa digital española. Anuario de Estudios Filológicos, 35, 65–84. González Sanz, M. (2017). Mecanismos de descortesía en la tertulia periodística de tema político. Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación, 13, 103–119. Grainger, K. (2011). “First order” and “second order” politeness: Institutional and intercultural contexts. In Linguistic Politeness Research Group (Eds.), Discursive approaches to politeness (pp. 167–188). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Haugh, M. (2007). The discursive challenge to politeness research: An interactional alternative. Journal of Politeness Research, 3, 295–317. Haugh, M. (2019). The metapragmatics of consideration in (Australian and New Zealand) English. In E. Ogiermann & P. G. Blitvich (Eds.), From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: Multilingual and multicultural perspectives (pp. 201–225). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haugh, M., & Culpeper, J. (2018). Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory. In C. Ilie & N. Norrick (Eds.), Pragmatics and its interfaces (pp. 213–239).Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

384

Impoliteness and conflict in Spanish

Hernández, G. (2014). Manifestación de la cortesía y anti cortesía en jóvenes de la provincia de Buenos Aires: Usos y representaciones de “malas palabras” e insultos. Signo y Seña, 26, 23–47. Hernández Flores, N. (2009). Percepciones de cortesía en México y España: Una comparación a través del test de hábitos sociales. In L. Rodríguez Alfano (Ed.), La (des)cortesía y la imagen social en México: Estudios semiótico-discursivos desde varios enfoques analíticos (pp. 171–206). Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León and Programa EDICE. Hernández Flores, N. (2012). Presencia, relevancia y perspectivas del elemento fónico en estudios de (des) cortesía. In J. Escamilla-Morales (Eds.), Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp.  545–565). Barranquilla and Stockholm: Universidad del Atlántico/Programa EDICE. Hernández Flores, N. (2013). Actividad de imagen. Caracterización y tipología en la interacción comunicativa. Pragmática Sociocultural, 1(2), 1–24. Hernández Flores, N. (2014). Rasgos fónicos en críticas, reproches y sus respuestas. ¿Muestras de cortesía, descortesía o de actividades de autoimagen? In Y. Congosto, M. L. Montero, A. Salvador (Eds.), Fonética experimental, educación superior e investigación (Vol. 3, pp. 419–493). Madrid:Arco Libros. Hidalgo Navarro, A. (2009). Modalización (des)cortés y prosodia: Estado de la cuestión en el ámbito hispánico. Boletín de Filología, XLIV, 161–195. Hidalgo Navarro,A., & Martínez Hernández, D. (2013). Hacia una propuesta metodológica para el estudio de la atenuación fónica en Es.Var.Atenuación. Pragmática Sociocultural, 5(1), 25–58. Kádár, D., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kádár, D., Parvaresh,V., & Ning, P. (2019). Morality, moral order, and language conflict and aggression: A position paper. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 7(1), 6–30. Kaiser, H. (2018). Intimacy matters: Uruguayan women’s refusal behavior in couples talk. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 6(2), 269–296. Kalbermatten, M. I. (2018).The role of verbal irony in conflict talk among relatives and friends in an Argentinian community. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 6(2), 297–317. Kaul de Marlangeon, S. (2008). Tipología del comportamiento verbal descortés en español. In A. BrizGómez & A. Hidalgo (Eds.), Estudios de cortesía sobre el español: De lo oral a lo escrito (pp. 254–266).Valencia, Estocolmo: Universidad de Valencia, Programa EDICE. Kaul de Marlangeon, S. (2017).Tipos de descortesía verbal y emociones en contextos de cultura hispanohablante. Pragmática Sociocultural, 5(1), 119–123. Kaul de Marlangeon, S. (2018). Fustigation impoliteness, emotions and extimacy in Argentine media celebrities. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22(1), 161–174. Kaul de Marlangeon, S., & Alba, L. (2012).A typology of verbal impoliteness behaviour for the English and Spanish cultures. Revista española de lingüística aplicada, 25, 69–92. Kaul de Marlangeon, S., & Cordisco,A. (2014). La descortesía verbal en el contexto político-ideológico de las redes sociales. Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna, 32, 145–162. Kienpointner, M. (1997). Varieties of rudeness: Types and functions of impolite utterances. Functions of Language, 4, 251–287. Locher, M., & Bolander, B. (2019). Ethics in pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 83–90. Locher, M., & Bousfield, D. (2008). Introduction. Impoliteness and power in language. In M. Locher & D. Bousfield (Eds.), Impoliteness in language: Studies on its interplay with power in theory and practice (pp. 1–13). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Locher, M., & Watts, R. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 9–33. López Martín, J. M. (2012). La cita como estrategia argumentativa y de imagen en el discurso parlamentario. Discurso & Sociedad, 6(1), 169–186. Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2007). (Im)politeness and the Spanish media.The case of audience participation debates. In M. E. Placencia & C. Garcia (Eds.), Research on politeness in the Spanish speaking world (pp. 145–166). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2011).“I have a question for you, Mr. President.” Doing accountability in “citizen interviews.” In M. Ekstrom & M. Patrona (Eds.), Talking politics in broadcast media. Cross-cultural perspectives on political interviewing, journalism and accountability (pp. 201–221).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (Eds.). (2013). Real talk: Reality television and discourse analysis in action. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mancera Rueda, A. (2009). Manifestaciones de descortesía y violencia verbal en los foros de opinión digitales de los diarios españoles. Discurso & Sociedad, 3(3), 437–466.

385

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

Mancera Rueda,A. (2017). La usurpación de la identidad con fines paródicos en la red social Twitter: ¿Manifestaciones de descortesía verbal? RILCE, 33(2), 537–565. Mancera Rueda, A., & Pano Alamán, A. (2013). El discurso político en Twitter: Análisis de mensajes que trinan. Barcelona: Anthropos. Márquez Guerrero, M. (2007). Estrategias de descortesía al servicio de la persuasión en publicidad. Revista Electrónica de Estudios Filológicos, 13. Retrieved from www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum25/secciones/estudios-11c-catalina_fuentes,_(2013,_tonos_25).htm Márquez Reiter, R. (2010). A ella no le gusta que le digan María y a mí que me traten de tú.A window into Latin American diversity. Sociolinguistic Studies, 4, 413–442. Márquez Reiter, R. (2013).The dynamics of complaining in a Latin American for-profit commercial setting. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 231–247. Marwick,A. E., & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately:Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. Moreno Benítez, D. (2009). Descortesía y violencia verbal en el aula: La relación alumno-profesor Lingüística en la red. Retrieved from www.linred.es/numero7_articulo_2.html Moreno Benítez, D. (2011). Distintas funciones de la descortesía: Los insultos de los políticos en la prensa escrita. Lingüística en la red. Retrieved from www.linred.es/numero9_articulo_7.html Mugford, G., & Arias Moreno, M. L. (2017). Refutation of perceived incivility in young adults:The detection of interpersonal practices tú/usted in Mexico. Discurso & Sociedad, 11(1), 134–162. Mugford, G., Sergio-Vargas, L., & Vázquez-Robles, E. (2013). Phatic communion: Anticortesía  and positive comity in the Mexican context. Pragmática Sociocultural, 1(2), 199–226. Ortiz Viso,T., & Fernández García, F. (2014). La agresión verbal como espectáculo: Estrategias de cortesía en Sálvame. ORALIA, 17, 289–315. Placencia, M. E., & Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (2013). Polémica y/o descortesía en programas televisivos de crónica social en Ecuador y España: El caso de Vamos con todo y Sálvame diario. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez (Ed.), (Des)cortesía para el espectáculo: estudios de pragmática variacionista (pp. 127–165) Madrid:Arco Libros. Romero-Trillo, J. (2017). Editorial. Corpus Pragmatics, 1, 1–2. Sifianou, M. (2010). Review of M. Locher & D. Bousfield (Eds.), Impoliteness in language: Studies on its interplay with power in theory and practice. Language in Society, 39, 119–122. Sifianou, M. (2016). On culture, face and politeness.Again. In E. Bogdanowska-Jakubowska (Ed.), New ways to face and (im)politeness (pp. 15–30). Katowice:Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego. Sinkeviciute,V. (2015).“There’s definitely gonna be some serious carnage in this house” or how to be genuinely impolite in Big Brother UK. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 3(2), 317–348. Tagg, C. (2015). Exploring digital communication: Language in action. New York: Routledge. Terkourafi, M. (2005). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(2), 237–262. Terkourafi, M. (2015). Conventionalization: A new agenda for im/politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 11–18. Vázquez Laslop, M. E. (2019). Tú y yo en los debates de candidatos a la Presidencia en México (1994–2012). Un estudio de deixis política. Mexico City: El Colegio de México. Vivas Márquez, J., & Ridao Rodrigo, S. (2015).“Lo siento pero me parecen horribles!!!” Análisis pragmalingüístico de la descortesía en la red social Facebook. Revista de Filología, 33, 217–236. Watts, R. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zappavigna, M. (2011).Ambient affiliation:A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media & Society, 13(5), 788–806. Zimmerman, K. (2003). Constitución de la identidad y anticortesía verbal entre jóvenes masculinos hablantes de español. In D. Bravo (Ed.), La perspectiva no etnocentrista de la cortesía: Identidad sociocultural de las comunidades hispanohablantes (pp. 47–59). Estocolmo: EDICE.

386

22 Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research Lori Czerwionka

1

Introduction

Mitigation is the linguistic communicative strategy of reducing, softening, or weakening an utterance (Fraser, 1980, 1990), thus limiting the face loss associated with a message (Brown & Levinson, 1987). It is a basic element of human interaction that connects language, context, cognition, and the social and affective world. Mitigation research includes the overlapping concepts of ‘downgrading’ (House & Kasper, 1981), ‘weakening’ (Brown & Levinson, 1987),‘hedging’ (Holmes, 1995), and ‘attenuating’ (Holmes, 1984; Leech, 1983). For example, a speaker could tell someone “sit down” or mitigate the directive with an utterance like “I’d appreciate it if you would sit down” (Fraser, 1980, p. 344). A wide range of linguistic forms serves to mitigate (e.g., lexical items, syntactic structure, prosody), and mitigation promotes agreement (Briz, 2003; Félix-Brasdefer, 2004), cooperation (Ballesteros, 2001), and negotiation (Briz, 2004). Given that mitigation moderates the force of the utterance itself and also has lasting impact within an interaction, on interlocutors, and on relationships among interlocutors, it is an important pragmatic resource to understand and one that is of current interest in Spanish pragmatics research (e.g., Albelda Marco, 2018a; Cestero, 2017; Chodorowska-Pilch, 2017; Czerwionka, 2012; Devís, 2014; Flores-Ferrán, 2010, 2020; Flores Salgado & Ramírez Cabrera, 2015).1 This chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of mitigation within Spanish pragmatics research. Situating mitigation in the field of pragmatics and theoretically explaining the construct, this chapter introduces fundamental pragmatic theories related to mitigation (Section 2.1). Section 2.2 focuses on the practical question of how to identify mitigation in interaction, describing individual linguistic structures and a taxonomy of mitigating functions. Sections 2.3 to 2.6 review current research trends, including pragmatic variation and mitigation, motivations of mitigation, prosody and mitigation, and second language (L2) learners and mitigation. Based on the review of literature, methodological considerations and critiques are provided (Section 3), as well as directions for future research (Section 4).

387

Czerwionka

2 2.1

Review of existing research Historical and theoretical position of mitigation in pragmatics

While mitigation is a separate subfield of pragmatics, its study has been fundamentally connected to theories of politeness, speech acts, and the related concepts of illocutionary and perlocutionary force.Therefore, we begin by reviewing basic understandings of politeness and speech act theory in order to situate mitigation generally within these theories and pragmatics. Politeness theories propose that interlocutors must nurture certain social needs. Brown and Levinson (1987) defined these needs as positive and negative ‘face’ needs, where positive face needs include feeling included as part of a group and negative face needs include feeling free, or not imposed upon by others (see Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness issues, this volume). Scollon and Scollon (2001) refer to involvement and independence, two sides of one’s face that can be addressed simultaneously in interaction. Researchers focused on the Spanishspeaking world argue that autonomy and affiliation are the most relevant social needs (Bravo, 1999, 2002). Given these needs, however they are defined, communication has the potential to upset them or their balance; thus, communication can be, as in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model, face threatening. Interlocutors often use mitigation in face-threatening communication, and politeness theories highlight some likely contextual boundaries for mitigation (i.e., face-threatening communication considering situational variables of distance, power, and imposition) and social ramifications of it (i.e., reduced likelihood of a face-threatening act). While politeness theories have served to highlight and explain the use of some types of mitigation, mitigation also provides an evaluative tool for culturally constrained politeness norms (Hernández Flores, 2004). Mitigation and politeness theories rely largely on speech act theory, which centers on the understanding that “the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action” (Austin, 1962, p. 5; see also Chapter 2 on speech act research, this volume).To be precise, a speech act consists of three acts: the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary.The locutionary act is the literal meaning of the utterance.The illocutionary act, which depends on the situational circumstances, is the act that is intended by the speaker and understood by the listener (e.g., request, promise).The perlocutionary act is a consequence of the illocutionary act beyond the most conventional response.Whereas a conventional response to a request is to do the requested action, a perlocutionary act intended by the speaker may be for the listener to feel offended or pleased, depending on the context. There are five types of speech acts: assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declaratives (Searle, 1976). Assertives state what one believes to be true or claims something as true; directives prompt hearers to take action in response to requests, orders, or warnings; commissives bring about future actions by the speaker, as in the case of a promise; and expressives manifest the speaker’s psychological state. Only declaratives are irrelevant for the study of mitigation (Albelda Marco, 2010).These basics of speech act theory allow us to understand how the utterance “It’s cold in here” has one locutionary meaning, following traditional syntactic and semantic interpretation, and also how it can be used to communicate the illocutionary meaning of an assertion (communication of information) or a directive (prompt for hearer action) depending on the context of the utterance, thus eliciting perlocutionary acts. Of these three acts, the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are most relevant in mitigation research. Within these theoretical frames, the study of mitigation has emerged as a focal point in pragmatics research. Mitigation responds to the need to communicate intentions and create actions

388

Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research

through language (speech act theory), while also considering the face needs of the interlocutors (politeness theory). People naturally use linguistic strategies that allow themselves, on the one hand, to say what they want to say (e.g., request something, express dismay), while at the same time consider the face needs of all interlocutors. Mitigation is a linguistic tool that facilitates communication, especially in contexts where this tension exists, although mitigation is not equivalent to politeness (e.g., Caffi, 2007; Fraser, 1980). Brown and Levinson (1987) outlined strategies used by speakers to avoid threatening a hearer’s negative face.A main strategy is to use an indirect speech act, which suspends at least one of the felicity conditions associated with the speech act. Felicity conditions are underlying assumptions that must be present for the act to occur. For directives, the ‘preparatory condition’ proposes that the hearer be able and willing to perform the requested action, the ‘sincerity condition’ refers to the speaker’s desire or want that something happen, the ‘propositional content condition’ states that the proposition must address the hearer’s future action, and the ‘essential condition’ affirms that the utterance represents the speaker’s attempt to get the hearer to do something (Searle, 1976). For example, by adding “if you don’t mind” to the directive “close the window” (example from Brown & Levinson, 1987, pp. 162–163), the speaker suspends the preparatory condition related to the hearer’s willingness to complete the requested action. This strategy reduces the imposition on the hearer and the possibility of threatening the hearer’s negative face. Brown and Levinson (1987) stated that “indirect speech acts function as hedges on illocutionary force” (p. 134) and used the term ‘hedge’ to mark this imperfect fit of the utterance within the speech act category as defined by the felicity conditions. In sum, politeness theories and speech act theory provide a strong theoretical background for the study of mitigation, yet many questions about mitigation and the related theoretical principles still remain. Research on Spanish has contributed to the field by challenging basic principles of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory (e.g., Bravo, 1999, 2002; Hernández Flores, 2004) and the premise that mitigation via indirectness always positively impacts the interaction (e.g., Alba-Juez, 2007). Spanish mitigation research has also examined mitigation and its relationship to positive politeness norms in addition to negative politeness norms (e.g., Curcó, 2007; Ruzickova, 2007).These new insights and others, discussed in subsequent sections, contribute to current understandings of mitigation.

2.2 Types of mitigation and functions Turning to ways in which mitigation can occur and be analyzed, the terms ‘bush,’ ‘shield,’ and ‘hedge’ are important.While various terms exist for the same types of mitigation, Caffi (2007) uses the term ‘bush’ for propositional mitigation, which communicates imperfect belonging within a semantic category (e.g., sort of a friend).‘Hedges’ are forms of mitigation that reduce the illocutionary force, as described in Section 2.1 (e.g., close the window, if you don’t mind). ‘Shields’ are forms of mitigation that rely on deictic reference to remove or distance an interlocutor, distance the spatial-temporal placement, or present a hypothetical world (e.g.,‘that would bother her’ vs.‘that bothers her’). Researchers of Spanish have identified linguistic structures that mitigate and the various functions that mitigating structures serve in interaction. For example, Meyer-Hermann (1988) defined four groups of linguistic devices that mitigate: verb tense (e.g., conditional, imperfect, subjunctive), adverbs and particles (e.g., algo así ‘something like that,’ probablemente ‘probably’), types of verbs and modal verbs (e.g., creo que ‘I think that,’ parece que ‘it seems that,’ no sé ‘I don’t know,’ deber+inf ‘should+infinitive,’ quiero+inf ‘I want+infinitive,’ es posible que ‘it’s possible

389

Czerwionka

that’), and formulas and phrases (e.g., se puede decir ‘it can be said,’ lo que sea ‘whatever,’ digamos ‘we would say’). Confirming the use of certain verbs and verb forms to mitigate, researchers have examined specific forms, such as conditional (Chodorowska-Pilch, 2017; Haverkate, 1990), poder ‘to be able’ in requests (Orozco, 2009), and dar ‘give’+gerund in requests (Cisneros Estupiñán, 2007). Other grammatical and lexical forms have also been identified as serving to mitigate in Spanish, including reduced parentheticals (Schneider, 2007), negation (Koike, 1994), concessions as a form of retrospective mitigation (Martí Sánchez & Fernández Gómiz, 2018), epistemic adverbs (Koike, 1998; Yelin & Czerwionka, 2017), and the lexical item tipo ‘type’ (Mihatsch, 2018). While most of these studies have explored the relationship between mitigation and politeness in terms of the functions of mitigation, certain investigations have also led to new insights about the development of mitigating forms, speech acts, and the problem of identifying mitigation. Mihatsch (2018) provided a historical, pragmatic approach by examining the word tipo ‘type’ in 19th-century scientific texts and 20th-century colloquial Argentine Spanish to expose the historical development of mitigation resources. Related to speech acts, Koike (1998) highlighted the use of linguistic resources to mitigate the illocutionary force of suggestions, like epistemic adverbs (e.g., quizás ‘perhaps’) or attenuating phrases (e.g., un poco ‘a little,’ diminutives), and claimed that these mitigating resources serve to identify the speech act of suggesting; Chodorowska-Pilch (2017) found that conditional constructions mitigate in certain speech acts; namely, offers, suggestions, indirect requests, impositive declaratives, and indirect questions. Providing an insightful analysis of when epistemic verbs (e.g., creer, pensar ‘to think’) communicate a mitigated meaning versus a reduced degree of certitude, Albelda Marco (2010) found that epistemic verbs are more likely to mitigate when they represent sub-acts within a larger speech act, when they are reformulations of a prior utterance, or when they co-occur with other structures that tend to identify mitigation (e.g., concessives). Her work highlights the importance of investigating mitigation within issues of vagueness and calls attention to the complicated topic of how such meanings are calculated in communication. In addition to the analysis of specific linguistic resources used to mitigate, recent work has also begun to use corpora to define taxonomies of mitigating resources and functions of mitigation, considering specific speech acts and certain varieties of Spanish (e.g.,Albelda Marco & Cestero, 2011; Cestero, 2015). Albelda Marco and Cestero (2011) summarized tactical strategies that relate to mitigation found in the Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y América (PRESEEA) corpus, considering assertive speech acts in data from Madrid and Valencia, Spain (see Table 22.1).Their results largely conform to details of prior mitigation research (e.g., Ballesteros, 2002; Briz, 1998, 2003; Caffi, 2007; Haverkate, 1994; Koike, 1994). Considering the connection between speech acts and mitigation, we do not expect the same linguistic devices and functions of mitigation to be equally useful or relevant for all speech acts or contexts. Albelda Marco (2010) reported that directives that benefit the speaker (e.g., requests) usually incorporate more mitigation than those that benefit the hearer (e.g., advice), and commissive and expressive speech acts include less mitigation than other speech acts. Furthermore, she pointed out that mitigation in assertive speech acts function to reduce the speaker’s responsibility. Taken as a whole, the literature on Spanish mitigation has provided an overview of the uses of a wide range of linguistic resources (e.g., phonetic, lexical, morphological, syntactic) and nonlinguistic communicative resources (e.g., laughter; Bravo, 1998) available to mitigate in Spanish. Spanish mitigation researchers have identified specific linguistic mitigation devices and taxonomies of the types and functions of mitigation. 390

Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research Table 22.1 Tactical mitigation strategies with select examples 1 Minimize or blur the quantity or quality of what has been said (e.g., diminutives; quantifers and modifers: un poco ‘a little,’ más o menos ‘more or less,’ euphemisms) 2 Reduce the assertion by expressing it in the form of doubt or uncertainty (e.g., modal verbs and adverbs: creer ‘to believe,’ pensar ‘to think”; uncertainty: no saber ‘to not know,’ dudar ‘to doubt’) 3 Defocus the personal or temporal elements of the enunciation (e.g., impersonal pronouns; impersonal lexical items: al parecer ‘apparently”; verb tense: conditional) 4 Narrow or restrict what has been said (opinion, assertion, petition) (e.g., para mí ‘for me,’ si no me equivoco ‘if I’m not mistaken’) 5 Justify (e.g., es que ‘it’s that,’ como ‘like,’ porque ‘because’) 6 Correct or repair (e.g., discourse markers: pues ‘well,’ bueno ‘well,’ laughter; apology) 7 Make concessions (e.g., structures that present an opposing view) 8 Involve the hearer in what was said by the speaker (e.g., ¿qué te parece? ‘what do you think?,’ ellipsis) 9 Formulate directives indirectly (e.g., questions, negation with a question or request) Source: Albelda Marco & Cestero, 2011, p. 18, translated by Czerwionka

2.3 Pragmatic variation and mitigation In addition to defining the theoretical and pragmalinguistic realms of mitigation, researchers have examined the ways in which mitigation strategies vary in different contexts, considering cross-cultural, regional, and intracultural examinations. Cross-cultural analyses compare across languages,2 regional analyses compare across countries but within one language,3 and intracultural analyses address mitigation strategies of a single community4 across different situations or genres5 (see Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, pp. 187–188 for types of pragmatic variation).These types of research provide insight into linguistic structures of mitigation and the likely use of mitigation in interactions considering different cultural groups and different situations, while also often reflecting the underlying social values that provoke more or less mitigation in interaction (e.g., negative politeness, positive politeness). Summarizing some findings in Spanish mitigation variation research, Spaniards tend to use fewer internal (within the main utterance of the speech act) and external modifiers (beyond the main utterance of the speech act) to mitigate and are usually more direct than non-Peninsular Spanish speakers and English speakers (e.g., Márquez Reiter, 2000, 2002; Placencia, 1994). Also comparing Peninsular Spanish speakers with other speakers of Spanish, Curcó and De Fina (2002) found that indirectness, diminutives, and negation within speech acts that threaten the hearer’s positive face (e.g., complaints, refusals, disagreement) are perceived to soften the acts more for Mexicans than Spaniards. Correspondingly, Bravo (1998) found that Mexicans used mitigation more often than Spaniards when expressing opinions. As in the studies mentioned, researchers often focus on the direct–indirect dichotomy and uses of internal and external mitigation to compare mitigation tendencies across communities or situations. Research has also examined different linguistic levels used to mitigate. For example, 391

Czerwionka

comparing Mexican, Costa Rican, and Dominican varieties of Spanish, Félix-Brasdefer (2009) analyzed the syntactic (i.e., preverbal negation, conditional and imperfect forms, durative aspect markers), lexical (e.g., diminutives, epistemic devices), and prosodic downgraders of requests. Pragmalinguistic results indicated that 25% of downgraders were syntactic and 75% were lexical. Syntactic forms of mitigation were not common in all contexts, and a variety of lexical forms were used with some differences among groups. Overall, Dominicans used less syntactic and lexical mitigation than the other groups. The differences found across different communities are often attributed to variation in underlying social values. For example, Curcó (2007) argued that Mexicans have a strong tendency to use mitigation to maintain the positive face of their interlocutors. Ruzickova (2007) similarly suggested that Cuban Spanish speakers used strong and mild hints in requests, which included conditional constructions, avoidance, and impersonal forms, to align with positive politeness norms. She found that mitigation relating to negative face threats occurred less frequently than strategies focused on positive face or solidarity. Providing more clarity on the relationship between mitigation and positive and negative politeness, Félix-Brasdefer (2009) identified similarities across cultures in how mitigation in request sequences relates to an initial inclination toward values of independence and, subsequently, values of involvement. Likewise, Chodorowska-Pilch (2017) claims that mitigation via conditional constructions addresses positive and negative face needs. While analyses of mitigation have often examined different sociocultural group norms and situational variables like power, distance, and rank of imposition, recent studies have begun to explore how social factors like age, sex, socioeconomic status, and lifestyle explain mitigation tendencies.These have often been analyses of intracultural variation, exploring single language communities:Albelda Marco (2008), Cestero (2012, 2015, 2017), and Cestero and Albelda Marco (2012) examined Peninsular Spanish of Madrid andValencia; Flores Salgado and Ramírez Cabrera (2015) investigated Mexican Spanish of Monterrey; and Torres Fontalvo and Rodríguez Cadena (2017) addressed Colombian Spanish of Barranquilla. In Cestero’s (2017) analysis of mitigation in Madrid, considering the functions of self-protection, prevention, or repair, she found that male speakers tended to mitigate for self-protection and women tended to use mitigation for prevention purposes. She also found self-protection to be a more common purpose for middle-aged speakers (35–54 years old), compared to those who were 20–34 years old and those 55 years old or older. Perhaps the most striking finding was the greater dependence on mitigation by participants with university-level education versus those with lower levels of education. Coupled with the quantitative analysis of mitigation frequency, Cestero (2017) also offered an analysis of linguistic mitigation strategies by social variables, thus highlighting that not only the purpose of mitigating but also the linguistic forms of mitigation vary across social dimensions. Research that addresses mitigation and social variables offers new insight into the forms and uses of mitigation. Additional large-scale studies of social variables and mitigation would benefit the field by confirming that results reflect social trends rather than individual characteristics of participants. Another variable of interest in intracultural mitigation studies is discourse genre (e.g., academic writing, conversation, political debate). Discourse genre has been shown to determine the frequency and function of mitigation (e.g.,Albelda Marco, 2018b; De Cock, Marsily, Pizarro Pedraza, & Rasson, 2018). Studies of discourse genre have confirmed that facework, which varies depending on discourse genre, provides an important explanatory variable for mitigation (Albelda Marco, 2018b). Prior work on Spanish mitigation has largely focused on differences across languages, different communities that speak the same language, social groups within the same community, situations, and discourse types.The similarities and differences in mitigation norms impact communication and perceptions of one another, and thus offer an important contribution to researchers and, indirectly, they offer useful information to speakers of Spanish and those who interact with them. 392

Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research

2.4 Motivations of mitigation The motivations of mitigation examined in prior research most often have been related to the communicative situations in which mitigation is likely (e.g., requests, arguments) and the three contextual variables salient in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory: power, distance, rank of imposition. Most studies of mitigation have not set out to examine these variables, but do include them as control variables (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2009, 2019, Chapters 3 & 7). However, Márquez Reiter, Rainey, and Fulcher (2005) examined the degree to which speakers’ expectations of compliance motivated mitigation in conventionally indirect requests, a type of directive, among British and Spanish participants. Findings suggested that Spaniards were more certain that the hearers would comply with requests and, correspondingly, they used conventionally indirect requests with little mitigation; British respondents evidenced the reverse.This suggests that Spaniards are oriented toward positive politeness and trust the existence of social group relationships and the related repercussions. Britons orient toward negative politeness.This study goes beyond the scope of traditional pragmatic studies of mitigation and confirms that uncertainty about hearer compliance motivates mitigation. More recently, a pair of studies by Czerwionka (2012, 2014) examined the social variable of imposition and cognitive variable of certitude as motivations for mitigation in assertive speech acts in ‘bad news’ situations.These two variables have had a long history in mitigation research (imposition; e.g., Briz, 2003; Brown & Levinson, 1987; certitude; e.g., Chafe & Danielwicz, 1987; Lakoff, 1973). Czerwionka (2012) included the variable of certitude by contrasting situations in which speakers had explicit information (i.e., certain situation) or implicit information (i.e., uncertain situation) to convey.Two levels of imposition were included as well. Mitigation was analyzed with a collective measure of interpersonal, discourse, and epistemic markers of mitigation. Results showed that most mitigation appeared in contexts with high imposition and uncertainty, showing an interaction between the two motivations.Thus, this research shows that interlocutors evaluate multiple contextual motivations collectively before using mitigation. Continuing to investigate certitude and imposition as motivations of mitigation, Czerwionka (2014) found that speakers’ sadness and hearers’ anger seemed to motivate mitigation.These findings confirm the relationship between mitigation and emotion, theoretically proposed by Martinovski, Mao, Gratch, and Marsella (2005).The examination of specific motivations of mitigation and the interaction among motivations from participant-perspective research via questionnaires (Márquez-Reiter et al., 2005) or participant playback comments (Czerwionka, 2014) suggest why certain contexts are perceived as face-threatening.These studies contribute a more detailed understanding of the context of mitigation by expanding the scope of context to include participant motivations, which is crucial for mitigation research in pragmatics since context and language jointly form the basis for pragmatics studies.

2.5 Prosody and suprasegmental features as mitigation devices Recent studies have identified prosodic patterns and suprasegmental features (e.g., duration, intonation) that align with mitigation (e.g., Cabedo Nebot, 2018; Devís, 2014; Orozco, 2008; see also Chapter 8 on pragmatics and prosody, this volume). Low F0 (Hidalgo & Folch, 2011), along with vowel lengthening, pitch, and expanded pitch range (Roldán, 2000), have mitigating effects. Based on corpus data, Devís (2014) formed hypotheses about the prosody of mitigation, which she then tested in a perception experiment with manipulated utterances. Her results indicated that circumflex final contours, phrase internal movement, and peaks in unstressed syllables serve to mitigate. She also suggested five combinations of prosodic variables that mitigate (e.g., internal 393

Czerwionka

contours with final marking of suspense).This study provides an example of the identification of not only prosodic variables that mitigate, but also robust methods to investigate the perception of mitigation and thus verify the mitigated meaning associated with the linguistic variables. Considering first-language development of prosodic mitigation, Hübscher, Garufi, and Prieto (2018) found that mitigation of requests in high imposition contexts occurs with rising intonation among 3- to 5-year-olds. They found that older children’s requests in high versus low imposition contexts exhibited more shimmer and breathiness but lower intensity.The findings indicate that children develop additional cues to express mitigation over these early years.Work bridging linguistic subfields of pragmatics, phonetics, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition serves to demonstrate the fundamental position of pragmatics in communication and provides new insight into the production and interpretation of pragmatic meanings.

2.6

Mitigation and L2 speakers of Spanish

Researchers interested in second language acquisition and pragmatics have examined mitigation in various speech acts and conversations (Félix-Brasdefer, 2004, 2007, 2008a, 2008b; Flores-Ferrán & Lovejoy, 2014; Koike, 1989). Flores-Ferrán and Lovejoy (2014) found that learners used a reduced range of linguistic mitigation devices compared to native speakers, relying most on parenthetical verbs and expressions of doubt or uncertainty.They also found that the asymmetrical power relationship between learners and native speakers does not affect mitigation. Regarding L2 development of mitigation, the only evidence is from investigations of developmental trajectories of L2 requests.Through the examination of role played requests by university learners of Spanish at varying levels, Félix-Brasdefer (2007) identified four stages of pragmatic development. Mitigated requests emerged in stage three, in which learners used conventionally indirect strategies and direct strategies with internal modification (e.g., conditional verb form), and in stage four, in which learners used pragmatic expressions with internal and external modification. Learners seemed to develop over time the pragmalinguistic knowledge that certain grammatical and lexical forms are associated with mitigation.Yet, whether learners are consciously aware of that knowledge or not remains unclear. Furthermore, in keeping with the fact that mitigation is not equally appropriate in all contexts or all Spanish varieties, L2 learners’ pragmatic use and development may also align with norms of different communities (e.g., Czerwionka & Cuza, 2017; Shively, 2011). This suggests the importance of a sociopragmatic perspective as it relates broadly to questions of L2 development of mitigation and pragmatics.

3

Methodological considerations

A variety of data collection and analytical methods has been used to study mitigation.The most common have been discourse completion tasks (DCT), roleplays, and other similar designs (see Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, Chapter 10; Chapter 33 on research methods, this volume).These experimental or quasi-experimental instruments present controlled scenarios that include a range of fixed variables (e.g., power, distance, rank of imposition) and to which participants respond with written or oral language. Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper’s (1989) seminal study of requests and apologies popularized DCTs.These types of instruments allow for large quantities of data to be collected in controlled situations, which is beneficial for cross-linguistic and cross-investigation comparisons of mitigation. They are also a useful method for understanding the relationship between mitigation and contextual variables. DCTs and similar approaches, while useful in principle, have often contained glaring design issues in Spanish mitigation research. For example, there are many examples of unbalanced 394

Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research

designs, meaning that an unequal number of situations representing different contextual variables are examined (e.g., a DCT with one situation with an unequal power relationship and two situations with equal power). Some designs do not sufficiently control or consider the presence of variables that could impact the results.When design issues are present, they must be accounted for in the analyses. Despite these weaknesses, strong methodological approaches are also currently being used and will be further refined as work continues. For example, research related to mitigation increasingly uses norming procedures that validate the representation of contextual variables in experimental designs (e.g., Márquez Reiter et al., 2005;Yelin & Czerwionka, 2017). In general, the wide range of interrelated variables that impact mitigation poses design challenges, yet it is nonetheless possible to develop methodological skills to avoid issues in data elicitation procedures so that these approaches do, in fact, offer their full benefits in terms of data quantity and comparative possibilities. While DCTs offer many benefits, the data produced with them do not represent fully naturalistic or authentic data. Depending on the goal of the study, this may be an important issue to consider.Various articles comment on the comparative value of elicited and naturalistic data (e.g., Bataller & Shively, 2011; Bou-Franch & Lorenzo-Dus, 2008). For more naturalistic data, Spanish mitigation research has included sociolinguistic interviews (e.g.,Albelda Marco & Cestero, 2011) or other approaches to record authentic data (e.g., Placencia, 2005; Ruzickova, 2007). Obtaining sufficient naturalistic data when the goal is to examine a specific type of mitigation or mitigation in certain, less frequent speech acts can be difficult. Of the literature reviewed in this chapter, data elicitation methods have also included questionnaires and video playback techniques to gauge speakers’ perspectives on mitigated language or the variables that provoke mitigation (e.g., Curcó & De Fina, 2002; Czerwionka, 2014; Márquez Reiter et al., 2005).These offer a different approach to the study of mitigation. Data collection methods should be chosen to address the goals of a given study, and researchers should critically evaluate the different possible approaches to the study of mitigation, whether they use experimentally elicited or naturally occurring data. For data analysis, the theoretical insights related to mitigation and the practical taxonomies that have emerged from prior literature guide researchers to identify mitigation. Analyses of Spanish mitigation have relied on quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method approaches, all which contribute to the overarching knowledge about mitigation. Based on the prior literature reported in this chapter, some trends include analysis of single linguistic or non-linguistic resources to mitigate, the examination of a wide range of mitigating devices collapsed together or collapsed within different linguistic levels of analysis (e.g., syntactic, lexical, prosodic), or analysis of many mitigating resources considering different types of speech acts, discourse genres, and individual characteristics of speakers.The analyses range from pragmalinguistic, where the goal is to examine the mitigated meaning of a given structure, to sociopragmatic ones that attempt to explain the contextual and social variation of mitigation. Within any of these approaches, an analytical trend often seen in mitigation research is to examine mitigation within the main head-act of a speech act (‘internal modification’) and those that fall outside of the main utterance (‘external modification’).This trend also emerged from the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). Current mitigation research seems to point to an emerging reliance on three types of analyses. First, corpora- and corpus-approaches are increasingly popular. Corpora most often include naturally occurring speech, which provides a context in which to identify and examine mitigation as a pragmatic value that “can only be interpreted in its own discursive context” (Albelda Marco & Cestero, 2011, p. 12, translation by Czerwionka). Corpus approaches also allow for automated analyses that lead to quantitative and qualitative understandings of pragmatic variables 395

Czerwionka

(Fernández, 2013), such as mitigation. Second, quantitative approaches are becoming more complex in the study of mitigation. For example, probabilistic analyses of the relationship between mitigating structures and other linguistic, non-linguistic, and contextual variables provide greater understanding of when mitigation is used and for what purposes (e.g., Orozco, 2009; Torres Fontalvo & Rodríguez Cadena, 2017). Third, while mitigation has always been understood as an important part of the interaction, recent research convincingly demonstrates that mitigation is a discourse-level phenomenon (e.g., Bravo, 2017; Flores-Ferrán, 2020). Mitigation not only occurs via single linguistic structures but also through the combination of linguistic structures over multiple turns, produced by multiple interlocutors.

4

Future directions and conclusions

Future work on mitigation will continue to provide a greater understanding of the pragmatic phenomenon and how it impacts people, relationships, and communication. Some suggestions for future work include: (a) consider the relationship between theories of mitigation and new research; (b) be cognizant of and clarify pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic issues, two main efforts of pragmatics research; and (c) evaluate methodological designs and select approaches that best align with specific research questions. As in any field of study, the relationship between theory and new results needs to be considered. Some general impressions based on the literature review of Spanish pragmatics mitigation research are that some investigations include rich data but lack sufficient reflection on theories of mitigation. Other research proposes newly found effects of mitigation, contributing to theory, but may not incorporate those new proposals into previous understandings of mitigation.Three ideas are related to this suggestion for future work. First, according to Brown and Levinson (1987), mitigation occurs when one of the felicity conditions of a speech act is hedged and in contexts where one of Grice’s maxims (1975) is hedged, which brings about a conversational implicature. Few authors use these criteria to classify the linguistic devices they examine as serving to mitigate (cf. Márquez Reiter et  al., 2005). Furthermore, the relationship between mitigation and conversational implicatures and, likewise, questions about how mitigated meanings are calculated in conversation and comprehended by hearers, have gone largely unexamined (cf. Martí Sánchez & Fernández Gómiz, 2018). This is not to say that authors are inaccurately defining linguistic devices that serve to mitigate or not addressing important questions, but that the absence of theory fails to ensure that the field stay focused on the same understanding of mitigation or clearly distinguishes different or new understandings. Secondly, Fraser (1980) and Caffi (2007) argued that mitigation is more than politeness. While politeness is a fundamentally important concept for pragmatics research and for language use in real contexts, we should examine the strong position of politeness within Spanish pragmatics mitigation research. Third, mitigation theories have always addressed the perlocutionary effect (Caffi, 2007; Fraser, 1980; Hübler, 1983) and the moment-by-moment effects (Martinovski et al., 2005) that create long-lasting impacts of mitigation, yet empirical data are not often used to test the theoretical understandings of the effects of mitigation (cf. Devís, 2014). Such tests would not only verify the use of specific linguistic devices to mitigate, but also begin to provide a framework that explains which effects are likely to emerge in different contexts and with different linguistic structures. Turning to the goals within pragmatics research to address sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic issues, it is important to identify clearly how investigations contribute to one or both. Of the current work on mitigation in Spanish, many studies focus on sociopragmatic questions. The data from this type of research also may be used to offer additional insight about the use of particular linguistic structures to mitigate. For future work, a suggestion is to consider how a 396

Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research

given set of data or how an investigation contributes to both concerns. Related specifically to L2 studies of mitigation and, in addition to the examination of linguistic devices commonly used to mitigate in L1 Spanish, researchers may also consider exploring the linguistic devices used to mitigate that are particular to an L2 community. Exposing L2 ways of mitigating would inform the fields of L2 acquisition and L2 pragmatics; it would also provide useful knowledge for those who interact with L2 speakers to enhance communication. Specifically, I suggest exploration of pragmalinguistic questions in L2 mitigation. Finally, as discussed in Section 3, strong methodological designs and approaches that align with specific research questions will continue to strengthen mitigation research. In closing, mitigation research is making progress in explaining what mitigation is, when it is used, how it is communicated, and why it is important to people and communication. Mitigation researchers examine language and communication at all levels and in all contexts, offering new insight into the theoretical and practical underpinnings of mitigation. Despite this progress, many questions remain about the construct, and future work should depend on and contribute to fundamental theories, address sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic issues, and explore the motivations, effects, and comprehension of mitigation, while selecting methods and data that respond best to the specific research questions.

Notes 1 Given the close connection between mitigation and politeness, the references in this chapter are mostly limited to those that have a clear goal of contributing to theories of mitigation. For related work, see Chapters 20 and 21 on (im)politeness and Chapter 2 on speech acts, this volume. 2 For example, Peninsular Spanish and British English (Bou Franch & Lorenzo-Dus, 2008; Lorenzo-Dus & Bou Franch, 2013; Márquez Reiter et al., 2005), Mexican, Spanish, and American English (Félix-Brasdefer, 2008b), Mexican, Spanish, and Swedish (Bravo, 1998), Uruguayan Spanish and British English (Márquez Reiter, 2002). 3 For example, Mexican and Peninsular Spanish (Curcó & De Fina, 2002), Mexican, Spanish, and American English (Félix-Brasdefer, 2008b), Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Mexican Spanish (Flores-Ferrán, 2018), Ecuadorian and Peninsular Spanish (Placencia, 2005). 4 For example, Argentine (Bravo, 2017), Chilean (González Riffo & Guerrero González, 2017), Cuban (Ruzickova, 2007), Peruvian (García, 1993),Venezuelan (García, 1992). 5 Other investigations address individual discourse genres and mitigation, such as institutional email communication (Callahan, 2011; Lorenzo-Dus & Bou Franch, 2013), medical interactions (Delbene, 2004; Flores-Ferrán, 2010, 2012; Hernández Flores & Rodríguez Tembrás, 2018), and political discourse (Blas, 2003; Kern, 2018).

Further reading Albelda Marco, M. (2010). ¿Cómo se reconoce la atenuación? Una aproximación metodológica basada en el español peninsular hablado. In F. Orletti & L. Mariottini (Eds.), En (des)cortesía en español (pp. 47–70). Roma: Università Roma Tre. This chapter answers the complex question as to how to identify mitigation in detail, through consideration of the context, face threats to the speaker and hearer, and the speech act.Albelda Marco calls for the use of more formal tests to identify mitigation in mitigation research, providing three tests to help identify epistemic verbs that mitigate versus those that express a degree of certitude. Albelda Marco, M., & Cestero,A. M. (2011). De nuevo, sobre los procedimientos de atenuación lingüística. Español actual: Revista de español vivo, 96, 9–40. This article offers a taxonomy of linguistic structures that mitigate by function.Their data derive from a Spanish corpus and represent naturally occurring uses of mitigation. Other references by Briz,Albelda Marco, and Cestero offer additional insight into corpus approaches to mitigation in Spanish and the use of mitigation in Spanish. 397

Czerwionka

Caffi, C. (2007). Mitigation. New York: Elsevier. This book represents a thorough work on the topic of mitigation.While the data are focused on mitigation in Italian, the book is ideal for any researcher who wants a more in-depth examination of mitigation considering linguistic, psychological, and philosophical perspectives. Czerwionka, L. (2012). Mitigation:The combined effects of imposition and certitude. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1163–1182. This work offers an analysis of imposition and certitude as motivations of mitigation. Moving beyond the theoretical frames of politeness and speech acts, this research incorporated Martinovski et al.’s (2005) cognitive and social approach to mitigation in language processing. It also demonstrated that the interaction among variables can be important in prompting mitigation. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008b).Teaching pragmatics in the classroom: Instruction of mitigation in Spanish as a foreign language. Hispania, 91(2), 479–494. A quasi-experimental,pre/posttest design testing the efficacy of teaching lexical and syntactic downgraders to L2 learners of Spanish showed gains for those who were exposed to the pedagogical intervention. This investigation supports the finding that explicit instruction facilitates certain types of pragmatic learning, like the use of mitigation in the L2.

References Alba-Juez, L. (2007). On the impoliteness of some politeness strategies:A study and comparison of the use of some pragmatic markers of impoliteness in British English and American English, Peninsular Spanish, and Argentine Spanish. In P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, M. Padilla Cruz, R. Gómez Morón, & L. Fernández Amaya (Eds.), Studies in intercultural, cognitive, and social pragmatics (pp. 37–56). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Albelda Marco, M. (2008).Atenuantes en Chile y en España: distancia o acercamiento. In A. Briz,A. Hidalgo, M.Albelda Marco, J. Contreras, & N. Hernández Flores (Eds.), Cortesía y conversación: De lo escrito a lo oral. III Coloquio Internacional del Programa EDICE (pp. 98–113).Valencia: Universitat de València. Albelda Marco, M. (2010). ¿Cómo se reconoce la atenuación? Una aproximación metodológica basada en el español peninsular hablado. In F. Orletti & L. Mariottini (Eds.), En (des)cortesía en español. EDICE (pp. 47–70). Roma: Università Roma Tre. Albelda Marco, M. (Ed.). (2018a). Estrategias atenuantes en géneros discursivos del español: interfaz semántico-pragmática. [Special issue]. Spanish in Context, 15(2). Albelda Marco, M. (2018b). La variación genérico-discursiva de la atenuación como resultado de la variación de la imagen. Spanish in Context, 15(2), 346–368. Albelda Marco, M., & Cestero,A. M. (2011). De nuevo, sobre los procedimientos de atenuación lingüística. Español Actual: Revista de Español Vivo, 96, 9–40. Austin, J. (1962). How to do things with words. (J. O. Urmson, Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ballesteros, F. J. (2001). La cortesía española frente a la cortesía inglesa: Estudio pragmalingüístico de las exhortaciones impositivas. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, 9, 191–207. Ballesteros, F. J. (2002). Mecanismos de atenuación en español e inglés. Implicaciones pragmáticas en la cortesía. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 11, Retrieved from https://webs.ucm.es/info/ circulo/no11/ballesteros.htm Bataller, R., & Shively, R. (2011). Role plays and naturalistic data in pragmatics research: Service encounters during study abroad. Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching, 2(1), 15–50. Blas, J. L. (2003). ‘Perdóneme que se lo diga, pero vuelve usted a faltar a la verdad, señor González’: Form and function of politic verbal behaviour in face-to-face Spanish political debates. Discourse and Society, 14(4), 395–423. Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bou-Franch, P., & Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2008). Natural versus elicited data in cross-cultural speech act realization:The case of requests in Peninsular Spanish and British English. Spanish in Context, 5(2), 246–277. Bravo, D. (1998). ¿Reírse juntos? Un estudio de las imágenes sociales de hablantes españoles, mexicanos y suecos. Diálogos hispánicos, 22, 315–364. Bravo, D. (1999). ¿Imagen ‘positiva’ vs. imagen ‘negativa’? Pragmática socio-cultural y componentes de face. Oralia, 2, 155–184. 398

Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research

Bravo, D. (2002). Actos asertivos y cortesía. Imagen del rol en el discurso de académicos argentinos. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 1–34). Munich: Lincom Europa. Bravo, D. (2017). Cortesía en español: Negociación de face e identidad en discursos académicos. Textos en Proceso, 3(1), 49–127. Briz, A. (1998). El español coloquial en la conversación: Esbozo de pragmagramática. Barcelona: Ariel. Briz, A. (2003). La estrategia atenuadora en la conversación cotidiana española. In D. Bravo (Ed.), Actas del primer coloquio del programa EDICE. La perspectiva no etnocentrista de la cortesía: identidad sociocultural de las comunidades hispanohablantes (pp. 17–46). Stockholm: Programa EDICE. Briz, A. (2004). La cortesía verbal codificada y cortesía verbal interpretada en la conversación. In D. Bravo & A. Briz (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: estudios sobre el discurso de la cortesía en español (pp. 67–92). Madrid:Ariel. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness usage: Some universals in language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cabedo Nebot, A. (2018). Atenuación con disminución prosódica significativa en géneros con distinto grado de planificación discursiva. Spanish in Context, 15(2), 218–236. Caffi, C. (2007). Mitigation. New York: Elsevier. Callahan, L. (2011). Workplace requests in Spanish and English: A case study of email communications between two supervisors and a subordinate. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 30(1), 27–56. Cestero,A. M. (2012). Recursos lingüísticos de atenuación en el habla de Madrid. Estudio sociopragmático. In T. Jiménez Juliá, B. López Meirama,V.Vázquez Rozas, & A.Veiga (Eds.), Cum corde et in nova grammatica. Estudios ofrecidos a Guillermo Rojo (pp. 233–246). Santiago de Compostela: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. Cestero,A. M. (2015). La atenuación lingüística en el habla de Madrid: un fenómeno sociopragmático variable. In I. Molina Martos & F. Paredes Garcia (Eds.), Patrones sociolingüísticos de Madrid (pp. 365–412). Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang. Cestero, A. M. (2017). La atenuación en el habla de Madrid: Patrones sociopragmáticos. RILCE. Revista de Filología Hispánica, 33(1), 57–86. Cestero,A. M., & Albelda Marco, M. (2012). La atenuación lingüística como fenómeno variable. Oralia, 15, 77–124. Chafe, W., & Danielwicz, J. (1987). Properties of spoken and written language. Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Writing. Chodorowska-Pilch, M. (2017).Atenuación pragmática: El caso de las condicionales. Normas, 7(1), 97–106. Cisneros Estupiñán, M. (2007).Atenuación de los mandatos y las peticiones en la ex-provincia de Obando. Lenguaje, 35(1), 29–46. Curcó, C. (2007). Positive face, group face, and affiliation: An overview of politeness studies on Mexican Spanish. In M. E. Placencia & C. García (Eds.), Research on politeness in the Spanish speaking world (pp. 105–120). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Curcó, C., & De Fina, A. (2002). Modo imperativo, negación, y diminutivos en la expresión de la cortesía en español: El contraste entre México y España. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 107–140). Munich: Lincom. Czerwionka, L. (2012). Mitigation:The combined effects of imposition and certitude. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1163–1182. Czerwionka, L. (2014). Participant perspectives on mitigation: The impact of imposition and certainty. Journal of Pragmatics, 67, 112–130. Czerwionka, L., & Cuza,A. (2017).The L2 acquisition of Spanish service industry requests in an immersion context. Hispania, 100(2), 239–260. De Cock, B., Marsily,A., Pizarro Pedraza,A., & Rasson, M. (2018). ¿Quién atenúa y cuándo en español? La atenuación en función del género discursivo. Spanish in Context, 15(2), 305–324. Delbene, R. (2004).The function of mitigation in the context of a socially stigmatized disease:A case study in a public hospital in Montevideo, Uruguay. Spanish in Context, 1, 241–267. Devís, E. (2014). La entonación de (des)cortesía en el español coloquial. Phonica, 7, 36–79. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2004). La mitigación en el discurso oral de mexicanos y aprendices de español como lengua extranjera. In D. Bravo & A. Briz Gómez (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural. Estudios sobre el discurso en cortesía en español (pp. 285–299). Barcelona:Ariel. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2007). Pragmatic development in the Spanish as a FLclassroom:A cross-sectional study of learner requests. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(2), 253–286. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008a). Perceptions of refusals to invitations: Exploring the minds of language learners. Language Awareness, 17(3), 195–211. 399

Czerwionka

Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008b).Teaching pragmatics in the classroom: Instruction of mitigation in Spanish as a foreign language. Hispania, 91(2), 479–494. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2009). Pragmatic variation across Spanish(es): Requesting in Mexican, Costa Rican, and Dominican Spanish. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(4), 473–515. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Fernández, J. (2013). A corpus-based study of vague language use by learners of Spanish in a study abroad context. In C. Kinginger (Ed.), Social and cultural aspects of language learning in study abroad (pp. 299–331). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2010). An examination of mitigation strategies used in Spanish psychotherapeutic discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(7), 1964–1981. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2012). Pragmatic variation in therapeutic discourse:An examination of mitigating devices employed by Dominican female clients and a Cuban American therapist. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues (pp.  81–112). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2018). Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Mexican Spanish: Mitigation and indirectness in an institutional setting. In M. González Rivera (Ed.), Current research in Puerto Rican linguistics (pp. 157–184). Oxford and New York: Routledge. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2020). Linguistic mitigation in English and Spanish: How speakers attenuate expressions. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Flores-Ferrán, N., & Lovejoy, K. (2014).An examination of mitigating devices in the argument interactions of L2 Spanish learners. Journal of Pragmatics, 76, 67–86. Flores Salgado, E., & Ramírez Cabrera, G. (2015). La atenuación de los actos asertivos: diferencias entre hombres y mujeres. Pragmática Sociocultural, 3(1), 90–119. Fraser, B. (1980). Conversational mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics, 4, 341–350. Fraser, B. (1990). Perspectives on politeness. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 219–236. García, C. (1992). Responses to a request by non-native English speakers: Deference vs. camaraderie. Multilingua, 11(4), 387–406. García, C. (1993). Making a request and responding to it:A case study of Peruvian Spanish speakers. Journal of Pragmatics, 19, 127–152. González Riffo, J., & Guerrero González, S. (2017). Estrategias de atenuación en narraciones conversacionales. Lengua y Habla, 21, 29–44. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York:Academic Press. Haverkate, H. (1990). Politeness and mitigation in Spanish: A morphosyntactic analysis. In H. Pinkster & I. Genee (Eds.), University in diversity. Papers presented to Simon C. Dik on his 50th birthday (pp. 107–131). Dordrecht: Foris. Haverkate, H. (1994). La cortesía verbal: estudio pragmalingüístico. Madrid: Gredos. Hernández Flores, N. (2004). Politeness as face enhancement. In R. Márquez Reiter & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish (pp. 265–284). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hernández Flores, N., & Rodríguez Tembrás,V. (2018).‘Lo que se debe hacer es cambiar un poco el estilo de vida’: Estrategias de atenuación en el consejo médico. Spanish in Context, 15(2), 325–345. Hidalgo, A., & Folch, M. P. (2011). Aprender a ser cortés: Aspectos pragmáticos de la enseñanza de ELE, expresividad fónica y comunicación cortés a través de la entonación. In A. Cabedo & P. Infante Ríos (Eds.), Lingüística XL. El lingüista del siglo XXI (pp. 43–54). Madrid: Sel Ediciones. Holmes, J. (1984). Modifying illocutionary force. Journal of Pragmatics, 8, 345–365. Holmes, J. (1995). Women, men, and politeness. New York: Longman. House, J., & Kasper, G. (1981). Politeness markers in English and German. In F. Coulmas (Ed.), Conversational routine (pp. 157–185). New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hübler, A. (1983). Understatements and hedges in English.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hübscher, I., Garufi, M., & Prieto, P. (2018). Preschoolers use prosodic mitigation strategies to encode polite stance. In 9th international conference on speech prosody 2018 (pp. 255–259). Poznań, Poland: ISCA. Kern, B. (2018). La promesa atenuada en el discurso parlamentario español. Spanish in Context, 15(2), 177–197. Koike, D. A. (1989). Pragmatic competence and adult L2 acquisition: Speech acts in interlanguage. Modern Language Journal, 73(3), 279–289. Koike, D. A. (1994). Negation in Spanish and English suggestions and requests: Mitigating effects? Journal of Pragmatics, 21, 513–526. 400

Mitigation in Spanish pragmatics research

Koike, D.A. (1998). La sugerencia en español: una perspectiva comparativa. Diálogos Hispánicos, 22, 211–235. Lakoff, G. (1973). Hedges: A study of meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts. In P. Peranteau, J. Levi, & G. Phares (Eds.), Papers from the eighth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 183– 228). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Bou-Franch, P. (2013).A cross-cultural investigation of email communication in Peninsular Spanish and British English: The role of (in)formality and (in)directness. Pragmatics and Society, 4(1), 1–25. Márquez Reiter, R. (2000). Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay:A contrastive study of requests and apologies. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Márquez Reiter, R. (2002). A contrastive study of conventional indirectness in Spanish: Evidence from Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish. Pragmatics, 12(2), 135–151. Márquez Reiter, R., Rainey, I., & Fulcher, G. (2005). A comparative study of certainty and conventional indirectness: Evidence from British English and Peninsular Spanish. Applied Linguistics, 26(1), 1–31. Martí Sanchez, M., & Fernández Gómiz, S. (2018).Atenuación retrospectiva y reformuladores de distanciamiento como recursos suyos. Spanish in Context, 15(2), 198–217. Martinovski, B., Mao, W., Gratch, J., & Marsella, S. (2005). Mitigation theory: An integrated approach. In B. Bara, L. Barsalou, & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of conference on cognitive science (pp. 1407–1412). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Meyer-Hermann, R. (1988).Atenuación e intensificación (análisis pragmático de sus formas y funciones en español hablado). Anuario de Estudios Filológicos, 11, 275–290. Mihatsch,W. (2018). De la escritura científica a la conversación coloquial adolescente: El caso de tipo. Spanish in Context, 15(2), 281–304. Orozco, L. (2008). Peticiones corteses y factores prosódicos. In E. Herrera & P. Martín Butragueño (Eds.), Fonología instrumental. Patrones fónicos y variación (pp. 335–355). México: El Colegio de México. Orozco, L. (2009). El empleo de perífrasis con el verbo poder en la realización de peticiones. In L. Rodríguez Alfano (Ed.), La (des)cortesía y la imagen social en México. Estudios semiótico-discursivos desde varios enfoques analíticos (pp. 105–122). Monterrey, México: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. Placencia, M. E. (1994). Pragmatics across varieties. Donaire, 2, 65–77. Placencia, M. E. (2005). Pragmatic variation in corner store interactions in Quito and Madrid. Hispania, 88(3), 583–598. Roldán,Y. (2000). Correlatos acústicos de actos de habla atenuados del español de Chile. Onomazein, 5, 107–118. Ruzickova, E. (2007). Strong and mild requestive hints and positive-face redress in Cuban Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(6), 1170–1202. Schneider, S. (2007). Reduced parenthetical clauses as mitigators:A corpus study of spoken French, Italian, and Spanish. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (2001). Intercultural communication (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Searle, J. R. (1976).A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 1–23. Shively, R. L. (2011). L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A longitudinal study of Spanish service encounters. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1818–1835. Torres Fontalvo,Y., & Rodríguez Cadena,Y. (2017). La atenuación en Barranquilla: estudio sociopragmático. Cuadernos de Lingüística Hispánica, 30, 55–79. Yelin, B., & Czerwionka, L. (2017). Capaz and quizás in Argentine Spanish: Epistemic adverbs with mood variability. Hispania, 100(1), 30–46.

401

23 Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research Francisco Yus

1

Introduction

This chapter addresses the comprehension of humor in Spanish and how humorous effects are derived by the addressee or audience from a pragmatic point of view. Pragmatics, as a linguistic paradigm, exhibits less uniformity than other consolidated linguistic paradigms, as seen in structuralism (Saussure, 1916) and generative grammar (Chomsky, 1957). As a consequence, pragmatics represents a diversity of schools and research programs that have tackled specific areas of human communication and comprehension. In this chapter, humor is highlighted as the outcome of the sender’s (i.e., as speaker, writer) intentions, based on predictions of the specific interpretive steps to be carried out by the receiver (i.e., as hearer, reader) when trying to process the words of the humorous text into meaningful interpretations. Indeed, since pragmatics analyzes “how more gets communicated than is said” (Yule, 1996), cognitive pragmatics (specifically relevance theory; see Sperber & Wilson, 1995) is the theory best suited to account for the intended humorous interpretations and effects resulting from the process of interpretation of humorous discourse (Yus, 2003, 2016, 2017a). According to relevance theory, addressees carry out three interpretive strategies in parallel whenever they infer the intended interpretation of an utterance, which also applies to the interpretation of humorous discourses: they construct an appropriate hypothesis about: (a) explicit content (explicatures) via decoding, disambiguation, reference resolution, and other pragmatic enrichment processes; (b) intended contextual information; and (c) intended contextual implications (implicated conclusions, a typical case of implicature), as in Example (1): (1)

Max: How was the party? Did it go well? Amy:There wasn’t enough to drink and everyone left early.

In this example, Amy’s utterance implicates that “the party did not go well,” which can only be obtained from a connection between what Amy says explicitly and contextual information. In this case, the hearer’s access to background, common-sense information about most parties, and the impossibility that they can be successful if they run out of drinks and people leave 403

Yus

early, will easily lead to that implicature. Grice (1975) emphasized that implicatures demand contextualization but dismissed its importance in the interpretation of explicit content. One contribution by relevance theory is to claim that the explicit interpretation of Amy’s utterance also demands contextualization. First,‘drinks’ are narrowed down to specifically alcoholic drinks. Second,‘everyone’ is narrowed to ‘everyone at the party.’ Finally, the specific time frame of ‘early’ depends on what is commonly assumed to be early for parties attended by people in the age group to which Max and Amy belong (Yus, 2016, p. 7). Similarly, when interpreting humorous discourses, addressees also engage in a parallel adjustment of explicit content, implicatures, and context. This inferential process is envisaged and manipulated for the sake of humor. As summarized in Yus (2016, p. 38), the humorist can predict the specific inferential strategies and the accessibility of contextual assumptions that the hearer (or reader) will invariably process when trying to reach an adequate understanding of the humorous discourse. This chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a general review of existing research on the pragmatics of humor. Section 3 focuses on some of the main issues in this research; namely, the interpretation of jokes, humor in stand-up comedy performances, the translation of humorous discourse, and multimodal combinations that are often used with humorous intention; i.e., cartoons, advertisements, and memes. Finally, Section 4 provides some suggestions for future research.

2

Review of existing research

There is already a substantial amount of research that addresses humor in Spanish, but very few studies examine it from a purely pragmatic point of view.Three studies stand out as exhibiting a more committed pragmatic approach, or at least some insight into contextual parameters in the interpretation of humorous discourses in Spanish: Ruiz Gurillo (2012, 2013) and Torres Sánchez (1999).To begin, Ruiz Gurillo (2014) outlines a model of humor inference applied to Spanish. She uses a neo-Gricean approach that explains how the infringement of pragmatics principles (i.e., Quality, Quantity, Informativeness, Manner) may lead to a humorous interpretation, as they are related to typical linguistic resources for the generation of humor, such as polysemy, homonymy, etc. Further interesting areas of humor research in Spanish include humor in conversation (Section 2.1), the translation of humor (Section 2.2), and humor in the media (Section 2.3).

2.1

Humor in Spanish conversations

Several publications pragmatically analyze Spanish conversations in which humor is exploited or co-constructed interactionally. For example,Alvarado Ortega (2012) used the general theory of verbal humor (Attardo & Raskin, 1991), a theory based on the humorous exploitation of a number of ‘knowledge resources’ (i.e., script opposition, logical mechanism, situation, target, narrative strategy, and language). Script opposition, for instance, is typical in cases of ambiguity. Scripts, defined as semantic information surrounding the word or evoked by it, clash in this case with their information being incompatible in some way. Similarly, Acuña Ferreira (2012) analyzed gender-centered humor in conversation, and advances beyond the stereotype that there is a ‘masculine humor’ (e.g., creative, competitive, playful), mainly used for the reinforcement of bonds, and a ‘feminine humor’ (e.g., supportive, intimate, subversive in relation to gender norms), generally oriented to female solidarity. She preferred to address gender-crossing phenomena in conversational humor, specifically 404

Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research

in friendly interactions among Spanish/Galician women. Other authors have looked at similar examples: for instance, Carranza Márquez (2010) studied the specific politeness strategies in the humor exhibited in parliamentary conversations in Britain and Spain. In the former, the instances of humor were valid for other cultures. However, in the latter, there were differences in humor in the context of both Parliaments: these include (a) how different formal routines in the discussion of each law affect humorous reactions; (b) that the Spanish Parliament does not allow for the expression of some taboo words but the British counterpart does; and (c) the fact that different strategies to achieve harmony are used. In the Spanish arena, the goal is harmony and the protection of the positive face of both the speaker and the hearer, while in the British counterpart, humor is designed for the reparation of the negative face of the speaker. Finally, Oropeza-Escobar (2011) analyzed the specificity of conversational humor in Mexican Spanish, the kind of conversational joking among close friends and family members that shows that one of the resources of Mexican Spanish speakers is to resonate through represented discourse. Resonance, in this case, refers to the fact that participants in an interaction tend to construct utterances on the basis of the utterance of the previous speaker so that their contributions are linked at different linguistic levels by a mapping relationship. Studies such as the ones just listed show that humor in Spanish conversations is typically intra-cultural, and its specificity does not export easily to other cultures. Conversational strategies and politeness issues in Spanish cannot easily translate into other conversational contexts.

2.2 The translation of humor into/from Spanish The issue of how to translate humorous English discourses into Spanish, and vice versa, has aroused the interest of a number of researchers (see Martínez Sierra & Zabalbeascoa Terrán, 2017, and other articles in that issue). In addition to the translation of jokes, which is addressed in more detail in Section 2.4.3 below, some authors have analyzed the translation of humor in films and TV programs. This is the case of Díaz Pérez (2014), who translated puns in film titles, and Zabalbeascoa (2000), who addressed the translated humor in Woody Allen’s films. Bolaños-García Escribano (2017) studied the translation of early Almodóvar films. Jiménez Carra (2009) analyzed the dubbing of the film Bridget Jones. Krajčovičová (2018), Lorenzo, Pereira, and Xoubanova (2003), Martínez Sierra (2003, 2008), and Muñoz Gil (2009) all analyzed the translation of the TV series The Simpsons. Muñoz Gil (2009) acknowledged that the translation of humorous elements is a demanding task, since humor usually relies on linguistic elements for which there may be no counterpart in Spanish, and hence adaptations (to a different language and culture) must be made. Sometimes humorous situations may fruitfully be transferred into Spanish, such as in (2) and (3) from the TV series The Simpsons (Muñoz Gil, 2009, pp. 152–153): (2)

Bart:

Lisa lleva razón. Comer esto es de beeeeeeeestias. ‘I think Lisa’s right, Dad. Eating meat is baaaaaaaaaaad.’ (imitating the bleating sound of a sheep)

(3)

Homer:

Yo te entiendo, cariño, porque yo también creía en esas cosas a tu edad. Hala, ¿quieres que te lleve a casa en caballito, digo montada en una verdurita? ‘I understand, honey. I used to believe in things when I was a kid. Come on, I’ll give you a piggyback . . . I mean a veggiback ride home.’ 405

Yus

There are, however, instances in which part of the humor is inevitably lost in the translation. A typical case is a polysemous word for which there is no equivalent in Spanish. An example is (4) below, with the translation provided (Muñoz Gil, 2009, p. 153): (4)

Troy: Ven Jimmy, veamos el edificio del matadero. Jimmy: Ohhh! (scared) Troy: Que no te engañe el nombre, Jimmy. No es un edificio, es más bien una cadena de despiece que permite que la materia cárnica pueda ser seleccionada y exportada. Troy: ‘Come on Jimmy, let’s take a peek at the killing floor. Jimmy: Ohhh! (scared) Troy: Don’t let the name throw you, Jimmy. It’s not really a floor, it’s more of a steel grating that allows material to sluice through so it can be collected and exported.’

  In this example, Jimmy’s fear arises from the polysemy of ‘killing floor,’ with which the Spanish audience is not familiar; the closest equivalent is edificio del matadero. However, edificio only means ‘building,’ so the target audience may not understand why Jimmy is panicking about the idea of visiting that building (p. 154). In sum, several publications address the tension that arises between trying to be faithful to the source text and, at the same time, try to convey, for the target text reader, the same quality and quantity of humorous effects that were intended for the source text.

2.3

Humor in Spanish media

Spanish media humor has also been analyzed by previous studies, addressing cartoons in the press (Section 3.4.1), advertisements (Section 3.4.2), and internet memes (Section 3.4.3). Some researchers have studied humor in informative media on Spanish TV, such as Méndez-García de Paredes (2013). In a nutshell, for this author, humor in this context is an intentional act capable of producing effects of collusion between the media and their audience, thanks to the intentional manipulation of the information conveyed by the media. Humor conveyed through the media is obtained, for example, by manipulating real news for humorous purposes, as in the case of a stereotyped conversational structure that conveys serious information using a humorous twist. Everything is allowed within this communicative frame and everything can be modified, consciously and intentionally. Overall, many studies addressing a pragmatics of humor in Spanish have acknowledged that some humorous strategies are universal and valid across languages, whereas more specific strategies may underlie some discourses in Spanish.

2.4

Main issues

In the pragmatics research on humor in Spanish, there are several topics that I consider to be central and deserving of more attention in this chapter, as commented in the next sections.

2.4.1

Humor arising from interpreting jokes in Spanish

The interpretive steps leading to an adequate interpretation of jokes are both predicted and manipulated for the sake of generating humorous effects.Yus (2013a, 2013b, 2016) proposed the intersecting circles model, comprising three areas or frames (i.e., a “cultural frame,” a “make-sense 406

Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research

Figure 23.1 The Intersecting Circles Model of humorous communication Source: Yus, 2013a, 2013b1

frame,” and “utterance interpretation”) that intersect, forming up to seven categories, depending on which area is exploited in the comprehension of the joke for the sake of producing humor (Figure 23.1).These frames are explained ahead.  2.4.1.1 THE CULTURAL FRAME

This frame refers to collective representations regarding society or culture, typically comprising stereotypical information about one’s nation, gender roles, professions, etc.This kind of knowledge is expected in jokes that play with general social stereotypes, but also with more finegrained information about the interlocutors’ own culture and society, and other cultures as well (see Vigara Tauste, 1994, p. 32). For example, Catalans are stereotypically known for being stingy, and a hearer who is unaware of this information will not understand the joke in (5): (5)

¿Que hace un catalán si tiene frío?— Se pone al lado de la estufa. ¿Y si así no se le quita? La enciende. ‘What does a Catalan do if he/she is cold? He/she sits by the stove. And if he/she is still cold? He/she switches it on.’

There is a distinction between the mental representations that people consider to be their own acquired thoughts (labeled ‘personal beliefs’), and those they regard as belonging to a community (‘metarepresented cultural beliefs’); these match, contradict, overlap with, or complement each other. Cultural stereotypes are normally salient to a whole community, becoming what is usually called ‘collective representations’ attributed to an entire social group, and need not be erased when a person privately constructs parallel but differing beliefs about the same referent (Yus, 2016, pp. 120–121). 407

Yus 2.4.1.2 THE MAKE-SENSE FRAME

This frame refers to the effort-saving construction of a suitable situation or scenario for the interpretation of a joke. This term comprises similar labels, typically used in previous research for how the hearer builds up a mental situation for the utterance being processed, such as ‘frame,’ ‘schema,’ or ‘script.’This “make-sense frame” may also be manipulated for the sake of humor. For example, in joke (6) (Ruiz Gurillo, 2012, p. 49), the hearer expects certain steps in the situation depicted in the joke that are later invalidated. Something similar occurs in the construction of the make-sense frame for joke (7) (Abad Lavín, 2017) concerning the use of a knife, in which the initial stretch of the joke contradicts the use of the knife described at the end, and the hearer has to readjust that initial prototypical scenario: (6)

–Señor, he venido a afinar su piano. ‘Sir, I’ve come to tune your piano.’ —Pero, ¡si yo no he pedido un afinador! ‘But, I didn’t ask for a tuner!’ —Usted no, pero sus vecinos sí. ‘You didn’t, but your neighbors did.’

(7)

Si salgo de noche siempre llevo navaja. Nunca se sabe quién te puede asaltar en una calle oscura y ofrecerte una pieza de fruta sin pelar. ‘If I go out at night, I always carry a knife with me. You never know who might approach you in a dark street and offer you a piece of unpeeled fruit.’

As can be seen, make-sense frames are useful in the accomplishment of a humorous strategy. Their construction is often done almost automatically and at a subconscious level, always directed at a relevance-oriented processing efficiency, and therefore they can be predicted and manipulated by the humorist in order to achieve the desired effects. 2.4.1.3 UTTERANCE INTERPRETATION

A joke may also be centered on the manipulation of the different stages leading to a contextualized interpretation of a text, an interpretation that invariably differs from the literal meaning that can be obtained from the words in the joke. Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) claims that interpreting an utterance involves the initial identification of its schematic grammatical structure (‘logical form’), which is then enriched at the explicit level with inferential strategies such as reference assignment, disambiguation (for polysemous words, see for example Simarro Vázquez, 2017; Solska, 2012a, 2012b), and concept adjustment (when the core meaning is preserved but is adjusted to meet the specific sense of the word intended).The result of this inferential enrichment is an explicature, which can be the only intended interpretation or part of the context needed to derive an implicature.All of these interpretive stages, carried out in parallel, may be exploited for the sake of generating humorous effects (see Chapter 5 on relevance theory, this volume). For example, joke (8) plays with the initial identification of the syntactic arrangement of the words in the joke (‘logical form’), as shown in (8a), which is then invalidated and replaced with an alternative arrangement (8b): (8)

408

No soy partidario de pegar a gente con gafas. Mucho mejor con palos. ‘I’m not a fan of hitting people with glasses. It’s much better with sticks.’ a. [pegar] [a gente con gafas]/b. [pegar] [a gente] [con gafas]. a. ‘[hit] [people with glasses]’/b.‘[hit] [people] [with glasses]’

Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research

Jokes (9–10) play with the adjustment of the concepts underlying the verb gastar ‘to wear out’ and the noun cabeza ‘head’: (9)

¿Qué es lo que los niños gastan más deprisa que sus zapatos? ‘What do children wear down faster than their shoes?’ ¡La paciencia de sus padres! ‘Their parents’ patience!’

(10) ¡Como me tiréis el puesto de ajos van a rodar cabezas! ‘If you knock down my garlic stand, heads are going to roll’ Jokes (11–12) play with the disambiguation of the polysemous words ‘house’ (TV series vs. kind of music) and probar fortuna (‘try one’s luck’ vs.‘try a specific brand of tobacco’): (11) Esta noche voy a ir a una discoteca que ponen house y estoy nerviosa porque no sé qué temporada echarán. ‘Tonight I am going to a disco where they play House, and I am nervous because I don’t know which season they will show.’ (12) Me han ofrecido apuntarme a un concurso de cata de tabaco, creo que voy a probar fortuna. ‘I was offered to join a course on tobacco tasting, I think I will try my fortune/try Fortuna.’ Joke (13) plays with the literal vs. idiomatic meanings of estirar la pata (idiomatically, ‘to die,’ but in this case, also ‘to stretch one’s leg’): (13) –¿Sabías que los cojos son inmortales? ‘Did you know that lame people are immortal?’ —¿Y por qué es eso? ‘Why is that?’ —Porque ya no pueden estirar la pata. ‘Because they can’t kick the bucket any more.’ Finally, joke (14) plays with the implicatures derived from the little girl’s comment “genial” (“she engages in sex,” among other implicatures, see Vigara Tauste, 1994, p. 75): (14) -Mamá, mamá, ¿yo con 10 años me puedo quedar embarazada? ‘Mom, mom, being 10 years old, can I get pregnant?’ —No. -¡Genial! ‘Great!’ In sum, all of the inferential strategies that are at work in the interpretation of normal utterances (that is, that are always performed by the hearer when turning the coded literal meaning of the utterance into a fully contextualized proposition) may be exploited and manipulated in order to obtain a number of relevant humorous effects.They range from the initial context-free identification of the semantic representation or logical form of the text (joke 8 above), to fully pragmatic inferential strategies such as concept adjustment (jokes 9–10), disambiguation (jokes 11–12), adjusting literal versus idiomatic readings (joke 13), and the derivation of implicatures (joke 14), among others. 409

Yus 2.4.1.4 PUNS

Pragmatics and relevance theory have also generated research on punning (i.e., the humorous strategy of playing with parallel/similar meanings or sounds of words) beyond several studies on the subject that have addressed the same topic. Solska (2012a, 2012b) suggests several possible pairings of concepts made possible by the punning element in the utterance, including (a) homonymy (e.g.,“The perfect car for a long drive”); (b) polysemy (e.g.,“There was a sign on the lawn at a drug rehabilitation center that said ‘Keep off the grass”); (c) juxtaposition of metaphorical and literal readings (e.g., the headline “Burning questions on tunnel safety unanswered” concerning fires in the Channel Tunnel); (d) homophony (e.g., the headline “A steak in the market” on two big meat producers agreeing to merge); (e) paronymy (e.g.,“I used to be a doctor, but then I lost patients”); and (f) homography (e.g., “Having demonstrated his shooting prowess, the king gave the archer a little bow”). By contrast,Yus (2016, 2017b) proposed that each pun should be given three labels so that it is uniquely delimited.The three labels refer to three possible classifications: Label 1: Punning structure. How are the two pun-related meanings expressed within the utterance containing them? Four possibilities are identified: (a) two possible meanings (entertained in parallel); (b) one meaning, then another (in this structure, one meaning is activated and, at a later stage during the interpretation of the utterance, another is activated); (c) one meaning, the other absent (in this kind of pun, one of the meanings is accessible, but the other is absent, and the hearer has to look for this additional meaning; and (d) both meanings are absent. Label 2: Sense relationship.What relationship exists between the two meanings that make the pun possible? In this case, traditional labels such as homophony, homonymy, polysemy, homography, paronymy, etc., would serve to denote typical relationships involved in punning. Label 3: Inferential strategy.What inferential strategy is involved in the identification (and resolution) of the punning elements? In this case, the aforementioned inferential operations (disambiguation, reference assignment, concept adjustment, etc.) would apply. An example of a pun and its three labels is provided in (15) (see Abad Lavín, 2017 for more examples of punning in Spanish): (15) Un aplauso para las mujeres de los policías, que son fieles a sus maridos sabiendo que no son sus únicas esposas. ‘Applause for policemen’s wives, who are faithful to their husbands despite knowing that they are not their only spouses/handcuffs.’ ([Label 1: two possible senses in parallel] [Label 2: polysemy] [Label 3: disambiguation]) In short, puns comprise varied ways in which wordplay may be exploited for the sake of obtaining humorous effects.The three aforementioned labels help us in the analysis of how they are devised and inferred for humor.

2.4.2

Stand-up comedy monologues in Spanish

Pragmatics has also addressed stand-up comedy performances in Spanish (see Castellón Alcalá, 2013; Rodríguez Santos, 2017; Ruiz Gurillo, 2012, 2013, 2015a, 2016, 2017;Yus, 2004). Stand-up monologues seem to base their effectiveness not so much on manipulations of discourse-specific inferential strategies (although they are also used), but rather on a strategy using the ‘personal’ vs. ‘collective’ status of the audience’s mental representations. In short, the comedian stirs the audience’s stored beliefs and mental representations in a number of ways. Sometimes they become strengthened or challenge typical social issues such as professions or gender-role stereotypes, which often overlap with the personal beliefs of every member of the audience. The ‘mutual manifestness’ of certain information leads to a change of attitude toward that information by 410

Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research

the audience (e.g., strengthening, altering). An example of an easily recognizable cultural item by the audience as ‘collective’ is adolescence, which proves to be successfully addressed by the comedian on stage in (16): (16) La vida tiene etapas difíciles, y yo estoy atravesando una de las peores: la adolescencia. ¡La de mi hijo! Mi pequeñín, ese que antes, cuando venía del colegio, me volvía loca contándome cosas de sus compañeros, de los profesores. . . . ¡Ahora no despega los labios! Ha dejado de hablar, pero como se deja el tabaco, de un día para otro. Cuando llega a casa se mete en su habitación y no se sabe lo que hace ahí dentro. (El Club de la Comedia, in Yus, 2004, p. 335) ‘People go through hard times in life, and I am going through one of the worst ones: adolescence. My son’s! My little boy, the same boy who, when he came home from school, used to drive me crazy by telling me everything about his classmates, his teachers. . . . Now his lips are sealed! He stopped talking, but just as when one stops smoking, he did it overnight. When he gets home, he shuts himself up in his room and God knows what he’s doing in there.’ Similarly, the fact that some information, which members of the audience thought was privately held, acquires a ‘collective’ (i.e., cultural) status during the comedian’s performance is, in itself, a source of humor. For instance, the comedians may remind the audience that many of the actions that people consider special, private, or individual to them are in fact performed by everybody in the community as a collective, as in (17): (17) Cuando estás enamorado no solo te comportas como un idiota . . . es que además piensas que eres especial, que las cosas que haces no las hace nadie más en el mundo.Aunque en realidad lo que haces es repetir las mismas tonterías de todos los enamorados. . . . [Si vas de ligue] Cuando llegas al coche . . . hay que poner musiquita romántica. Una cinta que te has grabado especialmente para esa noche y que en un alarde de originalidad le has puesto el título de “Lentas” (El Club de la Comedia, in Yus, 2004, p. 339) ‘When you are in love, not only do you behave like an idiot . . . you also think that you’re special, that nobody else in the world does the things you do. But in fact, what you do is to repeat the same silly things all people in love do. . . . [If you’re trying to pick up a girl] When you get into the car . . . you’ve got to put on romantic music. That tape you recorded especially for that occasion and that, showing off your originality, you labelled it “Slow music.”’ From the studies mentioned earlier, it may be concluded that a study of the pragmatics of humor must focus on how the speaker predicts that a certain interpretation (from a range of possibilities) is going to be obtained from the humorous discourse. Specifcally, it should clarify that certain nuances or concepts underlying words are going to be more prominent in the context of the comprehension of the humorous discourse, together with the prediction that certain background knowledge is going to be accessed. This happens in collective representations when common ground with the audience may be predicted by the stand-up comedian.

2.4.3

Translating jokes

Several studies have addressed the translation of humorous discourses from or into Spanish. For instance, Muñoz-Basols (2008) studied the translation of sound-based humor in Carol Weston’s literature into Spanish. In this section, the area in the analysis of humor translation 411

Yus

that is analyzed is how jokes from/into Spanish may be translated and their intended humorous effects maintained. For example, the sound-based joke in (18) cannot be easily translated into Spanish; the translator was forced to alter the text in order to preserve the pragmatic intentions involved (Muñoz-Basols, 2008, p. 154): (18) En el taxi, por ejemplo, Matt me preguntó,“¿Qué es lo que hace ja, ja, ja, ja, crac?” y le contesté, “¿Qué?” y dijo,“Alguien que SE PARTE de risa.” ‘In the taxi, for instance, Matt asked me, “What goes ha-ha-ha-ha-splat?” I said, “What?” and he said,“A man laughing his head off.” Yus (2012) claimed that there are degrees of translatability of jokes depending on how close the translation is to the content of the joke and, especially, to the inferential strategies that the source-language speaker expected their source-language interlocutor to carry out in order to obtain the intended humorous effects. A chart was proposed with 16 cases resulting from the combination of three parameters generically called ‘scenarios:’ (a) Cultural scenario. Cultural assumptions, with greater or lesser stereotypical quality, are assumed by a whole population. However, different audiences from different cultural backgrounds may obtain different degrees of humor or even fail to understand the point of the joke. (b) Semantic scenario.This scenario refers to whether the source language and the target language exhibit similar ways of coding the information, parallel ways of coding idioms, metaphors, etc., and similar options in the language for generating humorous effects. (c) Pragmatic scenario.This scenario is very important, and the translator should do the utmost to preserve this scenario, even if that involves radically changing the semantic scenario and also, perhaps, the cultural one. Overall, this scenario has to do with all the inferential strategies leading to a relevant interpretation of the joke as intended by the communicator of the source-language joke. An example in which these three scenarios are preserved is (19): (19) ¿Por qué Stevie Wonder y Ray Charles se llevaban tan mal? Porque no se podían ni ver. ‘Why didn’t Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles get along with each other? Because they couldn’t see eye to eye.’ This joke maintains similar cultural, semantic, and pragmatic qualities. By contrast, the translation of the joke in (20) demands a semantic alteration to comply with the pragmatic intention. The humor in this joke is based on the division of tratamiento ‘treatment’ into trata ‘he tries’ and miento ‘I lie.’That is not translatable into English unless the joke text is altered.The word ‘liability’ also bases its humor on the division of ‘lie’ and ‘ability’ (when pronounced), which can imply the woman’s lying and the man’s inability to perform in bed: (20) [Dos amigas están charlando sobre sus maridos]. Amiga 1: ¿Y cómo te va con tu marido en el sexo? Amiga 2: Bueno, estamos con el tratamiento. Amiga 1: ¿Tratamiento? Amiga 2: Sí, tratamiento. . . . Él trata y yo miento. 412

Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research

‘[Two friends are chatting about each other’s husbands]. Friend 1:What is sex like with your husband? Friend 2:Well, it’s a matter of liability. Friend 1: Liability? Friend 2:Yes, liability. . . . He has no ability and I lie.’

2.4.4

Verbal-visual discourses in Spanish

Visual discourses are also a good resource for the generation of humorous effects. In this section, three of them are briefly analyzed. 2.4.4.1 CARTOONS

Cartoons in the Spanish press are a good resource for producing humor in their verbal-visual quality (see Padilla-García, 2013, among others).Yus (2016) suggested that visual discourses also lead to both explicit and implicated interpretations, just like verbal discourse.Therefore, it was proposed that interpreting cartoons involves six stages (which are not meant to be sequential but parallel): Strategy 1. Decoding and inferentially enriching the verbal content of the cartoon (captions and/or dialogues between characters) in order to obtain the explicit interpretation of the text or ‘explicature.’ Strategy 2. Deriving implicatures from verbal content, if these are necessary to reach a relevant interpretation of the verbal content of the cartoon. Strategy 3. Decoding and inferentially enriching the image(s) depicted to yield so-called ‘visual explicatures.’ Indeed, images in cartoons are not simply identified effortlessly, because most cartoonists tend toward iconic abstraction. Strategy 4. Deriving implicatures or implications from the visual content of the cartoon, if these are necessary to reach an adequate interpretation of the cartoon as a whole. Strategy 5. Inferring possible combinations of text and image to yield interpretations (typically implicated ones or verbal-visual implicatures) that are only possible from the combination of these sources of information (text and image) and not from either of them taken separately. In my opinion, the effects of this combination of text and image are those that are more likely to result in humorous effects (or amusement, entertainment, etc.) while reading the cartoon, since the eventual interpretation demands the reader’s active participation in combining sources of information for the sake of a satisfactory interpretation. Strategy 6. Accessing as much contextual information as necessary to perform strategies 1–5 discussed above successfully. In the case of cartoons, the reader’s background knowledge (e.g., on current affairs, newsworthy events, political issues) is crucial to understanding the cartoon properly, to the extent that, very often, the cartoon makes little sense if it is separated from the specific time frame and pieces of news that justified its publication. 2.4.4.2 ADS

Advertisers also exploit humor as part of their marketing techniques.Very often, the humorous technique involves using the information provided in the visual content of the ad as a contrast to what is asserted verbally. In short, advertisers and cartoonists can use images in ads (and cartoons) in order to force the reader to entertain parallel literal/idiomatic or literal/ metaphorical interpretations for the same text, thus creating incongruence and increased 413

Yus

attention. As a consequence, what should be a unique interpretation of the text of the ad becomes two equally possible interpretations, and this duality puzzles the reader. Consider the ads in (21–22): (21) Product advertised:Travel insurance Image: A man hanging with one single hand from a cliff. Text: No se quede colgado.‘Don’t be left hanging/in the lurch’ (22) Image: A personal computer.A cable departs from the slogan and crosses the ad. Text: Fujitsu le echa un cable.‘Fujitsu throws you a cable/gives you a hand’ These Spanish ads play with literal/idiomatic readings of two phrases.The advertisers use the accompanying image to force the reader into accessing a parallel literal interpretation. In (21), the Spanish idiom No se quede colgado ‘don’t be left in the lurch’ has a possible but unlikely literal meaning in the context of this ad comprehension: ‘Don’t be left hanging.’ Despite being an irrelevant choice for an interpretation, the image of a man hanging from a cliff makes it as likely as the idiomatic interpretation, thus generating two parallel and equally valid interpretations of the phrase. Something similar happens in (22), where echar un cable is a very common idiom in Spanish meaning ‘give someone a hand,’ but it also has a purely literal, but unlikely, interpretation:‘to throw a cable at someone.’The visual depiction of a cable levels the accessibility to these two interpretations, producing incongruity, and the readers have to keep both interpretations active in their minds, which leads to greater attention and, perhaps, to some form of pleasure or entertainment. Needless to say, ads may produce humorous effects without the aid of accompanying visual information, as seen in the frequent humor communicated through one-liners in ads. Dziuba (2017) lists and categorizes them. Some are quoted in (23), with the key word(s) sustaining the humor in bold: KNEIPP Valeriana: Funciona, naturalmente. ‘KNEIPP Valeriana. It works, naturally.’ b. Dusen: Haciendo jerseys damos la talla. ‘Dusen:When it comes to making sweaters, we measure up.’ c. Asturiana: Nuestro verano es la leche. ‘Asturiana: Our summer is amazing.’

(23) a.

In (23a), the ad (for a brand of Valerian herb) plays with two meanings of naturalmente (‘of course’ or ‘in a natural way”); in (23b), the ad (for a clothes brand) plays with the literal/idiomatic sense of dar la talla (literal:‘to provide the size of the clothes,’ idiomatic:‘to be up to scratch/ acceptable’); and (23c), the ad (for Asturiana, a dairy company) plays with the literal/idiomatic senses of es la leche (literal:‘it’s milk,’ idiomatic:‘it’s incredible’). 2.4.4.3 MEMES

Memes are discourses that spread on the internet that are often generated with a humorous intention (see Yus, 2018a, 2019). Among the types of memes that can be found, the so-called ‘image macro’ is very common, comprising a line of text on top of and/or below the meme, and an image in the middle. There is a number of interesting text-image combinations with pragmatic implications. For example, some memes play with the famous incongruity-resolution 414

Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research

schema (initial puzzlement upon interpreting the text, followed by its humorous resolution).An example is (24): (24) Top text: Image: Bottom text:

Aún no está todo perdido. ‘All is not yet lost.’ Picture of the coach of the Spanish football team. Aún podemos perder contra Australia. ‘We can still lose against Australia.’

Memes may also exploit what was labelled the make-sense frame in Yus (2013a, 2013b), basically playing with the reader’s construction of an appropriate situation for the comprehension of the joke. Consider the meme in (25): (25) Top text: Image: Bottom text:

Mi amor, tu regalo de navidad es . . . ‘My love, your Christmas present is . . . ’ Picture of a young girl smiling. Estoy embarazada y nos casaremos. ‘I am pregnant and we’re getting married.’

In (25), the user activates encyclopedic knowledge related to Christmas, initially constructed as a “make-sense frame,” within which the text of the meme is processed, including such information as good wishes, giving presents, etc. However, the user suddenly comes across the bottom text of the meme that is incongruous with the information inferred so far, which forces a change or alteration of the Christmas make-sense frame (still active in the user’s short-term memory). Very often, the derivation of humorous effects entails accessibility to specific information from context that allows for these effects. For instance, an effective interpretation of meme (26) demands that the user be able to identify the two politicians in the image, Rajoy and Puigdemont, and also make an intertextual connection to the original photo of two players from the Barcelona football team, Piqué and Neymar. In the original image, the same text was uttered by Piqué about his certainty that Neymar would not sign with a different football team and would stay in Barcelona. Instead, the text in the meme (¡se queda! ‘he will stay!’) now refers to Rajoy’s certainty that Puigdemont will not pursue his separatist ideas: (26) Top text: Image:

Se queda!!! ‘He will stay!!!’ Picture of president of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, hugging Catalan separatist leader Puigdemont.

On other occasions, however, the text itself is the only source of humor, as happens in the famous series of memes portraying the TV presenter Matías Prats. He is prone to playing with punning words on TV (with different word arrangements or literal vs. idiomatic meanings of phrases in Spanish), and these memes also exhibit punning texts. Some examples follow in (27–28), with the punning elements in bold. In (27), the meme plays with two possible syntactic arrangements of the phrase, todo concuerda ‘everything fits in’ and todo con cuerda ‘everything with a rope,’ both of which are compatible with the information provided in the top phrase of the meme. In (28), by contrast, the author plays with an idiomatic interpretation of the utterance (They are probably cash-strapped) and a literal one (They cannot launch rockets), and again 415

Yus

both interpretations are compatible with the initial part of the meme, thus puzzling the reader humorously: (27) Top text: Bottom text:

(28) Top text: Bottom text:

La víctima murió ahorcada. ‘The victim died by hanging.’ Parece que todo concuerda. ‘It seems that everything fits/everything with a rope.’ La NASA sufre un recorte de presupuesto. ‘NASA suffers a budget cut.’ Se ve que no están para tirar cohetes. ‘It seems like they cannot launch rockets/are probably cash-strapped.’

In sum, memes exhibit a great variety of combinations between text and image (Yus, 2019) which may be used for the objective of generating humorous effects. Sometimes the picture does not play a substantial role in these effects, as in (27–28, more centered upon the text itself. On other occasions, though, the picture is necessary to lead the reader in the intended interpretive direction, as in (25) and (26) prior.

3

Methodological considerations

For pragmatic research on humor in Spanish, there are four main data-gathering methods. A first method is to utilize joke repositories that abound on the Internet, obliging the analyst to be responsible for structuring and contextualizing the initial, (usually) disorganized listings of jokes into meaningful categories according to the pragmatic phenomena involved. A second method is to access conversational corpora and extract those instances that involve humorous intentions and effects. For instance, for humor in Spanish conversations, the corpus by the Val.Es.Co. Group in Valencia has been used extensively to extract naturally occurring humorous exchanges. Some of these occurrences are already published on the website (www.valesco.es/corpus/corpussrch. php) for humor researchers. Especially for humor involving the role of vocal and visual nonverbal behavior, a third method is to access video repositories such as YouTube, which are particularly useful for analyses of stand-up comedy monologues. Finally, a fourth method is to record humorous interactions in natural environments without the interactants being aware of these recordings (even if permission is requested afterwards). Such is the case of Padilla Cruz’s (2020) analysis of his recordings of humor in bars in Seville.

4

Future directions and conclusion

There are many areas in which the pragmatics of humor in Spanish may develop, some of which I discussed briefly in Section 1. One issue is conversational humor in Spanish.This topic was already referenced at the beginning of this chapter, but future research will have to continue the analysis of how humor is co-constructed by several interlocutors and, therefore, move beyond the classical one-to-one situation analyzed in the literature review. Also, future research will have to analyze more thoroughly the functions that humor plays in conversations beyond simply amusing the interlocutor. Yus (2016) identified four major functions: (a) strengthening the ties and solidarity between interlocutors; (b) mitigating aggressive acts; (c) broadening social bonding; and (d) exerting or resisting power. 416

Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research

A second issue is the specificity of humor in the Spanish context and in different Spanishspeaking societies (e.g., countries in the Americas versus Spain), and the study of cultural or social assumptions, stereotypes, habits, collective beliefs, etc., underlying humor in Spanish.This is especially interesting for stand-up monologues (Section 3). A third issue is developmental pragmatics. More research should be done on how children who are native speakers of Spanish acquire the ability to produce and understand humor and use contextual information to derive humorous effects (e.g., Hess-Zimmerman, 2016; Ruiz Gurillo, 2015b;Timofeeva Timofeev, 2014, 2016, 2017). Finally, a new area for future research is to focus not only on humorous effects themselves, but also on non-propositional effects (e.g., feelings and emotions) generated by the humorous act of communication, both intended (i.e., affective attitude) and unintended, but nevertheless triggered by the interpretation of the humorous discourse (i.e., affective effects). Popova (2018), for example, comments on how jokes may generate additional feelings and emotions in the audience. She illustrates this point with the joke in (29): (29) Two elderly ladies meet in a shop and one of them addresses the other, saying that she

remembers going to the same school with her and being her close friend, but unfortunately she can’t remember her name.“Could you remind me of your name?” she asks.The other lady remains silent for a time and then replies,“Do you need it urgently?”

Popova argues that this joke has varied communicative values depending on who tells it. If the teller is a young person to elderly people, it may generate negative efects despite the display of ingenuity. On the other hand, if the joke is shared in a group of elderly people, it may enhance common traits and mutuality of information, with an ofset of non-propositional efects such as feelings of solidarity, connectivity, in-group membership, etc. Furthermore, in Yus (2018b), specifically in the context of internet communication, a number of non-propositional effects are listed: (a) Enhanced awareness of mutuality existing between interlocutors. Humorous communication typically demands certain mutual information in order to be successful. At the same time, these discourses also foreground areas of mutuality whose existence is vividly made explicit through the successful outcome of the humorous intention. In fact, many instances of humor are only intended to generate enjoyment through the mutual sharing of information. (b) Feelings of enhanced group membership, group specificity, and group solidarity. Discourse is a useful tool for emphasizing group membership, especially if it entails the use of specific jargon or demands a number of background assumptions that reveal appropriate membership, which aid in a more intense feeling of community membership. Humorous texts may also highlight group membership through an ability to retrieve group-specific assumptions from the context that are required for optimal humorous discourse comprehension and are also needed to react appropriately to it. (c) More fine-grained ability to extract humorous effects. Being able to perform the expected interpretive strategies leading to a humorous outcome may generate personal assumptions regarding the ability to engage successfully in the interpretation of this kind of discourse. Similarly, a greater sense of identity and self-esteem arises from an appropriate reaction to the intended humor, generated from an adequate inferential enrichment of the humorous text and its corresponding contextualization. To conclude, a pragmatics of humor in Spanish focuses on many ways in which speakers/authors devise their discourses to generate humorous efects. Although these discourses look varied in format (e.g., jokes, memes, advertisements), their authors systematically rely on specifc ways in 417

Yus

which the interpretation of these discourses may be predicted and manipulated for the sake of humor. Taking into account that all discourses underdetermine their interpretation and hence there is a more or less substantial gap between their literal meaning and their eventual relevant interpretation, speakers/authors may predict foreseeable interpretive inferences in the addressees and lead them in the intended, humorous direction.

Note 1 Permission granted by John Benjamins.This figure was originally published in Yus, F. (2013).An inferencecentered analysis of jokes.The intersecting circles model of humorous communication. In L. Ruiz-Gurillo & M. B.Alvarado-Ortega (Eds.), Irony and humor: From pragmatics to discourse (p. 73). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Further reading Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2012). La lingüística del humor en español. Madrid:Arco Libros. Although this book covers broad linguistic issues in the analysis of humor, it does include some discussion of pragmatic analyses of humor in Spanish discourses. The book mainly uses the general theory of verbal humor. It also has chapters on stand-up comedy monologues, parody in sketches, humor in everyday conversation, and a final chapter on irony. Ruiz Gurillo, L., & Alvarado Ortega, B. (Eds.). (2013). Irony and humor. From pragmatics to discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. This book is an edited collection, with some chapters that analyze aspects of humor in Spanish. Such is the case of the chapter by Mendez-García de Paredes on humor in Spanish media; Ruiz Gurillo’s analysis of humor in monologues by the Spanish comedian Buenafuente; work by Padilla-García on cartoons in the Spanish press; and that by Alvarado Ortega on failed humor in Spanish interactions. Torres Sánchez, M. A. (1999). Estudio pragmático del humor verbal. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, Servicio de Publicaciones. This book is not exclusively on humor in Spanish, but it does use Spanish examples. The book includes a contrast between traditional approaches to humor and new inferential models such as relevance theory. It also addresses a possible application of speech act theory and Grice’s maxims to humor.

References Abad Lavín, S. (2017). El humor en el one-liner: Retórica e interdiscursividad en el texto breve humorístico en español. Madrid: Universidad de Alcalá. Acuña Ferreira,A.V. (2012).The humorous display of transgressor femininities:‘Sharing a laugh’ in Spanish/ Galician friendly talk among young women. Sociolinguistic Studies, 6(1), 121–147. Alvarado Ortega, M. B. (2012). Una propuesta de estudio para el humor en la conversación coloquial. ELUA, 26, 7–28. Attardo, S., & Raskin,V. (1991). Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor, 4(3–4), 293–347. Bolaños-García Escribano, A. (2017). Subtitling audiovisual humour: The case of ‘early Almodóvar’ films during la movida in Spain (1980–1984). MonTI, 9, 219–247. Carranza Márquez, A. (2010).The faces of humor: Humor as catalyst of face in the context of the British and the Spanish Parliament. Humor, 23(4), 467–504. Castellón Alcalá, H. (2013). Humor y tipos textuales. Los textos expositivos en los monólogos cómicos. In M. B. Alvarado Ortega & L. Ruiz Gurillo (Eds.), Humor, ironía y géneros textuales (pp. 41–59). Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, Servicio de Publicaciones. Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures.The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Díaz Pérez, F. J. (2014). Relevance theory and translation:Translating puns in Spanish film titles into English. Journal of Pragmatics, 70, 108–129. 418

Pragmatics and humor in Spanish research

Dziuba,A. (2017). Los juegos de palabras en la publicidad de aerolíneas españolas e hispanoamericanas: Una propuesta de clasificación. Colindancias, 8, 161–172. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Speech acts (Syntax and Semantics 3) (pp. 41–58). New York:Academic Press. Hess-Zimmerman, K. (2016). Is this a joke? Metalinguistic reflections on verbal jokes during the school years. EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages, 3, 3–21. Jiménez Carra, N. (2009).Translating humour:The dubbing of Bridget Jones’s Diary into Spanish. In J. Díaz Cintas (Ed.), New trends in audiovisual translation (pp. 133–141). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Krajčovičová, V. (2018). El humor en la traducción audiovisual de la serie animada Los Simpson. MA Thesis. Masarykova Univerzita, Brno, Czech Republic. Lorenzo, L., Pereira, A., & Xoubanova, M. (2003).The Simpsons/Los Simpson: Analysis of an audiovisual translation. The Translator, 9(2), 269–291. Martínez Sierra, J. J. (2003). La traducción del humor en los medios audiovisuales desde una perspectiva transcultural. El caso de The Simpsons. Interlingüística, 14, 743–750. Martínez Sierra, J. J. (2008). Humor y traducción. Los Simpson cruzan la frontera. Castellón, Spain: Universitat Jaume I, Servicio de Publicaciones. Martínez Sierra, J. J., & Zabalbeascoa Terrán, P. (2017). Humour as a symptom of research trends in translation studies. MonTI, 9, 9–27. Méndez-García de Paredes, E. (2013). Discursive mechanisms of informative humor in Spanish media. In L. Ruiz Gurillo & M. B. Alvarado Ortega (Eds.), Irony and humor. From pragmatics to discourse (pp. 85–106). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Muñoz-Basols, J. (2008). Translating sound-based humor in Carol Weston’s with love from Spain, Melanie Martin: A practical case study. In M. Muñoz-Calvo, C. Buesa-Gómez, & M. A. Ruiz-Moneva (Eds.), New trends in translation and cultural identity (pp. 249–266). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Muñoz Gil, M. (2009). Dubbing the Simpsons in Spain: A case study. In J. Díaz Cintas (Ed.), New trends in audiovisual translation (pp. 142–157). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Oropeza-Escobar, M. (2011). Represented discourse, resonance and stance in joking interaction in Mexican Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Padilla Cruz, M. (2020).Verbal humor and age in cafés and bars in Seville, Spain. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 169–188). Oxford and New York: Routledge. Padilla-García, X. (2013). Cartoons in Spanish press:A pragmatic approach. In L. Ruiz Gurillo & M. B.Alvarado Ortega (Eds.), Irony and humor. From pragmatics to discourse (pp. 141–158).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Popova, M. (2018). Pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to humour in intercultural communication. Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, 34. Retrieved from http://journal.rhetoric.bg/?page_id=1658 Rodríguez Santos, J. M. (2017). Imagen social e identidad en el monólogo cómico. Actio Nova, 1, 51–68. Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2012). La lingüística del humor en español. Madrid:Arco Libros. Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2013). Eva Hache y El Club de la Comedia: del guión monológico al registro dialógico. Onomázein, 28, 148–161. Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2014). Infiriendo el humor. Un modelo de análisis para el español. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 59, 148–162. Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2015a). Sobre humor, identidad y estilos discursivos: Los monólogos de Eva Hache. Tonos Digital, 28. Retrieved from www.tonosdigital.com/ojs/index.php/tonos/article/viewFile/1241/770 Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2015b). ¡Marte es divertido! Sobre humor, apreciación y emociones en niños. Pragmalingüística, 23, 171–190. Ruiz-Gurillo, L. (2016). Metapragmatics of humor. Variability, negotiability and adaptability in humorous monologues. In L. Ruiz Gurillo (Ed.), Metapragmatics of humor. Current research trends (pp. 79–101). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ruiz Gurillo, L. (2017). El evidencial con humor entra. Acerca de su uso en los monólogos humorísticos. Normas, 7(2), 5–18. Saussure, F. de. (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. Lausanne, Switzerland: Playot. Simarro Vázquez, M. (2017). Humor verbal basado en la ambigüedad léxica y competencia léxico-semántica. Pragmalingüística, 25, 618–636. Solska, A. (2012a). Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure and processing multiple meanings in paradigmatic puns. In E. Wałaszewska & A. Piskorska (Eds.), Relevance theory. More than understanding (pp. 167–182). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 419

Yus

Solska, A. (2012b). On the notion of pragmatic ambiguity: Accessing multiple meanings in free indirect discourse. In A. Piskorska (Ed.), Relevance studies in Poland,Vol. 4. Essays on language and communication (pp. 54–63). Warsaw, Poland: WUW. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Timofeeva Timofeev, L. (2014). El humor verbal en niños de educación primaria: Desarrollo de la conciencia metapragmática. Feminismo/s, 24, 195–219. Timofeeva-Timofeev, L. (2016). Children using phraseology for humorous purposes. The case of 9-to10-year-olds. In L. Ruiz Gurillo (Ed.), Metapragmatics of humor. Current research trends (pp.  273–298). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Timofeeva-Timofeev, L. (2017). Metapragmática del humor infantil. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 70, 5–19. Torres Sánchez, M. A. (1999). Estudio pragmático del humor verbal. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, Servicio de Publicaciones. Vigara Tauste,A. M. (1994). El chiste y la comunicación lúdica: lenguaje y praxis. Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias. Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yus, F. (2003). Humor and the search for relevance. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(9), 1295–1331. Yus, F. (2004). Pragmatics of humorous strategies in El club de la comedia. In R. Márquez-Reiter & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish (pp. 320–344).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yus, F. (2012). Relevance, humour and translation. In E.Wałaszewska & A. Piskorska (Eds.), Relevance theory. More than understanding (pp. 117–145). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Yus, F. (2013a).An inference-centered analysis of jokes:The intersecting circles model of humorous communication. In L. Ruiz Gurillo & M. B.Alvarado Ortega (Eds.), Irony and humor. From pragmatics to discourse (pp. 59–82).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yus, F. (2013b). Analyzing jokes with the intersecting circles model of humorous communication. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 9(1), 3–24. Yus, F. (2016). Humour and relevance.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yus, F. (2017a). Relevance-theoretic treatments of humor. In S.Attardo (Ed.), Routledge handbook of language and humor (pp. 189–203).Abingdon: Routledge. Yus, F. (2017b). Incongruity-resolution cases in jokes. Lingua, 197, 103–122. Yus, F. (2018a). Identity-related issues in meme communication. Internet Pragmatics, 1(1), 113–133. Yus, F. (2018b). Positive non-humorous effects of humor on the Internet. In V.Tsakona & J. Chovanec (Eds.), The dynamics of interactional humor. Creating and negotiating humor in everyday encounters (pp.  283–304). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yus, F. (2019). Multimodality in memes.A cyberpragmatic approach. In P. Bou Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions (pp. 105–131). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Zabalbeascoa, P. (2000). La traducción del humor de Woody Allen o el arte de dominar la sutileza y la ironía. In L. Lorenzo & A. Pereira (Eds.), Traducción subordinada (I). El doblaje.Vigo, Spain: Universidade de Vigo.  

420

Part VI

Pragmatics learning contexts and teaching

24 Second language acquisition of Spanish pragmatics Lynn Pearson and Maria Hasler-Barker

1

Introduction

Pragmatics examines language “from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction[,] and the effect their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication” (Crystal, 1997, p. 301). Interlanguage (Selinker, 1972) describes language learners’ developing linguistic system in the target language (TL), which consists of features from the learner’s first language (L1), from the TL, and phenomena found in neither the L1 nor the TL.While Selinker’s theory accounts for development in structural aspects of language (e.g., phonology, syntax, morphology), L2 researchers also examine learners’ TL pragmatic knowledge through the lens of interlanguage. Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) combines research traditions of second language acquisition (SLA) and pragmatics (Félix-Brasdefer & Koike, 2014; Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993; Kasper & Rose, 2002;Taguchi & Roever, 2017) to investigate “nonnative speakers’ comprehension, production, and acquisition of linguistic action in L2” (Kasper, 1998, p. 184). ILP research analyzes language use and construction of meaning in interaction (Leech, 1983). The scope of ILP encompasses both the use and acquisition of pragmatics by L2 learners (FélixBrasdefer, 2017). However, the latter phenomenon, which has also been called “L2 pragmatics” by Bardovi-Harlig (2013), refers specifically to investigations about the “development of the pragmatics system in L2” (p. 69). L2 Spanish pragmatics research mirrors developments in the broader field of ILP. Early studies examined learners’ use of pragmatic acts and possible developmental patterns (e.g., Koike, 1989, 1995; le Pair, 1996). ILP studies confirm that pragmatics is often challenging for learners, leading to inappropriate comprehension and production of TL utterances (Blum-Kulka, 2012; Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989; Kasper & Rose, 2002;Taguchi & Roever, 2017). Researchers have expanded the agenda of Spanish ILP to include inquiry into instructional effects on the acquisition of L2 Spanish pragmatics (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2006, 2008a, 2008b; Hasler-Barker, 2016; Koike & Pearson, 2005; Pearson, 2006), L2 Spanish pragmatic development during study abroad (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2013; Shively, 2015), and web-based learning contexts (Sykes, 2005, 2015;Taguchi & Sykes, 2013).The growing body of L2 Spanish pragmatics work informs pedagogy (Dumitrescu & Andueza, 2018) and contributes to SLA theory more broadly as it examines 423

Pearson and Hasler-Barker

both cognitive processes and social motivations of L2 learners acquiring TLs (Félix-Brasdefer & Koike, 2014). This chapter describes our current understanding of the acquisition of L2 Spanish pragmatics. First, we situate Spanish ILP within SLA research, defining pragmatic competence and detailing factors that may affect it. Next, we describe pragmatic transfer and highlight the pragmaticsprosody relationship and the pragmatics-grammar relationship.We then discuss pragmatic phenomena and developmental patterns with attention to research in Spanish ILP.We subsequently review studies of L2 Spanish pragmatic acquisition in instructed and digital contexts that were not included in recent review articles by Félix-Brasdefer and Koike (2014), Félix-Brasdefer (2017), and Koike and Pearson (2019). Finally, we detail the implications of research in Spanish ILP and make recommendations for future studies of L2 pragmatic development.

2

Review of existing research

To situate our review of research in Spanish ILP, we give a brief overview of topics related to the acquisition of pragmatics in L2, including SLA theoretical and analytical frameworks, pragmatic competence, pragmatic transfer, the interface between pragmatics and other language systems, and awareness in ILP.

2.1

Issues in L2 Spanish pragmatics acquisition

As ILP has evolved from describing language use by nonnative speakers while realizing pragmatic functions to focusing on acquisition, researchers have employed several SLA theories and models to account for developmental patterns (Atkinson, 2011; Ishihara, 2010; Kasper & Rose, 2002; Taguchi & Roever, 2017). Kasper and Rose (2002) classified these theories or concepts according to their perspective on L2 pragmatic acquisition:‘intrapersonal’ and ‘interpersonal.’1 Intrapersonal models of SLA focus on the personal and cognitive factors of learners that may influence L2 acquisition. With regard to cognitive processes, Schmidt’s (1993, 2001) noticing hypothesis is the most prominent theoretical framework for ILP in Spanish and other languages. This model predicts that learners must notice TL features as a first step in acquisition.Attention to linguistic items facilitates the transformation of input into intake, which is then available for processing by the learners. Instructional pragmatics research has frequently employed the noticing hypothesis to test the effects of pedagogical measures.We discuss this framework further in Section 2.1.4 (Awareness and ILP). Interpersonal models or approaches describe SLA as a process and a product of interactions and relationships, in contrast with intrapersonal models, which emphasize individual learner characteristics and internal cognitive processes over interaction. Language socialization, interactional competence, and conversation analysis (CA) are three interpersonal frameworks used frequently in Spanish ILP research. Language socialization (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) describes both language use for socialization and socialization for language use. Blum-Kulka (1997/2012) describes ‘pragmatic socialization’ in her analysis of dinner-time talk as a locus of child language development as “children have to learn how to choose and introduce topics for talk, respond appropriately, tell a story, or develop an argument” (p. 3).While this concept initially applied to children in intercultural households, research in ILP has addressed the socialization of L2 learners to follow the pragmatic norms of the TL. In immersion contexts, this socialization may be explicit (e.g.,TL speakers overtly teach pragmatic forms and rules) or implicit (e.g., when learners participate in interactions and can observe pragmatic strategies used in the context). 424

Second language acquisition of pragmatics

The concept of interactional competence has been employed by researchers in various fields (Kasper & Rose, 2002).Within SLA, interactional competence is both an outcome of L2 learning and a process that facilitates it. Schmidt (1983) defines interactional competence as the discourse competence that speakers utilize to participate in conversations. He and Young (1998) view interactional competence as co-constructed by interlocutors and influenced by the social practices of the context.The analysis of interactions between learners or between learners and native-speakers can show how collaboration and topic management are acquired in L2 (Dings, 2014; Koike, 2010). To examine L2 pragmatics, especially the development of interactional competence, many researchers employ Conversation Analysis (CA), which is by nature centered on interactions.As Taguchi and Roever (2017) observe, while CA does not have the predictive quality to describe L2 pragmatic development, its microanalytic methodology is useful to examine pragmatic forms in the context of interactions. Researchers in ILP have employed CA in three distinct ways: (a) use CA solely as a research methodology to analyze social interaction; (b) use CA with SLA theories that describe learning (e.g., sociocultural theory and language socialization); and (c) use CA to analyze developmental patterns in the interactions. Each of the theories and approaches outlined in this section reveal different aspects of L2 learners’ pragmatic competence, a concept that we describe next.

2.1.1

Pragmatic competence

Pragmatic competence comprises two categories of knowledge (Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1983): (a) pragmalinguistic competence, or the specific linguistic resources for realizing pragmatic acts and modifying the level of force; and (b) sociopragmatic competence, or social beliefs or norms underlying the performance and interpretation of utterances communicating specific functions. For example, the speech act of thanking in Spanish may use a variety of pragmalinguistic items (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns) to express different strategies (e.g., Gracias ‘Thank you,’ Muchas gracias ‘Thank you very much,’ Te agradezco tu ayuda ‘I thank you for your help’). Speakers use sociopragmatic knowledge to assess context, hearer, and sociocultural norms to choose whether or not to thank and what strategies to use. L2 learners may experience pragmatic failure (Thomas, 1983) when they communicate inappropriately due to gaps in pragmatic knowledge. Many ILP studies have examined pragmalinguistic competence for a variety of speech act forms and/or linguistic items needed for appropriate TL interaction. Currently, the acquisition of sociopragmatic competence is an expanding research area (e.g., Bernal, 2018). Both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence may be affected by pragmatic transfer, as detailed in the next section.

2.1.2

Pragmatic transfer

Kasper (1992) describes ‘pragmatic transfer’ as “the influence exerted by learners’ pragmatic knowledge of languages and cultures other than L2 on their comprehension, production[,] and learning of L2 pragmatic information” (p. 207). Learners may rely on previous knowledge to formulate TL talk for various reasons, such as more efficient communication (Bou-Franch, 2012), lack of acculturation to L2 norms (Kecskes & Papp, 2000), or unwillingness/inability to follow L2 pragmatic rules despite awareness of them (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993; Koike, 1995; LoCastro, 2001). Pragmatic transfer can be positive (when a learner’s non-L2 knowledge corresponds with sociopragmatic or pragmalinguistic features of the L2) or negative (when there is a mismatch between sociopragmatic or pragmalinguistic features of the L2 and a learner’s knowledge). 425

Pearson and Hasler-Barker

Learners may exhibit pragmalinguistic transfer when “the illocutionary force or politeness value assigned to particular linguistic material in L1 influences learners’ perception and production of form-function mappings in L2” (Kasper, 1992, p. 209). Sociopragmatic transfer occurs when “the social perceptions underlying language users’ interpretation and performance of linguistic action in L2 are influenced by their assessment of subjectively equivalent L2 contexts” (Kasper, 1992, p. 209). Kecskes and Papp (2000) suggest that transfer fluctuates throughout SLA, depending on knowledge or skills acquired at a given time. While it may be difficult to isolate transfer from other factors, such as individual learners’ grammatical ability, general acquisitional processes, and pragmatic universals, researchers have observed some evidence of both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer in L2 Spanish contexts.With regard to pragmalinguistic transfer, Englishspeaking learners of Spanish transfer their L1 requesting strategy of speaker orientation (e.g., ¿Puedo tener el pan? ‘Can I have the bread?’) (Pearson, 2006; Pinto, 2005) instead of the Spanish-language preference for hearer orientation (e.g., ¿Me pasas el pan? ‘Can you [informal] give me the bread?’). Félix-Brasdefer (2003) observed transfer from L1 English to L2 Spanish in role play invitation refusals. Learners preferred direct strategies patterned after their L1, and overproduced positive opinions compared to native speakers (NSs) of Spanish.The limited sociopragmatic knowledge about target language norms for refusing invitations was also an important factor in the learners’ interlanguage forms. To understand L1 pragmatic transfer further, Bardovi-Harlig (2012) appealed to researchers to compare learners from typologically distinct L1s (i.e., Jarvis, 2000) to distinguish transfer from other acquisitional factors. In fact, she suggested that without this type of comparison, claims made about transfer are not sufficiently supported by the data.The current research in Spanish ILP has analyzed the developmental patterns of learners who have typologically similar L1s (e.g., English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian).We support Bardovi-Harlig’s suggestion of examining L2 pragmatic acquisition by learners of different languages to reveal evidence of L1 transfer. In addition, we encourage researchers to expand the scope of transfer studies to include other types of speech acts and other pragmatic features (see Chapter 2 on speech acts, this volume).

2.1.3

Prosody and grammar in ILP

ILP studies have investigated the role of prosody and grammar in learners’ production and comprehension of various pragmatic functions. For example, research indicates that L2 Spanish learners use prosody to convey pragmatic meaning (Félix-Brasdefer, 2007; Félix-Brasdefer & Lavin, 2009), although with a reduced inventory of cues (see Chapter 8 on pragmatics and prosody, this volume). Learners may transfer L1 intonational patterns to the TL (Aronsson & Fant, 2014). Shively, Menke, and Manzón-Omundson (2008) examined the comprehension of irony by three groups of L2 Spanish at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels.They found that only the advanced group were able to attend to prosodic cues in film scenes containing ironic utterances, while the other groups focused on the vocabulary and syntax in order to understand due to their lower proficiency. The pragmatics-prosody interface is an important component of current and future research in ILP (see Section 3 for further discussion), as is the pragmatics-grammar interface. There are two opposing perspectives on the interaction of grammatical and pragmatic competence for adult L2 learners. The first is that pragmatics may precede grammatical competence (Bialystok, 1993; Koike, 1989; Schmidt, 1983). Learners may formulate various pragmatic functions with a limited grammatical repertoire because grammatical competence develops more slowly. The second view is that grammar may develop before pragmatics (Salsbury & 426

Second language acquisition of pragmatics

Bardovi-Harlig, 2001;Takahashi, 2001).That is, even if L2 learners have acquired certain grammatical structures (e.g., conditional verb forms), they may not apply them to realize polite requests, which would reflect TL norms. The relationship between pragmatics and other linguistic systems, such as prosody and grammar, is complex. Learners’ decisions about how to use various linguistic resources in their pragmatic production is likely mediated by awareness of the need to design their utterances for contexts and hearers.

2.1.4

Awareness and ILP

SLA research suggests that TL pragmatic competence develops as a result of cognitive and social processes (Kasper & Rose, 2002;Taguchi & Roever, 2017), including awareness, or “the recognition or knowledge of the way in which language is used to encode social meaning through conscious reflection of relationships among the factors involved in pragmatic comprehension and production” (Takahashi, 2012). Sociopragmatic awareness, in particular, depends on learners’ awareness of and interactional experimentation with social factors that affect linguistic behavior (Haugh & Chang, 2015). Schmidt’s (1993) noticing hypothesis holds that input must be accompanied by attention to make TL information available for processing. Learners’ attention is limited, selective, and subject to voluntary control. Raising awareness through instruction has positive effects for acquiring L2 pragmatics. Instructional studies include strategies such as focuson-form, the presentation of grammatical forms in a meaningful context (Long, 1991), metapragmatic discussions, highlighting pragmatic forms in the input, consciousness raising, and repeated tasks (e.g., Hasler-Barker, 2016; Koike & Pearson, 2005; Mwinyelle, 2005; Pearson, 2006). Feedback is explicit or implicit, which may contribute to learners noticing aspects of the L2 (Koike & Pearson, 2005). Interactive role plays and conversations create opportunities for additional input and feedback (Alcón-Soler, 2002; Sykes, 2005).TL pragmatic awareness may develop implicitly as learners observe interactions in instructional and immersion contexts (Taguchi, 2012). Language socialization theory (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) indicates that L2 learners may also receive additional explicit instruction from NSs during interactions about what to say in specific TL situations (Shively, 2011). The development of L2 pragmatics is conditioned by numerous phenomena. Learners are subject to cognitive processes, including attention and awareness, along with individual factors such as opportunities for interaction, pragmatic transfer, and linguistic competence. In the following section, we describe investigations of Spanish ILP that examine the acquisition of various pragmatic aspects.

2.2 Existing L2 research on pragmatic phenomena Researchers have examined various pragmatic phenomena in L2 Spanish, such as deixis, implicatures, speech acts, and interactional competence (Félix-Brasdefer & Koike, 2014; Koike & Pearson, 2019). ILP studies reveal some common features in the acquisition of L2 pragmatics by learners in different contexts (e.g., naturalistic, instructed, digital) that indicate developmental stages (Taguchi & Roever, 2017), some of which have been documented in L2 Spanish pragmatics research.

2.2.1

Deixis

Deixis refers to grammatical and lexical categories that describe the social, physical, and metaphorical context of an utterance (Levinson, 1983), including spatial (e.g., aquí/allí ‘here/there,’ este/ese ‘this/that’), temporal (e.g., ayer/ hoy/ mañana ‘yesterday/ today/ tomorrow,’ verb tenses), 427

Pearson and Hasler-Barker

and personal (tú vs. usted) (Fillmore, 1997; see Chapter 3 on deixis, this volume). Koike (1989) used deixis to analyze direct and indirect formulations of L2 Spanish requests expressing different levels of politeness. Mwinyelle (2005) and Pearson (2006) examined the L2 acquisition of personal deixis for marking formality in an instructional study on Spanish requests and suggestions, respectively. In both studies, participants incorrectly assigned formality through verbal endings (e.g., debe hablar conmigo ‘you-formal should talk with me’ to address a friend). In some cases, learners mixed formality markers (e.g., debe ‘you-formal should’ and amigo ‘friend’). Both investigations revealed few changes in formality marking resulting from instruction.While learners demonstrated some awareness of grammatical formality distinctions, they lacked linguistic proficiency to encode personal deixis appropriately (see Section 2.1.3 for a discussion of the interaction between pragmatics and grammar).Villarreal (2014) found that some learners indicated that they chose tú or usted based on identity formulation, even though they knew that the usage differed from TL norms. Research on the development of deictic features indicates that, while learners may be aware of grammatical and contextual differences, they have difficulty interpreting and encoding these in practice. A learner’s ability to interpret context is crucial to the development of other pragmatic features, such as implicatures.

2.2.2

Implicature

‘Implicature’ refers to indirect or implicit meaning(s) encoded in utterances and is frequently culturally bound, requiring listener interpretation (Grice, 1975/1996; see Chapter 1 on implicature, this volume).The ambiguity in implicature presents comprehension difficulties for L2 learners (Bouton, 1999; Roever, 2013). Formulaic implicatures (e.g., indirect criticism, irony) require interpretation of an opposite or irrelevant meaning. The statement, Pues, tomé una linda siesta ‘Well, I took a lovely nap,’ in response to a question about whether the interlocutor enjoyed a movie, can be interpreted as ‘The movie was boring.’ Idiosyncratic implicatures (e.g., general conversational implicature) rely on context and utterance meaning. For example, if a speaker who has previously asked for favors states, Me quedé sin gasolina ‘I ran out of gas,’ the interlocutor could respond, Hay una gasolinera en la esquina ‘There is a gas station on the corner.’This response could be interpreted as giving information, but also denying further favors. Research on the development of L2 implicature comprehension shows a strong effect for proficiency in sequential development (e.g., Bouton, 1994; Taguchi, 2011; Wang, Brophy, & Roever, 2014). Beginning learners can understand more transparent idiosyncratic implicatures, while formulaic implicatures require utterance comprehension, followed by processing of irrelevant, contradictory, and/or cultural content to arrive at an appropriate interpretation. In a study examining the effect of audiovisual support for irony comprehension by beginning and advanced learners, Shively et al. (2008) found that only advanced learners showed improvement, reflecting the role of proficiency in interpreting implicatures. For beginning learners, lower comprehension levels may stem from working-memory limitations for processing visual and linguistic input. Koike (1995) investigated comprehension of Spanish suggestions by three levels of Spanish learners (beginning, intermediate, and advanced), finding that advanced learners understood better than beginning and intermediate learners, likely due to processing abilities. However, more advanced linguistic proficiency also led some learners to misinterpret Spanish indirect negated suggestions (e.g., ¿No has pensado en leer este libro?) because its literal translation communicates criticism in English (‘Haven’t you thought about reading this book?’).This negative L1 transfer resulted in inaccurate interpretation (i.e., a rebuke instead of a suggestion). Research in Spanish L2 implicatures indicates the need for instruction to help learners appropriately comprehend the meanings of utterances. 428

Second language acquisition of pragmatics

2.2.3

Speech acts

‘Speech acts’ (Austin, 1962/1975; Searle, 1975) are utterances that perform communicative functions (e.g., complaints, refusals, etc.; see Chapter 2 on speech acts, this volume).This theoretical framework dominates ILP research. Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) compared requests and apologies across several languages, including Spanish, and established a method for analyzing pragmalinguistic features of speech acts. Current research applies features from this framework, including head-act identification (e.g., request: ¿Me puedes prestar tus apuntes? ‘Can you-informal lend me your-informal notes?’), identification of force-modifying strategies (e.g., lexical softeners: por favor ‘please’), and/or support for the speech act (e.g., grounders: No asistí a la clase ayer ‘I didn’t attend class yesterday’). Spanish ILP research has examined various speech acts including requests (Félix-Brasdefer, 2007; Hernández & Boero, 2018; Koike, 1989; Pearson, 2006; Pinto, 2005; Shively, 2011; Shively & Cohen, 2008), suggestions (Koike, 1995; Koike & Pearson, 2005; Mwinyelle, 2005), apologies (Hernández, 2018; Shively & Cohen, 2008), compliments (Félix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 2012; Hasler-Barker, 2016), and refusals (Félix-Brasdefer, 2004, 2008a, 2008b, 2019a, 2019b, Chapter 7). Kasper and Rose (2002) formulated a model of developmental stages for requests, which have been documented among L2 Spanish learners at several levels (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2007; Pearson, 2006).We illustrate these stages using learner examples from Pearson (2006). Pre-basic stage learners may employ lexical items, which depend on context for interpretation.These early strategies lack syntactic structure and attention to interlocutor relationships (e.g., ¿La mochila? ‘The backpack?’ as a request to move a backpack).The formulaic stage is characterized by unanalyzed formulas, such as want/need statements (e.g., Quiero las aspirinas ‘I want aspirin’) or imperatives (e.g., Déme la revista ‘Give [formal command] me the magazine’). In the unpacking stage, learners begin to produce requests using conventional indirectness with modal verbs (e.g., ¿Me puedes dar la revistaTime? ‘Can you [informal] give me Time magazine?’). Pragmatic expansion follows as learners add new forms to their pragmalinguistic repertoire.They increase mitigation, explanations, and use more complex syntax as required with subjunctive forms (e.g., Necesito que limpies la cocina. Es [< Está] sucia ‘I need you [informal] to clean the kitchen. It’s dirty’). Finally, in the fine-tuning stage, learners regulate requestive force according to participants, goals, and contexts using a range of pragmalinguistic strategies, including vocatives, explanations, and internal and/or external modifiers. Examining L2 speech acts, especially in collaborative contexts, adds to our understanding of SLA developmental stages. In fact, Spanish ILP research has studied L2 speech acts in interactions where the pragmatic act occurs over a series of turns (Félix-Brasdefer, 2010; Hasler-Barker, 2016).This approach also allows for the analysis of interactional competence.

2.2.4

Interactional competence

Young’s (2011) model of interactional competence includes pragmatic features such as participant identity, speech acts and their sequential organization, and discursive practices to manage turn-taking and repairs.A speaker’s interactional resources hinge on others’ participation in social contexts. According to Young, interactional competence “is not what a person knows, it is what a person does with others” (p. 430, emphasis in the original). Taguchi and Roever (2017) summarize investigations of L2 interactional competence and propose three developmental stages: (1) Egocentric stage: learners’ main objective is communicating their message without paying attention to potential threats to social harmony and with heavy reliance on an expert interlocutor (e.g., NS or more advanced learner); 429

Pearson and Hasler-Barker

(2) Basic mutuality: learners begin to employ elements of preference organization and engagement with interlocutor’s topics, though they may simplify their participation by avoiding potential conflicts; and (3) Shared understanding: learners organize their participation with attention to the interlocutor’s understanding and social relationship and are able to maintain the interaction by contributing to developing topics. Dings’ (2014) longitudinal study of conversations between an L2 Spanish learner and a Spanish NS illustrates some of the stages described by Taguchi and Roever (2017). Using CA to analyze alignment moves, Dings observed that over the course of an academic year, the learner’s interactional competence developed to facilitate mutual understanding through co-construction in interactions and to include more complex contributions. The learner moved from one-word turns (e.g., sí ‘yes’) to comments matching the NS’s talk (e.g., supplying an appropriate word or phrase for the topic being discussed).While the learner in Dings’ (2014) study demonstrated improved interactional competence during study abroad (see Chapters 28 and 29 on pragmatics learning and teaching in the study abroad context, this volume), Félix-Brasdefer and Lavin (2009) found that learners’ development in this aspect of pragmatics was limited in a mixed group of learners (at-home and study abroad). The authors analyzed grammatical items that speakers use to begin or maintain turns (e.g., creo que . . .‘I believe that . . . ’) and prosody used to express tentativity (e.g., rising intonation) and/or continuation (e.g., elongated words).They suggest that learners may need instructional intervention to develop discourse, pragmatic, and interactional competence for conversation (see Section 3.2 for further discussion of instruction). Research in Spanish ILP has documented development in several aspects of pragmatics, some of which have yielded evidence of developmental patterns (e.g., implicature, speech acts). Studies have highlighted the crucial role of instructional intervention to raise learners’ awareness of pragmatic features and give them appropriate L2 interactional tools.The field is evolving to analyze L2 Spanish pragmatics in conversation in order to understand the development of interactional competence. In the next section, we discuss some of the most recent investigations of Spanish ILP that are pushing beyond more traditionally researched areas to document L2 Spanish pragmatic development.

3

Methodological considerations

In this section, we detail current studies in L2 Spanish pragmatics; namely, those not described in recent review articles (Félix-Brasdefer & Koike, 2014; Félix-Brasdefer, 2017; Koike & Pearson, 2019).These investigations examine topics such as indirect meaning comprehension and ILP in instructional and/or digital contexts.We describe their theoretical frameworks, learner characteristics, and contextual variables, and evaluate their contribution to our growing knowledge about the development of L2 Spanish pragmatic competence.

3.1

Comprehension of indirect meaning

Taguchi, Gómez-Laich, and Arrufat-Marqués (2016) investigated comprehension of indirect refusals, indirect opinions, and irony by L2 Spanish learners in intermediate and advanced undergraduate courses. Using relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1996) and conversational implicature (Grice, 1975/1996), the study examined how learners process pragmatic cues in indirect utterances (see Chapters 1 and 5 on implicature and relevance theory, respectively, this volume). The researchers assessed learners’ comprehension levels with a multimedia listening 430

Second language acquisition of pragmatics

test by measuring response times and documenting comprehension difficulties and inferential strategies. The investigation compared lower- and higher-scoring learners to identify factors that aided comprehension accuracy. Results showed that while learners had the most difficulty comprehending irony, they more easily understood indirect refusals, conveyed with conventional indirectness, and indirect opinions, expressed with nonconventional indirectness. Learners were quickest to signal comprehension of indirect opinions than for other functions. In retrospective verbal reports, learners identified several common comprehension strategies, including keyword inferencing (e.g., recognizing the word sufre ‘s/he suffers’ to understand that the speaker described something negative) and logical reasoning (e.g., deducing that a speaker could not afford a trip when the speaker indirectly refused an invitation by saying that they could not afford to buy a new clothing item). Lower-scoring learners favored the key-word inferencing strategy, which was less effective than other strategy types. Higher-scoring learners employed logical reasoning to interpret meaning. Comprehension of indirect meaning involves processing multiple utterance elements, including literal meaning, contextual features, and background information.The most successful learners attended to more than isolated lexical items and made more accurate inferences. Learner group differences suggest that language proficiency contributes to observable development patterns as discussed previously with regard to implicatures and speech acts (see Sections 2.2.2 and 2.2.3). In addition to examining the effects of linguistic proficiency in ILP development, researchers also continue to investigate the role of instruction on pragmatics, especially within the framework of current language teaching methodologies (e.g., task-based language teaching), which we discuss in the following section.

3.2 Instruction in pragmatics Task-based language teaching (TBLT) presents learners with activities that are objective-oriented and require language use (van den Branden, 2006).Tasks facilitate learning, allowing learners to attend to TL elements in focus-on-form instruction (Taguchi & Kim, 2018). Two recent studies examined the effects of the TBLT method on L2 pragmatic development (see Chapter 25 on pragmatics instruction for L2 classroom learners, this volume). McKinnon (2017) studied the effects of TBLT on L2 Spanish learners’ prosody in declaratives and imperatives, which are morphologically identical (e.g., Corta las cebollas ‘S/he cuts the onions’ or ‘Cut the onions’). Classroom Spanish learners participated in two types of task-based instruction: Focus-on-grammar (FOG) and Focus-on-grammar + intonation (FOG + I), the second of which drew learners’ attention to both grammatical and prosodic features. Each intervention included feedback. In FOG, corrections addressed morphological forms, while FOG + I feedback reminded learners of imperative intonation. Learners did not use intonation to distinguish imperatives from declaratives in the pre-test before instruction.The posttest indicated that only learners in the FOG + I condition differentiated intonation between imperatives and declaratives, although they did not approach their NS instructor’s production.While these results suggest that TL prosody instruction can help learners develop awareness of and acquire pragmatic strategies, the intervention was limited to one treatment and it is unclear whether changes in learners’ prosody persist for making the distinction between declaratives and imperatives. Although extensive research on pragmatics demonstrates that oral and written production are not equivalent, Reagan and Payant (2018) examined the effect of task modality (i.e., oral and written discourse-completion tasks (DCTs)) on the production of L2 Spanish requests. Prior to giving learners explicit instruction on request strategies in Spanish (e.g., head acts, internal and external modifiers), the researchers worked with instructors to develop tasks that targeted requests and reflected prescribed course outcomes.TBLT activities (information-gap, role plays, 431

Pearson and Hasler-Barker

and script writing) guided students to develop a story incorporating requests and refusals. Reagan and Payant administered a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed (14 days) posttest to measure the effects of task modality. Oral and written tests showed that TBLT activities had moderate effects on head-act indirectness and on internal and external modifications for both groups with no significant differences between oral/written modalities. The findings of McKinnon’s (2017) study and Reagan and Payant’s (2018) investigation emphasize the importance and effectiveness of targeting pragmatic structures within a TBLT curriculum. In addition to classroom-based work, researchers have also examined the role of technology in L2 pragmatic acquisition.

3.3

Digital communication

Advances in technology have created opportunities for learners to interact in real and simulated pragmatic contexts.The growing body of work in this area indicates positive results for L2 pragmatic acquisition using digital resources for instruction (González-Lloret & Ortega, 2018; Sykes, 2018). L2 Spanish learners benefit from participation in telecollaboration and other activities in digital environments (see Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse, this volume). Gonzales (2013) conducted a case study to observe one L2 learner taking accelerated lowerdivision Spanish courses (i.e., four semesters in one academic year), who interacted with NSs on Livemocha, an internet-based social network company for language learning that offers textbased, synchronous communication. The longitudinal investigation examined changes in the learner’s communication over one year. Using CA, the researcher documented language use in context and focused on the learner’s closing strategies. While the learner was reluctant to use Livemocha, analysis revealed that over time, he moved from abrupt endings to more extended closing sequences, indicating more effective rapport management. This evolution may result from the learner’s socialization into the Livemocha community while acquiring the conventions to end conversations.The study illustrated the utility of combining theoretical frameworks (i.e., CA and language socialization theory) to analyze L2 pragmatic development. Given the learner’s negative attitude toward Livemocha, which was a required course component, the socialization process showed the stronger effect of space (i.e., the online environment) to foster learning, over the goal to become a member of a social group (Gee, 2004). Blattner and Fiori (2011) assigned intermediate learners to use discourse analytic methods to examine greetings and leave-takings in Spanish on Facebook. Over the course of a semester, learners analyzed pragmatic features of Spanish-language Facebook group pages. Learners reported greetings and leave-takings that they observed on the page, when and where greetings and leavetakings occurred, and differences between greeting and leave-taking behaviors. In verbal reports, students commented on the way greetings changed according to the group’s formality or informality, the cultural differences between leave-takings in Spanish and English, and the prevalence of greetings compared to relatively few leave-takings.These findings suggest that learners at the intermediate level can develop sociopragmatic competence, allowing them to notice and describe the greetings and leave-takings in this digital context. Blattner and Fiori (2011) also acknowledge the need to examine whether sociopragmatic perceptions affect learner production.

3.4

Evaluation

The investigations surveyed in this section support the importance of cognitive processes and social practices for developing pragmatic competence in L2 Spanish. Following Schmidt’s (1993) noticing hypothesis, we observe that input and instructional strategies can draw learners’ attention 432

Second language acquisition of pragmatics

to aspects of L2 Spanish pragmatics; namely, pragmalinguistic features and sociopragmatic rules. In addition, learners’ verbal reports (e.g., Blattner & Fiori, 2011; Taguchi et al., 2016) demonstrate that proficiency plays a role in how learners allocate attention as they process information along with other variables, such as background information and logic. Social interactions in online text-based communication provide authentic models of pragmatic functions for learners to integrate as part of the ongoing language socialization process (Gonzales, 2013) and can also foster awareness of sociopragmatic norms (Blattner & Fiori, 2011). The studies reviewed in Sections 2 and 3 highlight the scope of L2 Spanish pragmatics research, which includes a wide range of topics (e.g., deixis, speech act behavior, development of interactive competence, comprehension of implicatures and other indirect language, instruction of pragmatics, and digital communication).The more recent investigations focus on intermediate-level learners and do not address pragmatic development, except for Gonzales (2013).Therefore, the information about the acquisition of L2 pragmatics in these studies only shows patterns in the initial stages of competence. Despite these limitations, the field of L2 Spanish pragmatics offers many avenues for continued research, which we address in the final section of this chapter.

4

Future directions and conclusion

L2 Spanish pragmatics research is rich with potential for future studies focusing on developmental patterns, which will contribute to ILP, SLA, and language pedagogy. First, investigators should test other SLA theoretical frameworks for validity in predicting L2 Spanish pragmatic development, as has been done in other languages. For example, Li (2012) employed the ‘adaptive control of thought-rational’ (ACT-R) model (Anderson, 1993) to create instructional treatments for Chinese requests with positive effects. Taguchi (2015, 2018) suggests the application of SLA models, such as chaos theory (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2009; Larsen-Freeman, 2012), dynamic systems (de Bot, 2008; Verspoor, de Bot, & Lowie, 2011), and emergentism (Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006), which can account for nonlinear processes observed in L2 pragmatic development when various factors (e.g., learners, context, input) interact with each other. Studies can also address various processes that may influence development, such as L1 transfer. Wyner and Cohen (2015) advocate for a new research agenda that more closely examines pragmatic transfer, suggesting that language teachers raise learner awareness of pragmatic transfer, including pragmatic universals. Likewise, the developmental stages for pragmatic phenomena described in Section 2 merit further investigation to determine whether they hold true for L2 Spanish pragmatic acquisition. Research should examine L2 pragmatic development at all proficiency levels to identify additional developmental stages. We recognize the effort required to include beginning learners, whose proficiency is limited, or more advanced learners, whose varied backgrounds and experiences make comparisons difficult. Nevertheless, by investigating learners at different proficiency levels, we can gain a more complete knowledge of L2 pragmatic development patterns in Spanish. For research in instructed contexts, L2 pragmatic competence in formal classroom contexts remains a topic of concern, as findings may be the impetus for innovative pedagogical materials incorporating pragmatics. TBLT methodology, seen in Section 3.2, presents many possible instructional applications to foster L2 pragmatic competence (Taguchi & Kim, 2018).The interaction of research and pedagogy fosters a significant contribution to SLA by investigating how learners develop the ability to comprehend and produce a variety of pragmatic targets in L2 Spanish. As described by Sykes (2018), digital contexts are commonly utilized in formal 433

Pearson and Hasler-Barker

coursework and leisure activities. Studying L2 pragmatic development through online communication is also crucial to understanding cognitive processes and social interactions. Investigators should expand inquiry beyond the traditional language classroom to foreign language residences, where L2 learners live with NSs (e.g., Dewey, Bown, Baker, & Martinsen, 2011).The status of Spanish in the U.S. also provides authentic opportunities for language use in service-learning and languages-for-the-professions courses. Research can measure the effects of these and other understudied contexts on L2 pragmatic development using social theories of SLA. Pragmatic needs analyses could also inform pedagogy focused on linguistic and cultural knowledge necessary for appropriate TL communication.Youn (2018) conducted a needs analysis to determine real-life language use in a program of English for Academic Purposes requiring pragmatic competence.The findings provide guidance to develop task-based curricula to provide learners with relevant pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge. Félix-Brasdefer and Koike (2014) call for research addressing the relationship between sociolinguistic variation in pragmatics and SLA. Investigations of L1 Spanish pragmatics (Félix-Brasdefer & Koike, 2012; Félix-Brasdefer & Placencia, 2020; Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005) demonstrate that Spanish varies significantly according to region, gender, social class, age, and other sociolinguistic considerations (Barron, 2003; see also Chapter 15 on pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish, this volume). Due to regional pragmatic norms in Spain, Latin America, and the U.S., learners may interact with NSs from different regions in the classroom and in naturalistic settings. The notion of teaching a single target (i.e., a regional variant of a particular speech act) is unrealistic, making it vitally important to raise learners’ awareness of sociolinguistic variability in Spanish (see Chapter 17 on Spanish intercultural pragmatics in a globalized world, this volume). In conclusion, our knowledge about the L2 acquisition of Spanish pragmatics has exploded in the last 20 years. We know that acquisition is affected by linguistic competence, pragmatic transfer, and awareness. Pragmatic features of Spanish, such as grammatical (in)formality marking and solidarity-politeness orientation, influence learners’ ILP comprehension and production. Researchers have observed stages of development for speech acts, implicatures, and interactional competence in Spanish, which has broadened dramatically our understanding of Spanish SLA. Future work in L2 Spanish pragmatics will undoubtedly continue to build our knowledge of SLA in general, and of Spanish ILP more specifically.

Note 1 Due to limited space, we discuss theories used only by researchers of L2 Spanish pragmatics. Some intrapersonal frameworks that have been applied in ILP studies in other languages are VanPatten’s (1996, 2007) input processing model, Anderson’s (1993) ACT-R model, and Schumann’s (1978) acculturation theory. ILP research has also employed an interpersonal model, sociocultural theory (Lantolf, 2006;Vygotsky, 1978).

Further reading Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Koike, D. (2014). Perspectives on Spanish SLA from pragmatics and discourse. In M. Lacorte (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Hispanic applied linguistics (pp. 25–43). New York: Routledge. A succinct synopsis of L2 Spanish pragmatics and discourse, including critical theoretical concepts in ILP, core issues, and future directions, this chapter is an excellent introduction to the state of the field. The article highlights the need to consider not only L2 production, but also SLA processes as they apply to L2 Spanish pragmatics. Gironzetti, E., & Koike, D. (Eds.). (2016). Bridging the gap in Spanish instructional pragmatics: From theory to practice [Special issue]. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2). 434

Second language acquisition of pragmatics

This journal issue is an overview of concerns in teaching Spanish pragmatics. Gironzetti and Koike’s introduction describes barriers to teaching pragmatics: the shortage of accessible teaching resources; lack of curricular integration; and the need to better understand the role of pragmatics teaching in contexts such as study abroad, heritage language, and Spanish for professions.They suggest that future research should focus on what to teach and how to teach it.The other articles in the issue provide useful information to improve instruction of pragmatics. Sykes, J. (2018). Interlanguage pragmatics, curricular innovation, and digital technologies. CALICO Journal, 35(2), 120–141. Sykes reviews the intersection of ILP and CALL, examining key areas such as the role of telecollaboration and digital contexts in learner development and the central role technological innovations have played in advancing research methodologies in L2 pragmatics. Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second language pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This comprehensive volume situates current innovations in L2 pragmatics within the historical context of pragmatic competence as a goal and as an object of SLA.The authors describe theoretical models and research methods, in addition to learning contexts, developmental patterns, and the role of individual differences.

References Anderson, J. (1993). Rules of the mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Alcón-Soler, E. (2002). Relationship between teacher-led versus learners’ interaction and the development of pragmatics in the EFL classroom. International Journal of Educational Research, 37, 359–377. Aronsson, B., & Fant, L. (2014). Boundary tones in non-native speech:The transfer of pragmatic strategies from L1 Swedish into L2 Spanish. Intercultural Pragmatics, 11(2), 159–198. Atkinson, D. (Ed.). (2011). Alternative approaches to second language acquisition. New York: Routledge. Austin, J. (1975). How to do things with words (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1962). Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2012). Pragmatics in second language acquisition. In S. Gass & A. Mackey (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 147–162). New York: Routledge. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2013). Developing L2 pragmatics. Language Learning, 63(s1), 68–86. Barron, A. (2003). Acquisition in interlanguage pragmatics: Learning how to do things with words in a study abroad context.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bernal, M. (2018).Teaching sociopragmatics: Face-work, politeness and impoliteness in L2 Spanish colloquial conversations. In D. Dumitrescu & P.Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to teaching (pp. 147–166). London: Routledge. Bialystok, E. (1993). Symbolic representation and attentional control in pragmatic competence. In G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics (pp. 43–57). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blattner, G., & Fiori, M. (2011).Virtual social network communities:An investigation of language learners’ development of sociopragmatic awareness and multiliteracy skills. CALICO Journal, 29(1), 24–43. Blum-Kulka, S. (2012). Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. (Original work published 1997). Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bou-Franch, P. (2012). Pragmatic transfer. In The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Retrieved from https:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0932.pub2 Bouton, L. (1994). Conversational implicature in the second language: Learned slowly when not deliberately taught. Journal of Pragmatics, 22, 157–167. Bouton,L.(1999).Developing nonnative speakers skills in interpreting conversational implicatures in English. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Culture in second language teaching and learning (pp. 47–70). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. (Ed.). (1997). The Cambridge encyclopedia of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Bot, K. (2008). Introduction: Second language development as a dynamic process. The Modern Language Journal, 92, 166–178. Dewey, D., Bown, J., Baker,W., & Martinsen, R. (2011). Foreign language housing in the U.S.: Results of a nationwide survey. ADFL Bulletin, 41(3), 70–86. 435

Pearson and Hasler-Barker

Dings,A. (2014). Interactional competence and the development of alignment activity. The Modern Language Journal, 98, 742–756. Dumitrescu, D., & Andueza, P. (2018). L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to teaching. New York: Routledge. Ellis, N., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (2006). Language emergence: Implications for applied linguistics—Introduction to the special issue. Applied Linguistics, 27, 559–589. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2003). Declining an invitation:A cross-cultural study of pragmatic strategies in American English and Latin American Spanish. Multilingua, 22, 225–255. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2004). Interlanguage refusals: Linguistic politeness and length of residence in the target community. Language Learning, 54(4), 587–653. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2006).Teaching the negotiation of multi-turn speech acts: Using conversation-analytic tools to teach pragmatics in the FL classroom. In K. Bardovi-Harlig, J. C. Félix-Brasdefer, & A. S. Omar (Eds.), Pragmatics and language learning 11 (pp. 165–198). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2007). Pragmatic development in the Spanish as a FL classroom: A cross-sectional study of learner requests. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(2), 253–286. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008a). Pedagogical intervention and the development of pragmatic competence in learning Spanish as a foreign language. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 16(1), 49–84. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2008b).Teaching Spanish pragmatics in the classroom: Explicit instruction of mitigation. Hispania, 91(2), 477–492. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2010). Data collection methods in speech act performance: DCTs, role-plays, and verbal reports. In A. Martínez-Flor & E. Usó-Juan (Eds.), Speech act performance:Theoretical, empirical and methodological issues (pp. 41–56).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2013). Refusing in L2 Spanish:The effects of the context of learning during a shortterm study abroad program. In O. Martí Andándiz & P. Salazar-Campillo (Eds.), Refusals in instructional contexts and beyond (pp. 147–173).Amsterdam: Rodopi. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2017). Interlanguage pragmatics. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 416–434). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019a). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. Oxford and New York: Routledge Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019b). Los rechazos. In M. E. Placencia & Joxé Padilla (Eds.), Guía práctica de Pragmática del español (pp. 18–28). London and New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2012). Compliments and compliment responses: From empirical evidence to pedagogical application. In L. Ruiz de Zarobe & Y. Ruiz de Zarobe (Eds.), Speech acts and politeness across languages and cultures (pp. 241–273). Bern: Peter Lang. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Koike, D. (2012). Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts: Methodological issues.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Koike, D. (2014). Perspectives on Spanish SLA from pragmatics and discourse. In M. Lacorte (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Hispanic applied linguistics (pp. 25–43). New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Lavin, E. (2009). Grammar, prosody, and turn expansion in second language conversations. In J. Collentine, M. García, B. Lafford, & F. Marín (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 53–67). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Placencia, M. E. (2020). Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world. Oxon, OX and New York: Routledge. Fillmore, C. (1997). Lectures on deixis. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Gee, J. (2004). Situated language and learning:A critique of traditional schooling. New York: Routledge. Gironzetti, E., & Koike, D. (Eds.). (2016). Bridging the gap in Spanish instructional pragmatics: From theory to practice [Special issue]. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2). Gonzalez,A. (2013). Development of politeness strategies in participatory online environments:A case study. In N.Taguchi & J. M. Sykes (Eds.), Technology in interlanguage pragmatics research and teaching (pp. 101–120). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. González-Lloret, M., & Ortega, L. (2018). Pragmatics, tasks, and technology:A synergy. In N.Taguchi & Y. Kim (Eds.), Task-based approaches to teaching and assessing pragmatics (pp. 191–217).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Grice, H. P. (1996). Logic and conversation. In H. Geirsson & M. Losonsky (Eds.), Readings in language and mind (pp. 121–133). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. (Original work published 1975). Hasler-Barker, M. (2016). Effects of metapragmatic instruction on the production of compliments and compliment responses: Learner-learner role-plays in the foreign language classroom. In K. Bardovi-Harlig & J. C. Félix-Brasdefer (Eds.), Pragmatics and language learning (Vol. 14, pp. 125–152). Manoa, HI: National Foreign Language Resource Center. 436

Second language acquisition of pragmatics

Haugh, M., & Chang,W. (2015). Understanding im/politeness across cultures: And interactional approach to raising sociopragmatic awareness. IRAL: International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 53(4), 389–414. He,A.W., & Young, R. (1998). Language proficiency interviews:A discourse approach. In R.Young & A.W. He (Eds.), Talking and testing: Discourse approaches to the assessment of oral proficiency (pp. 1–26). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Hernández,T. (2018). L2 Spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 8, 599–622. Hernández,T., & Boero, P. (2018). Explicit intervention for Spanish pragmatic development during shortterm study abroad:An examination of learner request production and cognition. Foreign Language Annals, 51(2), 389–410. Ishihara, N. (2010). Theories of language acquisition and the teaching of pragmatics. In N. Ishihara & A. Cohen (Eds.), Teaching and learning pragmatics:Where language and culture meet (pp. 101–122). London: Routledge. Jarvis, S. (2000). Methodological rigor in the study of transfer: Identifying L1 influence in them interlanguage lexicon. Language Learning, 50(2), 245–309. Kasper, G. (1992). Pragmatic transfer. Second Language Research, 8(3), 203–231. Kasper, G. (1998). Interlanguage pragmatics. In H. Byrnes (Ed.), Learning foreign and second languages: Perspectives in research and scholarship (pp. 183–208). New York: Modern Language Association. Kasper, G., & Blum-Kulka, S. (1993). Interlanguage pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kasper, G., & Rose, K. (2002). Pragmatic development in a second language. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Kecskes, I., & Papp,T. (2000). Foreign language and mother tongue. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Koike, D. (1989). Pragmatic competence and adult L2 acquisition: Speech acts in interlanguage. The Modern Language Journal, 73, 279–289. Koike, D. (1995).Transfer of pragmatic competence and suggestions in Spanish foreign language learning. In S. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures (pp. 257–281). Berlin: de Gruyter. Koike, D. (2010). Behind L2 pragmatics:The role of expectations. In D. Koike & L. Rodríguez-Alfano (Eds.), Dialogue in Spanish: Studies in functions and contexts (pp. 257–282).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Koike, D., & Pearson, L. (2005). The effect of instruction and feedback in the development of pragmatic competence. System, 33, 481–501. Koike, D., & Pearson, L. (2019). Pragmática. In J. Muñoz-Basols, E. Gironzetti, & M. Lacorte (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish language teaching (pp. 348–361). London: Routledge. Lantolf, J. (2006). Sociocultural theory and L2. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 67–109. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2012). Complexity theory. In S. Gass & A. Mackey (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 73–87). London and New York: Routledge. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2009). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. New York: Longman. le Pair, R. (1996). Spanish request strategies: A cross-cultural analysis from an intercultural perspective. Language Sciences, 18(3–4), 651–670. Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Li, S. (2012). The effects of input-based practice on pragmatic development of requests in L2 Chinese. Language Learning, 62(2), 403–438. LoCastro,V. (2001). Individual differences in second language acquisition:Attitudes, learner subjectivity, and L2 pragmatic norms. System, 29(1), 69–89. Long, M. (1991). Focus on form: A design feature in language teaching methodology. In K. DeBot, R. Ginsberg, & C. Kramsch (Eds.), Foreign language research in cross-cultural perspective (pp. 39–52). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Márquez-Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish pragmatics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McKinnon, S. (2017).TBLT instructional effects on tonal alignment and pitch range in L2 Spanish imperatives versus declaratives. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 39(2), 287–317. Mwinyelle, J. (2005). The acquisition of pragmatic competence in an L2 classroom: Giving advice in Spanish (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Texas,Austin,TX. Pearson, L. (2006). Patterns of development in Spanish L2 pragmatic acquisition:An analysis of novice learners’ production of directives. The Modern Language Journal, 90, 473–495. Pinto, D. (2005). The acquisition of requests by second language learners of Spanish. Spanish in Context, 2(1), 1–27. 437

Pearson and Hasler-Barker

Reagan, D., & Payant, C. (2018). Task modality effects on Spanish learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development. In N. Taguchi & J. Sykes (Eds.), Task-based approaches to teaching and assessing pragmatics (pp. 113–136).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Roever, C. (2013).Testing implicature under operational conditions. In G. Kasper & S. Ross (Eds.), Assessing second language pragmatics (pp. 43–64). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Salsbury, B., & Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2001). “I know your mean, but I don’t think so.” Disagreements in L2 English. In L. Bouton (Ed.), Pragmatics and language learning (Vol. 10, pp. 131–151). Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Division of English as an International Language. Schieffelin, B., & Ochs, E. (Eds.). (1986). Language socialization across cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, R. (1983). Interaction, acculturation and the acquisition of communicative competence. In N. Wolfson & E. Judd (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 137–174). Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Schmidt, R. (1993). Consciousness, learning and interlanguage pragmatics. In G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics (pp. 21–42). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, R. (2001). Attention. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp.  3–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schumann, J. (1978). The pidginization process:A model for second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Searle, J. (1975). Indirect speech acts. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. 3, pp. 59–82). New York:Academic Press. Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 10(3), 209–231. Shively, R. (2011). L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A longitudinal study of Spanish service encounters. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1818–1835. Shively, R. (2015). Developing interactional competence during study abroad: Listener responses in L2 Spanish. System, 48, 86–98. Shively, R., & Cohen,A. (2008). Development of Spanish requests and apologies during study abroad. Íkala, 13(20), 57–118. Shively, R., Menke, M., & Manzón-Omundson, S. (2008). Perception of irony by L2 learners of Spanish. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 16(2), 101–132. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1996). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sykes, J. (2005). Synchronous CMC and pragmatic development: Effects of oral and written chat. CALICO Journal, 22(3), 399–431. Sykes, J. (2015). Emerging technological contexts for teaching Spanish. In M. Lacorte (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Hispanic applied linguistics (pp. 238–257). London: Routledge. Sykes, J. (2018). Interlanguage pragmatics, curricular innovation, and digital technologies. CALICO Journal, 35(2), 120–141. Taguchi, N. (2011). Pragmatic development as a complex, dynamic process: General patterns and case histories. The Modern Language Journal, 95(4), 605–623. Taguchi, N. (2012). Context, individual differences, and pragmatic development. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Taguchi, N. (2015). Contextually speaking: A survey of pragmatic learning abroad, in class, and Online. System, 48, 3–20. Taguchi, N. (2018). Contexts and pragmatics learning: Problems and opportunities of study abroad research. Language Teaching, 51(1), 124–137. Taguchi, N., Gómez-Laich, M. P., & Arrufat-Marqués, M. J. (2016). Comprehension of indirect meaning in Spanish as a foreign language. Foreign Language Annals, 49(4), 677–698. Taguchi, N., & Kim,Y. (Eds.). (2018). Task-based approaches to teaching and assessing pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second language pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taguchi, N., & Sykes, J. (Eds.). (2013). Technology in interlanguage pragmatics research and teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Takahashi, S. (2001).The role of input enhancement in developing pragmatic competence. In K. R. Rose & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 171–199). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Takahashi, S. (2012). Pragmatic awareness in second language learning. In The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0926 438

Second language acquisition of pragmatics

Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4, 91–122. van den Branden, K. (Ed.). (2006). Task-based language education: From theory to practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. VanPatten, B. (1996). Input processing and grammar instruction:Theory and practice. Norwood, NJ:Ablex. VanPatten, B. (2007). Input processing in adult SLA. In B.VanPatten & J.Williams (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition (pp. 115–135). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Verspoor, M., de Bot, K., & Lowie,W. (2011). A dynamic approach to second language development: Methods and techniques.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Villarreal, D. (2014). Connection production to judgments: T/V address forms and the L2 identities of intermediate Spanish learners. Journal of Pragmatics, 66(1), 1–14. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society:The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wang, S., Brophy, S., & Roever, C. (2014). Learner background factors and learning of second language pragmatics. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 52(4), 377–401. Wyner, L., & Cohen, A. (2015). Second language pragmatic ability: Individual differences according to environment. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 5(4), 519–556. Youn, S. J. (2018).Task-based needs analysis of L2 pragmatics in an EAP context. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 36, 86–98. Young, R. (2011). Interactional competence in language learning, teaching, and testing. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (Vol. 2, pp. 426–443). New York: Routledge.

439

25 Advances in L2 Spanish pragmatics classroom instruction Cecilia Sessarego

1

Introduction

Numerous studies on L2 Spanish pragmatics instruction have addressed foreign language classroom settings (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer & Cohen, 2012; Koike, 1989; Pearson, 2018; Sessarego, 2007), and study abroad (SA) contexts (e.g., Shively, 2015; see also Chapters 28 and 29 on pragmatics and study abroad, this volume), although research has also recently increased regarding courses for heritage language speakers (e.g., Showstack, 2016; see also Chapter 26 on heritage speakers and pragmatics, this volume), and for professional purposes (e.g., Belpoliti & Pérez, 2016).This chapter focuses on the Spanish foreign language (SFL) classroom context and addresses a variety of pragmatic targets, mostly for beginner and intermediate levels of proficiency.1 First, interventional studies and pedagogical initiatives have been selected to show a variety of theoretical approaches, various pragmatic targets, and effects of instruction in the classroom. Instructional models are examined from a Second Language Acquisition (SLA) socio-cognitive perspective (Atkinson, 2011) as well as on the basis of aspects of pragmatic development (i.e., authentic input, noticing, interaction, explicit/implicit instruction, and the development of pragmatics and grammar). Next, three significant issues that affect the inclusion of pragmatics in SFL curricula and teaching materials are discussed. The first crucial concern in the foreign language context is the dominant SLA perspective that assigns grammar a primary role in learning and is ingrained in established curricula that cover an extensive scope of grammar and lexis. Second, although communication is frequently the stated goal in textbooks (VanPatten, 2015), the underpinning conceptualization of the construct is limited, since oral activities comprise exchanges of semantic meaning for no other purpose than to practice vocabulary and grammar.The third concern is that, to address pragmatics, teachers need to have preparation in both theory and pragmatics instruction (De Pablos-Ortega, 2016). On the other hand, advances in research-based L2 Spanish pragmatics pedagogy can currently offer helpful direction for the design of pragmatics instruction and the inclusion of pragmatics in curricula and textbooks. Future directions for addressing L2 Spanish pragmatics in the classroom are suggested in order to facilitate the development of L2 Spanish learners’ pragmatic language ability. 441

Sessarego

2 2.1

Review of existing research Theories, concepts, and research studies

Research on L2 pragmatics developed from speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1976) with the view that language as action permits speakers to use different strategies to carry out various functions (e.g., request and apologize). Investigations that compared speech act realization patterns of native speakers (NSs) and L2 speakers established empirically that L2 speakers with a good command of the grammar and vocabulary of the target language failed to communicate appropriately in L2 contexts (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1983). Research on L2 pragmatics instruction began in ESL/EFL contexts (Kasper & Rose, 2002, Chapter 6) and aimed to inform teachers of various ways of implementing teaching materials and strategies to help develop learners’ pragmatic competence. Among the first instructional models, Olshtain and Cohen (1991) suggested five steps for presenting and practicing speech acts: (a) diagnostic assessment of students’ level of awareness of speech acts and of the specific speech act addressed; (b) model dialogue; (c) evaluation of the situation; (d) role play activities; and (e) feedback and discussion. In the SFL classroom, García (1996) followed this model to teach the speech act of declining an invitation, and drew from politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) to examine deferential strategies that show respect and distance between interlocutors in the Hispanic cultural context. On the basis of sociolinguistic research on NS language use, these early models stressed the need to create learners’ awareness of speech acts in order to promote sociolinguistic competence. Félix-Brasdefer (2006, 2019b) focused on the speech act of refusals and adopted a conversation analysis (CA) (Schegloff, 1993) approach in order to teach the sequential organization of speech acts in discourse. The author pointed out that speech acts should not be analyzed as individual utterances because they are accomplished through negotiation and co-construction of meaning between interlocutors. Learners’ attention should be drawn to the various turns and sequences in a communicative event. In his instructional model, aimed at an intermediate level, both the instructor and students undertake a conversation analysis of the sequential organization of refusals across multiple turns. Another goal is to develop learners’ awareness of cross-cultural differences between the native and target language by means of audio examples and transcripts of different speech acts in English and Spanish. Contextual variables such as setting, participants, age, and the distance and power relationships between participants were considered. These early models adopted a consciousness-raising approach (Schmidt, 1990), followed by metapragmatic instruction (e.g., setting, personal relationships, politeness conventions, and conversational sequences), grounded on the results of pragmatic development studies that showed that such an approach was more efficient than input alone (e.g., Kasper & Rose, 2002, p. 273). Learners were directed to become aware of cross-cultural differences between L1 and L2 and to notice the targeted speech acts, and were provided explicit instruction on the various linguistic resources for appropriate language use. In this respect, however, these models do not address the learners’ grammatical competence at the time of instruction. Strategies to express various types of refusals (e.g., direct and indirect) are highlighted in Félix-Brasdefer’s (2006) input dialogues, but it is unclear at which proficiency levels learners will have the grammatical ability to produce them. In García’s (1996) study, linguistic items were presented as ‘formulae’ (fixed forms of words used in particular contexts) in a list of possible strategies.The complexity of grammatical structures was not unpacked, making it appear that all strategies can be taught together. Koike and Pearson’s (2005) interventional study explored the effects of explicit and implicit pragmatic instruction in the SFL classroom.The authors indicated that explicit instruction and 442

Advances in L2 Spanish instruction

feedback can help learners understand pragmatic elements and contexts by helping them pay attention to pragmatic form. Implicit instruction in the form of question recasts may force learners to notice L2 pragmatic resources after receiving negative feedback. It must be noted that, although learners were given lists of specific suggestion strategies, they incorporated only a few in the test dialogues. At an intermediate-low level of proficiency, learners may not have been grammatically ready to use more complex strategies.Taguchi and Roever (2017) state that studies show better results for explicit instruction; however, the effectiveness of explicit or implicit instruction depends on the complexity of the target phenomenon and the processing cognitive demands of the assessment task. Learners may build declarative knowledge of a target feature, that is, knowledge about pragmatics, but not the ability to use it. Moreover, a key element in explicit/implicit instruction is the input that is presented to learners, since the representation of conversation is used as a model for pragmatic analysis and production in the classroom.Truly authentic material may be difficult to understand and a little overwhelming, so some editing can make it more efficient for students to learn the material (Cohen & Ishihara, 2010).Two websites provide natural conversation samples that are appropriate input for high beginner or intermediate levels. Sykes and Cohen’s (2006) Dancing With Words offers video modules for the following speech acts: compliments, gratitude and leave-taking, requests, apologies, invitations, service encounters, advice, suggestions, disagreements, complaints, and reprimands. Examples of linguistic regional variation (e.g., Peninsular Spanish, Spanish in Uruguay, and California) are also provided. Brown, O’Brien, Russell, Wahlgren, and Worley’s (2008) Pragmatics en español/ Spanish Pragmatics addresses complaints and requests in both English and Spanish in similar scenarios. Importantly for pragmatic instruction, the communicative input is based on research on NSs performance of the said speech acts. Therefore, a metapragmatic analysis can offer learners pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic regularities and patterns that will help them at the practice stage, as well as for comparing their performance with NS language use. In the aforementioned studies, the roles of grammar and learners’ grammatical competence in facilitating pragmatic language use have not received much attention. Koike (2008) proposed a change in perspective from the common view of grammar as decontextualized sentences to a conceptualization of grammar as connected discourse that serves the speaker’s intentions and meaning in contexts of language use. She states there is “a lack of an L2 learning model that guides learners from the discrete elements of language to their functional use” (Félix-Brasdefer & Koike, 2014, p. 33). In an earlier interventional study, Koike (1989) investigated the role of learners’ grammatical competence in the performance of speech acts at a beginner level. She demonstrated that even though students may try to produce linguistic forms for speech acts that are more pragmatically appropriate to context, many feel they do not have the necessary grammatical competence and rely on less appropriate but syntactically simpler forms. The field that studies the relationship between form and language use in learners’ acquisition of pragmatics is interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), a branch of SLA (Bardovi-Harlig, 2010). Studies typically compare the performance of L1 and L2 speakers in order to assess the nature of L2 speakers’ pragmatic competence (e.g., pragmatic transfer from L1 to L2 and accuracy) (HaslerBarker, 2016; Ishihara, 2010). In this respect, Félix-Brasdefer (2007) identified four stages of interlanguage development in a cross-sectional study of learner requests, from a pre-basic stage characterized by verbless expressions, to pragmatic expansion when most requests are realized with complex grammatical information. Results show a strong preference for conventionally indirect requests among intermediate and advanced learners. Most pedagogical models that were proposed later focused on the grammar component needed to make function connections for appropriate language use in context. The facility to map grammar to specific functions constitutes ‘pragmalinguistic competence.’ An associated 443

Sessarego

ability is ‘sociopragmatic competence,’ which refers to knowledge about and performance consistent with social norms of a society. In fact, most L2 Spanish pragmatics studies have been pragmalinguistic, while only few have dealt specifically with sociopragmatics. At a beginner level, van Compernolle, Gómez Laich, and Webber’s (2016) interventional study addressed the informal/formal second person pronoun system (i.e., ‘tú’ vs. ‘usted’) to illustrate the concepts of self-presentation, social distance, and power in Spanish. The study showed positive gains in conceptual sociopragmatic knowledge and the ability to apply this knowledge when making pragmalinguistic choices. However, morphosyntactic accuracy in performance appeared to lag behind conceptual knowledge. At an intermediate level, sociopragmatics has been addressed mainly in reference to politeness conventions (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer & Mugford, 2017) and cultural norms (e.g., Koike & Lacorte, 2014).As a whole, pedagogical models all include some sociocultural information that learners need in order to make appropriate pragmalinguistic choices in context, such as degrees of formality, some linguistic regional differences (e.g., Peninsular Spanish vs. Spanish American varieties), and cultural features (e.g., speakers’ insistence when an invitation is declined by an interlocutor). Pearson’s (2018) and Sessarego’s (2007, 2009) pedagogical models deal with pragmalinguistics at beginner levels, and take special consideration of the learners’ stage of interlanguage. Pearson addressed the teaching of directives (requests, commands, and suggestions) with the additional objective of helping the acquisition of difficult grammatical forms for English-speaking learners. Pearson’s (2006) interventional study and Sessarego’s (2007, 2009) exploratory research showed that beginner learners’ performance ranges between the second and third stage of Félix-Brasdefer (2007) four stages of development for Spanish requests, and Kasper and Rose’s (2002) five-stage model of interlanguage: (1) pre-basic (no syntax); (2) formulaic (analyzed formulas and imperatives); (3) unpacking formulas for productive language use; (4) pragmatic expansion (addition of new forms to pragmalinguistic repertoire, increased mitigation, more complex syntax); and (5) fine tuning (to regulate requestive force according to participants, goals, and contexts). Moreover, both Pearson and Sessarego point out that learners already have their L1 pragmatic system (cf. Kasper & Rose, 2002, pp. 187–188) to handle basic exchanges similar to their own culture. Furthermore, in Sessarego’s model, beginner level students interact with native speakers of Spanish or advanced L2 speakers since learners need the support of the interlocutor (ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, 2012) to be able to complete a speech event. Félix-Brasdefer and Cohen’s (2012) instructional proposal, implemented at an intermediate level, deals with grammar as a communicative resource for producing various speech acts in oral interaction (e.g., suggestions, compliments, refusals), and includes one example of an email message from a student to a professor. Concepts such as politeness, distance, uncertainty, and mitigation are taught explicitly and some examples of regional variation for Mexico and Peru are also provided.There is a table of pragmalinguistic resources and their pragmatic functions, and a case is made for teaching pragmatics from beginner levels of language instruction. However, the authors do not discuss which speech act-grammar connections indicated in the table can be amenable to instruction at each stage of interlanguage. Politeness features such as mitigation in making suggestions (e.g., ¿Crees que puedas llamarme? ‘Do you think you might call me?’) may be difficult for learners who are not familiar with the nuances expressed by the subjunctive mood used after the verb creer in a question. An expression such as ¿Qué tal si . . .? ‘How about . . . ?’ may be more amenable to instruction at a beginner level. Langer’s (2013) interventional study addressed the pragmalinguistics of requests and speakers’ different politeness levels in Spanish. The treatment comprised online lessons with preand posttest components. Linguistic resources were included for some contextual features (e.g., imperative-less polite; IO+ podrías ‘could’ + infinitive + DO-higher level of politeness). 444

Advances in L2 Spanish instruction

Results on dialogue completion tasks showed that explicit instruction was effective at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, as learners who received treatment received higher scores than the control groups. The author pointed out, however, that students at the intermediate level showed the most improvement and seemed more receptive to the acquisition of requests. Hasler-Barker’s (2016) interventional study reported on the effects of metapragmatic instruction of compliment-compliment response sequences, also at an intermediate level of L2 Spanish. Since Qué ‘How/What’+ ADJ/ADV is the most frequent strategy used by NSs and attested in Spanish pragmatics literature, instruction emphasized it to increase its production among learners. Learners in the explicit and implicit instructional groups showed increased variability in the types of compliment and compliment responses; however, posttests showed that learners in all groups overproduced Me gusta/encanta +NP ‘ I like+NP; NP is pleasing to me’ as compared to NSs.Time-on-task and learners’ level of proficiency may have had an impact on the results. Only 40 minutes were allotted for metapragmatic instruction and 10 minutes for each pre- and posttesting session. Learners at the intermediate level tested may not have had the grammatical competence needed to produce structures for syntactically complex compliment-compliment responses. Félix-Brasdefer and Mugford (2017) offer pedagogical principles for teaching refusals at an intermediate level and provide grammatical items for the realization of refusals (e.g., the conditional, the imperfect, and the imperfect subjunctive). There was no examination of the role of learners’ stage of interlanguage or grammatical competence in the various realizations of speech acts. On the other hand, the authors pointed out that a challenge in the SFL classroom is to allow L2 learners to be polite in their own ways by giving them the necessary range of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic resources.Thus, it is also possible that learners’ choices constituted a variable in the degree of convergence and divergence from target NS norms. When learners engage in intercultural interactions with NSs of the target language, their linguistic behavior is influenced by their feelings, values, and perceptions, among other factors (Ishihara, 2010). Furthermore, in contrast to the aforementioned pedagogical proposals that all involve spoken interaction, Sessarego (2018) adopted a genre analysis approach based on communicative purpose (Askehave & Swales, 2001). Her model, geared to an intermediate level of proficiency, focused on consciousness-raising of rhetorical moves to perform pragmatic functions in full persuasive texts, as well as corresponding linguistic items at a discourse level.The author pointed out that pragmatics is embedded and manifested in a culture’s wide scope of discourse genres through a variety of media (oral, written, digital texts, etc.) and that pragmatic competence is also needed to understand and produce texts of such genres effectively. SFL programs should help learners acquire functional language ability for them to navigate a wide range of texts and fields (MLA, 2007) (the author’s emphasis).

2.2 Research-based contributions to L2 Spanish pragmatics instruction Research-based pedagogical models have noticeably addressed mostly beginner and intermediate levels of proficiency (Mir, 2018), possibly because most learners in North America typically take only two years of academic instruction (Pearson, 2018).The analyzed models have made a number of contributions to SFL pragmatics instruction. First, they lend support to the growing evidence in various languages that pragmatic competence is teachable (e.g.,Taguchi, 2015) and that there are benefits to pedagogical intervention. Second, they demonstrate that pragmatics instruction can be implemented at SFL beginner and intermediate levels, in contrast to the 445

Sessarego

view that pragmatics should be included only in more advanced courses when learners already have sufficient grammatical competence (Pearson, 2018).Third, the pedagogical studies analyzed provide a window to learners’ interlanguage pragmatics; i.e., their grammatical ability and pragmatic language use in social contexts at various acquisitional stages. ‘Instructional pragmatics,’ as a component of interlanguage pragmatics, can help advance pragmatics teaching, curriculum development, and teacher education (Ishihara, 2010). Indeed, the selected studies offer insights into learners’ grammatical and pragmatic abilities after instructional implementation.Van Compernolle et al. (2016), Félix-Brasdefer (2007), Koike (1989), Langer (2013), Pearson (2006, 2018), and Sessarego (2007, 2009) found that L2 Spanish learners at a beginner level show positive gains in conceptual pragmatic knowledge, can identify pragmatic differences between L1 and L2, and can apply this knowledge in their pragmalinguistic choices. On the other hand, they can handle basic grammar and vocabulary only for the expression of several speech acts, since their pragmatic production is limited by their grammatical competence. At intermediate and advanced levels, learners’ pragmatic use for the expression of requests more closely converges with NS forms (Félix-Brasdefer, 2007; Langer, 2013). Nevertheless, the pragmatic target and its more grammatically complex structures may play a role in the effect of instruction (e.g., Hasler-Barker, 2016). Short time-on-task may also have an impact on the results.Another fundamental factor is the nature of the practice activities learners are required to do, which can be viewed in a continuum of processing demand, from less demanding, guided activities focused on individual targets, to more demanding, integrated, open activities under time pressure (Taguchi & Roever, 2017). On the whole, regarding the grammar knowledge-pragmatic language use relationship, these studies seem to corroborate Kasper and Rose’s (2002) view that beginner learners have available pragmatic knowledge from their L1 and make do with whatever grammar they have, at the same time acquiring the grammar needed to perform actions in L2. As they progress, their learning changes to figuring out the various pragmatic meanings that grammatical forms have beyond their primacy meanings. Furthermore, another contribution concerns the planning of instructional steps in the classroom. Olshtain and Cohen’s (1991) five steps for presenting and practicing speech acts have been largely adopted and further explored and defined (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2019a; Koike & Pearson, 2018). First, raising learners’ awareness of pragmatic language use in their L1 and the target language is the initial step for learners to understand and function pragmatically in interactional L2 contexts. Second, the presentation of authentic input (naturalistic exchanges) in the form of complete dialogues in written form, audio, or video, constitutes the basis for the third step, which involves noticing the targeted speech acts, and providing metapragmatic information on the negotiation of meaning in context (e.g., setting, personal relationships, politeness conventions) as well as on linguistic resources. Fourth, learners’ practice consists of role plays of situations or discourse completion tests (DCTs) where speech acts are used in interactional events. Interactions can take place in the classroom, carried out through websites or with NSs such as language assistants or Hispanic students. Fifth, learners get feedback on their performance, based on NS conventionalized expressions and learners’ linguistic choices. In short, the aforementioned research-based pedagogical models on several pragmatic targets offer the benefit of having been implemented and tested in the classroom, and therefore can be readily used and adapted for similar SFL learning contexts.Additionally, there are several contrastive analysis research studies of specific speech acts in L1 and L2 that can be used to help learners notice sociolinguistic differences between them (e.g. De Pablos-Ortega, 2015, for the speech act of thanking).Yet, particularly in North America, teachers of Spanish programs face a number of challenges to adopt a pragmatic instructional approach. 446

Advances in L2 Spanish instruction

3

Methodological considerations

Three significant interrelated issues regarding the inclusion of pragmatics instruction in SFL classrooms are examined. First, current conceptualizations of grammar and the prevalent SLA perspective that assigns grammar a primary role in learning prevent the implementation of a pragmatic approach to SFL instruction. Second, the impact of this enduring approach has a direct effect on the narrow conceptualizations of ‘communication’ that underpin textbook materials and restrict the possibility of addressing the pragmatic dimension of authentic communication. The third concern is teachers’ knowledge of pragmatics and preparation in teaching appropriate target language uses.

3.1 Conceptions of grammar, SLA perspectives, and SFL grammar-pragmatics development Although there has been a need for change in curricula of university modern language programs in North America for a long time (e.g., MLA, 2007), undergraduate programs still typically consist of language courses that focus on the formal aspects of language in the first two years of study (e.g., Paesani & Allen, 2012). Language courses may include ‘communication’ goals, but learning outcomes are driven by a comprehensive coverage of the grammatical system and vocabulary of Spanish, with little attention to how grammatical competence can be used for communication in sociocultural contexts (Sessarego, 2012).The conception of the nature of language is that of a system of ordered rules, whereby syntax and semantics are studied at an abstract level, outside their context of use (Chomsky, 1965).This perspective is aligned with cognitive approaches to Spanish SLA (Doughty & Long, 2003), which hold a view of learners as computational systems and of learning as information processing (Atkinson, 2011). In contrast, an SLA socio-cognitive perspective is associated with a view of language that is inseparable from its sociocultural context (Halliday, 1978). Cognition in language learning is not conceived as an all-in-the-mind psychological process, but rather as situated cognition,“an open biological system designed by evolution and experience to align sensitively with the ambient environment” (Atkinson, 2011, p. 144). As well, from a complex systems theoretical approach, learners ‘soft’ assemble their language resources in interaction in real-life experiences, and constantly adapt their language patterns when making meaning in dynamic communicative situations (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). It follows that if L2 instruction’s goal is to develop communicative competence, it needs to approach grammar as discourse within the context of language use (e.g., Koike, 2008). Naturally, in adopting a grammar-functional teaching approach, teachers may be concerned about learners’ instructional readiness in terms of grammatical language ability and pragmatic language ability, which can be difficult to gauge. Additionally, SFL learners may find it more difficult to learn pragmatics as they must pay attention to mappings of form, meaning, function, context, social relationships, cultural conventions, and language variation. Nonetheless, the aforementioned issues should not be perceived as creating a dichotomy between a teaching approach focused on discrete items and pragmatic instruction. The pedagogical models analyzed in this chapter lend support to an instructional perspective based on an integrated L2 pragmatic-grammar development (Félix-Brasdefer, 2007; Pearson, 2018). Grammar instruction can include constant grammar-pragmatics connections to access the meanings that arise from the intimate connections. The five stages of pragmatic development (Kasper & Rose, 2002; Pearson, 2018) can guide instructors to see how learners evolve in their grammarpragmatics language use.The stages are: (1) Pre-basic: no syntax or relational goals; (2) formulaic 447

Sessarego

(analyzed formulas and imperatives); (3) unpacking of formulas for productive use; (4) pragmatic expansion (new pragmalinguistic forms); and (5) fine-tuning according to participants, goals, and contexts.

3.2

Conceptions of communication in textbook materials

As previously mentioned, there is a mismatch between the stated communicative goals in curricula of L2 Spanish university programs and what is actually taught in classrooms. As VanPatten (2015) claims, most non-experts in SLA in languages departments do not have a working definition of communication. Textbooks are generally not informed by research in SLA or pragmatics, and speech acts are barely addressed (De Pablos-Ortega, 2018). Instructors’ beliefs on the nature of language and SLA drive the content of textbooks, which in turn have an impact on the instructional approach and curricula. This prevalent situation results in conceptualizations of communication underpinning textbooks that can be characterized as limited. ‘Communicative’ activities mainly consist of oral exercises where interaction is conceived as a question-answer format with the purpose of practicing grammar and lexis associated with a topic. Compared to textbooks from the 1980s and 90s where vocabulary and structures were presented and practiced as abstract concepts, current materials show contextualization of formal items by connecting them to a topic (e.g., travel, university life, leisure). However, ‘topic contextualization’ does not mean that a context/communicative situation as defined by Hymes (1972) has been addressed. Hymes developed the S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G acronym (setting/scene, participants, ends, act sequence, key, instrumentalities, norms, and genre) to represent the intersecting factors in the context of a speech event. Likewise, according to Wilkins (1976), notionalfunctional syllabi that address communication should comprise three categories of meaning: semantico-grammatical meaning, modal meaning, and communicative function (e.g., requests, complaints, compliments).Textbooks and SFL syllabi that purport to adhere to a communicative teaching approach generally lack a connection between semantic meaning of linguistic items and communicative purpose (functions). Mir’s (2018) analysis of pragmatic features in eight beginning and eight intermediate college Spanish textbooks published in the U.S. between 2011 and 2017 indicates that speech acts appear embedded in grammatical explanations or in vocabulary lists, and there is no explanation of how or when the expressions are used. Learners are encouraged to learn the expressions as ‘chunks’ (e.g., lexical phrases, and set phrases) to facilitate conversation but with little attention to the sociopragmatics of the language.As to activities, students use speech acts in one-sentence responses and the true aim is practicing a specific grammatical form and/or vocabulary on a list. De Pablos-Ortega (2018) examined pragmatic content in the Aula Internacional series published by Difusión in Spain. He explored general pragmatic information (including speech acts, politeness, and sociopragmatics) and metapragmatic explanations connected to the use of language.The materials show evidence of pragmatic awareness by textbook writers, but there are inconsistencies in the use of metapragmatic-related tasks.At a beginner A1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), the only metapragmatic information refers to the use of the second-person pronouns.There are many grammar points and explanations that could have been exploited pragmatically, thus providing learners with an opportunity to reflect on the use of language. Specifically for the speech act of thanking, De Pablos-Ortega’s (2015) analysis of didactic materials suggests that they do not widely, or accurately, represent the Spanish sociocultural performance of this speech act. 448

Advances in L2 Spanish instruction

Teachers interested in including pragmatics instruction can always adapt textbook content or provide complementary materials that address pragmatics. However, a research-based change to a pragmatics pedagogical approach will definitely require strong teacher preparation.

3.3 Teachers’ knowledge of pragmatics and preparation to teach pragmatic language use Since textbooks provide little content on pragmatics, the concern is what knowledge teachers have to address the pragmatic dimension of communication in the classroom. One of the questions in Cohen’s (2016) survey asked native teachers (NTs) and nonnative teachers (NNTs) in a variety of languages how knowledgeable they feel they are about sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic issues relating to the specific target language (TL). Fifty-three percent of NTs reported being very comfortable teaching TL pragmatics versus 37% of NNTs. Both NTs and NNTs expressed they would like to have greater access to pragmatics information and research findings in a wide scope of pragmatic areas. Cohen pointed out that both NTs and NNTs may be unaware of the norms or, if they have intuitions, these can be idiosyncratic or inaccurate. Also, teachers would benefit from comparing pragmatic norms in different dialects, since they are not necessarily aware of appropriate language use in other countries where the TL is spoken. Additionally, Ishihara (2010) suggested that in the U.S., the fact that language teachers receive a component on pragmatics theory (e.g., politeness, speech-act theories) in their education programs does not mean they become automatically capable of producing instructional materials. A qualified teacher would need to have an awareness of pragmatic norms and variation in the target language, be able to provide metapragmatic information and conduct pragmatic-focused instruction and assessment, as well as have a sensitivity to learners’ cultures and subjectivities. Regarding L2 Spanish in particular, De Pablos-Ortega (2016) investigated whether university teacher preparation in the U.S. and Spain included courses related to pragmatics. Most programs in 20 universities in Spain included a pragmatics course, while only two U.S. universities out of 16 that responded to the survey indicated pragmatics was addressed.The author concluded that there is a need to integrate pragmatics in L2 Spanish teacher preparation programs systematically so that future teachers realize that it is an essential component in the development of L2 Spanish communicative competence. There are indeed existing resources that can offer quite a comprehensive preparation to instructors. Koike (2010) provided an introduction to pragmatics and addressed topics such as sociocultural norms, speech acts, formulas, metapragmatic discussion, pragmatics, and proficiency levels. Félix-Brasdefer (2011) included theoretical explanations of pragmatics, politeness, and speech-acts geared to researchers and instructors.As well, there are ample references to research studies on speech-act linguistic variation in various Spanish-speaking regions. More recently, a series of publications geared specifically to undergraduate/graduate students and instructors of Spanish synthesize most important pragmatic concepts and theories, and also provide helpful teaching guidance to non-specialist instructors on various topics. Félix-Brasdefer’s (2019a) Pragmática del español/ Spanish pragmatics is a comprehensive textbook that offers valuable examples in Spanish of pragmatic concepts, especially regional pragmatic variation and ways of address in the Hispanic world. Koike and Pearson (2018) discuss recent approaches to L2 Spanish pragmatics acquisition and teaching.They stress that the instructional objective is to draw students’ attention to the different social, cultural, and linguistic features between the L1 and L2, by means of input and tasks that offer opportunities for pragmatic analysis and practice. In short, research studies, resources, and courses on pragmatics theory in Spanish university programs, albeit in only a few universities in North America, offer theoretical preparation for 449

Sessarego

educators. However, to effect change in Spanish programs, universities need to hire language experts to ‘drive the bus of language development’ (VanPatten, 2015, p. 2). Importantly, instructors need to have up-to-date preparation in SFL teaching arising from sociolinguistic and SLA research in order to help develop learners’ communicative competence. Instructors can then work with textbook designers to improve didactic materials on the basis of current research on L2 Spanish pragmatics.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Since underlying beliefs on what constitutes language and language learning drive teachers’ approaches to instruction and the design of materials, the prevalent view on grammar needs to change to a conception of grammar as a strategic resource for communication in social contexts. Indeed, a refocus of SFL instructional goals can equip learners with the connections between grammatical knowledge and pragmatic strategies for use in L2 sociocultural contexts. This change may have to be explicitly stated, particularly in the SFL classroom. It is important to instill in learners a sense of contextualized use of language beyond the need for grammatical accuracy. As well, learners need to be motivated to see the importance of appropriate language use in the target L2 community that is typically removed from their L1 context. For example, politeness attitudes and values of the target culture may be hard to teach, as they touch on identity issues regarding the L2 and its pragmatic norms.Thus, learners’ attitudes to appropriate L2 sociocultural norms when engaged in pragmatically focused activities is an area of future research that can offer understandings on their interlanguage pragmatic development. Additionally, research is needed that is grounded in authentic classroom contexts, whereby grammar and pragmatic targets are articulated and recycled in a variety of communicative contexts over a period of two semesters or more. Most of the analyzed pedagogical models have been one-time laboratory experiments focusing on only individual pragmatic targets, taking limited time from regular instruction.There is a need for investigations on the link between learners’ use of various pragmatic targets and their grammatical ability in communicative discourse, including classroom-based assessment, at various levels of proficiency. Action research studies, typically designed and conducted by practitioners to improve their own practice, and informed by research on interlanguage pragmatics, can provide some answers to teachers’ pedagogical concerns in terms of pragmatic instructional planning and, over time, will help define L2 Spanish curricula. Regarding L2 Spanish teaching materials, teachers with pragmatic instructional preparation can make connections with textbook designers to incorporate authentic input, research-based metapragmatic information, and communicative practice. Metapragmatic information is quite accessible from not only existing L2 Spanish pragmatics publications but also from Spanish pragmatic studies (e.g., Fuentes-Rodríguez, Placencia, & Palma-Fahey, 2016). Naturalistic input (preferably in audio or video) is fundamental as it is the model for practice activities.There are few naturalistic exchanges on websites and in written form in the analyzed instructional research studies. Corpora may offer a variety of examples (see Chapter 32 on corpus pragmatics, this volume). Félix-Brasdefer (2019a) includes sites where instructors can find samples for the analysis of oral and written discourse (p. 290). It must be pointed out that such examples need to be pragmatically selected and adapted to be amenable for instruction at various levels of proficiency. Natural conversation samples that can be readily available for use in an articulated sequence of pragmatic targets instruction over two or more semesters, especially at beginner and intermediate levels, are definitely needed. As for pragmatic language practice, most studies analyzed included learner-learner exchanges. Since the purpose of pragmatic instruction is for learners to be able to interact with interlocutors from the target culture, instructional models that include experiential 450

Advances in L2 Spanish instruction

activities with NSs (e.g., language assistants, online exchanges, and community engagement) should be investigated, particularly if students do not have the opportunity to study abroad. Moreover, most research on L2 pragmatics instruction has addressed speech acts in oral interaction, with very few examples of pedagogical proposals for written texts (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer & Cohen, 2012; Sessarego, 2018). Writing is an important component in current L2 Spanish curricula; since written texts in real life also involve pragmatics, authentic written samples from simple to more complex texts can also serve to promote learners’ understanding and production of pragmatic language use. Current categorizations such as narration and exposition can be put to use in communicative events. In view of advances in technologically driven communication, research on the pedagogical implementation of a greater scope of texts (written, hybrid, and digital), can provide learners with additional opportunities to develop their pragmatic competence. Furthermore, regarding curricula, several of the research studies analyzed (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer & Cohen, 2012; Mir, 2018) have proposed including materials on pragmatics as an extension of existing curricula. It is important to point out that pragmatics should not be just ‘added’ to the way grammatical and lexical discrete items are presented and practiced in current textbooks, especially in North American publications. As discussed in Section 3.2., textbooks present dialogues and activities at the service of grammatical and vocabulary instruction. A new pragmatics teaching perspective is needed that contextualizes these items in communicative contexts and helps learners see that grammar and vocabulary are actually resources for pragmatics language use.Additionally, considering the limited time for L2 Spanish instruction in the academic classroom and the multiple goals stated in syllabi (e.g., reading, writing, and cultural understanding), the change to pragmatics instructional approaches will require a reduction in the scope of grammatical content addressed in the first two years of instruction. Importantly, if communication is to be the goal of SFL instruction, the inclusion of pragmatics in curricula should bring about actual change, and not become just a statement of an aspiration.All Spanish faculty will need to work collaboratively to bring about the transformation in curricular organizations and teaching materials. All in all, teaching-oriented publications aimed at developing L2 Spanish pragmatic competence have increased substantially over the last decade. Undoubtedly, the complexity of ILP competence will necessitate further research in a number of areas, and curricular challenges will have to be explored in new studies.The intent of the discussion in this chapter is to demonstrate that existing pragmatically focused instructional models already provide a foundation for teachers to begin including and articulating pragmatics in SFL programs. In the 21st century, there is no question that SFL teachers should help learners communicate with the people of the target culture/s. Learners may take only a couple of courses and attain limited L2 proficiency but, as pragmatics plays a stronger role in L2 Spanish pedagogy, they will certainly gain skills and understandings of their own linguistic and cultural behaviors and those of the target Hispanic cultures.

Note 1 A beginner level corresponds to the Novice High proficiency level in ACTFL (2012) and the A1.1 level of the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001).An intermediate level covers the range from Intermediate Low to Intermediate Mid/High levels in ACTFL and the A2 to B1 levels in the CEFR.An advanced level covers from Intermediate High to Advanced levels in ACTFL and B2 to C1 levels of the CEFR (ACTFL, 2016).

Further reading Cohen,A. D. (2014).Towards increased classroom assessment of pragmatic ability. Iranian Journal of Language Testing, 4(1), 1–25. A comprehensive rationale is offered for assessing second language (L2) pragmatics in the classroom including various ways to collect students’ pragmatic production. 451

Sessarego

Gironzetti, E., & Koike, D. (2016). Bridging the gap in Spanish instructional pragmatics: From theory to practice/Acortando distancias en la enseñanza de la pragmática del español: de la teoría a la práctica. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 89–98. Topics include updated perspectives on the pragmatics instruction of a number of pragmatic phenomena in different teaching contexts with various populations. Challenges for integrating pragmatics in the curriculum are also addressed. Russell,V. (2018).Web-based pragmatics resources:Techniques and strategies for teaching L2 Spanish pragmatics to English speakers. In D. Dumitrescu & P. L.Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to teaching (pp. 232–247). New York: Routledge. A detailed model is proposed for other instructors to develop their own pragmatics tutorials for the languages and levels that they teach.

References American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). (2012). ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Retrieved from www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/acftl-proficiency-guidelines2012 American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). (2016). Assigning CEFR Ratings to ACTFL Assessments. Retrieved from www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/reports/Assigning_CEFR_Ratings_ To_ACTFL_Assessments.pdf Askehave, I., & Swales, J. (2001). Genre identification and communicative purpose:A problem and a possible solution. Applied Linguistics, 22(2), 195–212. Atkinson, D. (2011).A sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition: How mind, body, and world work together in learning additional languages. In D.Atkinson (Ed.), Alternative approaches to second language acquisition (pp. 143–166). New York: Routledge. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2010). Exploring the pragmatics of interlanguage pragmatics: Definition by design. In A. Trosborg (Ed.), Pragmatics across languages and cultures (pp. 219–260). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Belpoliti, F., & Pérez, M. E. (2016). Giving advice in medical Spanish: Pragmatic and intercultural competence in Spanish for the health professionals curriculum. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 127–142. Blum-Kulka, S. (1983). Interpreting and performing speech acts in a second language:A cross-cultural study of Hebrew and English. In N.Wolfson & E. Judd (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language acquisition (pp. 36–55). Cambridge: Newbury House. Brown, C., O’Brien, C., Russell,V.,Wahlgren, P., & Worley, G. (2008). Pragmatics en español. Retrieved from www.slaitresearch.com Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cohen,A. D. (2014).Towards increased classroom assessment of pragmatic ability. Iranian Journal of Language Testing, 4(1), 1–25. Cohen, A. D. (2016). The teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: What they know and what they report doing. Studies in Second Language Teaching and Learning, 6(4), 561–585. Cohen, A. D., & Ishihara, N. (2010). Discourse, interaction and language corpora. In N. Ishihara & A. D. Cohen (Eds.), Teaching and learning pragmatics. Where language and culture meet (pp. 166–186). London: Pearson. Council of Europe. (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Retrieved from www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/level-descriptions De Pablos-Ortega, C. (2015).Thank you for a lovely day! Contrastive thanking in textbooks for teaching English and Spanish as foreign languages. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 3(2), 150–173. De Pablos-Ortega, C. (2016). Pragmática en la formación de profesores de español como segunda lengua. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 171–188. De Pablos-Ortega, C. (2018). Pragmatics in L2 Spanish textbooks: Perspectives from Spain. In D. Dumitrescu & P. L. Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to teaching (pp. 53–73). New York: Routledge. Doughty, C., & Long, M. (Eds.). (2003). The handbook of second language acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell. 452

Advances in L2 Spanish instruction

Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2006).Teaching the negotiation of multi-turn speech acts. Using conversation-analytic tools to teach pragmatics in the classroom. In K. Bardovi-Harlig, J. C. Félix-Brasdefer, & A. Omar (Eds.), Pragmatics and language learning 11 (pp. 165–197). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2007). Pragmatic development in the Spanish as a FL classroom: A cross-sectional study of learner requests. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(2), 253–286. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2011). Pragmatics at Indiana University. Retrieved from https://pragmatics.indiana.edu Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019a). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. London and New York: Routledge Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019b). Speech acts in interaction: Negotiating joint action in a second language. In N.Taguchi (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of second language pragmatics (pp. 17–30). London: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Cohen,A. D. (2012).Teaching pragmatics in the foreign language classroom: Grammar as a communicative resource. Hispania, 95(4), 650–669. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Koike, D. (2014). Perspectives on Spanish SLA from pragmatics and discourse. In M. Lacorte (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Hispanic applied linguistics (pp.  25–43). New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Mugford, G. (2017). (Im)politeness: Learning and teaching. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp.  489–516). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fuentes-Rodríguez, C., Placencia, M. E., & Palma-Fahey, M. (2016). Regional pragmatic variation in the use of the discourse marker pues in informal talk among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile), and Seville (Spain). Journal of Pragmatics, 97, 74–92. García, C. (1996).Teaching speech act performance: Declining an invitation. Hispania, 79(2), 267–279. Gironzetti, E., & Koike, D. (2016). Bridging the gap in Spanish instructional pragmatics: From theory to practice/Acortando distancias en la enseñanza de la pragmática del español: de la teoría a la práctica. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 89–98. Halliday, M.A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic. London: Edward Arnold. Hasler-Barker, M. (2016). Effects of metapragmatic instruction on the production of compliments and compliment responses: Learner-learner role-plays in the foreign language classroom. In K. Bardovi-Harlig & J. C. Félix-Brasdefer (Eds.), Pragmatics language learning (pp. 125–152). Honolulu: National Foreign Language Resource Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics:The ethnography of communication (pp. 35–71). New York: Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston. Ishihara, N. (2010). Instructional pragmatics: Bridging teaching, research, and teacher education. Language and Linguistics Compass, 10(4), 938–953. Kasper, G., & Rose, K. R. (2002). Pragmatic development in a second language. Oxford: Blackwell. Koike, D. A. (1989). Pragmatic competence and adult L2 acquisition: Speech acts in interlanguage. The Modern Language Journal, 73(3), 279–289. Koike, D.A. (2008).A grammar of L2 pragmatics: Issues in learning and teaching. In S. Katz & J.WatzingerTharp (Eds.), Conceptions of L2 grammar: Theoretical approaches and their application in the L2 classroom (pp. 35–52). Boston, MA: Heinle and Heinle. Koike, D.A. (2010). Pragmatics. In C. Blyth (Ed.), Foreign language teaching methods. COERLL.The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved from https://coerll.utexas.edu/methods/modules/pragmatics/ Koike, D. A., & Lacorte, M. (2014).Toward intercultural competence: From questions to perspectives and practices of the target culture. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 1(1), 15–30. Koike, D.A., & Pearson, L. (2005).The effect of instruction and feedback in the development of pragmatic competence. System, 33(3), 381–546. Koike, D. A., & Pearson, L. (2018). Pragmática. In J. Muñoz-Basols, E. Gironzetti, & M. Lacorte (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish language teaching. Metodologías, contextos y recursos para la enseñanza del español (pp. 348–361). New York: Routledge. Langer, B. D. (2013).Teaching requests to L2 learners of Spanish. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 4, 1147–1159. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Research methodology on language development from a complex systems perspective. The Modern Language Journal, 92(2), 200–213. Mir, M. (2018). Learning L2 Spanish pragmatics: What research says, what textbooks offer, what teachers must do. In D. Dumitrescu & P. L. Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics. From research to teaching (pp. 33–52). New York: Routledge. 453

Sessarego

Modern Language Association (MLA). (2007). Foreign language and higher education: New structures for a changed world. New York: Modern Language Association. Olshtain, E., & Cohen, A. D. (1991). Teaching speech act behavior to nonnative speakers. In M. CelceMurcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (pp. 154–165). New York: Newbury House. Paesani, K., & Allen, H. (2012). Beyond the language-content divide: Research on advanced foreign language instruction at the postsecondary level. Foreign Language Annals, 45(1), 54–75. Pearson, L. (2006). Patterns of development in Spanish L2 pragmatic acquisition:An analysis of novice learners’ production of directives. Modern Language Journal, 90(4), 473–495. Pearson, L. (2018). L2 Spanish pragmatics at the novice level: Creating meaningful contexts for the acquisition of grammatical forms. In D. Dumitrescu & P. L. Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics, from research to teaching (pp. 214–231). New York: Routledge. Russell,V. (2018).Web-based pragmatics resources:Techniques and strategies for teaching L2 Spanish pragmatics to English speakers. In D. Dumitrescu & P. L.Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to teaching (pp. 232–247). New York: Routledge. Schegloff, E. (1993). Reflections on quantification in the study of conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 26, 9–128. Schmidt, R. (1990).The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11, 129–158. Searle, J. (1976).A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5, 1–23. Sessarego, C. (2007). La enseñanza de la pragmática: principios de un enfoque didáctico para nivel principiante en un entorno universitario anglófono. Hispania, 90(2), 316–327. Sessarego, C. (2009). Pragmatic language instruction and beginner learners of Spanish:A discourse approach to pragmalinguistics. Estudios de Lingüística Aplicada, 49, 97–120. Sessarego, C. (2012). Reframing the undergraduate major in Spanish in the Canadian context:A curriculum for the 21st century. Notos, 12(2), 13–24. Sessarego, C. (2018). Developing L2 Spanish discursive-pragmatic ability in a persuasive genre at an intermediate level. In D. Dumitrescu & P. L. Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to teaching (pp. 151–168). New York: Routledge. Shively, R. (2015). Developing interactional competence during study abroad: Listener responses in L2 Spanish. System, 48, 86–98. Showstack, R. (2016). La pragmática transcultural de los hablantes de herencia de español: análisis e implicaciones pedagógicas. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 143–156. Sykes, J., & Cohen, A. (2006). Dancing with words: Strategies for learning pragmatics in Spanish. Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, the University of Minnesota. Retrieved from www.carla. umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html Taguchi, N. (2015). Instructional pragmatics at a glance:Where instructional studies were, are, and should be going. Language Teaching, 48(1), 1–50. Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second language pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Compernolle, R. A., Gómez-Laich, M. P., & Weber, A. (2016). Teaching L2 Spanish sociopragmatics through concepts:A classroom-based study. The Modern Language Journal, 100(1), 341–361. VanPatten,W. (2015).Where are the experts? Hispania, 98(1), 2–13. Wilkins, D.A. (1976). Notional syllabuses:A taxonomy and its relevance to foreign language curriculum development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

454

26 Research on pragmatics learning, teaching, and curricula for heritage speakers Rachel Elizabeth Showstack and Damián Vergara Wilson

1

Introduction

When Ana1 is visiting her mother at the family ranch in Michoacán, Mexico, she rarely uses apologies. If something spills, her mother cleans it up before anyone has a chance to say anything about it. Nobody is expected to arrive for a social occasion at an exact time, so there would be no reason to apologize for being 30 minutes late. In Wichita, Kansas, where Ana raised her children and developed her career, she might say perdón ‘pardon me’ or even lo siento ‘I’m sorry’ in situations in which she would not say anything if she were in México. By most definitions,Ana would be considered a ‘native speaker’ of Spanish, because she immigrated to the U.S. at age 18. The way her family in the U.S. interweaves elements from English when speaking Spanish does not impede her communication in any way; it may, in fact, facilitate communication in some cases. On the other hand, if she wanted to become a Spanish teacher or use Spanish in certain professional contexts in the U.S., she may benefit from the study of Spanish pragmatics. Ana’s children and grandchildren, who are heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish and will likely take a Spanish language course in the future, all have different levels of understanding and competencies in the pragmatic practices of different contexts in which they may find themselves using Spanish in the future, and thus have a range of different learning needs. In this paper, we use the term “Spanish heritage speaker” to refer to an individual “who is raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken, who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language” (Valdés, 2000, p. 1). However, we recognize that the range of backgrounds and experiences of those who can be categorized as HSs is broad and heterogeneous and that bilinguals who do not fit into that category will also engage in pragmatic practices influenced by more than one culture. The study of heritage language (HL) pragmatics is complex, because contact between two languages and cultures can influence the pragmatic practices in a specific context. Speakers may or may not be aware that they communicate differently depending on their geographical location or the origin of their interlocutor, perhaps in addition to other factors that influence pragmatic practices (e.g., status, formality, situational context; Showstack, 2016). HSs who speak their family language fluently may suddenly find that they do not know what to say to remedy particular situations outside of the home, especially when visiting the country of family origin or 455

Showstack and Wilson

when encountering an unexpected situation.At the same time, established U.S. Spanish-speaking communities may have their own pragmatic practices. By gaining a deeper understanding of the effects of language contact on pragmatics, instructors can determine how best to serve their HSs when teaching pragmatics in HL courses and Spanish linguistics courses. This chapter reviews existing studies on pragmatics and Spanish HSs and proposes new avenues for research in this area.We start by discussing the existing research on the role of language contact in HL pragmatics, the construct of “native speaker norm,” the best practices in HL pedagogy, and studies that have explored HL pragmatics. Next, we address relevant topics and current methodological issues in HL pedagogy. Finally, we discuss work that is still needed in this area.

2

Review of existing research

2.1

Fundamental concepts in HL research and teaching

When discussing HS pragmatic practices and the teaching of pragmatics in HL education, it is important to keep the sociolinguistic and ideological contexts in mind. In this section, we examine fundamental concepts to be considered in research on pragmatics and HSs, including the role of language contact, the native speaker norm, and best practices in HL pedagogy.

2.1.1

Context and contact of languages and cultures

As shown in other chapters in this volume,‘context’ is fundamental in the analysis of pragmatic practices (see Chapter 12 on pragmatics and argumentation, this volume). The components of context recognized in traditional pragmatics research, including the relationship between the speakers (status and social distance) and the specific situation they address, play a part in the choices that speakers make about the strategies they use for a particular speech act. However, a broader understanding of context must inform our analyses of the interactions that take place in today’s world of permeable cultural boundaries and fluid identities.As demonstrated by Cicourel (1992), moments of interaction are embedded in histories of previous interactions that shape the way communication develops and is understood.The history in which interaction is embedded, then, becomes part of the context for pragmatic practices. In transcultural contexts, it is also important to consider the cultural and linguistic background of the speakers and the place where the interaction occurred (Cohen, 2012). Pragmatic practices are intertwined with other aspects of culture; for example, whether or not a person will apologize for being late in a particular context is related to cultural understandings of time and expectations of arrival at a particular social event. HS speech communities in the United States are almost always found in multilingual settings in which two or more languages and cultures are in contact. As is well documented (García & Wei, 2014; Zentella, 1997), bilingual speakers can draw from a broad linguistic repertoire as they participate in multilingual practices that are commonly described in terms of borrowing, codeswitching, or translanguaging.2 In fact, speakers may produce innovative forms that may evolve into community norms.What is most relevant here is that the choice to participate in translingual practices conveys pragmatic and social meaning. Bilingual individuals’ capacity to index social meaning and respond to a particular social context by drawing from their full range of discursive resources is more complex than simply choosing between English and Spanish (Auer, 1984; Zentella, 1997). For example, an utterance may use words from Mexican Spanish to respond to a sociopragmatic expectation within the discursive practices of a region in the U.S. (e.g., an 456

Research on heritage speakers

apology in a context where one would not be expected in some Mexican cultures).These are languaging choices that represent a vast array of choices available to Spanish-English bilinguals.

2.1.2

The monolingual speaker norm

An important question that language educators face, whether overtly or not, is: what kinds of speakers do they wish for their students to emulate? Traditional approaches to Spanish HL education aimed to eradicate all indications of bilingualism and to teach HSs to use a ‘standard’ variety of the language, emulating idealized native speakers from countries where Spanish is the dominant language (Leeman, 2005).While HL education has moved away from this approach, at least in theory, some researchers continue to describe the communicative practices of HSs through the monolingual speaker norm (Villa, 2002). Pinto (2012) cautions against comparing HS pragmatic practices with those of so-called ‘native speakers’ of the HL (e.g., Escalante, 2017; Pinto & Raschio, 2007). HSs may not need to emulate such speakers in their pragmatic practices and may develop hybrid practices that reflect the pragmatic norms of both the HL and the dominant language. The imagined, idealized, monolingual ‘native speaker’ so often referenced in traditional HL education and research does not exist in reality: all language users are able to participate to varying degrees in different types of practices in which a given language is used (see Rampton, 1995). In their guide to HL teaching, Beaudrie, Ducar, and Potowski (2014, p. 34) point out that what distinguishes HSs from native speakers, idealized or otherwise, is the language experience. HSs live in a context where their HL is the subordinate societal language and, as a result, is not used in as many contexts as the majority language. Although the reduced range of use may lead to less language exposure, they point out that educators should view HS’s bilingual repertoires as assets instead of deficiencies. Because of its focus on context, the study of HL pragmatics sheds light upon why the endorsement of idealized native speaker norms does not make sense in today’s globalized world. The differences between HS pragmatic practices and those of relatives living in the region of family origin reflect a different cultural frame, context, and communicative needs. Pragmatic competence requires the ability to respond to a particular social context in a way that allows speakers to co-construct their intended meaning with a specific interlocutor (Koike, 2009). This competence does not depend on speakers’ ability to emulate an imagined ‘native speaker,’ but rather they must be able to respond to the discursive practices of a local context. For many students, the local context will be one where speakers co-construct meaning through translanguaging in a way that does not resemble these idealized monolingual norms.

2.1.3

Best practices in heritage language pedagogy

Here we outline some prominent trends in HL education as related to the present endeavor. One of the primary characteristics that sets HSs apart from second language (L2) learners is the exposure and connection to a home variety of Spanish spoken in a specific place by a specific speech community, which affects orientations toward language learning. Beaudrie et al. (2014) promote an orientation that recognizes the HS’s linguistic and cultural knowledge as a resource and suggest that HSs should be introduced to concepts of language variation.Whereas L2 learners may approach the study of Spanish as though it were another academic topic, such as math or history, HS language learning can be connected to students’ identities as members of a specific community (pp. 48–49). However, many details of HL implementation will vary according to the level of the students and the nature of a given learning goal. For example, explicit 457

Showstack and Wilson

language teaching might be appropriate for formal writing or learning certain collocations, whereas implicit approaches that implement a top-down approach might work for enhancing communicative competence. In the rest of this section, we cover relevant orientations but point the reader to Beaudrie et al. (2014) for a panoramic description of best practices. Many educators advocate for a critical approach to HL education (e.g., Leeman, 2005; Martínez, 2003; Parra, 2016) that questions the power structures that influence social outcomes through collaborative questioning from teachers and students.According to Parra (2016, p. 167), the critical approach has its roots in the teachings of Paulo Freire (2005, orig. 1968) and the goal is critical consciousness and language awareness. Understanding power dynamics is important in understanding how some language varieties and their speakers will be devalued while others are uplifted (e.g., Fairclough, 1992). One of the goals is that students will be empowered and informed in choosing which language variant or speech acts to use in which setting, and why. Fostering a connection between the HSs and their heritage communities is another fundamental component of HL education (Beaudrie et al., 2014), and scholarly work on service learning in HL education is becoming more commonplace (e.g., Leeman, Rabin, & RománMendoza, 2011; MacGregor-Mendoza & Moreno, 2016; Pascual y Cabo, Prada, & Lowther Pereira, 2017).While these works highlight the transformative nature of service learning and the effectiveness in attaining critical language awareness, MacGregor-Mendoza and Moreno (2016) also propose that HSs may leverage their knowledge of speech community pragmatics as an important resource. Through service learning, HSs develop a consciousness of how their own sociocultural and linguistic skills can be valuable to the community and they develop skills in using language to reflect social relationships that are different from those they encounter at home. Lastly, studies that examine the perspective of HL students suggest that educators should embrace bilingual phenomena and encourage HSs to do the same (Wilson & Ibarra, 2015). By denigrating bilingual practices, an educator might be missing out on important opportunities for promoting engagement with the HL in the local community.

2.1.4

Heritage language assessment

A core concept to consider when conducting research on HS pragmatics is the question of assessment, which is important for the placement of students in HL courses and the evaluation of students’ learning through coursework. Research on HL assessment indicates that the traditional placement exams are not sufficient to assess the language abilities of HSs, who usually learn the HL in a naturalistic context that is not reflected in the exam format (Beaudrie, 2016). Beaudrie et al. (2014) recommend the use of assessment that elicits creative use of language through the completion of real-world tasks. Linguistic variation must also be taken into consideration in decisions about which variants are considered acceptable (Beaudrie, 2016). Beaudrie (2016) points out that methods of assessment should be in line with the goals of particular HL programs and consider the groups of HL students that enter those programs.

2.2

Studies on Spanish HS pragmatics

Researchers have begun to investigate Spanish heritage speakers’ realization of speech acts, their use of discourse markers, and other elements of their pragmatic repertoire and practices. An overarching finding is that HSs develop pragmatic practices that reflect their contact situation. Pragmatic practices can be broadly divided into two areas:‘pragmalinguistics’ and ‘sociopragmatics’ (Leech, 1983;Thomas, 1983). Pragmalinguistic practices comprise the linguistic choices, such as using a speaker-oriented apology (e.g., lo siento ‘I’m sorry’) or a hearer-oriented one (e.g., 458

Research on heritage speakers

discúlpame ‘pardon me’), whereas sociopragmatic practices are related to social norms and expectations, such as whether a specific situation requires an apology (Cohen, Shively, Emert, & Hoff, 2005). This distinction is important when it comes to heritage speakers because, as Showstack (2016) suggests, even when HSs have a well-developed pragmalinguistic competence and awareness, their knowledge of sociopragmatic practices may be based on a limited set of contexts. It is important to research HSs’ experiences with communication in intercultural contexts and their perceptions of the pragmatic practices of diverse groups (Showstack, 2016). Research on HSs’ production of speech acts has primarily focused on requests, considering the level of directness of the request, the frequency of downgraders, the use of forms of address, and the use of positive and negative politeness strategies. Pinto and Raschio (2007) and Escalante (2017) found differences between the requests produced by HSs and those produced by native speakers from regions where Spanish is the dominant language. Specifically, Pinto and Raschio (2007) found that HSs differed significantly from monolingual Spanish speakers in the level of directness of the head act; they tended to employ more indirect strategies, as are commonly produced by monolingual English speakers. On the other hand, while Escalante (2017) found that her participants followed the monolingual norm in the formation of the head act, there were subtle differences in the distribution of positive and negative politeness strategies by HSs and Spanish monolinguals. In contrast to the findings of the first two studies described, Barros García and Bachelor (2018) found no significant differences between HSs and monolingual Spanish speakers’ scores on written and oral discourse completion tasks and saw no improvement in HSs’ scores on these tasks after pragmatics instruction. However, their study considered HSs placed at the intermediate-high proficiency level and did not look at beginning students.3 While requests are one of the most frequent types of speech acts in daily interaction, Showstack (2016) analyzed heritage speakers’ production of the speech act of apology, which is found less frequently in natural interaction. In an analysis of her participants’ responses to a set of apology scenarios that included variation in social distance and authority between the interlocutors, and the severity of the offense, she examined her participants’ choice of strategies, the number of different types of strategies they employed for an apology, and the orientation (to the speaker or the hearer) of the illocutionary force-indicating device. Showstack found that the HSs who participated in her study (all enrolled in second-year Spanish courses) resembled monolingual Spanish speakers in their preferred strategies and in the use of a broad range of strategies in an individual apology, while they tended to use more speaker-oriented strategies in their illocutionary force-indicating device (e.g., lo siento ‘I’m sorry’), reflecting the apologies of monolingual English speakers. In addition to these transcultural elements, Pinto and Raschio (2007) noted the use of grammatical structures that resembled structures from English in the speech acts of HSs. In their study of requests among Spanish HSs, they found that some of their participants utilized request structures that were also found in other groups of native English speakers, such as ¿Puedo . . . ? ‘Can I . . .?,’ ¿Está/estaría bien . . . ? ‘Is it/would it be OK . . .?,’ and Quería saber/ver si . . . ‘I wanted to know/see if. . . . ’ Choice of strategy and grammatical structure are not the only elements to consider when analyzing HL speech acts; Elías (2015) shows that awareness of expectations is also significant. In a study on refusals among second-generation Spanish HSs of Mexican parents, she found that her participants utilized indirect forms of refusal similar to those found among monolingual native Spanish speakers when presented with a range of role play situations; however, in some of the scenarios presented, participants did not anticipate that those producing the invitation or suggestion would insist multiple times before accepting the rejection. Finally, HL speech act research has extended to the examination of HSs and other types of Spanish-English bilinguals learning a third language. In a study on third-language pragmatics in 459

Showstack and Wilson

oral and written modalities, Koike and Palmiere (2011) found that native Spanish speakers from Spanish-dominant countries, Spanish L2 learners, and Spanish HSs from the United States all produced speech acts with similarities to Spanish when speaking and writing in Portuguese.The authors supported Kellerman’s (1983) hypothesis that learners’ perceptions of the typological similarity between two languages can affect the likelihood of transfer, but they pointed out that the set of factors influencing transfer is more complex than initially presented by Kellerman; subsequent research on multilingual practices also demonstrates that traditional notions of transfer are inadequate (e.g., García & Wei, 2014). Research on Spanish-English bilingual pragmatics also includes the examination of Spanish- and English-origin discourse markers. Sánchez-Muñoz (2007) examined heritage speakers’ use of discourse markers in different registers of language use. Aaron (2004), Lipski (2005), Sánchez-Muñoz (2007),Torres (2003), and Torres and Potowski (2008) studied the function and frequency of specific English-origin discourse markers (e.g., so, you know, I mean) in Spanishlanguage discourse. Both Aaron (2004) and Torres and Potowski (2008) found functional similarities between ‘so’ and ‘entonces’ in the speech of different groups of Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. However, while Aaron found that both discourse markers were distributed equally across four discourse functions for New Mexican Spanish speakers,Torres and Potowski found that ‘so’ was preferred for three out of four functions among their participants of Mexican origin and Puerto Rican origin in Chicago. Both sets of data were designed to examine the Spanish-language discourse of each respective community; however, each community undoubtedly engaged in unique translingual practices, of which discourse markers are an important component. In addition to interchanging production of discourse markers of English and Spanish origin, HSs may also use Spanish language discourse markers in ways that differ from their usage among monolingual Spanish speakers. Said-Mohand (2007) considered heritage speakers’ usage of discourse markers (e.g., tú sabes ‘you know’) and found that some of the ways HSs used these terms resembled English language usage. The choice to utilize linguistic resources associated with more than one named language can hold pragmatic meaning in itself.Valdés (1981) analyzed requests in conversations of bilingual New Mexican college students and found that code-switching was used as a strategy in both mitigating (Ex. 1) and aggravating strategies (Ex. 2), and in conveying Chicano/a identity (Ex. 3). These examples demonstrate how bilinguals use multilingual practices as a pragmatic strategy. (1)

No toques eso. I don’t want it broken. Hang up right now, Todavía tienes que acabar con este tiradero. ‘Don’t touch that.’ . . .‘You still have to finish this mess.’ (Valdés, 1981, p. 102)

(2)

M: Listen, your gum is driving me up a tree. S: He . . . took off . . . and . . . [Son continues to chew gum noisily] M: Tira el chicle y luego me dices. ‘Throw out the gum and then talk to me.’ (Valdés, 1981, p. 101)

(3)

Mira mano, you just have to do it till it’s okay and they say it’s okay. ‘Look brother.’ . . . (Valdés, 1981, p. 104)

The choices multilinguals make to deploy elements from one or two languages in their speech may also convey social meaning and index the recognition of a particular social context. 460

Research on heritage speakers

In an ethnolinguistic study of women’s language usage in a small New Mexican village, Gonzales (1999) shows that speakers use Spanish, English, and code-switching to represent social relations and group membership.The village women used Spanish at a wedding in a larger city to maintain identity and solidarity in reaction to a prevalence of English at this event (pp. 27–28), and the younger speakers in the village used primarily Spanish with elders to convey deference. Code-switching, on the other hand, had become the community norm for the broader Hispanic community in northern New Mexico. In this section, we pointed out the importance of students’ individual histories and the sociolinguistic context, highlighted the vast array of choices for making social meaning that are available to bilinguals, showed why the native speaker norm is problematic for HS pragmatics research and teaching, and described best practices for HL education and assessment. We also described existing research on HS pragmatics and highlighted the connections between this body of research and the key concepts in HL pedagogy.

3

Methodological considerations

There is a need to develop methodologies for teaching pragmatics to HSs that fit into current approaches to HL education. We have proposed that HSs benefit from the use of critical and sociolinguistic approaches that are contextualized and utilize both implicit and explicit instruction. HL students will benefit from an examination of how certain pragmatic features can imply certain positionalities or achieve particular sociopragmatic goals. Integration into a community is enhanced when students attend to pragmatics; therefore, it should be taught both as a subject of academic inquiry in upper-level courses (i.e., linguistics study), and also incorporated throughout the language curricula.While the theoretical frameworks, pedagogical practices, and assessment guidelines described in this chapter are important for HL education, they are also relevant in L2 education; thus, we echo Pascual y Cabo and Prada’s (2018) call to “reformulate (Spanish) language education programs . . . in a way that reciprocally fortifies both groups” (p. 537) and we suggest that instructors incorporate many of our recommendations into general world language curricula, not just HL curricula. We argue that an important component of teaching pragmatics to HSs is providing them with the opportunity to build on their existing knowledge and develop identities of expertise. Showstack (2016) points out that because HSs come to the classroom with intuitions about the pragmatics of their HL, it is useful to begin a lesson by asking students to reflect on their own experiences with specific types of speech acts and the pragmatic practices in which they participate, in order to exercise their metapragmatic awareness.This discussion can align with a broader conversation about cultural differences with respect to communication. For example, many Spanish HSs in the western United States have roots in a rural Mexican culture that has its own expectations for limiting the expression of emotion.They may have noticed people being more expressive of emotions in communities outside of their families and could have encountered miscommunications due to these types of differences, especially in intimate relationships.When framing the discussion of pragmatics within a discussion of broader cultural tendencies, students can gain a deeper understanding of the cultural situatedness of specific pragmatic practices.These initial discussions, which correspond to the initial despertar conciencia ‘consciousness-raising’ phase of Félix-Brasdefer’s (2019, Chapter 9) pedagogical model, could be more in-depth for HSs than for many L2 learners because of the pragmatic intuitions these students bring with them to the classroom. After raising awareness about the pragmatic practices to which they have been exposed, HSs, like L2 learners, can benefit from additional input, allowing them to examine and analyze 461

Showstack and Wilson

examples of pragmatic practices from specific communities and, in particular, types of interactions. Scholarship on pragmatics instruction for L2 learners suggests that students can better understand and internalize pragmatic norms and the ways in which speech acts are negotiated through an analysis of extended, contextualized dialogues (Koike, 2009) and explicit instruction in strategies for interlanguage pragmatic learning (Sykes & Cohen, 2018). This method is reflected in the educational website Dancing with Words (Sykes & Cohen, 2006). Despite the good number of resources available for teaching Spanish pragmatics, Showstack (2016) points out that most of the existing materials are geared toward L2 learners and lack the nuances needed to respond to the transcultural nature of HS pragmatic practices. Many of the existing materials focus on the types of encounters in which HSs may already be comfortable communicating in Spanish, while there is a need for additional training on pragmatic norms in specific professional contexts, such as when providing care or interpreting services in healthcare contexts. Many HSs with a high level of competence in using the language in family and community contexts may not have the language skills they need for specific professional contexts, and pragmatics is an important part of learning how to interact in these contexts. In particular, some HSs may need to develop skills in conveying formality and social distance in the workplace and in the norms of particular types of interactions, such as the role of the interpreter in healthcare contexts. In intermediate and advanced level Spanish HL courses, especially those including a community service-learning component, it would be useful to provide opportunities in class to analyze videos and transcriptions of language use in a range of professional contexts.The analysis can be guided so that students are able to determine inductively the expectations and meanings of language use in these contexts, which can be supported by some explicit instruction to highlight the relationship between specific forms and pragmatic meanings. After raising awareness and analyzing input on pragmatic practices, language learners can benefit from opportunities to practice communicating in particular situational and social contexts (Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, Chapter 9). This communicative practice can take place in the classroom between students, in a virtual world between a student and an avatar, or outside of the classroom in a service-learning context. After each of these types of interaction, it could be helpful for students to engage in guided reflection on how meaning and social positions were conveyed and interpreted by the interlocutors. Pragmatic components can also be highlighted in interprofessional communicative practice exercises, such as a simulation of a patient interview with a Spanish-English interpreter involving students of both Spanish and the health professions (see Chapter 14 on pragmatics and medical discourse, this volume). In addition to including pragmatics instruction that reflects the skills, awareness, experiences, and practices of HSs in language courses and that allows them to expand their repertoires and broaden their awareness and communicative skills, it is also important to consider how best to teach pragmatics in Spanish linguistics courses at a time when Spanish-English bilingual practices are ubiquitous in most regions of the U.S. and in many other parts of the world. Linguistics instructors can draw from many of the same theoretical approaches and strategies discussed earlier; in multilingual contexts, allowing students to draw on their own expertise can become an important pedagogical model. Class discussions on pragmatic theory and practices can be enriched when students share their own experiences and observations and are permitted to question whether these perspectives support or disprove the linguistic theories being studied.An assignment for students to teach a pragmatics lesson to less advanced students can support the development of heritage speakers’ expert identities while allowing them to verbalize what they know and what they have learned; for aspiring linguistics professors or language teachers, the opportunity to practice their teaching skills is also valuable. 462

Research on heritage speakers

In both language and linguistics courses, study abroad programs are an especially rich context in which to provide instruction in pragmatics. Shively (2011) and Félix-Brasdefer and Hasler-Barker (2015) examined the development of speech acts among Spanish L2 learners in study abroad contexts and demonstrated that students’ requests and compliments became closer to the host community pragmatic norms over time. HSs, while they may produce more pragmalinguistically appropriate forms than L2 learners, are likely to discover sociopragmatic differences between the pragmatic practices in their own families and the pragmatic norms in the host community.This is especially true if the host community is in a different region from that of their family origin, or if their host community is more rural or more urban than their family origin. For example, the pragmatic practices in rural Mexico differ substantially from the practices in urban centers (Farr, 2000); therefore, while cultural similarities may exist across central Mexico, HSs whose family comes from a ranch in Michoacán may not be accustomed to the forms of politeness used in Puebla City. If these students participate in a study abroad program in Puebla City, they might desire to learn the politeness practices in their host culture and may also maintain a certain component of their home language practices as well. Some HSs face an additional challenge when negotiating pragmatic elements of communication in study abroad contexts: members of the host community may expect them to interact in certain ways because they may look and sound Latino, and HSs may feel isolated when they feel they do not meet these expectations (Quan, Pozzi, Kehoe, & Menard-Warwick, 2018; Shively, 2016). In addition to the teaching strategies suggested previously, the SA context opens new pedagogical opportunities. One strategy for teaching pragmatics to HSs in a study abroad context is to ask them to reflect on what certain features and practices mean to them within their home communities and then either have them interview members of the host community or watch videos of interviews with members of the host community about the locals’ perceptions of those same practices. For example, heritage speakers’ use of tú (T) and Usted (V) may differ from the norms of the host community; while tú may indicate friendship and affection for a HS in a certain context, it may be seen as disrespectful in that same context for members of the host community.We suggest that after raising students’ awareness of the potential for these types of differences (and misunderstandings), instructors can encourage HSs to negotiate openly the meanings of pragmatic norms with members of the host community. For example, they can explain to a member of the host community what kind of social relation they hope to index by using tú in a particular context (See Chapter 29 for additional information on pragmatics instruction in study abroad contexts, this volume). Another strategy would be to introduce HS students in a study abroad program to the concept of speech acts and have them document observations of these in the host culture for later analysis. For example, the instructor may decide to focus on greetings and assign students to document these with host families and in public spaces.The students can attempt to document positionality between speakers (e.g.,‘an adolescent female greets a librarian’) in addition to any other relevant contextual factors (e.g.,‘the library appears to be a place that compels formality’). Subsequently, students can use the documented speech acts as a topic in the classroom in which they compare their own metapragmatic intuitions and experiences on greetings to those of the host culture. As a final note in this section, we must recognize that most students are conditioned to think about language learning in terms of formal grammar and traditional approaches to teaching, and that common forms of language proficiency assessment often highlight these formal aspects of learning while discounting the kind of language learning that takes place in naturalistic settings. By exposing HSs to the field of pragmatics and highlighting the importance of interactional 463

Showstack and Wilson

norms in language learning, we might precipitate a shift in the way students view their linguistic development. As stated, some HSs have an intuition for many pragmatic norms that come from their own culture and it might boost their self-confidence to position this intuition as an important resource. A shift in assessment practices should accompany this shift toward a more wholesome way of looking at HL development. In this section, we suggested a broadening of approaches to context in studying HS pragmatics, cautioned scholars against assuming that HSs need to emulate a monolingual norm in their pragmatic practices, reviewed relevant best practices in HL pedagogy, and described existing research on HS pragmatics. In the next section, we indicate some areas in HS pragmatics research and pedagogy where further work is needed.

4

Future directions and conclusion

One of the conclusions of the research on HL pragmatics has been that there is evidence of an ‘intercultural style’ in the pragmatics of HSs (Pinto & Raschio, 2007). By unpacking the nuances of this description, we can gain valuable insight into the nature of multilingual practices that can allow us to address these practices effectively in pedagogical contexts. To provide a more thorough discussion of this interculturality, it is necessary to reconsider the ways we describe multilingual practices, how we understand the notion of ‘context’ in pragmatics research, and our methods of assessing the proficiency levels of HSs. The range of studies on HL pragmatics summarized in this chapter shows that there are many ways in which pragmatic practices associated with Spanish and English-speaking communities can overlap in HS discursive practices, from pragmalinguistic features, such as the orientation of an illocutionary force-indicating device, to sociopragmatic features, such as which type of situation deserves an apology, to the mixing of Spanish and English words in an utterance.This recognition of unique bilingual pragmatic practices encourages us to move away from traditional notions of ‘transfer’ and, instead, consider how speakers employ a broad range of discursive resources to respond to specific contexts and represent social positions, as in the Gonzales (1999) study mentioned earlier. Beyond examining their language use, more experimental research on HS pragmatics should also include participant reflection to better understand how they perceive the sociopragmatic expectations of the situations provided. An additional concept that needs to be further unpacked to improve HL pragmatics research is the notion of context. The discourse completion tasks (DCT) that have traditionally been used in pragmatics research provide a brief description of a situation and a social relationship between the interlocutors. One benefit of the DCT is that it can provide responses from a large number of participants to identical situations (Ogiermann, 2018). However, DCTs have been criticized because they represent a type of reported speech (i.e., what participants say they would say in a given situation) and do not allow for the amount of negotiation, elaboration, hedging, variety, and quantity of speech that would occur in natural interactions; they also do not represent the social relationships between members of a specific group (Beebe & Cummings, 1996). In addition, as demonstrated by Showstack (2016), these tasks may not include certain contextual features that would influence the responses of participants who engage in multilingual practices in their communities. Other experimental methods like role plays can allow interlocutors to co-construct the interactional context, overcoming some of the limitations of DCTs (Félix-Brasdefer, 2018). In addition, HL pragmatics research needs to go beyond experimental methods and use ethnographic observation to understand how HSs utilize discourse-pragmatic features in natural interaction in the communities where they grew up, in the communities of their family’s origin (if different), and in other contexts such as study abroad. 464

Research on heritage speakers

It would also be valuable to compare the pragmatic practices within bilingual communities in different regions of the U.S. As shown in this chapter, the broad understanding of pragmatic practices that many HSs take with them to the language classroom includes knowledge of the ways in which language is used in bilingual communities in the United States. Traditional proficiency measures, such as the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages Oral Proficiency Interview (ACTFL OPI) and written placement exams do not necessarily obtain a valid assessment of this type of knowledge.Widely utilized standardized written placement exams (e.g.,WebCAPE) do not measure pragmatic knowledge, and the rubrics used to evaluate oral proficiency, such as the OPI or the Common European Framework of Languages (CEFR), do not allow for any type of translanguaging practices; these elements must be taken into consideration when developing HS assessment instruments. HS assessment should also reflect the range of contexts in which students may or may not have experience using their HL, because the amount of contact with the HL in different contexts can influence pragmatic competence and practices (Taguchi, Zhang, & Li, 2017). Recognizing the value of bilingual pragmatic practices will improve the accuracy of the assessment of HS proficiency levels, giving HSs the credit they deserve for the skills they bring with them to the academic context. A nuanced approach to HS pragmatic assessment might include questions about how certain responses might be interpreted in different contexts. It is also important to include an assessment of HS’s pragmatic awareness, including their articulation of their own experiences with the use of discourse-pragmatic features in their HL and in the dominant societal language and, when assessing advanced students, their knowledge of regional and contextual variation in pragmatic practices.This could be assessed with written or oral questionnaires (Showstack, 2016) and could also be examined through an analysis of class discussions on the topic. HS pragmatics research could be strengthened by a consideration of the kinds of speech acts in which HSs engage in Spanish and in English, the kinds of speech acts they want and need to learn, and the ways they engage in pragmatics instruction in the classroom and integrate their classroom learning into their daily lives (see Chapter 25 on instruction of pragmatics in L2 contexts, this volume). Throughout any analysis of HS pragmatic practices, it is important that researchers remain cognizant of the individuality of the experiences and communicative practices of Spanish-English bilinguals and the situatedness of the choices they make in a particular moment of discourse. Ana, the Spanish-English bilingual grandmother from Michoacán, would fill out a discourse completion task very differently depending on where she envisions herself engaging in the featured interaction. In turn, Ana’s grandchildren, who have learned to use language from her, from her children, and from their peers and teachers, will undoubtedly have unique individual experiences with communicating in Spanish. Both Ana and her grandchildren will be challenged to negotiate the illocutionary force of their utterances with Spanish speakers from diverse backgrounds, and this process of negotiation should be a key focus of both research and pedagogy in HL pragmatics.

Notes 1 A pseudonym is used to protect the anonymity of this individual. 2 We acknowledge an ongoing debate between code-switching and translanguaging approaches to describing practices of incorporating elements of two or more languages into the same discourse production. While our defense of the translanguaging model is beyond the scope of this paper, we use the term ‘translanguaging’ to refer to these practices. 3 It is not clear which aspects of the requests were analyzed in Barros García and Bachelor (2018), suggesting that the study may have lacked certain nuances. 465

Showstack and Wilson

Further reading Cohen, A. D. (2012). Research methods for describing variation in intercultural pragmatics for cultures in contact and conflict. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts (pp. 271–294).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Focusing on doctor-patient interviews in the U.S. Southwest, this chapter considers the many different factors that can affect pragmatic practices in intercultural contexts and provides recommendations for data collection and analysis. Cohen makes an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about the nature of intercultural pragmatics in bilingual communities. Pinto, D. (2018). Heritage Spanish pragmatics. In K. Potowski (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 190–202). New York: Routledge. This chapter provides an overview of research on heritage Spanish pragmatics from a primarily linguistic perspective, highlighting the distinction between sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics. Showstack, R. E. (2016). La pragmática transcultural de los hablantes de herencia de español: análisis e implicaciones pedagógicas. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 143–156. Drawing on a study about the speech act of apologies among Spanish HSs in Kansas, this article discusses theoretical and methodological considerations for research on pragmatics in bilingual contexts and offers recommendations for teaching pragmatics to HSs.

References Aaron, J. E. (2004). So respetamos un tradición del uno al otro: So and entonces in New Mexican Bilingual Discourse. Spanish in Context, 1(2), 161–179. Auer, P. (1984). Bilingual conversation.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barros García, M. J., & Bachelor, J.W. (2018). Pragmatic instruction may not be necessary among heritage learners of Spanish:A study on requests. Journal of Foreign Language Education and Technology, 3(1), 163–193. Beaudrie, S. M. (2016). Advances in Spanish heritage language assessment. In D. Pascual y Cabo (Ed.), Advances in Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 143–158).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Beaudrie, S. M., Ducar, C., & Potowski, K. (2014). Heritage language teaching: Research and practice. New York: McGraw-Hill. Beebe, L., & Cummings, R. (1996). Natural speech data vs. written questionnaire data: How data collection methods affect speech act performance. In S. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communicating in a second language (pp. 1–14). New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Cicourel,A.V. (1992).The interpenetration of communicative contexts: Examples from medical encounters. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon (pp. 291– 310). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, A. D. (2012). Research methods for describing variation in intercultural pragmatics for cultures in contact and conflict. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in first and second language contexts (pp. 271–294).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cohen,A. D., Shively, R. L., Emert, H.A., & Hoff, J. G. (2005). Maximizing study abroad through language and culture strategies: Research on students, study abroad program professionals, and language instructors. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. Elías,V. (2015). Pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic variation: Refusing among Spanish heritage speakers. Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers, 1–32. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.iu.edu/ journals/index.php/iulcwp/article/view/26217 Escalante, C. (2017).Te lo pido por favor: estrategias de cortesía de hablantes de herencia del español mexicano. Normas, 7(2), 273–296. Fairclough, N. (1992).The appropriacy of ‘appropriateness.’ In N. Fairclough (Ed.), Critical language awareness (pp. 33–56). New York: Longman. Farr, M. (2000). ¡A mí no me manda nadie! Individualism and identity in Mexican ranchero speech. Pragmatics, 10(1), 61–85. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2018). Role plays. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W.Wolfram (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 305–332). Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso, y variación. London and New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2015). Complimenting in Spanish in a short-term study abroad context. System, 48, 75–85. 466

Research on heritage speakers

Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary edition; trans. M. Berg-Ramos). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1968). García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gonzales, M. D. (1999). Crossing social and cultural borders:The road to language hybridity. In D. Galindo & M. D. Gonzales (Eds.), Speaking Chicana:Voice, power, and identity (pp. 13–38).Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Kellerman, E. (1983). Now you see it, now you don’t. In S. M. Gass & L. Selinker (Eds.), Language transfer and language learning (pp. 112–134). Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Koike, D. A. (2009). A grammar of L2 pragmatics: Issues in learning and teaching. In S. L. Katz & J.Watzinger-Tharp (Eds.), Conceptions of L2 grammar:Theoretical approaches and their application in the L2 classroom (Vol. 2008, pp. 35–52). Stamford, CT: Heinle Cengage Learning. Koike, D. A., & Palmiere, D.T. L. (2011). First and second language pragmatics in third language oral and written modalities. Foreign Language Annals, 44(1), 80–104. Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. Leeman, J. (2005). Engaging critical pedagogy: Spanish for native speakers. Foreign Language Annals, 38(1), 35–45. Leeman, J., Rabin, L., & Román-Mendoza, E. (2011). Identity and activism in heritage language education. The Modern Language Journal, 95(4), 481–495. Lipski, J. (2005). Code-switching or borrowing? No sé so no puedo decir, you know. In L. Sayahi & M.Westmoreland (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the second workshop on Spanish sociolinguistics (pp. 1–15). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. MacGregor-Mendoza, P., & Moreno, G. (2016). Connecting Spanish heritage language students with the community through service-learning. Heritage Language Journal, 13(3), 405–433. Martínez, G. (2003). Classroom-based dialect awareness in heritage language instruction: A critical applied linguistic approach. Heritage Language Journal, 1(1), 1–14. Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 229–255). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Parra, M. L. (2016). Critical approaches to heritage language instruction: How to foster students’ critical consciousness. In M. Fairclough & S. M. Beaudrie (Eds.), Innovative strategies for heritage language teaching: A practical guide for the classroom (pp. 39–55).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Pascual y Cabo, D., & Prada, J. (2018). Redefining Spanish teaching and learning in the United States. Foreign Language Annals, 51, 533–547. Pascual y Cabo, D., Prada, J., & Lowther Pereira, K. (2017). Effects of community service-learning on heritage language learners’ attitudes toward their language and culture. Foreign Language Annals, 50(1), 71–83. Pinto, D. (2012). Pragmatics and discourse: Doing things with words in Spanish as a heritage language. In S. M. Beaudrie & M. Fairclough (Eds.), Spanish as a heritage language in the United States:The state of the field (pp. 121–138).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Pinto, D., & Raschio, R. (2007). A comparative study of requests in heritage speaker Spanish, L1 Spanish, and L1 English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(2), 135–155. Quan,T., Pozzi, R., Kehoe, S., & Menard-Warwick, J. (2018). Spanish heritage language learners in study abroad across three national contexts.The Routledge handbook of study abroad research and practice (pp. 437–451). London: Routledge. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. New York: Longman. Said-Mohand, A. (2007). A sociolinguistic study of the use of the Spanish discourse marker tú sabes (you know) in the oral narrative of Hispanic heritage speakers. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 26(2), 67–93. Sánchez-Muñoz, A. (2007). Style variation in Spanish as a heritage language: A study of discourse particles in academic and non-academic registers. In K. Potowski & R. Cameron (Eds.), Spanish in contact: Policy, social and linguistic inquiries (pp. 153–172).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Shively, R. L. (2011). L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A longitudinal study of Spanish service encounters. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1818–1835. Shively, R. L. (2016). Heritage language learning in study abroad: Motivations, identity work, and language development. In D. Pascual y Cabo (Ed.), Advances in Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 259–280). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Showstack, R. E. (2016). La pragmática transcultural de los hablantes de herencia de español: análisis e implicaciones pedagógicas. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 143–156. Sykes, J., & Cohen,A. (2006). Dancing with words: Strategies for learning pragmatics in Spanish. Retrieved from http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html 467

Showstack and Wilson

Sykes, J., & Cohen, A. (2018). Strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: Explicit and comprehensive. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 8(2), 381–402. Taguchi, N., Zhang, H., & Li, Q. (2017). Pragmatic competence of heritage learners of Chinese and its relationship to social contact. Chinese as a Second Language Research Journal, 6(1), 7–37. Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4(2) 91–111. Torres, L. (2003). Bilingual discourse markers in Puerto Rican Spanish. Language in Society, 31, 65–83. Torres, L., & Potowski, K. (2008).A comparative study of bilingual discourse markers in Chicago Mexican, Puerto Rican, and MexiRican Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 12(4), 263–279. Valdés, G. (1981). Codeswitching as deliberate verbal strategy:A microanalysis of direct and indirect requests among bilingual Chicano speakers. In R. P. Durán (Ed.), Latino language and communicative behavior (pp. 95–108). Norwood, NJ:Ablex. Valdés, G. (2000). Introduction. In N.Anderson (Ed.), American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese professional development series handbook for teachers K-16,Vol. 1. Spanish for native speakers (pp. 1–20). New York: Harcourt. Villa, D. J. (2002).The sanitizing of U.S. Spanish in academia. Foreign Language Annals, 35(2), 222–230. Wilson, D. V., & Ibarra, C. E. (2015). Understanding the inheritors: The perception of beginning-level students toward their Spanish as a heritage language program. EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages, 2(2), 85–101. Zentella,A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. Malden, MA:Wiley-Blackwell.

468

27 Pragmatics and teacher education Manel Lacorte

1

Introduction

As Koike and Pearson (2019) recently noted, pragmatics constitutes a relatively new area of interest in the field of second/foreign (L2) language teaching and learning, which began to develop after the increase of studies on the acquisition of pragmatics in the 1980s (p. 383).While pragmatics research related to Spanish L2 has primarily focused “on the use and understanding of speech acts by native speakers and by learners with different levels of competence” (Gironzetti & Koike, 2016, p. 89), the field is now at an exciting crossroads (see e.g., Dumitrescu & Andueza, 2018; Félix-Brasdefer, 2019a; Placencia & Padilla, 2019;Taguchi, 2019;Taguchi & Roever, 2017). At the same time, there are some areas that have received less consideration to date, such as the systematic integration of pragmatics into the main L2 curriculum; the development, use, and evaluation of pragmatic competence with specific goals (e.g., Spanish for the professions or Spanish for heritage speakers); and the role of pragmatics as a more visible dimension of preparation programs for pre- and in-service Spanish instructors. In a manner similar to the distinction suggested by Gironzetti and Koike (2016) in their introduction to a collection of work on Spanish instructional pragmatics, the inclusion of pragmatics as part of current L2 teacher education programs may be influenced by two types of challenges concerning “what to teach” and “how to teach” (pp. 93–94).As to the first challenge, teacher educators and teachers may have conflicting views about what contents, if any, could be included or addressed in these programs: from those more easily categorized forms of speech acts, deictic expressions, and discourse markers to more abstract concepts such as conversational maxims, implicatures, relevance, and politeness. In the case of international languages such as Spanish, another area of substantial interest would involve sociopragmatic variation among its many native speakers throughout the Hispanic world (e.g., Bernal & Hernández Flores, 2016;Vera Luján & Martínez, 2019). As to the second challenge concerning how to teach pragmatics in the L2 classroom, if at all, or in our case, as part of L2 teacher education programs, Gironzetti and Koike (2016) point that instructors may choose between several options from a continuum consisting of more explicit to more implicit, more deductive to more inductive, teaching techniques, and/or strategies. An additional challenge that could be related to either what to teach and how to teach in L2 pragmatics involves the decisions and resources to be considered regarding assessment. More 469

Lacorte

specifically, teachers and L2 teacher educators would need to become more aware of what concepts or areas to assess (e.g., speech acts, implicatures, discourse markers, politeness), as well as how to assess those concepts (e.g., discourse completion tasks, role plays, rubrics, and print or virtual portfolios; see Chapter 33 on research methods, this volume) (Carroll, 2019; Cohen, 2008, 2019; Roever, 2014). As will be shown in the next sections, we would argue that the most common approaches to pragmatics in Spanish L2 teacher education programs have been either to disregard the subject completely, or include it as part of modules or courses dealing with various theoretical areas of the Spanish language such as phonetics, morphology, or syntax. In this instance, the content presented to future or current Spanish L2 teachers often deals with “pragmalinguistic information regarding the most readily categorized pragmatics phenomena, such as speech acts, deictic expressions, and discourse markers, with little to no mention of sociopragmatic contexts and variables that affect their use” (Gironzetti & Koike, 2016, p. 91). This chapter first provides a critical review of the presence of pragmatics in current major L2 curricular frameworks, and in institutional standards for L2 teacher education.The following sections introduce a different approach to the role of pragmatics in L2 teacher education.This approach is based on (1) the value of sociocultural theory for L2 teacher education due to its “most-developed L2 pedagogical implications and clearest vision of learning goals, means, and instructional support” (Toth & Davin, 2016, p.  158); (2) the adaptation of essential strategies proposed by experts in the fields of pedagogical and instructional pragmatics (Félix-Brasdefer, 2019b; Koike & Pearson, 2019; Murray, 2009, 2012; van Compernolle, 2018; van Compernolle, Weber, & Gomez-Laich, 2016) to L2 teacher education; and (3) the reassessment of the widely outdated distinction between “native and nonnative speakers” (e.g., Llurda, 2016; Thompson & Cuesta Medina, 2019) in light of recent views on L2 multicompetence and use (e.g., Cook, 2016; Cook & Wei, 2016).

2

Review of existing research

As suggested earlier, the diverging positions described by Gironzetti and Koike (2016) about the “what” and the “how” of teaching L2 pragmatics can also be noticed in the treatment of the same subject in current L2 teacher education programs. Specifically, Figure 27.1 shows a combination of options from theory-based contents to competence-based contents (“what to teach”), and from explicit to implicit coverage (“how to teach”): 

Figure 27.1 Treatment of pragmatics in L2 teacher education programs 470

Pragmatics and teacher education

As in other academic contexts,“explicit” and “implicit” coverage refers to whether participants in L2 teacher education programs are provided with explanations, demonstrations, and practice specifically related to what is to be learned (explicit), or they are provided with examples, uses, instances, illustrations, or visualizations of a knowledge component without a direct reference about what is to be learned (implicit). In L2 teacher education,“theory-based content” may involve knowledge of L1 and/or L2 learning/acquisition theories, L2 methodological approaches, and certain grammatical or pragmatic features, among other components. On the other hand, “competence-based content” relates to the development of skills or abilities to carry through something successfully or efficiently (e.g., participating actively in several oral interactions during a social event, or understanding the underlying meaning of certain contributions to those oral interactions). For instance, a teacher-education module or course focused on the main features of L2 teaching methods (theory-based content) could expose participants to a range of teaching strategies and activities linked to the most popular methodological options for present or future teachers (e.g.,Total Physical Response, Direct Method, Comprehensible Input) without any open reference to their pragmatic dimensions (implicit coverage). Similarly, the content of a different module or course could address some specific pragmatic features (e.g., speech acts) (theory-based) discussed in relation to both their meaning and their geographical and/or social variation (explicit coverage). In other contexts, a module or course could introduce participants (explicit coverage) to several strategies and/or specific actions related to L2 pragmatic competence (competence-based content). In general, it might be expected that the introduction of either theory- or competence-based pragmatic content in L2 teacher education through a more or less implicit or explicit coverage would reflect the way in which L2 pragmatics has been defined by (a) major curricular frameworks used in the articulation of L2 programs, the design of course syllabi, and the development of teaching materials; and (b) key recommendations and/or standards for the preparation of L2 teachers.The following subsections will examine these two points with respect to U.S. and European institutional and professional contexts for Spanish L2 teachers from a variety of personal and professional backgrounds.1

2.1 Major L2 curricular frameworks and pragmatics As De Pablos-Ortega (2016) notes, the guidelines for language proficiency first launched in the 1980s by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), and most recently updated in 2012, “se limitan a presentar información sobre las estrategias de comunicación empleadas para negociar el significado y para comprender los mensajes, sin recoger información específica sobre el ámbito de la pragmática”‘are limited to presenting information on the communication strategies used to negotiate meaning and to understand messages, without gathering specific information about the context of the pragmatics’ (De Pablos-Ortega, 2016, p. 172). More specifically, the ACTFL guidelines describe the tasks or functions that learners can handle at each level (i.e., Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Superior, and for some languages, Distinguished), as well as the content, context, accuracy, and discourse types related to tasks/functions at each level. For example, the general description for speakers at an advanced level points out that they should be able to “engage in conversation in a clearly participatory manner in order to communicate information on autobiographical topics, as well as topics of community, national, or international interest . . . by means of narration and description in the major times of past, present and future,” with the paragraph as the key measure of Advanced-level discourse length and elaboration. In addition, advanced learners should be able to deal with diverse kinds of novel situations in social contexts; e.g.,“what would you say to a friend from whom you borrowed a laptop—or any other personal property—which has been either stolen or damaged beyond repair?” 471

Lacorte

A few more details about these linguistic features related to pragmatic behavior may be found in the 2017 National Council of State Supervisors for Languages (NCSSFL)-ACTFL Can-Do Statements (ACTFL, 2017), structured around the three modes of communication of the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (The National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015): (1) Interpretive: Learners understand, interpret, and analyze what is heard, read, or viewed on a variety of topics. (2) Interpersonal: Learners can interact and negotiate meaning in spoken, signed, or written conversations to share information, reactions, feelings, and opinions. (3) Presentational: Learners present information, concepts, and ideas to inform, explain, persuade, and narrate on a variety of topics using appropriate media and adapting to various audiences of listeners, readers, or viewers. For example, at an advanced level of interpersonal communication, the question “How can I meet my needs or address situations in conversations?” would be answered by this can-do statement:“I can interact and negotiate to resolve an unexpected complication that arises in a familiar situation, providing detailed explanations and ofering a variety of resolutions across major time frames.” Additionally, the Can-Do Statements for intercultural communication provide a range of examples and scenarios for learners to demonstrate the target language and their knowledge of culture. At an advanced level of intercultural communication, the proficiency benchmark is “I can interact at a competent level in familiar and some unfamiliar contexts,” while the two performance indicators are: (1) “I can converse comfortably with others from the target culture in familiar and some unfamiliar situations and show some understanding of cultural differences” (language); and (2) “I can demonstrate awareness of subtle differences among cultural behaviors and adjust my behavior accordingly in familiar and some unfamiliar situations” (behavior). In contrast to their U.S. counterparts, the European-based curricular frameworks provide explicit references to competences, strategies, and activities in the learning of L2 pragmatics. First, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, or MCER for its Spanish acronym; Council of Europe, 2001) divides the language user/learner’s competences into two major groups: (1) general competences (declarative knowledge, or savoir; skills and know-how, or savoir faire; “existential” competence, or savoir être; and ability to learn, or savoir apprendre); and (2) communicative language competences, which include linguistic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic competences.The latter concern the language user’s/learner’s knowledge of how messages are (a) organized, structured, and arranged (‘discourse competence’); (b) used to perform communicative functions (‘functional competence’); and (c) sequenced according to interactional and transactional schemata (‘design competence’; Council of Europe, 2001, p. 123). As part of a subsequent chapter about some methodological options for L2 learning and teaching, the CEFR introduces the question of whether the user’s/learner’s development of L2 pragmatic competence should be: (a) assumed to be transferable from education and general experience in the mother tongue (L1); or (b) facilitated through a range of options, including a gradual increase of complexity in discourse structures, tasks requiring a wider functional range of verbal exchange patterns, explicit teaching and exercising of language functions, verbal interaction patterns and discourse structures, and/or awareness-raising activities in addition to practical activities (Council of Europe, 2001, p. 154). The CFER Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2018) was written to elaborate on some of the most significant and productive concepts of the CEFR, such as the descriptors for certain 472

Pragmatics and teacher education

innovative areas that did not have rating scales in the 2001 text, or needed further details and/ or illustration. Regarding pragmatic competence, the illustrative descriptor scales in the CFER Companion Volume provide specific information concerning flexibility (“ability to adapt language learnt to new situations and to formulate thoughts in different ways”); turn-taking (“ability to take the discourse initiative”); thematic development (“the way in which ideas are logically presented in a text and related to each other”); coherence and cohesion (“the way in which the separate elements of a text are interwoven into a coherent whole”); propositional precision (“the ability to pinpoint how to formulate what one wishes to express”); and spoken fluency (“ability to construct utterances, despite hesitations and pauses; ability to maintain a lengthy production or conversation; and ease and spontaneity of expression”) (CFER Companion Volume, pp. 139–144).

2.2 Standards for L2 teacher preparation and pragmatics Contrary to the degree of detail about pragmatics provided by some of the aforementioned L2 curricular frameworks, the most common guides for L2 teacher preparation both in the U.S. and Europe offer rather scarce and vague standards and/or recommendations about the type of pragmatics content to be taught (“what”) and the way(s) in which they should be taught (“how”). In the U.S. context, ACTFL and the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) launched in 2002 their Program Standards for the Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers, later revised in 2013. Overall, these standards combine several CAEP principles (A:The learner and learning; B: Content; C: Instructional practice; and D: Professional responsibility) with ACTFL’s Six Content Standards (ACTFL/CAEP, 2015): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Language proficiency: Interpersonal, Interpretive, and Presentational Standard; Cultures, Linguistics, Literatures, and Concepts from Other Disciplines; Language Acquisition Theories and Knowledge of Students and Their Needs; Integration of Standards in Planning, Classroom Practice, and Use of Instructional Resources; Assessment of Languages and Cultures-Impact on Student Learning; and Professional Development,Advocacy, and Ethics.

More specifcally, pragmatics is included as part of one of the elements of Standard 2 (“Rules for sentence formation; discourse, sociolinguistic and pragmatic knowledge”), and defned in the following terms: [L2 teacher candidates] explain/identify/are aware of pragmatic and sociolinguistic features (e.g., politeness, formal/informal address) of the target discourse, how discourse features convey contextual and cultural meaning, and how they vary based on setting, communicative goal, and participants.They explain how coherence is achieved in spoken and written discourse. (ACTFL/CAEP, 2015, p. 12) In Europe, Las competencias clave del profesorado de lenguas segundas y extranjeras, a popular reference work for Spanish L2 teacher preparation, was published by the Instituto Cervantes in 2012, and recently updated in 2018. In general, this document is not intended as a list of compulsory knowledge and/or resources, but as a way “to redefine and improve basic teaching competences, as well as other qualities that language teachers should possess and have in common with other professionals” (Pastor Cesteros & Lacorte, 2015, p. 122). Out of the eight competences described in the document, the one centered on the development of intercultural competence among both L2 learners and language educators might be considered as loosely related to pragmatic 473

Lacorte

competence, while the other competences address varied areas such as instructional technology, involvement in the educational institution, or having students be more aware of their own learning process (Instituto Cervantes, 2012). Similar to Las competencias clave, the 2013 European Profiling Grid (EPG) project is an instrument intended to improve the quality and effectiveness of language training. Specifically, the EPG describes three main types of competences of L2 teachers (i.e., training and qualifications, key teaching competences, and enabling competences) and presents them in tabular form spanning six phases of development (an interactive e-Grid is available at http://egrid.epg-project. eu/en).As one dimension of the “Enabling Competences,” pragmatics might again be somehow linked to intercultural competence (EPG, 2013, p. 6). Finally, another set of online resources for L2 teacher preparation produced in both the U.S. and Europe is focused on the preceding standards and much more on practical applications of L2 pragmatics. For instance, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) at the University of Texas at Austin offers a module about pragmatics as part of its online course on Foreign Language Methods. It includes an introduction to pragmatics and intercultural communication, followed by explanations about the teaching of pragmatics in the L2 classroom (Koike, 2010). A more recent resource for teachers is the Pragmatics Wiki (http://wlpragmatics. pbworks.com/), which intends “to serve as a repository for teaching materials in a variety of target languages.” The resources offered by this wiki include video or audio recordings of natural discourse, instances of speech acts, examples of conversational management or mismanagement by speakers, and anecdotal accounts.Among other similar initiatives, a consortium of Spanish publishers (SGEL), universities (Salamanca), and institutions (Instituto Cervantes,Asociación para la Enseñanza del Español como Lengua Extranjera (ASELE) has organized the Programa de Desarrollo Profesional para profesores de español (PDP) since 2014 (https://microsites.edinumen.es/formacion). It provides open access to a program consisting of seven modules, each with interviews with experts, overviews on the topics, practical comprehension and discussion activities, relevant bibliography, and other activities through social media.While L2 pragmatics has not been considered as the main topic of any of the seven modules, it is discussed, for example, in relation to the sociocultural dimension of L2 learning, or the development of intercultural awareness among Spanish L2 learners. All the aforementioned resources offer a promising outlook for the integration of pragmatics in L2 teacher education. In his recent study about the role of pragmatics in Spanish L2 teacher training syllabi, De Pablos-Ortega (2016) indicates that more Spanish programs at U.S. universities include courses on pragmatics as part of a major or minor in Spanish linguistics (theory-based, explicit coverage) than before. However, the same subject is rarely taught as a component of programs or courses for future Spanish L2 teachers (implicit coverage), perhaps due to limited information about the subject included in the previously described L2 teacher preparation guides. On the other hand, De Pablos-Ortega (2016) notes that a growing number of graduate programs for future Spanish L2 teachers in Spain have implemented courses and content related to pragmatics (explicit coverage). Nevertheless, these contents are usually strongly geared toward certain phenomena that may be more easily categorized (theory-based) (e.g., Gómez Morón, Padilla Cruz, Fernández Amaya, & Hernández López, 2009; Pons Bordería, 2005;Vera Luján & Blanco Rodríguez, 2014), perhaps because of the current, commonly held view in the field of Spanish linguistics toward pragmatics as a secondary or subordinate area of Spanish grammar. In the same study, De Pablos-Ortega (2016) reports that three of the most theory-grounded topics in pragmatics (i.e., speech acts, verbal politeness, and “basic concepts”) have a significant presence in most of the syllabi analyzed, while other topics somewhat closer to pedagogical applications, such as pragmatic competence, nonverbal communication, or the treatment of pragmatic errors or misunderstandings, appear in only around 30% of the syllabi collected. 474

Pragmatics and teacher education

Considering the substantial value of context for L2 learning processes (e.g., De Bot, Lowie, Thorne, & Verspoor, 2013; Larsen-Freeman, 2012, 2019), and therefore the significance of integrating pragmatics in L2 teaching, the next section outlines a general approach to pragmatics in L2 teacher education based on (1) explicit attention to L2 teachers’ personal awareness about L2 pragmatics as either native or nonnative speakers of the language; (2) the gradual correlation between personal understanding about L2 pragmatics and a range of theoretical and pedagogical concepts and strategies; and (3) explicit exposure to both theory- and competence-based contents as part of the teacher preparation modules or courses.The eventual objective of such an approach to pragmatics in L2 teacher education is to encourage educators to apply their own pragmatic awareness through a variety of pedagogical tools and strategies suitable for Spanish L2 learners in any kind of instructional context.

2.3 Theoretical underpinnings and teacher preparation As mentioned in the introduction, our preferred approach to pragmatics in L2 teacher education draws on a sociocultural theoretical position, recommendations from pedagogical/instructional pragmatics, and an alternative stance toward the traditional distinction between ‘native’ and ‘nonnative’ speakers. Our goal is not to ‘rescue’ current and/or future, native and/or nonnative L2 teachers through a set of specific standards or a predetermined model for pragmatics in L2 teacher education. Rather, our goal is to offer these professionals an approach that promotes personal reflection on one’s own individual pragmatic experience and knowledge and a crucial step toward the understanding of both theoretical and pedagogical concepts and/or strategies.

2.3.1

Sociocultural theory and L2 teacher preparation

Based on Vygotsky’s (1978) work on social psychology, human cognition is understood as inherently social. Specifically, every cognitive function appears first on a social level between individuals and later on an individual level within the person’s mind. That is, being situated in diverse cultural environments allows individuals to develop representational systems, such as language, that eventually become the medium, mediator, and tools of thought (for further details see Lantolf & Poehner, 2014). Karen Johnson and her colleagues (Johnson, 2009, 2016; Johnson & Golombek, 2011, 2016) perceive L2 teacher education as: a process of appropriation of culturally valued patterns of the social situations within which teachers interact on a regular basis.Typically, this involves appropriating normative ways of acting and interacting that refect the values, assumptions, and attitudes that are embedded in the classrooms where teachers were once students, in the teacher education programs where they receive their professional credentialing, and in the schools where they eventually work. (Johnson & Kuerten Dellagnelo, 2015, p. 11) More specifcally, Johnson and Golombek (2011, 2018) redefne two types of concepts around which L2 teachers develop their professional careers.The frst and most visible, ‘everyday concepts’ concern teachers’ personal knowledge about teaching and learning in general, as well as their own experiences as learners, including those related to the explicit and implicit exposure to L2 pragmatics inside and outside the classroom; e.g., study abroad contexts or involvement with heritage learner communities.Therefore, these concepts are mainly based on “observations and/or generalizations gleaned from a surface-level understanding of what language learning and teaching is all about” (Johnson & Golombek, 2011, p. 2), and/or are “often one-sided . . . and 475

Lacorte

sometimes theoretically misinformed (e.g.,‘all students learn like me’)” (Johnson & Golombek, 2018, p. 444).This kind of experimental knowledge related to “empirical learning” may be seen as insufcient for the teachers’ professional development, but at the same time may be deeply ingrained in their attitudes and performance. For this reason, the transition toward ‘scientifc/ academic’ or ‘academic’ concepts (i.e., knowledge originated from systematic observations and theoretical investigations and presented in L2 teacher education programs) should be grounded in activities mediating between teachers’ personal experiences and theoretical and pedagogical dimensions in order to “promote the development of teachers’ expertise as well as their use of this expertise to transform their teaching” (Johnson & Golombek, 2018, p. 244). Otherwise, these programs run the risk of leaving prospective or current teachers with “empty verbalism”; that is, terms or notions that may be relevant at a purely theoretical level, but not internalized “in such a way that they become psychological tools for thinking” (Johnson & Golombek, 2011, p. 3). Johnson and Golombek (2011), and more recently Johnson (2016) and Johnson and Golombek (2018), note that achieving a productive and truly relevant relationship between these two types of concepts from language teachers’ first steps in their professional development continues to be a major challenge for programs that are “often disconnected in any substantive way from the practical goal-directed activities of actual teaching” (Johnson & Golombek, 2011, p. 2). For this reason, sociocultural theory applied to L2 teacher education underlines the importance of considering these concepts and the knowledge derived from them as interrelated. In other words, the constant mediation between what is taught, and how and where it is taught, should become an essential foundation for the development of teaching expertise.Table 27.1 shows the types of knowledge related to everyday and scientific/academic concepts that should be understood holistically in any teacher preparation program or activity. Drawing upon Cestero Mancera’s (2018) exploration of the subject, we have also included some examples related to nonverbal communication, an area of L2 pragmatics that has traditionally received limited attention in L2 teaching and learning. Table 27.1 Types of knowledge in L2 teacher development

Everyday concepts

Scientifc/academic concepts

476

Personal practical knowledge related to (a) personal experiences as L2 learners, and (b) procedures, strategies, techniques in everyday L2 teaching. Example: Nonverbal communication experienced by a teacher while interacting with other speakers of the L2 or studying L2 abroad (e.g., facial and bodily gestures and movements to indicate interest, attention, disregard, etc.), and how the teacher includes this type of communication as part of the instruction (e.g., through visual comparisons between L2 and L1 gestures and movements). Subject matter knowledge about the language and cultures that are taught. Example: Understanding of the main nonverbal communication systems and/or the fundamental characteristics of nonverbal signs so that L2 students can get a better sense of their functions and use in the context of the L2. General pedagogical knowledge about theoretical and pedagogical frameworks related to L2 teaching Example: Applying a communicative methodology successfully to develop nonverbal communication: (1) explicit or implicit presentation of nonverbal signs; (2) activities to practice and reinforce the learning of nonverbal signs; and (3) activities focused on the use of nonverbal signs outside the L2 classroom.

Pragmatics and teacher education

2.3.2

Pedagogical/instructional pragmatics and L2 teacher education

The aforementioned sociocultural notions of reflection on everyday concepts by L2 teachers and the mediation with scientific/academic concepts are educational processes closely related to the main tenets of pedagogical/instructional pragmatics. First, Murray (2009, 2012) defines pedagogical pragmatics as a more productive relationship between pragmatics and language teaching intended “to develop teaching techniques and materials that raise learners’ awareness and ultimately control of this crucial aspect of communication” (2009, p. 294). In this sense, Murray underlines the convenience of alternating three complementary types of strategies or actions that would allow teachers to develop their own pragmatic awareness: (1) inductive teaching strategies raise learners’ awareness by using an inductive, bottom-up approach whereby the observation of particulars (e.g., speech acts that reflect learner needs or interests) leads to an understanding of general principles; (2) deductive teaching strategies raise learners’ awareness by using a deductive, top-down approach through which learners develop an appreciation of those general, universal principles that govern linguistic choices (e.g., Grice’s Cooperative Principle) and the way in which we use language appropriately; and (3) empirically based teaching strategies derive from discussions about the results from studies on pragmatic aspects in relation to the learners’ own experiences with those aspects. In the context of L2 teacher preparation, activities structured around any of these types of strategies would allow participants to mediate between everyday concepts and scientifc/academic concepts in diferent complementary ways; among them, discussing the results from research conducted by specialists in L2 pragmatics and/or by the same participants in a more informal fashion. For his part, van Compernolle (2018) notes that L2 instructional pragmatics research has explored the extent to which learning environments can be intentionally organized to facilitate, on the one hand, the acquisition of pragmalinguistic conventions (e.g., request strategies) and, on the other, the development of sociopragmatic knowledge (e.g., which request strategy could be appropriate in context). (p. 211) While the author discusses the possible applications of this model in several L2 learning contexts (classroom, study abroad, technology-enhanced learning),Van Compernolle’s conceptbased pragmatics instruction (CBPI) model could also be useful for L2 teacher education programs in terms of its emphasis on high-quality explanations of relevant concepts (often with the support of diagrams and other visual aids), options for learners/teachers to put into their own words how they understand the concepts, and practice of the concepts through both problemsolving and communicative tasks (van Compernolle, 2014, 2018). Finally, recent work by Félix-Brasdefer (2019b) and Koike and Pearson (2019) underline the importance of (a) explicit strategies and instruction on L2 pragmatics, and (b) opportunities for reflection and practice based on authentic materials. For instance, Koike and Pearson (2019) outline three components for L2 pragmatics instruction: (1) Awareness: defining pragmatics as a linguistic system, highlighting pragmatic variation in the L1, and 477

Lacorte

emphasizing the importance of using language appropriately; (2) Input: providing examples through authentic materials in real contexts, and giving students opportunities to conduct their own research on pragmatics phenomena; and (3) Practice: assisting in the identification of pragmatic strategies in L2 communication, and using these strategies in activities in and outside the L2 classroom. Based on the similarities found in the models developed by the aforementioned experts regarding (a) L2 teacher education from a sociocultural perspective, and (b) L2 pedagogical/ instructional pragmatics, we suggest the following approach to pragmatics in L2 teacher education structured around three major stages (with examples adapted from De los Heros’s (2018) study on humor in the L2 classroom): (1) Raising awareness through pragmatic input: By means of inductive, deductive, and/or empirically based teaching strategies, the teacher educator explicitly asks participants to experience, explore, reflect upon, and/or discuss topics related to pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge of the L2, often in comparison or in contrast with the L1.As highlighted in the introduction, topics for this stage may be more easily categorizable (e.g., speech acts or types of implicatures) or the more abstract notions of cooperation, relevance, and courtesy, among others. Example: Participants in a L2 teacher education program are asked to answer some questions about the role of humor in the L2 classroom, and then discuss the comments about the same questions made by other participants in a recent research project (De los Heros, 2018, pp. 199–203). (2) Analyzing and reflecting on pragmatic input: The teacher educator implements a range of instructional techniques, such as those suggested by van Compernolle (2014, 2018), in order to explain or co-construct the key dimensions of the pragmatic topic under study so that participants can develop a more principled combination of personal, practical knowledge based on their common activities and experiences inside and outside the L2 classroom. It would also be based on subject matter knowledge, related in this case to the understanding of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic topics in Spanish L2 pragmatics. Example: Participants engage in reflection on, among other options, the most relevant theoretical approaches to humor in pragmatics, the main verbal and nonverbal features of humor, and/or its possible functions; e.g., to facilitate social alignment between strangers, to show bonding among participants of same or similar status, or to mitigate conflict between participants. (3) Applying analysis and reflection to pedagogical activities: The teacher educator focuses on the participants’ general pedagogical knowledge through the analysis of pedagogical activities involving Spanish L2 pragmatics that they could implement in their classroom, such as through dialogues, surveys, role plays, discourse completion tasks, virtual games, and telecollaboration. As a way to reinforce the connection between the teacher preparation process and the actual instructional sequence in the L2 classroom, many, if not all, of these activities should also be used in the first stage, when participants are exposed to pragmatic input and develop a pragmatic awareness. Example: Participants review and discuss different strategies for the integration of humor in the L2 classroom, such as individual/group collection and analysis of Spanish video clips and/or humorous texts from a range of media sources. The Figure 27.2 summarizes the main points of our proposed approach to pragmatics in L2 teacher-education modules or programs.  478

Pragmatics and teacher education

Figure 27.2 General approach to pragmatics in L2 teacher education

2.3.3.

“Native” and “nonnative” teachers and L2 pragmatics teacher preparation

The topic of ‘nativeness’ may seem particularly relevant if we understand L2 teaching and learning as activities inherently based on the collaboration between individuals with different profiles, abilities, and perspectives regarding L2. For this reason, we do not believe that the main goal of L2 teacher education should be replicating the skills of idealized ‘perfect language teachers’ nor trying to achieve the competence of idealized ‘native’ L2 teachers. Logically, any good L2 teacher should receive appropriate support and work hard to develop essential linguistic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic competences. However, L2 teacher education should also be concerned with the development of an awareness by language users and language educators about their personal and social agency2 in the L2, more critical competence, and more resources to interpret and produce a wide range of texts in diverse social spaces. All the standards and recommendations discussed in this chapter (ACTFL/CAEP, 2015; EPG, 2013; Instituto Cervantes, 2012) have been constructive steps forward in the professional development of pre- and in-service L2 instructors.Yet, a number of experts still remind us of the perseverance of the ‘native speaker model’ in L2 teaching and learning (e.g., Braine, 2010; Llurda, 2005), that is, native speakers are by nature the ideal L2 instructors (Cook, 1999). Possible consequences of this model involve: different perceptions toward native and nonnative instructors among students and colleagues; the self-image and confidence of those educators not favored by ‘native speaker model’ expectations; or even the limited professional opportunities for instructors with certain geographical and/or sociolinguistic backgrounds (Aslan & Thompson, 2016; Hertel & Sunderman, 2009;Thompson & Cuesta Medina, 2019;Thompson & Fioramonte, 2013). We recommend that direct, honest discussions about the issue of ‘native’ and ‘nonnative’ speakers/L2 teachers be included in any kind of Spanish L2 teacher preparation program, but 479

Lacorte

especially in those where pragmatics has been given appropriate consideration. When dealing with a field based precisely on the value of communication in diverse interactional, geographical, sociolinguistic, and/or institutional contexts, neither L2 learners nor L2 teachers should see themselves “as failures always trying to be like native speakers, [but] as successes, achieving things as L2 users that are out of the reach of monolinguals” (Cook, 2016, p. 188).Together with these discussions, both nonnative and native L2 teachers would greatly benefit from (a) the analysis of areas of teaching pragmatics where it may help the nonnative teacher and other areas for which being a native teacher may be convenient regarding intuitions about pragmatics, and (b) the development and exchange of activities focused on L2 pragmatics from which both groups of professionals may compensate for any gaps in their knowledge (Cohen, 2018). In general, it is important to move from seeing the words ‘native’ and ‘nonnative’ as opposites of a distinction, toward as a key source of collaboration between teachers with a variety of personal, cultural, and professional backgrounds.

3

Methodological considerations

As expected, an approach to pragmatics in L2 teacher education that deems personal reflection on one’s own individual pragmatic experiences and knowledge as important as the mediated understanding of theoretical/pedagogical notions, involves several relevant methodological considerations at different levels. First, designers and/or facilitators of courses, modules or workshops on L2 pragmatics for pre- and in-service instructors should make a genuine effort to include participants’ reflection and discussion about any type of topic in L2 pragmatics as an indispensable component of these activities. It is as important as establishing some type of order in the presentation of contents, if not more so, to ensure that these opportunities to raise an awareness about pragmatics phenomena help create one more step toward the understanding of related theoretical and/or pedagogical dimensions.That is, the goal is for more easily categorizable or abstract notions in L2 pragmatics. Second, curriculum creators should also emphasize both the analysis of pedagogical activities (e.g., role plays, surveys, games, dialogues, etc.) that participants could put into practice in their future or current classrooms.Ways must be found in which these activities could be adapted to the different personal, academic, and social contexts where the L2 may be taught, such as Spanish for learners of diverse age groups, courses for foreigners in Spanish-speaking countries or students in areas where Spanish is not a commonly used language, study abroad programs, Spanish for the professions, or Spanish for heritage learners, among other options.The chapters included in this volume constitute an excellent prime reference for further information about these and other learning and institutional environments. Finally, reflection, collaboration, and flexibility should be seen as necessary qualities not limited to individuals directly involved in programs dealing with L2 pragmatics; i.e., pre- and inservice instructors and teacher educators. For instance, the preparation of future Spanish teachers in universities in the U.S. is generally handled by departments or units housed in schools of education (e.g., L2 teaching methods, L2 learning/acquisition theories, teaching competencies and skills) and humanities (e.g., pragmatics in relation to other fields in Spanish linguistics, theories and basic concepts in L1/L2 pragmatics). As discussed in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, it is also important for these agents to be equally responsible for the development and implementation of L2 teacher education activities, to inform each other and collaborate in regard to both contents and, especially, the methodological approach outlined in Section 2.3.2 for pedagogical/instructional pragmatics and L2 teacher education. 480

Pragmatics and teacher education

4

Future directions and conclusion

This chapter began with a reference to the growing interest in pragmatics as an important area of L2 teaching and learning, precisely at a time when the notion of context has gained prominence in the fields of Second Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics. Next, the chapter described the role of pragmatics in current L2 curricular frameworks and standards for L2 teacher education. Drawing upon sociocultural theory applied to L2 teacher education and some key principles of pedagogical/instructional pragmatics, the final part of the chapter has outlined an approach to the integration of pragmatics in L2 teacher education that highlights the importance of mediation between personal practical knowledge (everyday concepts) and the subject matter/general pedagogical knowledge (scientific/academic concepts), through (1) an explicit approach to both theory- and strategy-based contents and materials; (2) a combination of inductive, deductive, and empirically based strategies to raise pragmatic awareness; and (3) a sequence of three major stages: raising awareness through pragmatic input, analyzing and reflecting on pragmatic input, and applying both analysis and reflection to pedagogical activities. In addition to emphasizing the important role of pragmatics in L2 teacher education, our model is intended to be useful for current or future language educators working in a variety of personal and professional scenarios (e.g., native and nonnative teachers, study abroad programs, heritage language courses, young and adult learners, hybrid and online programs), and to provide them with a preparation framework directly related to the way that we believe that pragmatics should be taught in the Spanish L2 classroom. We have placed special emphasis on the contributions that both nonnative and native instructors can make to the teaching of pragmatics in the L2 classroom through not only critical examination of the very notions of ‘native’ and ‘nonnative,’ but also the collaboration between instructors with different profiles, needs, and interests. Some relevant areas of future work could involve the relationship between the teaching of pragmatics and grammar in the context of L2 teacher education; e.g., considering the degree of attention to normative explanations for either area, the implementation of inductive, deductive, or empirically based strategies or activities, and the kind of attention that nonnative and native instructors would pay to either grammar or pragmatics in their preparation. More research is also needed about L2 teacher beliefs and attitudes regarding the teaching of L2 pragmatics, and the space it should be assigned as part of the teacher education process. At a more general level, we need much more detail about the role assigned to pragmatics (if at all) in the curriculum of current Spanish L2 teacher education programs in a wider variety of geographical and institutional contexts, as well as about the knowledge gained by participants in these programs.A more accurate assessment of pragmatics in L2 teacher education would inform the development of quality pedagogical and professional resources for all types of L2 instructors, who in turn would find it easier to engage diverse populations of students with a more dynamic, interactive, and authentic view of language learning.

Notes 1 A variety of resources of interest for Spanish L2 pragmatics are available online in sites such as the Instituto Cervantes (http://cvc.cervantes.es/Ensenanza/Biblioteca_Ele/plan_curricular/default.htm), Dancing with Words (https://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html), the Indiana University Pragmatics Website (https://pragmatics.indiana.edu), Corpus Español Multimodal de Actos de Habla (www.lllf.uam.es/coremah/), Fonocortesía (www.fonocortesia.es/),Atlas interactivo de la entonación del español (http://prosodia.upf.edu/atlasentonacion/index.html), and Diccionario de partículas discursivas del español (www.dpde.es/#/). Further information and in-depth discussion about these sites and other resources for instructional pragmatics can be found in other chapters in this volume. 481

Lacorte

2 “Teacher agency” is defined here as the capacity of teachers to act purposefully and constructively to direct their professional growth and contribute to the growth of their colleagues (for further information see Kalaja, Barcelos,Aro, & Ruohotie-Lythy, 2016; Kay-Aydar, Gao, Miller, & Varghese, 2019).

Further reading Cohen,A. (2019). Considerations in assessing pragmatic appropriateness in spoken language. Language Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444819000156 A revised version of a plenary that offers an insightful perspective about recent developments in the assessment of L2 pragmatics in spoken language. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019a). Pragmática del español. Contexto, uso y variación. New York: Routledge. An excellent resource for both students and instructors of Spanish with appealing descriptions of a wide variety of topics in pragmatics and discourse. Gironzetti, E., & Koike, D. (2016). Bridging the gap in Spanish instructional pragmatics: From theory to practice/Acortando distancias en la enseñanza de la pragmática del español: de la teoría a la práctica. [Special issue]. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2). A wide perspective on Spanish pragmatics instruction with scholars from diverse institutional backgrounds and with differing concerns and areas of research interest. Koike, D. A. (2010). Pragmatics. In C. Blyth (Ed.), Foreign language teaching methods. Austin, TX: COERLL– The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved from http://coerll.utexas.edu/methods A very clear and useful presentation about the role of pragmatics in L2 teaching, especially for student teachers and/or instructors with limited experience in this area. Koike, D. A., & Pearson, L. (2019). Pragmática. In J. Muñoz-Basols, E. Gironzetti, & M. Lacorte (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish language teaching (pp. 382–397). London: Routledge. An overview of recent approaches to Spanish L2 pragmatics acquisition and teaching, together with interesting pedagogical suggestions, strategies, and resources for teaching L2 pragmatics.

References ACTFL. (2012). ACTFL performance descriptors for language learners. Retrieved from www.actfl.org/sites/ default/files/pdfs/public/ACTFLProficiencyGuidelines2012_FINAL.pdf ACTFL. (2017). NCSSFL-ACTFL can-do statements. Retrieved from www.actfl.org/publications/ guidelines-and-manuals/ncssfl-actfl-can-do-statements ACTFL/CAEP. (2015). Program standards for the preparation of foreign language teachers. Retrieved from www. actfl.org/sites/default/files/CAEP/ACTFLCAEPStandards2013_v2015.pdf Aslan, E., & Thompson, A. S. (2016). Are they really “two different species”? Implicitly elicited student perceptions about NESTs and NNESTs. TESOL Journal, 8(2), 277–294. Bernal, M., & Hernández Flores, N. (2016).Variación sociopragmática en la enseñanza del español: aplicación didáctica de un cuestionario de hábitos sociales. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 114–126. Braine, G. (2010). Non-native speaker English teachers: Research, pedagogy, and professional growth. London: Routledge. Carroll, B. (2019).Assessing L2 pragmatics: Issues and considerations. Studies in Applied Linguistics & TESOL at Teachers College, Columbia University, 19(1), 35–41. Cestero Mancera, A. M. (2018). Nonverbal communication in L2 Spanish teaching. In D. Dumitrescu & P. L.Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics. From research to teaching (pp. 90–107). New York: Routledge. Cohen,A. (2008).Teaching and assessing L2 pragmatics:What can we expect from learners? Language Teaching, 41(2), 213–235. Cohen, A. (2018). Learning pragmatics from native and nonnative language teachers. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Cohen,A. (2019). Considerations in assessing pragmatic appropriateness in spoken language. Language Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444819000156 Cook,V. (1999). Going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 33(2), 185–189. Cook,V. (2016).Where is the native speaker now? TESOL Quarterly, 50(1), 186–189. 482

Pragmatics and teacher education

Cook, V., & Li Wei (Eds.). (2016). The Cambridge handbook of linguistic  multi-competence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Council of Europe. (2001). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from https://rm.coe.int/16802fc1bf Council of Europe. (2018). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Companion volume with new descriptors. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Retrieved from www.coe.int/en/ web/common-european-framework-reference-languages. De Bot, K., Lowie, W., Thorne, S., & Verspoor, M. (2013). Dynamic systems theory as a comprehensive theory of second language development. In M. P. García Mayo, M. J. Gutiérrez Mangado, & M. Martínez Adrián (Eds.), Contemporary approaches to second language acquisition (pp.  199–220). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. De los Heros, S. (2018).Teaching with and about humor in the L2 Spanish classroom. In D. Dumitrescu & P. L.Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics. From research to teaching (pp. 191–213). New York: Routledge. De Pablos-Ortega, C. (2016). Pragmática en la formación de profesores de español como segunda lengua. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 171–188. Dumitrescu, D., & Andueza, P. L. (Eds.). (2018). L2 Spanish pragmatics. From research to teaching. New York: Routledge. European Profiling Grid. (2013). The European profiling grid. Retrieved from www.epg-project.eu/ wp-content/uploads/The-EPG-PDF-publication_EN.pdf Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019a). Pragmática del español. Contexto, uso y variación. New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019b). El componente pragmático. In F. Jiménez Calderón & A. Rufat Sánchez (Eds.), Manual de formación para profesores de ELE (pp. 189–209). Madrid: SGEL. Gironzetti, E., & Koike, D.A. (2016). Bridging the gap in Spanish instructional pragmatics: From theory to practice/Acortando distancias en la enseñanza de la pragmática del español: De la teoría a la práctica. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 89–98. Gómez Morón, R., Padilla Cruz, M., Fernández Amaya, L., & Hernández López, M. (Eds.). (2009). Pragmatics applied to language teaching and learning. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hertel, T., & Sunderman, G. (2009). Student attitudes toward native and non-native language instructors. Foreign Language Annals, 42(3), 468–482. Instituto Cervantes. (2012). Las competencias clave del profesor de segundas lenguas. Retrieved from https://cvc. cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/competencias/competencias_profesorado.pdf Johnson, K. (2009). Second language teacher education.A sociocultural perspective. New York: Routledge. Johnson, K. (2016). Language teacher education. In G. Hall (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of English language teaching (pp. 121–134). New York: Routledge. Johnson, K., & De C. Kuerten Dellagnelo, A. (2015). L2/FL teacher education: Bridging the complexities of teaching and the learning of teaching. Ilha Do Desterro, 68(1), 11–16. Johnson, K., & Golombek, P. (Eds.). (2011). Research on second language teacher education.A sociocultural perspective on professional development. New York: Routledge. Johnson, K., & Golombek, P. (2016). Mindful L2 teacher education: Sociocultural perspective on cultivating teachers’ professional development. New York: Routledge. Johnson, K., & Golombek, P. (2018). Making L2 teacher education matter through Vygotskian-inspired pedagogy and research. In J. Lantolf, M. Poehner, & M. Swain (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of sociocultural theory and second language development (pp. 443–456). London: Routledge. Kalaja, P., Barcelos,A. M.,Aro, M., & Ruohotie-Lythy, M. (Eds.). (2016). Beliefs, agency and identity in foreign language learning and teaching. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kay-Aydar, H., Gao, A., Miller, E., & Varghese, M. (Eds.). (2019). Theorizing and analyzing language teacher agency. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Koike, D.A. (2010). Pragmatics. In C. Blyth (Ed.), Foreign language teaching methods.Austin,TX: COERLL-The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved from http://coerll.utexas.edu/methods Koike, D. A., & Pearson, L. (2019). Pragmática. In J. Muñoz-Basols, E. Gironzetti, & M. Lacorte (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish language teaching (pp. 382–397). London: Routledge. Lantolf, J., & Poehner, M. (2014). Sociocultural theory and the pedagogical imperative in L2 education:Vygotskian praxis and the research/practice divide. New York: Routledge. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2012). Complexity theory. In S. Gass & A. Mackey (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 73–87). London: Routledge. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2019). On language learner agency: A complex dynamic systems theory perspective. The Modern Language Journal, 103(Suppl. 1), 61–79. 483

Lacorte

Llurda, E. (2005). Non-native language teachers: Perceptions, challenges, and contributions to the profession. New York: Springer. Llurda, E. (2016). Native speakers, English, and ELT: Changing perspectives. In G. Hall (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of English language teaching (pp. 51–63). London: Routledge. Murray, N. (2009). Pragmatics, awareness raising, and the Cooperative Principle.ELT Journal,64(3), 293–301. Murray, N. (2012). English as a lingua franca and the development of pragmatic competence. ELT Journal, 66(3), 318–326. National Standards Collaborative Board. (2015). World-readiness standards for learning languages. Alexandria, VA: ACTFL. Pastor Cesteros, S., & Lacorte, M. (2015).Teacher education. In M. Lacorte (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Hispanic applied linguistics (pp. 117–133). New York: Routledge. Placencia, M. E., & Padilla, X.A. (2019). Guía práctica de pragmática del español. New York: Routledge. Pons Bordería, S. (2005). La enseñanza de la pragmática en la clase de E/LE. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Roever, C. (2014).Assessing pragmatics. In A. J. Kunnan (Ed.), The companion to language assessment (pp. 1–15). Boston, MA: John Wiley-Blackwell. Taguchi, N. (Ed.). (2019). The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and pragmatics. London: Routledge. Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second language pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, A., & Cuesta Medina, J. (2019). Profesores no nativos. In J. Muñoz-Basols, E. Gironzetti, & M. Lacorte (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish language teaching (pp. 720–733). London: Routledge. Thompson,A., & Fioramonte,A. (2013). Nonnative speaker teachers of Spanish: Insights from novice teachers. Foreign Language Annals, 45(4), 564–579. Toth, P., & Davin, K. (2016).The sociocognitive imperative of L2 pedagogy. The Modern Language Journal, 100(1), 148–168. van Compernolle, R. (2014). Sociocultural theory and L2 instructional pragmatics. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. van Compernolle, R. (2018). Concept-based pragmatics instruction. Principles and applications. In J. Lantolf, M. Poehner, & M. Swain (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of sociocultural theory and second language development (pp. 211–228). London: Routledge. van Compernolle, R., Weber, A., & Gomez-Laich, M. P. (2016). Teaching L2 Spanish sociopragmatics through concepts:A classroom-based study. The Modern Language Journal, 100(1), 341–361. Vera Luján,A., & Blanco Rodríguez, M. (2014). Cuestiones de pragmática en la enseñanza del español como 2/L. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Vera Luján, A., & Martínez, I. (2019). Actuar y hablar en español: la pragmática en el PCIC. In C. López Ferrero & J-T. Pujolà (Eds.), La didáctica de lenguas de par en par (pp. 204–223). Barcelona: Difusión. Vygotsky, L.V. (1978). Mind in society. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

484

28 The impact of study abroad on L2 Spanish pragmatics development Àngels Llanes

1

Introduction

Second language acquisition can typically occur in four primary contexts1 (Freed, Segalowitz, & Dewey, 2004): the naturalistic setting, study abroad (SA), immersion (IM), and foreign language (FL) instruction.The first two settings occur in the second language (L2) or FL, but they differ from each other in that learners in a naturalistic setting usually move to the L2 country for an indefinite period of time, whereas learners in an SA setting do so for a definite period of time (typically from two weeks to one academic year). However, what these contexts have in common is that while learners are in the L2 country, exposure to the L2 is supposedly unlimited and provides multiple opportunities to practice the L2 with a variety of interlocutors. Additionally, the input they receive is authentic and varied.The IM and the FL instructed settings occur in the students’ home country, so the amount and quality of input are supposedly of less and sometimes worse quality than that in naturalistic and SA settings, and less varied and authentic. Another commonality between the IM and the FL instructed settings is that the use of the L2 is usually restricted to the institution. However, in the IM setting the L2 is the vehicular language and is used most of the time in the institution, whereas in the FL instructed setting the L2 is used only in the L2 class (usually three to four hours per week).Another difference between the IM and the FL settings is that, in the latter, the L2 teacher is the only expert interlocutor that students have (although students are encouraged to use the L2 to communicate with each other, they hardly ever do so), whereas in the IM setting students have more interlocutors. Intuitively, it seems that engagement in an SA context leads to significant gains in the L2, probably due to the intensive amount of exposure to the L2, the amount of input received while abroad, and the multiple opportunities for practice and interaction in the L2.Whereas this has been proven to be true for some L2 areas such as oral skills, other areas such as reading or writing have either been neglected or results are far from clear (Lafford, 2006;Taguchi & Collentine, 2018), and consequently, no conclusions can be drawn. One area that needs further investigation is pragmatics, which deals with “the functional use of language within a social, cognitive, and cultural context” (Koike, Pearson, & Witten, 2003, p. 161).The impact that the SA context has on pragmatics is especially relevant because pragmatics knowledge entails not only pragmalinguistic competence (that is, the linguistic strategies and resources needed to encode and decode 485

Llanes

a given illocution), but also sociopragmatic competence, which is concerned with “the rules and conventions of situationally, culturally, and socially appropriate and acceptable language use” (Laughlin, Wain, & Schmidgall, 2015, p.  8) (this distinction was introduced by Leech [1983] and Thomas [1983]). Given that students in learning contexts such as the naturalistic or the SA ones are supposedly exposed to appropriate pragmatic behavior and have ample opportunities to apply and practice pragmalinguistic knowledge, they have more opportunities to develop pragmatic knowledge than learners in other learning contexts. In other words, participants in a naturalistic or SA context have the opportunity to use the L2 for real purposes with different interlocutors and of different status, from low status (i.e., local friends or classmates) to high(er) status (i.e., a professor or a doctor). In contrast, students in an FL-instructed setting often lack enough (adequate) exposure to the L2 and opportunities for pragmatic features to develop since L2 use is usually restricted to the hours assigned to its teaching and the L2 teacher is often the sole provider of input.Thus, in the FL context, students are often deprived of opportunities for learning or developing their pragmatic competence. For these reasons, with such a rich environment, it is expected that SA students’ pragmatic competence will expand rapidly. Far from the scant opportunities for authentic pragmatics use that participants in an FL setting have, students in an SA context have many chances to expand their L2 pragmatic knowledge in real-life settings. This chapter examines studies on SLA in the SA context to verify if this assumption holds true, and in what areas of language they could make gains. It is important to verify this because although SA students seem to have the optimal conditions to learn (the pragmatics features of) the L2, not all of them succeed in doing so despite the economic and educational implications that engaging in an SA program entails. This chapter is organized as follows. First, a review of the existing research is provided, where the most relevant studies of pragmatics conducted with participants engaging in an SA program in a Spanish-speaking country are included. Second, some current methodological considerations are pinpointed; and finally, some suggestions for further research and some conclusions are provided.

2

Review of existing research

Cross-cultural communication varies depending on the cultures, and there is a body of research in pragmatics, which has grown exponentially over the past 10 years, that attests to it (Taguchi, 2015).These studies have focused on several aspects of L2 pragmatics, from offers, refusals, and requests, to greetings or leave-takings among others, and although studies in L2 pragmatics abound, findings are not conclusive (Taguchi, 2015,2019). Despite the large number of studies on pragmatics, when the focus of the study is the development of a particular aspect of L2 pragmatics in an SA context, the number of studies is reduced significantly; when Spanish is the target language, the number of studies is even smaller.Table 28.1 displays a review of 18 studies focusing on L2 Spanish pragmatics development in an SA context.

2.1

Commonlyinvestigated speech acts

The few studies that document the L2 Spanish development as a result of an SAan SA experience have mostly focused on requests. One of the studies that documents request strategy use in L2 Spanish in an SA context is Bataller (2010), which explored the request usage of a group of North American college students (n=31) studying abroad in Spain for four months. In order to gather the data, Bataller’s participants interacted with a native speaker (NS) of Spanish by means of a role play that triggered the use of requests.The author found that participants’ requests strategies changed slightly from the pre- to the posttest, approximating the NS’s norms. However, 486

SA (n= 67)

SA (n= 15)

Félix-Brasdefer (2009)

Bataller (2010) SA (n= 31) & NS Spanish (n= 32)

Mostly family

Accommodation

23.8

(Mean) age

6 weeks– 30 months

LoS

Advanced

Initial L2 profciency level

English Latin America Family (n= 12) & religious mission (n= 3) English Spain n.a. 20

23.8

4 months

n.a.

4–24 months Advanced

Family (n= 64), Undergraduates 1 semester n.a. student dormitory (n= 14), private apartment with roommates (n=13) & private apartment alone (n=1). English Spain & Latin- Family (n= 56) & 20 1 semester n.a. America student dormitory (4–5 months) (n= 11)

Shively and Cohen (2008)

Cohen and Shively (2007)

SA (n= 24) English Mexico, & NS Spanish Venezuela, (n= 20) & NS Ecuador, English (n= 20) Cuba, Chile & Guatemala Instructed SA Mostly Spanish (n= 42) &non- (82/86) & French instructed SA English speaking (n= 44) countries

Destination/s

Félix-Brasdefer (2004)

L1

Participants

Study

Table 28.1 Review of the literature of SA Spanish pragmatics

Role play interaction with NSs of Spanish

Background questionnaire, Language Contact Profle (LCP), Intercultural Development Inventory, request and apology written questionnaire Role-play

Face-to-face intervention for learning speech acts, self-study guide book, journals

Role plays and retrospective verbal report

Instrument/s

Requests

Refusals

Requests and apologies

Requests and apologies

Refusals

Topic

(Continued )

SA somehow benefcial

SA benefcial

SA benefcial

SA benefcial

Longer LoS better at refusing

Results

SA (n= 12) & AH (n= 12) & NS Spanish (n= 15)

SA (n= 10)

SA (n= 1)

SA (n=1)

SA (n= 25) & English Mexico AH (n= 10) & NS Spanish (n= 15) & NS English (n= 15)

Félix-Brasdefer (2013)

Reynolds-Case (2013)

Shively (2013)

Dings (2014)

Felix-Brasdefer and HaslerBarker (2015)

English Spain

English Spain

English Spain

English Mexico

English Spain

Instructed SA (n= 7)

Destination/s

Shively (2011)

L1

Participants

Study

Table 28.1 (Continued)

Family

Family

Family

n.a.

Family

Family (n= 6) & dorm (n= 1)

Accommodation

8 weeks

1 semester (14 weeks)

LoS

21.9

Undergraduate

21

1 academic year 8 weeks & delayed posttest 4 months afterwards

1 semester

Undergraduates 4 weeks

20.58

20.5

(Mean) age

Topic

Alignment activity Compliments

L2 humor development

Usage “vosotros” vs. “ustedes”

Naturalistic Apologies and audio recordings, requests journals, interviews, background questionnaire Multimedia Refusals Elicitation Task, LCP

Instrument/s

Intermediate- Pre-departure advanced survey &shortanswer question, observation while abroad, post-program survey Intermediate- Naturalistic high/ audio recordings, advanced weekly journals Intermediate- Naturalistic high video-recordings n.a. Discourse Completion Task (DCT)

Advanced

Variable

Initial L2 profciency level

SA benefcial

SA benefcial

SA benefcial

SA benefcial (in terms of using + indirect strategies) SA benefcial

SA benefcial

Results

English Spain

English Spain

SA (n= 20)

SA (n= 6)

Hernández (2016) Shively (2016)

SA (n= 17), NSs of Spanish (n= 15)

Czerwionka and Cuza (2017b)

English Argentina

English Spain

Hernández and Instructed Boero (2018a) SA (n= 7)

Hernández and Instructed Boero (2018b) SA (n= 15)

English Spain

SA (n=17), NSs English Spain Spanish (n= 15)

Czerwionka and Cuza (2017a)

English Spain

SA (n= 6)

Destination/s

Shively (2015)

L1

Participants

Study

Family

Family

Family

Family

n.a.

Family

Family

Accommodation

Initial L2 profciency level Naturalistic audiorecordings, journals, interviews

Instrument/s

19–30

19–23

21.2

5 weeks & delayed posttest 4 weeks

6 weeks

n.a.

Most advanced

n.a.

DCT, retrospective verbal reports

Role-plays

DCT

Intermediate Written DCT, and advanced LCP, Undergraduates One semester n.a. Naturalistic audio recordings, weekly journal entries, 1 interview 19–22 6 weeks n.a. DCT, pragmatic felicity judgment task

One semester n.a.

LoS

Undergraduates 4 weeks

20.50

(Mean) age

Requests

Assessments (utterances that evaluate one’s or others’ talk) Requests (personal deictic information, directness of requests & use of por favor) Requests (personal deictic info and directness of requests) Request strategies

Requests

Interactional competence (listener’s responses)

Topic

SA benefcial

Instruction + SA effective

SA benefcial

SA benefcial

SA benefcial

SA benefcial

SA highly benefcial

Results

Llanes

when the data produced by the learners of Spanish were compared to those of a group of NSs of Spanish, the results showed that the difference between the two groups was significant, indicating that despite their improvement, L2 learners were still far from native-like in their performance. In two more recent studies, Czerwionka and Cuza (2017a, 2017b) also provide evidence of the impact of an SA experience on the development of L2 requests. However, these authors focused on a short SA experience of six weeks. More specifically, in their first study the authors (2017a) analyzed the types of requests used as well as the participants’ pragmatic intuitions about certain requests after six weeks in Spain. The data, gathered through an oral Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and a felicity judgment task, showed that participants developed their pragmatic competence in terms of request strategies and intuitions regarding requests (aligning with NSs norms). In their second study, the authors (2017b) provide more evidence on the development of requests during a six-week SA experience in Spain.They explored the personal deictic orientation and directness of the requests and found that after the SA experience, participants shifted from a speaker-oriented to hearer-oriented perspective, following NSs’ norms. Hernández (2016) also investigated L2 Spanish requests during an SA experience. However, the author focused on an even shorter SA experience (four weeks). Hernández’s participants, 20 North American college students of Spanish, engaged in a four-week SA program in Spain. Participants were administered a pre- and posttest written DCT, and a Language Contact Profile (LCP) in the posttest. Hernández found a positive SA impact since the participants’ request production was rated as more native-like in the posttest and some of the students employed more strategies used by NSs of Spanish.Another study that examined request development in Spanish during a short SA program is Hernández and Boero (2018a), although participants in this study received explicit pedagogical intervention (see Chapter 29 for an overview of the effects of pragmatics instruction in study abroad contexts, this volume).The authors explored the request strategy development of seven SA participants (n= 7) who engaged in a five-week SA program in Spain. Participants first received 90 minutes of instruction on requests before going abroad; then they were asked to perform several role plays.The authors found that participants used more target-like request strategies in the posttest. Elaborating on the results of their previous study (2018a), Hernández and Boero (2018b) found that the combination of the pedagogical intervention with SA participation had a positive impact since students (n= 15) improved significantly in their request performance between the pre- and posttests. However, from the studies by Hernández and Boero it is not clear whether improvement derives from the pedagogical intervention, participation in an SA experience, or a combination of both. Such is not the case in Cohen and Shively’s (2007) study, which compared the development of requests and apologies over an SA experience of two groups of participants; one that received instruction and one that did not. Their participants were mostly North American university students, learners of L2 Spanish or French, who engaged in a semester-long SA experience in Spanish- or French-speaking countries. Participants in the experimental group (n= 42) received instruction on requests and apologies, whereas participants in the control group (n= 44) did not. The authors found improvement in requests and apologies strategies in the posttest, but they did not find any statistically significant differences between those who received instruction and their uninstructed counterparts. Hence, this study indicates that improvement in L2 pragmatics is more likely to come from participation in an SA program than from the pedagogical intervention. One year later, Shively and Cohen (2008) further explored the L2 development of requests and apologies as a consequence of an SA experience.Their North American university students (n= 67) engaged in a semester-long study abroad experience in Spain or Latin America. Participants completed a background questionnaire, the LCP, and a written questionnaire on requests and apologies before and after their SA experience.Additionally, participants completed 490

Study abroad on L2 pragmatics development

the Intercultural Development Inventory, which is a 50-item questionnaire that assesses intercultural competence (defined as “a critical capability in a number of studies focusing on overseas effectiveness of international sojourners, international business adaptation and job performance, international student adjustment, international transfer of technology and information, international study abroad, and inter-ethnic relations within nations”; https://idiinventory.com/products/).The authors found that participants improved significantly in the use of requests and their degree of interculturality as a result of the semester abroad. Moreover, the authors found that these gains were related to the amount of time participants had spent speaking Spanish out of class and to the frequency with which the student had an extended conversation in Spanish with the host family during study abroad. One more study that explores the development of Spanish requests and apologies over a semester-long SA program was that of Shively (2011). Shively instructed her SA participants on L2 requests and apologies, but here instruction was not only at the beginning of the SA program, but also in the middle. However, instead of asking her participants (n=7) to complete a test on requests and apologies before and after the SA experience, Shively also asked the participants to record themselves in service encounters in Spain. These recordings were made at the beginning, middle, and end of their SA sojourn.The author found that over the semester, learners changed toward the L2 norms despite individual variation. In sum, the studies that have focused on the development of L2 requests and apologies over an SA experience indicate that the SA learning context has a positive impact regardless of the duration of the program. What is not so clear is the impact that instruction on the target items has on their development. Another topic of L2 pragmatics in the SA context that has also received some attention from scholars is that of refusals, and evidence of the impact that an SA experience has on the refusals development in L2 Spanish is found largely in work by Félix-Brasdefer. In 2004, the author explored the ability to negotiate and mitigate a refusal by 24 learners of Spanish engaged in SA experiences of different Lengths of Stay (LoS) in several Latin American countries. Using role plays and verbal reports, the author concluded that the LoS influenced positively the ability to negotiate and mitigate a refusal (participants with a longer LoS had a greater ability to negotiate and mitigate refusals, approximating NSs norms). In a later study, Félix-Brasdefer (2013) explored the production of refusals of 12 U.S. college students engaged in an eight-week SA program in Mexico.The author included two comparison groups: one group of students learning Spanish at home (AH; in their home country, n= 12), and another group of NSs of Spanish as a baseline for comparison (n= 15).The participants were asked to respond orally to 15 situations focusing on several L2 pragmatics aspects in a Multimedia Elicitation Task (three of the situations targeting the use of refusals) at the beginning and end of their SA experience.The author found that SA participants produced a higher number of strategies than their AH counterparts (n=380 for the SA group, and n=269 for the AH group), but both groups of L2 learners showed comparable gains. However, the groups of L2 learners differed significantly from the NS group. Félix-Brasdefer (2009) also examined refusals after an SA experience, although the author did not focus on the development of refusals before and after the SA experience, but rather on the type of strategies used to negotiate a resolution after refusing an invitation, suggestion, or request by a NS of Spanish of a higher status than the participant.This cross-sectional study included 15 L1-English learners of Spanish who had spent between four and 24 months in a Latin American country.After asking the learners to participate in an open roleplay to elicit the data, the author found that the learners used a variety of strategies, both direct and indirect, and the interactional input provided by the NS was key to resolving the conversation successfully. Hence, no conclusive results can be drawn from the studies that examined the development of refusals in an SA context because some of them did not include a control group, and for those that did, results did not clearly favor a specific group. 491

Llanes

2.2

Understudied pragmatic features

The impact of an SA experience on other L2 pragmatic features has also been examined, although these are certainly understudied areas. Reynolds-Case (2013), for example, documented the effects of a short SA experience on the usage of vosotros (‘you’ informal) and ustedes (‘you’ formal).The 10 North American university students that participated in the Reynolds-Case’s study engaged in a four-week SA program in Spain. Prior to their departure, participants completed a survey that triggered the use of the target forms under study and a short-answer question about the amount of prior exposure to the target forms. One week after their return from Spain, participants completed another survey targeting the L2 forms under study.The author found that after studying abroad, participants improved their understanding of the two different pronouns and their appropriate use of ustedes. Another topic that has also been investigated as a result of an overseas experience is complimenting in an L2. Félix-Brasdefer and Hasler-Barker (2015) compared the ability to compliment in Spanish by two groups of U.S. university students; one engaged in an 8-week SA program in Mexico (n= 25), and the other one learning Spanish AH (n= 12). The authors also included a group of NSs of English (n= 15) and NSs of Spanish (n= 15) as a baseline for comparison.After administering a DCT to their participants at the beginning and end of their stay, the authors found that the SA participants improved in the use of some strategies toward the NS norm, whereas AH participants did not show any statistically significant differences between the pre- and posttest. Additionally, the authors asked four of the SA participants to answer a delayed posttest four months after their return from the target country and found that they increased or retained their overall production strategies from the pre- or posttest to the delayed posttest. However, they also found that none of the groups of L2 learners approximated the NSs’ compliment patterns. Evidence from another underexplored pragmatics feature comes from Dings (2014), who investigated the impact of an SA experience on L2 interactional competence and alignment activity. Alignment activity refers to “the complex means by which human beings effect coordinated interaction, and maintain that interaction in dynamically adaptive ways” (Atkinson, Churchill, Nishino, & Okada, 2007, p. 169). Dings reports on a case study by an L1 English learner of Spanish who spent an academic year in Spain and was videotaped in naturalistic videorecordings six times over the academic year.The author found changes in participation by the learner, which allowed her to play a more active role in the interactions and consequently increase her contributions to co-construction in communication. Three other clearly unexplored pragmatics features were investigated by Shively. In 2013, Shively reported on the development of humor in Spanish in a university student engaged in a semester-long SA program in Spain.The naturalistic audiorecordings and the weekly journals of the participant revealed that the learner developed some spontaneous use of humor during the SA experience. Shively (2015) examined the impact of an SA experience on L2 interactional competence; namely, the listener’s responses.The six U.S. college students in Shively’s study were asked to record themselves in naturalistic conversations several times throughout their semester abroad in Spain. Participants were also asked to write a journal and to participate in interviews. The author found that participants developed an interactional competence during their sojourn. Finally, Shively (2016) explored the development of assessments, which are “utterances that evaluate one’s or other’s talk” (Shively, 2016, p. 157), over a semester abroad by six U.S. university students learning Spanish in Spain. Again, the author asked participants to record themselves in authentic conversations with NSs, keep a journal during their semester abroad, and participate in an interview.The author found that students expanded their assessments and broadened their repertoire as a result of their SA experience. 492

Study abroad on L2 pragmatics development

Altogether, these findings suggest that SA experiences also have a positive impact on understudied pragmatic features. Such pragmatic features include a variety of pragmatics aspects such as the use of a specific pronoun (ustedes vs. vosotros), compliments, interactional competence, humor, and assessments. However, no robust conclusions can be drawn given the scarcity of research in these specific areas of pragmatics.

3

Methodological considerations

It is clear from the previous section that there are few studies that focus on the development of a pragmatics aspect of Spanish (L2) as a result of an SA context. Hence, no robust conclusions can be drawn.Apart from the scarcity of research that makes it difficult to reach a conclusion, another important aspect to highlight are the several methodological issues of the studies mentioned in the previous section. One of these issues is the focus of the previous research that has indeed examined the development of a particular aspect of L2 Spanish pragmatics during an SA experience. Most of the previous research has concentrated on the development of requests, apologies, and refusals, whereas the remaining studies have centered on the development of aspects of pragmatics that deserve further investigation because they have been investigated only once (i.e., humor, compliments, assessments). Another methodological issue to be highlighted from previous research are the instruments used to gather the data. The instruments that have been most commonly used are Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) (or a variety of DCTs such as the Multimedia Elicitation Tasks), role plays, and questionnaires to gather background information of the participants (see Chapter 33 on research methods, this volume).The use of role plays and DCTs has been questioned in the literature because they are not authentic; participants say what they think they would say in a given situation (see, e.g., Félix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 2017). DCTs have also been criticized because they tend to elicit single-use responses (Ogiermann, 2018) and also because they are in written form and participants have time to think, whereas in ‘real-time’ situations, participants have to act in a more spontaneous manner (Barron, 2003).These criticisms have raised doubts regarding many studies that have explored the effects of an SA experience on L2 Spanish pragmatics development. However, a recent survey of methods and data collection procedures used in pragmatics research indicates that there is no best method and that certain methods can be used for certain purposes but not for others (Schneider, 2018).What is true is that most of the previous studies have used DCTs, so more studies with naturalistic data are needed to have a broader picture of the development of pragmatics in an SA setting. Another methodological aspect worthy of mention about the studies that have investigated the role of an SA experience on L2 Spanish pragmatics development is the profile of participants. Regarding participants’ first language (L1), it is conspicuous that all the aforementioned studies were conducted with L1 English speakers (namely, North American students). Additionally, the participants in all these studies were university students, with no previous study including younger participants (i.e., adolescents or children), so results are skewed toward American adults. Another noticeable methodological flaw from the aforementioned studies related to the participants’ characteristics is that very few specify the participants’ proficiency level.As can be seen from Table 28.1, the few studies that do identify the proficiency level have been conducted with advanced level participants.The remaining studies either do not mention the participants’ initial L2 level, or they mention the minimum number of semesters of Spanish classes completed by participants, but not their actual L2 proficiency level. 493

Llanes

It is clear from the review of the literature that program duration is another methodological characteristic to be considered. Roughly half of the studies discussed in the previous section examine the effects that a semester-long SA experience has on the development of a Spanish L2 pragmatic feature.The other studies document the impact of shorter SA experiences that range from four to eight weeks.Yet, the impact of a longer SA experience (e.g., one academic year) on L2 Spanish pragmatics acquisition is completely unknown. Likewise, only two studies have attempted to investigate the long-term effects of an SA experience. Félix-Brasdefer and HaslerBarker (2015) is one of the first attempts to explore the long-term effects of an SA experience on the acquisition of L2 Spanish pragmatics.The authors first examined the effects of production of compliments acquired in an eight-week SA program. Four months after their return from the host country, four participants were asked to complete a DCT.The authors found that there was some retention of the pragmatic feature under study (complimenting strategies), although the retention rate was lower than expected. Due to the low number of participants, however, no inferential statistical test could be run and results are purely descriptive. Likewise, Hernández and Boero (2018a) explored whether gains in request performance obtained as a result of an instructed five-week SA experience would be retained five weeks after the participants’ return from the host country.The authors found that participants maintained gains in three scenarios but, like Félix-Brasdefer and Hasler-Barker, no inferential statistics were run because of the low number of participants (n= 7). In fact, a study conducted with 13 English learners in the UK, in which inferential statistics were run, found that the gains that students experienced after explicit instruction were not maintained six weeks afterwards (Halenko & Jones, 2011). Hence, no conclusions can be drawn because the little evidence available is mostly descriptive, and the single study that ran inferential statistics found no long-term gains. Another methodological issue that emerges from the studies mentioned in the prior section is that very few include a control group. Only two studies (Félix-Brasdefer, 2013; Félix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 2015) include a comparison group of at-home (AH) learners of L2 Spanish pragmatics.Thus, although most of the studies provide positive results regarding engagement in an SA experience and L2 Spanish pragmatics development, it is possible that participants in an AH setting also developed their L2 pragmatics competence. In fact, neither of these two studies found a clear advantage for participants in the SA context.There are three other studies (Hernández & Boero, 2018a,2018b; Shively, 2011) that include only one group of participants; namely, an instructed SA group, or a group of SA participants that also received instruction on the target pragmatics item(s). For these particular studies, then, it is not clear whether the results are due to the students’ participation in an SA program, the instruction they received, or a combination of both. In fact, Cohen and Shively (2007) compared the effects of instruction in two groups of SA participants (one group received instruction on L2 pragmatics, the other did not) and did not find any advantage for those who had received instruction over those who had not. Hence, these results suggest that gains in pragmatics are more likely to derive from participation in an SA program than from instruction, but clearly more research is needed to draw any conclusions. Regarding comparison groups, it is interesting that several of the aforementioned studies do not include a control group of AH Spanish learners but they do include a group of NSs of Spanish, and the data of the Spanish learners are compared to those of these NSs.Although this comparison is interesting to shed light on how close or far L2 learners are from NSs’ standards, this comparison is a bit naive, not to say unfair or ambitious, because participants in the aforementioned studies have, in the best-case scenario, participated in a semester-long SA experience. Assuming that during this semester overseas they had the optimal conditions to learn, it is still a short period of time to compare their performance with those of NSs (Muñoz, 2008) unless the comparison with NSs is purely descriptive, as opposed to researching whether L2 learners’ 494

Study abroad on L2 pragmatics development

productions are significantly different from those of the NSs after the SA experience and running inferential statistical tests to see if there is any significant difference.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Due to the scarcity of studies examining the impact of an SA experience on L2 Spanish pragmatics, no conclusions can be drawn and many gaps need to be addressed by further research. Some gaps already acknowledged in the previous section include: (a) less-commonly studied speech acts; (b) instruments used (most studies have used DCTs); (c) characteristics of the participants in the previous studies (all of them were L1 English speakers living in the U.S. and of ages 18+ with an advanced or an unreported Spanish proficiency level); (d) duration of the SA program (most studies have centered on SA programs that last from four weeks to six months, and only two investigations report on the long-term effects of SA experiences); and (e) comparison groups (many studies do not include a comparison group of AH Spanish learners). For this reason, further research should try to remedy these shortcomings by expanding our knowledge of the impact that SA experiences have on speech acts other than requests, apologies, or refusals, and possibly should elicit data using instruments other than the DCT. Ideally, video recordings of interactions with NSs should be used because the data obtained would allow the study of the acquisition of linguistic and non-linguistic cues and expressions. Moreover, more research should be conducted with participants of L1s other than English and from other parts of the world other than North America, because students from Europe, for example, are known to be more bilingual/multilingual given their contact with other languages (Murphy-Lejeune, 2002). The role of bilingualism or multilingualism in the acquisition of Spanish pragmatics while abroad is rather unexplored. Furthermore, all these studies reported in this chapter have been conducted with university students. Hence, it is unknown if the results of previous research conducted with adults can be extended to younger students.The little research on L2 pragmatics carried out with adolescents (Alcón-Soler, 2017) or children (Achiba, 2003) found positive results for SA. However, this research included learners of English, not Spanish.There is no data, to the author’s knowledge, on the impact of an SA experience on a particular aspect of L2 Spanish pragmatics with younger students such as adolescents or children, despite the large number of adolescents participating in SA programs. Given that younger participants, especially children, are more immature than older participants and often lack pragmatics ability even in their L1, it would be interesting to investigate the development of a specific characteristic of L2 Spanish pragmatics with younger participants. Another aspect to be considered is the participants’ initial L2 level. Since previous studies have found that this level determines the amount of learning in the SA experience (Brecht & Robinson, 1995), it is important to control for proficiency level in studies that report on the impact of an SA experience on the acquisition of L2 Spanish pragmatics. Lafford (2006) proposed a threshold hypothesis that claims that “students with a well-developed cognitive, lexical, and grammatical base will be more able to process and produce grammatical forms more accurately after their experience in an SA context” (p. 18). If future studies controlled for their participants’ L2 initial proficiency level, further light could be shed on the optimal proficiency level that participants should have before engaging in an SA experience. Another issue that should be included in the SA research agenda is the duration of the SA program and its long-term effects; i.e., studies should examine the impact of SA programs longer than six months and should also try to measure the long-term impact of the gains (if any) experienced by learners. 495

Llanes

However, there are other issues that were not highlighted in the previous section that should also be considered before undertaking research on the impact of an SA context on a given L2 pragmatics feature. One such issue is the impact that an SA experience has on receptive pragmatics (as opposed to productive pragmatics). Koike (1995) examined receptive pragmatics competence (namely, comprehension of suggestions) by a group of L2 learners of Spanish in an AH university in the U.S. and found that, although comprehension of Spanish suggestions improved with proficiency, many L2 learners still made incorrect assumptions about L2 forms. It is possible that receptive competence is influenced as much as, or even more, than productive competence by an overseas experience. In fact, the study by Czerwionka and Cuza (2017a) is probably the only one on L2 Spanish pragmatics that has explored the impact of an SA experience on receptive pragmatics (namely, pragmatic intuitions about requests), and found improvement after the SA experience.Thus, more studies examining the impact of an SA experience on L2 receptive pragmatics are needed. Another issue left for further research is related to the type of research conducted. Given that most of the studies fall into the quantitative paradigm, more mixed methods approaches should be employed when analyzing the SA pragmatics data in order to obtain a more complete and robust picture of the impact of an SA experience on L2 pragmatics. Another conspicuous limitation of the studies that have explored the development of L2 Spanish pragmatics during an SA experience is determined by the participants’ age (Achiba, 2003; Ellis, 1992). Age (and personality type) will also determine the type of SA experience participants will undergo because adolescents and adults have more opportunities than children regarding the use of technology to communicate with their AH friends and family, which also can impact their SA outcome. While it is true that SA participants are supposedly exposed to large amounts of input and have the opportunity to interact with NSs, there are many SA participants who do not take advantage of this because of the availability of internet and social media; i.e., they remain tethered to their home language, culture, and friends (Kinginger, 2008). Since L2 pragmatic competence develops with interaction with NSs, the use of social media while abroad and its impact on L2 pragmatics should also be included in the research agenda of SA. Likewise, since age determines the type of SA experience that participants will undergo, SA children will most likely live with a host family, whereas SA adults can choose from a variety of living arrangements (Llanes & Muñoz, 2013).The impact that accommodation type has on the development of a specific pragmatics feature is unexplored because the vast majority of the studies on (L2 Spanish) pragmatics focus on students staying with a host family (see Table 28.1). It would be interesting if more research on SA and L2 pragmatics were conducted with participants in other living arrangements (i.e., a dorm, apartment with NSs or other L2 speakers) and if such research compared to see whether one type of living arrangement is more beneficial than others for the acquisition of the target items. Another issue is that future work should include other learning contexts. First, studies should consider the inclusion of an AH control group. Whereas most of the studies included in this chapter show gains after participating in an SA program regardless of the pragmatic aspects under investigation, no conclusions can be drawn because most of these studies do not include an AH comparison group; those that do include a control group find that both groups of participants show comparable development. Moreover, the characteristics of the participants in the control group should be comparable to those of the SA group (e.g., in terms of motivation, profile). Second, there is almost no evidence conducted in emerging contexts such as the experiential language learning context (EX-LL), where students have ample opportunities to acquire Spanish pragmatics in community venues where they are serving (see Note). Given the potential of the EX-LL context, future studies should aim to explore it. 496

Study abroad on L2 pragmatics development

Finally, further research should also try to disentangle the role that instruction plays with SA participants.There is almost no evidence on the type of instruction that SA participants receive in an overseas experience (whether specific attention was paid to facilitating their L2 pragmatic competence in the SA courses participants took) and also a lack of evidence on the impact of different types of instruction on L2 pragmatics development (cf. see Chapter 29 for an in-depth overview of the effects of instruction in study abroad). Given the costly expenses associated with participation in SA programs and the logistics that it involves, further research should consider all the gaps stressed in the present study in order to obtain a broader and clearer picture of the impact of an SA program on the development of L2 Spanish pragmatics. In so doing, more relevant information can be provided to students, parents, and stakeholders and actions can be taken in order to make the SA experience more profitable.

Acknowledgments This research was supported by grants 2017 SGR1522 and FFI2015–67769P. I would like to thank the editors for their patience and their insightful comments, and the two anonymous reviewers for their ideas and feedback, which were key to improving this chapter. Special thanks also go to Judith Borràs for her help with the literature search.

Note 1 A rather new context for acquiring an L2 that has not received much attention from scholars is Experiential Language Learning (EX-LL). EX-LL not only incorporates “language learning that takes place through the real world (and/or classroom) experiences of the learner” (Lafford, 2013, p. 81), but also reflections on those experiences. EX-LL can occur in SA and AH, and its characteristics vary according to whether it takes place in the former or the latter (see Lafford, 2013 for more detailed information).

Further reading Barron, A. (2003). Acquisition in interlanguage pragmatics: Learning how to do things with words in a study abroad context.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. This study was one of the first to examine the impact of an SA experience on L2 pragmatics development. It focuses on the development of requests, offers, and refusals of a group of Irish learners of German spending an academic year in Germany. Félix-Brasdefer J.C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2015). Complimenting in Spanish in a short-term study abroad context. System, 48, 1–11. This article focuses on the development of compliments as a result of a short (8 weeks) SA experience in Mexico.This study includes a comparison group AH, and a group of NSs as a baseline for comparison. Additionally it reports on the long-term impact of SA. Shively, R. L. (2011). L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A longitudinal study of Spanish service encounters. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1818–1835. This study focuses on the development of a neglected area in pragmatics, namely humor, over an SA experience in Spain. The data were collected naturalistically at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester abroad.

References Achiba, M. (2003). Learning to request in a second language: Child interlanguagepragmatics. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Alcón-Soler, E. (2017). Pragmatic development during study abroad: An analysis of Spanish teenagers’ request strategies in English emails. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 37, 77–92. 497

Llanes

Atkinson, D., Churchill, E., Nishino,T., & Okada, H. (2007). Alignment and interactionin a sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition. Modern Language Journal, 91, 169–188. Barron, A. (2003). Acquisition in interlanguage pragmatics: Learning how to do things with words in a study abroad context.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bataller, R. (2010). Making a request for a service in Spanish: Pragmatic development in the study abroad setting. Foreign Language Annals, 43(1), 160–175. Brecht, R.D., & Robinson, J.L. (1995). On the value of formal instruction in study abroad: Student reactions in context. In B.F. Freed (Ed.), Second language acquisition in a study abroad context (pp. 317–334). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cohen, A. D., & Shively, R.L. (2007). Acquisition of requests and apologies in Spanish and French: Impact of study abroad and strategy-building intervention. Modern Language Journal, 91(2), 189–212. Czerwionka, L., & Cuza,A. (2017a). Second language acquisition of Spanish service industry requests in an immersion context. Hispania, 100(2), 239–260. Czerwionka, L.,& Cuza, A. (2017b). A pragmatic analysis of L2 Spanish requests: Acquisition in three situational contexts during short-term study abroad. Intercultural Pragmatics, 14(3), 391–419. Dings,A. (2014). Interactional competence and the development of alignment activity. The Modern Language Journal, 98(3), 742–756. Ellis, R. (1992). Learning to communication in the classroom: A study of two learners’requests. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14, 1–23. Félix-Brasdefer, J.C. (2004). Interlanguage refusals: Linguistic politeness and length of residence in the target community. Language Learning, 54(4), 587–653. Félix-Brasdefer, J.C. (2009). Dispreferred responses in interlanguage pragmatics refusal sequences in learnerNS interactions. Applied Language Learning, 19(1), 1–28. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2013). Refusing in L2 Spanish:The effects of the context of learning during a shortterm study abroad program. In O. Martí Andándiz, & P.Salazar-Campillo (Eds.), Refusals in Instructional Contexts and Beyond (pp. 147–173).Amsterdam: Rodopi. Félix-Brasdefer, J.C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2015). Complimenting in Spanish in a short-term study abroad context. System, 48, 1–11. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C.,& Hasler-Barker, M. (2017). Elicited data. In A. Barron (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 27–40). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Freed, B., Segalowitz, N., & Dewey, D. (2004). Context of learning and second language fluency in French: Comparing regular classroom, study abroad, and intensive domestic immersion programs. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26, 275–301. Halenko, N., & Jones, C. (2011).Teaching pragmatic awareness of spoken requests to Chinese EAP learners in the UK: Is explicit instruction effective? System, 39, 240–250. Hernández, T. A. (2016). Acquisition of L2 Spanish requests in short-term study abroad. Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education, 1(2), 186–216. Hernández,T. A., & Boero, P. (2018a). Explicit instruction for request strategy development during shortterm study abroad. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 5(1), 35–49. Hernández, T. A., & Boero, P. (2018b). Explicit intervention for Spanish pragmatic development during short-term study abroad:An examination of learner request production and cognition. Foreign Language Annals, 51, 389–410. Kinginger, C. (2008). Language learning in study abroad: Case studies of Americans in France. The Modern Language Journal, 92, 1–124. Koike, D.A. (1995).Transfer of pragmatic competence and suggestions in Spanish foreign language learning. In S. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures (pp. 257–281). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Koike, D.A., Pearson, L., & Witten, C. (2003). Pragmatics and discourse analysis in Spanish second language acquisition research and pedagogy. In B. Lafford & R. Salaberry (Eds.), Spanish second language acquisition: State of the science (pp. 160–185).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lafford, B. (2006).The effects of study abroad vs. classroom contexts on Spanish SLA: old assumptions, new insights and future research directions. In A. Carol Klee & L.Timothy Face (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 7th conference on the acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as first and second languages (pp. 1–25). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Laughlin, V., Wain, J., & Schmidgall, J. (2015). Defining and operationalizing the construct of pragmatic competence: Review and recommendations. ETS Research Report Series, 1–12. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. New York: Longman. Llanes,À. (2018).The role of language awareness in a study abroad context. In J. M. Cots & P. Garrett (Eds.),The Routledge handbook of language awareness (pp. 275–289). Oxon and NY: Routledge. ISBN10: 1138937045 498

Study abroad on L2 pragmatics development

Llanes,À., & Muñoz, C. (2013).Age effects in a study abroad context: Children and adults studying abroad and at home. Language Learning, 63(1), 63–90. Muñoz, C. (2008). Symmetries and asymmetries of age effects in naturalistic and instructed L2 learning. Applied Linguistics, 24(4), 578–596. Murphy-Lejeune, E. (2002). Student mobility and narrative in Europe:The new strangers. New York: Routledge Studies in Anthropology. Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 229–255). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Reynolds-Case,A. (2013).The value of short-term study abroad:An increase in students’ cultural and pragmatic competency. Foreign Language Annals, 46(2), 311–322. Schneider, K. P. (2018). Methods and ethics of data collection. In A. Jucker, K. P. Schneider,& W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 37–93). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Shively, R. L. (2011). L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A longitudinal study of Spanish service encounters. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1818–1835. Shively, R. L. (2013). Learning to be funny in Spanish study abroad: L2 humor development. Modern Language Journal, 97, 939–946. Shively, R. L. (2015). Developing interactional competence during study abroad: Listener responses in L2 Spanish. System, 48, 86–98. Shively, R. L. (2016). Development of assessments in L2 Spanish during study abroad. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 157–170. Shively, R. L., & Cohen,A. D. (2008). Development of Spanish requests and apologies during study abroad. Íkala, revista de lenguaje y cultura, 13(20), 53–118. Taguchi, N. (2015). Instructed pragmatics at a glance:Where instructional studies were, are, and should be going. Language Teaching, 48(1), 1–50. Taguchi, N. (Ed.). (2019). The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and pragmatics. New York and Oxford: Routledge. Taguchi, N., & Collentine, J. G. (2018). Language learning in a study-abroad context: Research agenda. Language Teaching, 51(4), 553–566. Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied linguistics, 4(2), 91–112.

499

29 Pragmatics instruction and assessment in study abroad research Rachel L. Shively

1

Introduction

Study abroad (SA) is a type of international migration that is voluntary, temporary, relatively short and, as the term implies, involves enrollment in coursework at a foreign institution.Those who choose to study in a country in which their mother tongue (L1) is not the majority language typically can take classes to improve their second language (L2) skills. However, even though formal education is an essential part of SA, what happens in classrooms abroad has received relatively little attention in the literature (e.g., Isabelli-García, Bown, Plews, & Dewey, 2018; cf. McMeekin, 2006). More specifically, classroom instruction has not largely been the focus in research that has examined the development of pragmatic competence during SA. Pragmatic competence refers to “the ability to communicate your intended message with all its nuances in any socio-cultural context and to interpret the message of your interlocutor as it was intended” (Fraser, 2010, p. 15) and involves aspects such as displaying politeness, expressing formality, and interpreting non-literal speech. Since each speech community has different norms regarding “how-to-say-what-to-whom-when” (Bardovi-Harlig, 2013, p. 68), if SA students are unaware of pragmatic norms in their host country, they risk not being able to express intended meanings, achieve communicative goals, and project desired identities. Previous studies suggest that SA students can acquire the pragmatic norms of the host country naturalistically, but that such development may occur at a slow pace (e.g., Pérez-Vidal & Shively, 2019). Reasons for that delay include the fact that some pragmatic features occur infrequently in daily life, leaving few opportunities for learners to observe and acquire local norms. Even when pragmatic features are frequent in the input, students may not notice pragmatic differences between their L1 and L2.Another potential difficulty is that expert speakers of the L2 tend not to provide explicit feedback on pragmatic issues (e.g., Hassall, 2013). Finally, some pragmatic features are more complex than others; thus, while greetings may be learned quickly, complex speech acts such as refusals may be acquired more slowly. These potential limitations on developing pragmatic competence through exposure alone have led some scholars to advocate offering instruction about L2 pragmatic norms before and/or during SA to support students in their learning of pragmatics (e.g., Henery, 2015; Morris, 2017; Shively, 2010). Pragmatics instruction in SA can raise students’ awareness about how languages 501

Shively

differ pragmatically, expose them to pragmatic features that are infrequent in the input, present a more systematic picture of pragmatic norms than students’ individual everyday experiences permit, and provide insights into the meanings that linguistic forms express in the local community. Existing research suggests that formal instruction in pragmatics can, indeed, help to enhance and accelerate L2 pragmatic development during SA (e.g., Alcón-Soler, 2015; Bouton, 1999;Winke & Teng, 2010). The goal of this chapter is to discuss these findings and to use insights gleaned therein to offer guidance for designing pragmatics instruction and assessment for SA. The chapter begins with a review of previous studies to examine the outcomes of pragmatics instruction for SA students. The following section highlights ‘backward design’ as an approach to developing pragmatics instruction for SA and draws on existing research to describe potential learning objectives, assessment methods, and instructional strategies. Finally, conclusions and suggestions for future research are provided.

2

Review of existing research

Research studies that have investigated the effects of pragmatics instruction in SA are greatly overshadowed numerically by those that have been concerned with examining the L2 learning that occurs outside of class or with documenting pragmatic gains after a stay abroad. For many scholars, what makes SA an interesting setting for investigating L2 learning are the many opportunities for learners to engage in L2-mediated activities outside of class. Hence, it is not surprising that SA research has overwhelmingly been concerned with L2 development ‘in the wild’ rather than in the classroom abroad. Of the handful of existing studies on instructed pragmatics in SA, a few focus on Spanish (e.g., Cohen & Shively, 2007; Hernández & Boero, 2018a, 2018b; Morris, 2017; Shively, 2010), while others have considered different target languages including Chinese (Winke & Teng, 2010), English (Alcón-Soler, 2015; Bouton, 1999; Halenko & Jones, 2011), and French (Henery, 2015). Given the paucity of research, all studies, regardless of target language, will be discussed here.And as this section will illustrate, the findings suggest that pragmatics instruction can be effective in supporting SA students’ development of both receptive and productive pragmatic skills.

2.1

Receptive pragmatic skills

Although receptive skills in pragmatics have received less attention than productive skills, two studies indicated that instruction in SA can enhance pragmatic comprehension and awareness. With regard to pragmatic comprehension (i.e., ability to interpret pragmatic meaning), Bouton (1999) designed a face-to-face pedagogical intervention for L2 English learners of various nationalities studying abroad in the U.S. to assist them with their interpretation of difficult conversational implicatures.The instructional materials consisted of six different types of implicatures (e.g., irony, indirect criticism), which students analyzed and discussed in class with the guidance of their instructors.After six hours of training, instructed learners demonstrated comprehension skills on par with a control group of learners who had been in the U.S. for a longer period, but who had not received the intervention. Consequently, pragmatics instruction had the effect of accelerating learners’ comprehension of implicatures, compared to exposure alone. In a second study focused on pragmatic awareness (i.e., ability to recognize and analyze pragmatic practices), Henery (2015) discovered that teaching American SA students in France about various aspects of style and register in French (e.g., address terms, colloquial expressions, phonological reductions) helped to increase their awareness about how linguistic forms index identity and formality. Henery’s approach was informed by concept-based pragmatics instruction, which led 502

Pragmatics in study abroad research

to the creation of conceptual diagrams and images to help students understand the social meanings that particular linguistic forms convey. For example, when discussing the meanings of the second person singular pronouns tu and vous in French, Henery provided students with drawings of people in t-shirts and jeans using tu and individuals in suits and ties using vous to illustrate that language, like clothing, can express formality or informality and is implicated in self-presentation.

2.2 Productive pragmatic skills Productive skills have more commonly been the target of pragmatics-focused pedagogical interventions abroad. Cohen and Shively (2007), for instance, investigated the production of apologies and requests before and after American students spent a semester in a French- or Spanishspeaking country. The researchers provided participants with a predeparture orientation and workbook that students completed while abroad, both of which included pragmatics instruction as well as more general information and activities concerning language and culture learning. No statistically significant effect was found for the intervention when comparing the instructed learners’ improvement on apologies and requests with that of a control group of SA students, but the authors observed that SA students who received the intervention generally perceived that the materials were helpful for their learning. For example, one student commented that the workbook activities had encouraged her to pay attention to pragmatics while studying in Mexico. Similarly, using some of the same pedagogical materials, Shively (2010) found that the instruction that she provided during SA (i.e., an introduction to pragmatics and an in-class activity focused on service encounter requests) was helpful to American SA students in Spain as they learned appropriate request forms in Spanish. Halenko and Jones (2011) also reported a positive effect for their six-hour intervention concerning requests in English and provided to Chinese learners of English studying in Britain. Their instruction included awareness-raising about the appropriateness of various request strategies, a discussion of cross-cultural pragmatic differences, and analysis and communicative practice activities. Students who received the instruction became more target-like in their request performance, whereas a control group of uninstructed SA students did not make similar improvements.While the authors argued that pragmatics instruction was beneficial for learners, a delayed posttest six weeks after the intervention suggested that the learning was not retained. In another study on requests, Alcón-Soler (2015) examined Spanish SA students’ abilities to mitigate L2 English requests in authentic emails during their stay in Britain. Both an experimental and a control group were exposed to email requests in their coursework, but only the experimental group was given explicit instruction.The intervention consisted of four 20-minute lessons about requests, which were incorporated into an existing language course. Instruction was based on a consciousness-raising approach, drawing students’ attention to appropriate request forms, pragmatic norms in the host community, and social factors (e.g., social distance, degree of imposition) that affect request realization.The results indicated that students in both groups improved their abilities to mitigate requests in emails after SA, but those who received the pedagogical intervention made greater strides in pragmatically appropriate requests. Requests were also targeted by Hernández and Boero (2018a, 2018b), who investigated the outcomes of pragmatics instruction in short-term SA programs (4–5 weeks) in Spain and Argentina. Pedagogical interventions in the two studies were similar: American students were provided with 90 minutes of request instruction prior to departure and then, during SA, were asked to complete a series of tasks related to requests. For each task, students audio-recorded a response to a prompt designed to elicit a request, asked a Spanish native speaker to do the same and, finally, wrote a reflection comparing their own and native speaker requests. Researchers 503

Shively

subsequently provided corrective feedback in which they drew students’ attention to ways in which their requests diverged from L2 pragmatic norms. Results from both studies indicated that request performance improved after SA, although since these studies did not include control groups, instruction could not be isolated from naturalistic learning. Work by Winke and Teng (2010) and Morris (2017) involved more extensive instruction in pragmatics than the studies discussed earlier.Winke and Teng designed an intervention for American students in China that involved 32 hours of instruction delivered through a workbook with discussion, reflection, and production activities that students completed together with a Chinese tutor trained in pragmatics. After an eight-week period, the authors observed improvements in learners’ performance of various speech acts in Chinese (e.g., requests, complaints, refusals) and in the use of formulaic expressions.The SA students also outperformed a control group of L2 learners who did not go abroad. In another study, Morris (2017) offered SA students in Spain 40 hours of in-class, task-based pragmatics instruction over the course of 10 weeks, which was supplemented with out-of-class online activities and communicative practice with an expertspeaking language partner during SA. The findings indicated that SA learners increased their abilities to perform speech acts and engage in conversations in the L2. Further, the instructed learners showed greater gains in pragmatics than a control group of uninstructed SA students and they maintained those gains one year later, as demonstrated by a delayed posttest.

2.3

Discussion

Taken together, the results of the studies discussed in this section suggest that offering pragmatics instruction during SA can be beneficial for assisting students in developing their receptive and productive skills in pragmatics, specifically regarding the performance of speech acts, participation in conversation, awareness of style and register, and comprehension of conversational implicatures. Moreover, most studies in this database that included a control group of SA students who did not receive pragmatics training (i.e., Alcón-Soler, 2015; Bouton, 1999; Halenko & Jones, 2011; Morris, 2017) found that instructed learners made greater improvements in their pragmatic competence than their uninstructed peers. Although existing research points to the benefits of instruction for L2 pragmatic development, this finding should be considered preliminary due to the small number of studies and the relatively few pragmatic targets represented— particularly with productive skills, where requests predominate. Further, because not all studies included a control group of uninstructed SA students, more research is needed to enhance our understanding of the role of instruction during SA compared to exposure alone in developing pragmatic competence. Finally, few studies implemented a delayed posttest to measure the longterm impact of instruction.

3

Methodological considerations

While the previous section highlighted the outcomes of L2 pragmatics interventions in SA, this section takes a closer look at methods for designing instruction and assessment for SA students. When considering how to integrate pragmatics instruction into the SA curriculum or how to design a research study to investigate instruction of L2 pragmatics in SA, I propose that a useful starting point might be the curriculum design process known as ‘backward design’ (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005).This framework was considered ‘backward’ when first proposed because, rather than planning instruction by starting with a textbook, activity, or technology tool—which Wiggins and McTighe argued was common practice—the curriculum designer begins by identifying what the desired results or learning outcomes are for a period of instruction. The next 504

Pragmatics in study abroad research

step is to determine what evidence is acceptable to show achievement of the desired results; i.e., how learning will be assessed. Finally, step three in the backward design process involves planning the learning activities that will assist students in developing the knowledge and skills needed to achieve the learning outcomes and succeed on the assessments. Each step of the backward design process is discussed in greater detail ahead, with examples from the research on pragmatics instruction in SA.

3.1 Step 1: Identify learning outcomes To establish the desired results of instruction, curriculum designers can first ask themselves the following questions: what should students know, understand, or be able to do at the end of the instructional period? What is worth understanding? (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). The term ‘understanding’ here refers to being able to go beyond listing or recalling facts, to being able to synthesize, evaluate, and apply information. In the context of pragmatics, this notion of understanding can be extended to mean that learners should not only develop the skills to communicate and interpret meaning in context, but also the metapragmatic awareness1 to be able to understand and analyze, at a conceptual level, issues such as how the social context shapes language use, how pragmatic norms can vary cross-culturally, and how language indexes identity. Further, what is ‘worth understanding’ in backward design are topics that meet learners’ developmental needs and motivate them to engage in the material. A needs assessment is useful for this purpose, such as that conducted by Morris (2017). Morris asked both her beginning-level American SA students and their on-site instructors in Spain what types of functions would be useful to include in her instruction. Consequently, Morris developed learning objectives based on the responses that she received, ultimately including pragmatics instruction focused on the following tasks: meeting new people, inviting a friend out, ordering a meal, asking directions, purchasing a product, and maintaining a conversation. Although Morris did not publish her learning objectives, an example of a learning objective focused on productive skills is the following: ‘Students will be able to extend an invitation orally to a friend in Spanish.’ Similarly, a learning objective targeting metapragmatic awareness might be articulated as: ‘Students will be able to describe and compare pragmatic norms in invitations in Spanish and English.’ When determining learning objectives for a group of SA students, a variety of factors can be taken into consideration, such as students’ initial L2 proficiency, the types of activities in which students will likely engage while abroad, and the Spanish-speaking region in which they will reside.With regard to L2 proficiency, the curriculum designer will need to consider the types of pragmatics-focused learning outcomes that are most appropriate for each level. Previous research on L2 pragmatics instruction provides some guidelines (e.g., Koike, 2008; Mir, 2018; Sessarego, 2007).At the early stages of proficiency, L2 speakers tend to speak at the sentence level, employ simple grammar structures, and rely on substitutions of lexical items in fixed phrases.Therefore, instruction may focus on communicative functions that are in line with students’ grammatical knowledge. Learners at this level can develop basic competency in common speech acts and discourse functions (e.g., opening, maintaining, and closing a conversation), as well as in building their pragmalinguistic skills.2 In addition, instruction for beginners can encourage learners to pay attention to pragmatics, as well as enhance their awareness about the ways that the social and linguistic context impacts language use. At the intermediate and advanced levels, pragmatics instruction can assist SA students in increasing their sociopragmatic skills3 and in expanding their repertoire of linguistic forms for mitigation, politeness, and indirectness. Learners at higher proficiency levels can also work on fine-tuning their pragmalinguistic skills in different social situations; for example, varying 505

Shively

pragmatic behavior according to contextual factors such as the social distance of the interlocutors and the formality or informality of the setting. Higher-proficiency students also possess the grammatical and lexical knowledge to be able to incorporate new forms and strategies to add greater nuance and complexity to the realization of speech acts.The interactional resources needed to participate in topic management, assessment, and alignment in conversation can also be the focus at this level. An additional learning outcome for more advanced learners is the development of automaticity, so they can continue to improve their abilities to put their knowledge into practice in real-time interactions. As just one example of a curriculum that articulates pragmatic skills with proficiency level, Table 29.1 provides an overview of some of the features that can be targeted at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels according to the curricular plan of the Instituto Cervantes (https://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/plan_curricular/indice.htm).4 Table 29.1 offers only a summary of the types of pragmatic aspects that can form the basis for learning outcomes at different proficiency levels.The previously cited website provides much more detail, including a large inventory of pragmalinguistic expressions in Spanish that are employed in speech acts and for discourse functions. As suggested by Table 29.1, pragmatic features (e.g., speech acts, discourse markers) can be recycled throughout the curriculum by incrementally increasing the complexity at each proficiency level. In addition to considering L2 proficiency when developing learning outcomes, if an SA program involves heritage speakers of the target language, their unique needs should be taken into

Table 29.1 Pragmatic skills by proficiency level based on the Instituto Cervantes curricular plan CEFR level

Pragmatic skills

A1–A2 (Beginning)

• Speech acts, simplifed and largely unmitigated (e.g., greetings, requests, apologies, suggestions, invitations, offers, thanks, compliments, expressions of (dis)agreement, and responses to these acts) • Basic repertoire of interactional resources to engage in conversation (e.g., listener responses, open/close a conversation) • Basic use of deictic expressions • Basic repertoire of discourse markers • Use of the formal second person pronoun (usted) • Speech acts: use of a basic inventory of resources (lexical, morphosyntactic, paralinguistic) to realize and mitigate speech acts and to express politeness • Broad repertoire of interactional resources to engage in conversation • Broad repertoire of discourse markers • Sophisticated uses of deictic expressions • Basic metaphors • Basic repertoire of idiomatic expressions • Speech acts: use of an extended range of resources (lexical, morphosyntactic, paralinguistic) to realize and mitigate speech acts and to express politeness • Extensive repertoire of interactional resources to engage in conversation • Communicate more subtle attitudes and emotions • Extensive repertoire of discourse markers • Complex metaphors • Irony • Extensive repertoire of idiomatic expressions • Appropriate use of informal and formal registers

B1–B2 (Intermediate to advanced)

C1–C2 (Advanced)

506

Pragmatics in study abroad research

account. In the U.S. context, heritage speakers are individuals who were “raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken. The student may speak or merely understand the heritage language and be, to some degree, bilingual in English and the heritage language” (Valdés, 2000, p. 1). Heritage speakers can vary considerably in terms of their abilities with oral and written language, but they often have a different linguistic profile than L2 students: they tend to have more native-like pronunciation, stronger grammatical competence, and more extensive vocabulary (e.g., Kagan & Dillon, 2008). This group may also display greater pragmatic competence in their heritage language than L2 learners, specifically in the home and community settings to which they are accustomed (e.g., Showstack, 2016; see also Chapter 26 on heritage language issues for pragmatics, this volume).Additionally, the pragmatic practices of heritage speakers may be hybridized and display characteristics of the two or more languages that they speak (e.g., Pinto & Raschio, 2007). For these reasons, SA students who are heritage speakers may have different instructional needs than L2 learners. Barros and Bachelor (2018) discovered, for example, that heritage-speaking learners of Spanish did not benefit from instruction about making requests in Spanish, while L2 learners who received the same training did benefit.This is not to say that pragmatics instruction is always ineffectual for heritage speakers (e.g., Kim, Lee, & Kim, 2018); it is simply that, in some cases, their needs may be different than those of L2 learners (e.g., Pinto, 2018). A needs assessment can help determine appropriate learning objectives for any given group of heritage-speaking SA students. As an example, the following are some possible learning outcomes for Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. For this group, it may be useful to raise heritage speakers’ awareness about pragmatic differences across varieties of Spanish, including regional variation, but also in standard and non-standard dialects (see Chapter 15 on pragmatic variation, this volume). If heritage-speaking students use a non-standard or contact variety of Spanish, they may face linguistic discrimination in SA from locals who speak a prestige dialect (e.g., Riegelhaupt & Carrasco, 2000). In this case, instruction can serve to build students’ confidence by emphasizing that their own Spanish variety is equally complex and viable as any other (e.g., Martínez, 2016).Teachers can also empower students to choose the pragmatic norms that they want to follow, and to be able to articulate those choices (e.g.,“In my community we do it this way, but I know that in other Spanish-speaking communities it’s done differently.”).Another potential learning outcome for heritage speakers in SA might be to help them expand their bilingual range with regard to pragmatics, that is, to develop their pragmatic competence beyond familiar settings such as home and community. For example, they can fine-tune pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic skills for professional and academic contexts (e.g.,Valdés & Geoffiron-Vinci, 1998). In addition to L2 proficiency and heritage language considerations, the types of activities in which SA students are likely to engage and the dialect spoken in the host community are two additional factors that can be considered when identifying learning outcomes. In the first case, if students will be participating in internships or work placements while abroad, curriculum designers may want to include in instruction a discussion of pragmatic norms in the workplace, in addition to discussing pragmatic practices relevant to interactions with host families, local friends, and service encounters. Moreover, in the case of Spanish, pragmatic norms vary considerably across dialects (e.g., Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005, chapter 5; Félix-Brasdefer & Placencia, 2020; see Chapter 15 on pragmatic variation, this volume); therefore, instruction prior to and during SA may benefit from a focus on the pragmatics of the region where students will reside, while at the same time, including activities to raise students’ awareness that each speech community in the Spanish-speaking world may have different pragmatic practices. 507

Shively

3.2

Step 2: Assessment

After identifying the learning outcomes, the next step in the backward design process is to create summative assessments to determine whether students have accomplished the instructional goals, as well as formative assessments to give students feedback as they work toward the summative assessment. In pragmatics, more specifically, assessments can target students’ abilities to produce language appropriately (pragmatic productive skills), to understand the meaning or function of an utterance (pragmatic comprehension skills), or to recognize and analyze pragmatic features and norms (metapragmatic awareness). In the SA classroom setting, assessment is also an important opportunity for instructors to provide feedback to students about their performance, so that learners can continue to grow as a result of the assessment. For research purposes, assessments become data that are used to evaluate the effectiveness of a pedagogical intervention.This section will discuss methods that have been employed for both classroom and research purposes to assess the learning of pragmatics during SA. A variety of methods are available to assess pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bouton (1999), for instance, provided students with a written questionnaire that included a series of short dialogues in the L2 in which the intended meaning of one of the utterances could only be understood by making an inference (i.e., conversational implicatures). In their response to each item, learners needed to explain the meaning of the utterance in question to demonstrate comprehension of the implicature. Henery (2015) also asked her students to analyze texts, but she examined metapragmatic awareness rather than pragmatic comprehension.The focal texts in Henery’s study involved transcripts of two different authentic conversations, one more formal and one more informal. Differences between the two texts related to the use of pronouns and the presence or absence of colloquial vocabulary, phonological reductions, and complex syntax. Students were asked to read the transcripts, describe the differences that they observed in the use of language in the two texts, and explain how speakers’ language choices were shaped by the social context. Henery found that both instruction and everyday lived experiences in the host country influenced students’ interpretations. Written questionnaires, role plays, and authentic language samples are all methods to assess productive skills in pragmatics. By far the most widely employed assessment in L2 pragmatics is the discourse completion task (DCT), which is a written production questionnaire that consists of a series of scenarios (e.g., Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Ogiermann, 2018). For each situation, students are asked to write what they would say.The DCT developer typically crafts each scenario to target specific aspects of the context that influence language use, such as social distance and social status. This type of task is useful for assessing students’ knowledge of pragmalinguistic forms and sociopragmatic norms, but a DCT does not indicate whether students could put that knowledge into practice in real-life situations (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2013). Cohen and Shively (2007), Halenko and Jones (2011), Hernández and Boero (2018a), Morris (2017), and Winke and Teng (2010) all employed DCTs to assess pragmatic development in SA for research purposes, although this method is common in classroom pragmatics assessment as well (e.g., Ishihara & Cohen, 2010). Role plays (i.e., a spontaneous simulation of oral interaction), another assessment method for productive skills, have the advantage of being more interactive than DCTs and as a result, typically include features of real-life oral interactions such as hesitations, restarts, and multiple turns of talk (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2018). Several of the authors discussed in this chapter included role plays as formative assessments in their classrooms (Halenko & Jones, 2011; Morris, 2017) and Hernández and Boero (2018b) employed this method to assess L2 pragmatic development for research purposes. Crucially, in the case of both DCTs and role plays, the fact that instructors or 508

Pragmatics in study abroad research

researchers craft the scenario descriptions carefully means that they can control and determine in advance the contextual variables represented in the assessment. Further, since students all complete the same questionnaire or role play situations, it is easy to compare performance across participants and at different points in time (e.g., pre- and post-SA). A final method represented in the literature on instructed pragmatics in SA is the collection of authentic language samples. Morris (2017), for example, asked students to audio-record themselves completing tasks in the host community (e.g., ordering food, asking for directions) for their summative assessments. Alcón-Soler (2015) also assessed pragmatic development based on authentic samples, but in this case, in writing.The researcher collected student emails addressed to their professors in which students made a request; those writing samples served as an assessment for both instructional and research purposes. In their decision to assess students through authentic samples, both Alcón-Soler and Morris took advantage of the SA setting, which offers many opportunities for students to interact with L2 expert speakers in real-life situations. If the goal is to assess what students can do with language in the real world during SA, asking students to complete assessment tasks (e.g., asking directions, ordering food in a restaurant, emailing a professor, or initiating a conversation) outside the classroom, in the community, is both practical and more valid than assessing productive skills via role plays or DCTs. A downside of authentic samples, however, is that since the assessment designer cannot control the exact contextual factors of each authentic interaction, comparability often suffers. In the end, choosing assessment methods involves weighing issues such as practicality, validity, and reliability, as well as determining what is to be evaluated (e.g., receptive or productive skills), how the task will be evaluated, and whether the focus is knowledge or skills (see Chapter 33 on research methods, this volume).

3.3 Step 3: Learning activities The final phase in the curriculum design process is to lay out which learning activities and delivery methods will assist students in acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills to be successful on the summative assessments.The curriculum designer identifies the vocabulary, grammar, pragmalinguistic forms, and sociopragmatic norms that students need to learn and then integrates those features into the input and output activities provided to students. Such activities can include mini-lectures on the part of the instructor, authentic input (e.g., film clips, real-life conversations), guided analysis and discussion of pragmatic features in oral or written texts, and communicative practice. Instruction may be delivered through face-to-face or online classes, tutoring, or self-access materials. In terms of sequencing pragmatics instruction, typically students are first exposed to authentic input that contains the pragmatic feature under study, then they engage in awareness-raising activities to draw their attention to that feature, and finally, they are given opportunities to practice with the target feature (e.g., Koike, 2008; Kondo, 2008; Martínez-Flor & Usó-Juan, 2006). The approach to teaching pragmatic features may be either explicit or implicit: the former refers to when the instructor or researcher provides students with metapragmatic explanations about pragmatic norms, whereas the latter involves activities that expose students to a pragmatic feature and in which learners need to deduce pragmatic patterns on their own (e.g., Ishihara & Cohen, 2010; Kasper, 2001; Taguchi & Roever, 2017). Previous research suggests that both explicit and implicit instruction can be effective teaching methods as long as students’ attention is drawn to the target pragmatic forms (Taguchi, 2015). Curriculum designers can also take advantage of the SA setting to encourage students to collect their own data on pragmatics by asking them to observe the use of pragmatics in out-of-class interactions (e.g., Shively, 2010). Doing so has the added advantage of assisting students in becoming self-directed learners of pragmatics. 509

Shively

In the existing research on teaching pragmatics in SA, a variety of learning activities and delivery methods have been employed. Studies by Alcón-Soler (2015), Bouton (1999), Helenko and Jones (2011), Morris (2017), and Shively (2010), for example, all involved face-to-face instruction in the classroom setting during SA. Morris (2017) first provided students with input that contained the focal pragmatic feature, typically via film clips; then she engaged students in awareness-raising activities, explaining and discussing the appropriate forms and social norms for each pragmatic feature.The next step was guided communicative practice: students first practiced using the target forms with their peers in class, then they completed online practice activities outside of class, and, finally, they met with an expert-speaking language partner from the host community to continue practicing the target pragmatic feature. Morris implemented task-based pragmatics instruction in her pedagogical intervention, focusing on real-world activities such as requesting information, issuing an invitation, and ordering a product (see e.g.,Taguchi & Kim, 2018). Henery (2015) and Winke and Teng (2010), in contrast, delivered pragmatics instruction during SA through one-on-one interactions with a tutor who had been trained in pragmatics. In Winke and Teng’s study, local Chinese preservice Mandarin teachers were provided with training so that they could tutor beginning-level American SA students on pragmatics. Over the course of eight weeks, students met three times per week with a tutor to work together on a series of task-based pragmatics units that incorporated a variety of speech acts, such as apologies, compliments, and requests.The tutoring sessions involved guided discussion about the task, as well as communicative practice with the tutor and in the community. Students also completed journals in which they reflected on what they had learned about linguistic forms, cultural norms, and cross-cultural differences. Another approach to instructional delivery is observed in Cohen and Shively (2007). First, the researchers provided a face-to-face predeparture orientation in which they introduced students to pragmatics and then provided explicit instruction and communicative practice that spotlighted apologies and requests. The students were then given the Maximizing Study Abroad guidebook (Paige, Cohen, Kappler, Chi, & Lassegard, 2002) and were asked to complete readings and activities from the book, as well as to write reflective journals at regular intervals over the course of one semester abroad.The Maximizing guidebook includes specific information about pragmatics, although most of the book focuses more broadly on strategies for language and culture learning abroad. The provision of a predeparture orientation and self-access materials is a practical method in situations in which a curriculum designer wants to incorporate pragmatics instruction into SA but does not have control over the content of coursework that students will receive while abroad. In sum, I argue that backward design may be a useful approach to integrating pragmatics instruction into SA. Key principles include developing learning objectives that meet students’ needs, aligning assessments with those goals, and planning activities that will give students the knowledge and skills to succeed in assessments and achieve the learning objectives. In this way, SA programs can plan to assist students with their unique needs with respect to pragmatics and design pragmaticsfocused assessments and instructional activities that fit the format of a specific SA program.

4

Future directions and conclusion

This chapter has discussed previous research focused on pragmatics instruction in SA, highlighting findings regarding the effectiveness of instructed pragmatics and showcasing different methods for assessing pragmatic ability and delivering instruction while abroad. It has also presented

510

Pragmatics in study abroad research

backward design as one approach to integrating pragmatics into the SA curriculum. Regarding effectiveness, findings from existing studies suggest that pragmatics instruction during SA can enhance and accelerate L2 pragmatic development and provide learners with a broader awareness of pragmatic norms. For lower-proficiency SA students, pragmatics instruction can help build confidence and skills to encourage participation in L2-mediated everyday activities abroad. For intermediate and advanced students, pragmatics instruction can assist them in developing pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic skills and an awareness to enable them to express and comprehend intended meanings in the L2, make choices about how they want to present themselves through the L2, build and maintain relationships with L2 speakers, and participate fully in a wide range of L2-mediated interactions. The existence of only a small number of studies concerning instructed pragmatics in SA means that more research is needed to confirm and expand on previous findings. In particular, one issue that future studies may want to investigate is the relative effectiveness of different instructional delivery methods. Certainly, the approach taken by Morris (2017) to develop an entire course based on pragmatics is ideal and it yielded positive results in terms of learning outcomes, as did the tutoring method employed by Winke and Teng (2010). However, not all advocates of pragmatics instruction in SA have the means to implement those time- and labor-intensive approaches or the necessary control over the curriculum at foreign institutions. Teaching pragmatics through a predeparture orientation and self-access materials, as done in Cohen and Shively (2007), or through an online course, are more practical models for many SA programs.Yet, more research is needed to determine whether the latter delivery methods are effective in terms of facilitating student achievement of pragmatics-related learning objectives. Furthermore, future researchers may consider including a delayed posttest in their research design in order to advance our understanding of the long-term effects of pragmatics instruction in SA. Future research may also want to focus more attention on teaching and assessing lessstudied aspects of pragmatic competence and go beyond the overwhelming focus on speech acts in the L2 pragmatics literature. Three studies in the database examined here (Bouton, 1999; Henery, 2015; Morris, 2017) did not focus (only) on speech acts: Bouton taught conversational implicatures, Henery guided students on how to signal style and register linguistically, and Morris included instruction on interactional resources for conversation (e.g., opening a conversation, showing interest, and transitioning between topics).While the ability to perform speech acts is a key component of L2 pragmatic competence, other areas such as humor, interactional competence, and conversational implicature are also worthy of teachers’ and researchers’ attention. Currently, relatively little is known about what happens in the L2 classroom at foreign educational institutions (Isabelli-García et al., 2018). Given that pragmatics is often not emphasized in the L2 curriculum, we may assume that little to no class time in the host country is dedicated to pragmatics instruction but, in reality, this is an empirical question that has not yet been investigated. In addition, part of the reason that pragmatics is not taught more frequently has to do with the considerable challenges of doing so (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2017). For example, many textbooks do not focus on pragmatics, so teachers are often left to their own devices to develop materials and create lessons on pragmatics (e.g., Dumitrescu & Andueza, 2018). Gironzetti and Koike (2016) also point out that pragmatics instruction is ideally based on empirical research, yet research is lacking in some areas of pragmatics and what is available may not be easily accessible to teachers. Hence, another role for researchers in pragmatics is to translate their considerable expertise into instructional materials that are accessible to teachers and students. Examples of

511

Shively

efforts by researchers to disseminate pragmatics-focused instructional materials include the following websites: • • • •

Dancing with Words: Strategies for learning pragmatics in Spanish (http://carla.umn.edu/ speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html) Pragmatics at Indiana University (https://pragmatics.indiana.edu) Pragmatics Wiki (http://wlpragmatics.pbworks.com) Strategies for Learning Speech Acts in Japanese (http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/ introtospeechacts/index.htm).

Finally, as researchers and teachers, those of us in the feld of L2 pragmatics can advocate at our home institutions that pragmatics be integrated into the curriculum long before students go abroad. If our goal is to create learning experiences that will help L2 learners achieve advanced profciency, of which pragmatics is a crucial component, then instruction for pragmatic competence should be built into the foreign language curriculum from the beginning of language study.

Notes 1 Metapragmatic awareness refers to learners’ ability to recognize, think about, and analyze L2 pragmatic practices. 2 Pragmalinguistic skills refer to being able to link specific L2 forms (e.g., verbs, lexical items, grammatical constructions) to their functions, meanings, and use in specific contexts. 3 Sociopragmatic skills refer to knowing in what situations, at what moment, and with whom specific L2 forms, strategies, and speech acts are performed. 4 As far as I am aware, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) does not provide a similar breakdown of pragmatic functions based on the ACTFL proficiency levels.

Further reading Dumitrescu, D., & Andueza, P. L. (Eds.). (2018). L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to practice. New York: Routledge. For a recent discussion about researching and teaching L2 pragmatics, this edited volume examines both theoretical issues as well as more practical concerns specifically related to Spanish.The book addresses topics such as how pragmatics is presented in Spanish language textbooks (if at all), how to teach discourse markers in Spanish, and how to incorporate humor and irony into the classroom. Ishihara, N., & Cohen,A. D. (2010). Teaching and learning pragmatics:Where language and culture meet. Harlow: Longman. This book is an excellent resource for designing and implementing pragmatics instruction for the L2 classroom. The authors provide practical guidance about integrating pragmatics into the curriculum, teaching approaches, and assessment methods. Taguchi, N. (Ed.). (2019). The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and pragmatics. New York: Routledge. This state-of-the-art volume discusses a wide range of issues related to teaching and learning L2 pragmatics. Of particular interest here are chapters 19–22 on teaching and assessing pragmatics and chapter 23 on SA.These chapters discuss previous studies and offer suggestions relevant to both teachers and researchers.

References Alcón-Soler, E. (2015). Pragmatic learning and study abroad: Effects of instruction and length of stay. System, 48, 62–74. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2013). Developing L2 pragmatics. Language Learning, 63, 68–86. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2017).Acquisition of L2 pragmatics. In S. Loewen & M. Sato (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of instructed second language acquisition (pp. 224–245). New York and London: Routledge. 512

Pragmatics in study abroad research

Barros García, M. J., & Bachelor, J. (2018). Pragmatic instruction may not be necessary among heritage learners of Spanish:A study on requests. Journal of Foreign Language Education and Technology, 3, 163–193. Bouton, L. F. (1999). Developing nonnative speaker skills in interpreting conversational implicatures in English: Explicit teaching can ease the process. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Culture in second language teaching and learning (pp. 47–70). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen,A. D., & Shively, R. L. (2007).Acquisition of requests and apologies in Spanish and French: Impact of study abroad and strategy-building intervention. The Modern Language Journal, 91, 189–212. Dumitrescu, D., & Andueza, P. L. (2018). L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to practice. New York: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2018). Role plays. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 305–331). Berlin: De Gruyter. Félix-Brasdefer, C., & Placencia, M. E. (2020). Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world. New York: Routledge. Fraser, B. (2010). Pragmatic competence:The case of hedging. In G. Kaltenböck,W. Mihatsch, & S. Schneider (Eds.), New approaches to hedging (pp. 15–34). Bingley, UK: Emerald. Gironzetti, E., & Koike, D. (2016). Bridging the gap in Spanish instructional pragmatics: From theory to practice. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3, 89–98. Halenko, N., & Jones, C. (2011).Teaching pragmatic awareness of spoken requests to Chinese EAP learners in the UK: Is explicit instruction effective? System, 39, 240–250. Hassall, T. (2013). Pragmatic development during short-term study abroad: The case of address terms in Indonesian. Journal of Pragmatics, 55, 1–17. Henery,A. (2015). On the development of metapragmatic awareness abroad:Two case studies exploring the role of expert-mediation. Language Awareness, 24, 316–331. Hernández,T., & Boero, P. (2018a). Explicit intervention for Spanish pragmatic development during shortterm study abroad:An examination of learner request production and cognition. Foreign Language Annals, 51, 389–510. Hernández,T., & Boero, P. (2018b). Explicit instruction for request strategy development during short-term study abroad. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 5, 35–49. Isabelli-García, C., Bown, J., Plews, J., & Dewey, D. P. (2018). Language learning and study abroad. Language Teaching, 51, 439–484. Ishihara, N., & Cohen,A. D. (2010). Teaching and learning pragmatics:Where language and culture meet. Harlow: Longman. Kagan, O., & Dillon, K. (2008). Issues in heritage language learning in the United States. In N.Van DeusenScholl & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education, 2nd edition,Vol. 4: Second and foreign language education (pp. 143–156). New York: Springer. Kasper, G. (2001). Classroom research on interlanguage pragmatics. In K. Rose & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 33–62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Kim, M., Lee, H., & Kim,Y. (2018). Learning of Korean honorifics through collaborative tasks. In N.Taguchi & Y. Kim (Eds.), Task-based approaches to teaching and assessing pragmatics (pp. 28–54). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Koike, D. (2008).A grammar of L2 pragmatics: Issues in learning and teaching. In S. Katz & J.Watzinger-Tharp (Eds.), Conceptions of L2 grammar: Theoretical approaches and their application in the L2 classroom (pp. 35–52). American association of university supervisors and coordinators 2008 volume on L2 Grammar. Kondo, S. (2008). Effects on pragmatic development through awareness-raising instruction: Refusals by Japanese EFL learners. In E. Alcón & A. Martínez-Flor (Eds.), Investigating pragmatics in foreign language learning, teaching and testing (pp. 153–177). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish pragmatics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Martínez, G. (2016). Goals and beyond in heritage language education: From competencies to capabilities. In M. A. Fairclough, S. M. Beaudrie, A. Roca, & G.Valdés (Eds.), Innovative strategies for heritage language teaching:A practical guide for the classroom (pp. 39–55).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Martínez-Flor, A., & Usó-Juan, E. (2006). A comprehensive pedagogical framework to develop pragmatics in the foreign language classroom:The 6Rs approach. Applied Language Learning, 16, 39–64. McMeekin, A. (2006). Negotiation in a Japanese study abroad setting. In M. DuFon & E. Churchill (Eds.), Language learners in study abroad contexts (pp. 177–202). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mir, M. (2018). Learning L2 Spanish pragmatics: What research says, what textbooks offer, what teachers must do. In D. Dumitrescu & P. L. Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to practice. New York: Routledge. 513

Shively

Morris, K. (2017). Learning by doing:The affordances of task-based pragmatics instruction for beginning L2 Spanish learners studying abroad (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of California, Davis. Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 229–255). Berlin: De Gruyter. Paige, R. M., Cohen,A. D., Kappler, B., Chi, J. C., & Lassegard, J. P. (2002). Maximizing study abroad:A students’ guide to strategies for language and culture learning and use. Minneapolis: Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. Pinto, D. (2018). Heritage Spanish pragmatics. In K. Potowski (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 190–202). New York: Routledge. Pinto, D., & Raschio, R. (2007). A comparative study of requests in heritage speaker Spanish, L1 Spanish, and L1 English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11, 135–155. Riegelhaupt, F., & Carrasco, R. L. (2000). Mexico host family reactions to a bilingual Chicana teacher in Mexico: A case study of language and culture clash. Bilingual Research Journal:The Journal of the National Association for Bilingual Education, 24, 405–421. Sessarego, C. (2007). La enseñanza de la pragmática: Principios de un enfoque didáctico para nivel principiante en un entorno universitario anglófono. Hispania, 90, 316–327. Shively, R. L. (2010). From the virtual world to the real world:A model of pragmatics instruction for study abroad. Foreign Language Annals, 43, 105–137. Showstack, R. (2016). La pragmática transcultural de los hablantes de herencia de español: análisis e implicaciones pedagógicas. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3, 143–156. Taguchi, N. (2015). Instructed pragmatics at a glance:Where instructional studies were, are, and should be going. Language Teaching, 48, 1–50. Taguchi, N., & Kim, Y. (2018). Task-based approaches to teaching and assessing pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second language pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valdés, G. (2000). Bilingualism and language use among Mexican Americans. In S. McKay & C. Sau-Ling (Eds.), New immigrants in the US (pp. 113–146). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valdés, G., & Geoffiron-Vinci, M. (1998). Chicano Spanish:The problem of the “underdeveloped” code in bilingual repertoires. The Modern Language Journal, 82, 473–501. Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria,VA: ASCD. Winke, P., & Teng, C. (2010). Using task-based pragmatics tutorials while studying abroad in China. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7, 363–399.

514

Part VII

Pragmatics, technology, and research methods

30 Eye-tracking applications for Spanish pragmatics research Elisa Gironzetti

1

Introduction

The metaphor of the eyes as windows to the soul (los ojos son el espejo del alma in Spanish) dates back to Cicero (106–43 B.C.) and refers to the importance of the eyes—their size, shape, degree of openness, movements, etc.—for people to understand another person’s emotions, thoughts, and attitudes. Eye-tracking is a research technique that gives us access to this information and facilitates the interpretation of underlying emotional and cognitive processes. In this section, we briefly explore what eye trackers are and how they work by looking at mechanical and theoretical milestones in eye tracking development, as well as defining the most commonly used measures. An eye-tracker is a device that allows the researcher to observe, record, and analyze eye movements while people perform different tasks. From a mechanical point of view, the first eyetrackers were highly invasive, requiring the person to have a rubber tube or a plaster cap attached to their eye so that the researcher could see the eyes moving or record their movements by means of a pointer attached to the cap.1 In 1935, Buswell used a novel and less intrusive technique: he recorded eye movements during reading by means of light beams, which were reflected on the reader’s eyes and recorded on film. Nowadays, most eye-trackers are nonintrusive and rely on a similar technique: pupil center corneal reflection (PCCR), which employs an infrared light directed toward the eye and a camera to record the reflections of this light on the surface of the eye.2 Modern eye-trackers also rely on proprietary software that include algorithms for the automatic classification of eye movements into saccades and fixations, the two most commonly used eye-tracking metrics. Fixations are eye movements during which the eyes slow down, showing only small gliding movements, so that the eye can acquire content, and are on average between 100 and 600 milliseconds long. Saccades, on the other hand, are abrupt, fast eye movements that relocate the point of fixation of the eye, with an average length between 20 and 40 milliseconds. It should be noted that fixations and saccades are not automatically detected by any eye-tracker, but rather are calculated by applying different algorithms to the raw coordinates of the eye. Therefore, how these measures are theoretically defined and mathematically calculated needs to be explicitly addressed and justified in every study (see Hessels, Niehorster, Nyström,Andersson, & Hooge, 2018; Salvucci & Goldberg, 2000). 517

Gironzetti

From a theoretical perspective, one of the most important advances is generally attributed to Yarbus (1967), who, by recording eye movements of participants examining a picture while completing different tasks (e.g., determining the age of the people or inferring what they had been doing), recognized that saccadic eye movements reflect the person’s underlying cognitive processes. This idea is the basis of modern eye-tracking research, yet eye movements do not always reflect what people are paying attention to, as we can also turn to covert attention to select and process visual information at a cued location (Raz, 2004). In fact, we now know that the time-locking hypothesis, which claimed that cognitive processing of a stimulus occurs during the time when a person is fixating on it (Holmqvist et al., 2011), is not accurate. However, even though “it has become evident that eye movements are not a perfect reflection of cognitive processes . . . , they remain a rather good index of the moment-to-moment online processing activities that accompany visual cognition tasks” (Rayner, 1992, p. 2). Eye-tracking has gained a lot of attention in the last few years, as demonstrated by the increasing number of publications in different disciplines (van Gompel, Fischer, & Murray, 2007), due to rapid technological advances and a parallel reduction in costs. These changes have made eye-trackers more affordable, accessible, portable, easy to use, and versatile in terms of research applications. In the next sections, the results and foci of studies using eye-tracking methodology as a tool to research pragmatics are reviewed, and some current and future methodological considerations are explored. Section 2 integrates studies conducted on a variety of languages and methods (including visual world paradigms, reading studies, and eye-tracking-while-listening studies) to highlight the methodological and theoretical contributions of eye-tracking for pragmatic research. Section 3 includes recent and novel applications of eye-tracking to the study of social interaction and non-verbal behavior, as well as some practical considerations for conducting eye-tracking studies. Finally, Section 4 identifies topics within pragmatics in need of more attention and outlines some future lines of research that could benefit from the application of eye-tracking technology. The chapter assumes the existence of a shared set of pragmatic phenomena and processes across languages. Therefore, on the one hand, it is possible to draw meaningful comparisons between results and findings in different languages and cultures. On the other hand, however, the paucity of studies focusing specifically on Spanish is problematic, in the sense that it limits our understanding, for example, of the cultural elements upon which Spanish speakers draw to interpret ironic statements.While there has been an increasing number of eye-tracking studies on a variety of linguistic aspects of Spanish (e.g., Contemori & Dussias, 2019; Lew-Williams, 2017), the specific ways in which language and culture shape how Spanish speakers use language in context is still an open and urgent research avenue for eye-tracking pragmatic research.

2

Review of existing research

The application of eye-tracking to pragmatics research is a novel, welcome addition to the study of language.3 However, this is still a young research area, notably absent from a recent volume on eye-tracking for applied linguistics research (Conklin, Pellicer-Sánchez, & Carrol, 2018), as existing studies deal mostly with lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of language (see Sagarra & Seibert Hanson, 2011). Before exploring the methods, results, and conclusions of eye-tracking studies focusing on pragmatics, Table 30.1 offers an overview of the different metrics that are mentioned throughout this chapter.These are presented with a corresponding description and interpretation because, as Rayner (1992) highlighted, eye-tracking data are a pointer to several aspects of cognition and need to be interpreted carefully (see also Dussias, 2010).Table 30.1 also includes some sample reference works that apply each measure to the study of pragmatics. 518

Eye-tracking applications Table 30.1 Eye-tracking metrics: interpretation, description, and sample references for pragmatic research Go-past time (regression path duration) on target region Interpretation How long participants took to reinterpret the target; processing diffculty. Metric description Total time spent on target and pre-target region from the frst fxation on target to when the eyes moved to the right of the region. Sample references for pragmatics RE: Noh, Choo, and Koh (2013); Carrol and Conklin (2017); Filik, Howman, Ralph-Nearman, and Giora (2018). First-pass reading time Interpretation Metric description Sample references for pragmatics Rereading time Interpretation

Early processing of target, associated with early integration of information. Sum of all fxations on target region before eyes moved to a different region (either left or right). RE:Siyanova-Chanturia, Conklin, and Schmitt (2011); Carrol and Conklin (2017).

Metric description Sample references for pragmatics

Late processing of target, reanalysis of text, disambiguation, and discourse integration. Total fxation time on target minus frst-pass reading time on target. RE:Noh et al. (2013), Filik, Brightman, Gathercole, and Leuthold (2017).

Total reading time Interpretation Metric description Sample references for pragmatics

Late processing of target, reanalysis of text and discourse integration. Total fxation time on the target region. RE: Siyanova-Chanturia et al. (2011); Carrol and Conklin (2017).

Fixation count Interpretation Metric description Sample references for pragmatics

Total fxation duration Interpretation Metric description Sample references for pragmatics

Late processing of target, associated with reanalysis of text, disambiguation, discourse integration. Total number of fxations made within a target region. DS:Gironzetti, Attardo, and Pickering (2016); Gironzetti, Pickering et al. (2016). RE: Siyanova-Chanturia et al. (2011); Carrol and Conklin (2017). Attention to target. Sum of the duration of all fxations within a target region. DS: Gironzetti, Attardo et al. (2016); Gironzetti, Pickering et al. (2016). VW: Deliens, Antoniou, Clin, Ostashchenko, and Kissine (2018).

Proportion of fxations (looks) to target Interpretation Contrast between early and late processing of target; effect of verbal context. Metric description Proportion of the number of fxations on target (versus competitor) within a given time window. Sample references for pragmatics VW: Huang and Snedeker (2009, 2010); Schwarz (2014); Degen and Tanenhaus (2016). Pupil dilation (task-evoked pupil response) Interpretation Measure of cognitive effort. Metric description Rapid changes in pupil dilation, pupil diameter change over time. Sample references for pragmatics VW: Zellin, Pannekamp, Toepel, and van der Meer (2011); Tromp, Hagoort, and Meyer (2016). Note: Sample references included in this table have been classified based on the method used in the study; that is, VW (Visual World or While-Listening Paradigm), RE (Reading study), and DS (Dual or Social eye-tracking).

519

Gironzetti

In the next sections, studies that applied eye-tracking to research pragmatic phenomena are reviewed, focusing on their methods, results, and implications for the study of pragmatics.These studies relied mostly on two different methods, which are described briefly in the next paragraphs: reading metrics and stimuli, and the ‘while-listening’ or ‘visual-world’ paradigm.A more recent development includes social or dual eye-tracking procedures, which is addressed more in depth later in the chapter. The number of studies that use eye-tracking to research the processing of written texts is extensive (see Rayner, 1997, for an overview of methods and research topics). Among these, scientists have used eye-tracking to gain access to a variety of higher-order processes that are relevant for the study of pragmatics, such as discourse processing and ambiguity resolution, and a less numerous but equally relevant number of pragmatic phenomena such as the processing of irony and idiomatic expressions. Eye-tracking used in reading studies has been realized via a variety of gaze- or eye-contingent methods, in which what one sees depends on where they are looking. Two of the most frequently used are the ‘moving-window paradigm’ (where the text one sees depends on where they are fixating) and the ‘moving-mask paradigm’ (the inverse of the moving window, where the text that one does not see depends on where they are fixating). The ‘visual-world paradigm’ (VWP) (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995) is an experimental procedure to research the relationship between linguistic and visual information by providing participants with a visual context for processing linguistic information (Huettig, Rommers, & Meyer, 2011), while the ‘eye-tracking-while-listening’ paradigm provides contextual and/or linguistic information aurally. The two paradigms are similar in that they allow researchers to explore language processing on a narrow time scale, such as that of spoken word recognition.Typically, a participant hears the first syllable of a word and fixates on the images that match it (e.g., images of a carpet and a carton for the syllable [kar]) within about 300 milliseconds, while then proceeding to disambiguate the word and fixating only on the corresponding image after hearing the missing syllable.

2.1

Idiomatic expressions

Within linguistics, two main approaches to the study of idioms can be distinguished: the ‘compositional’ and ‘non-compositional’ approaches, which differ in how idiomatic expressions are conceptualized and how speakers derive their meaning. The compositional approach underscores the contribution of individual words to the idiom’s meaning, while the non-compositional approach looks at the meaning of idioms as being processed as a whole. Eye-tracking studies have the potential to shed light on the fine-grained time scale of cognitive processes involved in idiom comprehension, and have been typically applied to researching the processing of written idioms by native and nonnative speakers by means of contrasting them with non-idioms. In a series of eye-tracking reading studies, idiomatic expressions were found to be read by native speakers (NSs) at different rates depending on their decomposability (Titone & Connine, 1999) and to be processed faster and reread and reanalyzed less than non-idioms (SiyanovaChanturia et al., 2011). Moreover, NSs differ substantially from nonnative speakers (NNSs) in their processing of idioms in terms of time needed, as well as type of processing. NSs need more time to process novel phrases compared to known ones, but NNSs do not, as they read idioms as novel phrases and need more time to process their non-literal meaning (Siyanova-Chanturia et al., 2011). Along the same lines, Carrol and Conklin (2017) found that non-compositional idioms represent a challenge for NNSs, who were able to recognize the L1 idiomatic meaning when translated into the L2, but who read them at a slower rate.The results indicated that recognition of the component words of idioms is an automatic process even in the L2 but does not 520

Eye-tracking applications

automatically lead to the activation of the figurative meaning. Instead, a compositional or literal meaning seems to be the default.These findings suggest that the processing of idiomatic expressions and metaphors depends on language proficiency and support the view that L2 pragmatics knowledge is not a construct distinctly different from L2 proficiency.

2.2 Irony Ironic statements have attracted much attention from researchers interested in determining whether the literal interpretation is first accessed and rejected before the ironic interpretation of the text, or whether the ironic interpretation can be accessed directly. In this regard, eye-tracking is crucial, as it allows researchers to study and compare different online measures of irony processing. What we know regarding the online processing of written irony has been mostly informed by eye-tracking reading studies (Au-Yeung, Kaakinen, Liversedge, & Benson, 2015; Filik et al., 2017, 2018; Filik, Leuthold, Wallington, & Page, 2014; Filik & Moxey, 2010; Kaakinen, Olkoniemi, Kinnari, & Hyönä, 2014; Olkoniemi, Ranta, & Kaakinen, 2016; Ţurcan & Filik, 2016).These studies focused on the evolution over time of processes involved in computing the meaning of a written ironic statement by looking at how native speakers processed familiar and unfamiliar ironies. Results from late-processing measures consistently found irony interpretation to be more effortful than non-irony interpretation (Au-Yeung et al., 2015; Kaakinen et al., 2014) and unfamiliar ironic statements to be more difficult to process than familiar ones (Filik et al., 2014; Ţurcan & Filik, 2016). Olkoniemi et al. (2016) showed that while the processing of irony and metaphors is similarly effortful, difficulties in processing metaphors affected early measures (first-pass reading) and difficulties in processing irony were evident in late measures (rereading). Initial studies (Filik et al., 2014; Filik & Moxey, 2010) found support for the graded salience hypothesis (Giora, 1997), which states that salient meanings are always activated and accessed first. However, Filik et al. (2018) found evidence in support of the default hypothesis of irony processing (Giora, Givoni, & Fein, 2015), which, in contrast, assumes that some non-salient meanings are derived directly and by default.The study by Filik et al. (2018) showed that nondefault interpretations of utterances, such as a sarcastic interpretation of an affirmative utterance, required more processing effort (e.g., rereading) than default interpretations. Additionally, Filik et al. (2017) used eye-tracking to research the emotional impact of ironic versus literal criticism by monitoring eye movements while people read short stories with ironic and non-ironic comments that provided the victim’s or the protagonist’s point of view. A comparison of early and late metrics showed how readers’ interpretations change as text comprehension progresses, moving from an initial response to negative aspects of ironic criticism, toward a more positive interpretation of its functions that considers the speaker’s motivations.

2.3 Prosody Two studies applied a listening and/or visual-world paradigm and collected pupil dilation measures to investigate the prosodic marking of pragmatic focus (Zellin et al., 2011) and indirect request comprehension (Tromp et al., 2016).This is a novel application of pupillometry, as pupil diameter had been shown to change as the result of linguistic complexity (e.g., syntax and vocabulary complexity; see Schmidtke, 2018, for an overview), although no studies focused specifically on pragmatic factors.The first study by Zellin et al. (2011) looked at the cognitive effort required to process discourse by presenting participants with question-answer audio recordings and measuring their pupil dilations. The researchers found that processing pragmatic correction foci is faster than processing new information foci, which induced slower pupil dilation 521

Gironzetti

response, and that a prosodically adequate realization is less costly, as shown by smaller peak pupil dilation. In the second study by Tromp et al. (2016), participants had to listen to an utterance while looking at an image and decide whether the utterance was a request or a statement. Results indicated that the processing of nonconventional indirect requests required more cognitive effort, as reflected by a significant increase in pupil size, and thus confirmed that “identifying (and presumably understanding) nonconventional indirect requests is not an automatic process but requires processing effort beyond that needed to process mere statements” (Tromp et al., 2016, p. 1106). As these studies exemplify, the application of pupillometry to study the effect of prosodic features on pragmatic inferencing is a fruitful avenue of research that could be applied to study the effect of prosody on intelligibility in interactions among native and nonnative speakers, as well as monolingual and bi-/plurilingual speakers, to complement current uses of other offline and online measures.

3

Methodological considerations

As the review of representative works in the previous section has shown, the use of eye-tracking has led to interesting findings in different areas of pragmatic research.Thanks to this technique, researchers have been able to pinpoint difficulties and qualitative differences between NSs’ and NNSs’ processing of idiomatic expressions, support a more nuanced understanding of irony processing, and shed light on the effect of prosodic features on pragmatic inferencing. Overall, the studies reviewed in the previous section represent the beginning of what promises to be a productive avenue of research into the pragmatic features of any language. The application of eye-tracking to collect and analyze online measures of pragmatic processing is still an underexplored area, although one with the potential of making an important contribution to how speakers make sense of language. As shown, most eye-tracking studies have been conducted using written, aural, or visual stimuli in a controlled setting, such as a laboratory. However, new portable eye-trackers have enabled the broadening of eye-tracking methodology to social situations, allowing researchers to study multiple participants’ interactions as they occur in naturalistic settings (Barisic et al., 2013; Cheng et al., 2015). This novel approach and its contributions to pragmatic research is the focus of the following paragraphs, followed by a more practical section focusing on data collection, data loss, and data analysis.

3.1

Social and dual eye-tracking studies

Dual eye-tracking (or social eye-tracking; Gironzetti, 2017) is the use of two or more eyetracking devices to study participants’ social cognition and behavior, including social attention.This paradigm relies on the use of nonintrusive wearable or portable eye-tracking devices (such as eye-tracking glasses) and allows researchers to collect and examine online measures of interactional dynamics.Additionally, current eye-tracking systems allow for the integration of other measures, such as galvanic skin response and event-related potential (ERP), which contribute to a richer interpretation of the data. A still rather limited but growing body of research applies this procedure to investigate pragmatic aspects of communication (see Brône, Oben, Jehoul,Vranjes, & Feyaerts, 2017; Broz, Lehmann, Nehaniv, & Dautenhahn, 2012; Gironzetti, 2017; Gironzetti et  al., 2016; Ho, Foulsham, & Kingstone, 2015; Macdonald & Tatler, 2018; Rogers, Speelman, Guidetti, & Longmuir, 2018;Vranjes, Brône, & Feyaerts, 2018).The results of these studies have important implications for pragmatics research regarding turn allocation and the role of facial expressions during face-to-face and computer-mediated interaction. 522

Eye-tracking applications

3.1.1

Turn taking

The study of face-to-face conversation, including turn management, has been approached using dual or social eye-tracking techniques that required participants to wear head-mounted eyetrackers, such as eye-tracking glasses. Studies in this area built on the seminal work of Kendon (1967) and looked at the different functions (i.e., social, cognitive, emotional) of gaze in face-toface conversation.While several previous studies already pointed to the turn-taking function of gaze, this aspect had not been examined by considering the temporal dynamics of social interactions in natural settings. Ho et al. (2015) employed wearable eye-tracking devices to record and analyze the moment-to-moment temporal characteristics of turn-taking in a natural setting where dyads played two social guessing games. The authors found evidence for a turn-taking regulatory function of gaze during face-to-face interaction, with gaze aversion used to mark the beginning of a turn, and direct gaze, the end of it. Brône et al. (2017) looked at how speakers used gaze patterns to negotiate their conversational role in dyadic and triadic interactions from the In Sight Interaction Corpus (Brône & Oben, 2015). Their results indicated, among other aspects, that speakers avert their gaze before starting a new turn, and are consistent with findings by Ho et al. (2015). Vranjes et al. (2018) expanded this line of research to face-to-face interpretermediated dialogues.Their results show that the interpreter’s gaze contributes to turn-taking by selecting the next speaker in a tripartite interaction involving extended narrative sequences.

3.1.2

Facial and gaze cues

Looking at, or avoiding, other people’s faces (i.e., mutual gaze and gaze aversion), are two common strategies by means of which speakers negotiate meaning in conversation. Additionally, facial expressions are a rich communication channel that is attended to and interpreted along with, or in support of, the verbal message. Broz et al. (2012) analyzed gaze behavior of speakers in dyadic interactions in order to inform the design of human-computer interaction devices and found that mutual gaze behavior depends on the characteristics of both partners.Their findings indicated that participants spent just 46% of the time displaying mutual face gaze behavior, a rather low number considering the amount of information conveyed by facial expressions and interlocutor gaze. However, this may indicate that gaze cues displayed during interaction may be followed covertly and/or may be looked at only briefly but at specific and strategic moments (Macdonald & Tatler, 2018). In the case of dyadic humorous exchanges (Gironzetti, 2017; Gironzetti, Pickering et al., 2016), the eyes and the mouth areas were shown to receive distinct attention by speakers when compared to nonhumorous exchanges by the same speakers, supporting the previously stated hypotheses. This distinct behavior in the presence of humor was linked to the function of smiling as a non-discrete marker of conversational humor (Gironzetti, Attardo, & Pickering, 2018) and was not affected by the language of the interaction (i.e., Spanish or English).Together, these findings suggest that speakers rely on the visual clues of smiling and gaze to negotiate the pragmatic value of what is being said while it is being said.While speakers tended to look at the interlocutor’s eyes and mouth during an interaction, these studies showed that their gaze behavior differs depending on the type of stimuli and task being accomplished. Dual and social eye-tracking studies represent a valuable and underexplored resource for conversational processes, such as turn-taking, perspective-taking, and common ground, and the exploitation of multimodal resources for meaning-making, as briefly shown in this section. Additionally, the results of dual or social eye-tracking studies underscore the value of conducting research with real-life situations, since individual gaze behavior varies greatly from one person 523

Gironzetti

to another depending on individual characteristics and preferences, as well as the context of the exchange being studied (Rogers et al., 2018).

3.2 3.2.1

Some practical considerations Data collection

Researchers interested in applying eye-tracking to pragmatics research should consider the type of eye-tracker that is best suited for their research design by taking into account the device’s accuracy, precision, and latency, as well as its portability, sampling rate, and degree of freedom of movement.The device should be accurate (i.e., the coordinates for the reported gaze points should be as close as possible to the true gaze points), precise (i.e., it consistently calculates participants’ gaze points), and have limited latency (i.e., it measures gaze points as occurring as closely as possible to real time).When considering sampling rate, researchers should also consider portability and degree of freedom of participants. For example, the more portable an eye-tracker is (e.g., eye-tracking glasses suited for research in real-life scenarios), the lower its sampling rate (e.g., between 30 and 100 Hz). Conversely, screen-based and non-portable eye-trackers (e.g., requiring a head strap and located in a laboratory) will allow for higher sampling rate (e.g., 1000 Hz) and thus be more suited for lab-based reading studies.Additionally, the sampling rate of the eye-tracker is also linked to the freedom of movement allowed by the machine. More powerful eye-trackers—i.e., those with a higher sampling rate—require the participants to stay still and often have their head strapped into a support that prevents them from moving, thus lacking the ecological validity that would be necessary to research second language acquisition.

3.2.2

Data loss

Until recently, the majority of eye-tracking studies of gaze patterns and face processing have been developed using static images of faces, often manipulated by the researchers to combine parts of the face expressing different emotions.This research provided useful insight into how people perceive other people’s faces and expressions and established a baseline for future social eye-tracking research of face perception in interaction. However, in contrast to social eye-tracking, these studies failed to represent gaze behavior in more naturalistic social situations where people interact with each other face-to-face.While the possibilities for pragmatic research offered by this new procedure are numerous, as exemplified by the studies in Sections 2 and 3, researchers should be aware of two important shortcomings of social eye-tracking, which may cause data loss and thus should be considered when estimating the required number of participants for a study. On the one hand, technical difficulties may arise during the data collection (e.g., initial calibration difficulties and the fact that it may be impossible to recalibrate during the study); on the other hand, the loss of data may instead be due to participants moving or covering their faces with their hands, or to external factors such as light changes or long eyelashes. Moreover, depending on the research questions of the study, since social eye-tracking involves the analysis of data from two or more participants, the loss of data for one participant may invalidate corresponding data from other participant/s.

3.2.3

Data analysis

Analyzing social eye-tracking data is a time-consuming process as it involves several steps, from data cleaning to using dynamic areas of interest (AOIs, also called ROIs, ‘regions of interest’) and statistical analysis.While the majority of these steps apply to any eye-tracking study, the use 524

Eye-tracking applications

Figure 30.1 Visualization of fixations, saccades, and a sample dynamic area of interest for social eye-tracking data analysis

of dynamic AOIs is particularly important for studies with dynamic and nonlinear stimuli, such as those of social eye-tracking. AOIs or ROIs are portions of the visual field of the participant that were video recorded, and over which eye-tracking data were superimposed. One can think of these as geometrical apportionments of the screen where data are visualized, as illustrated in Figure 30.1. In the case of social eye tracking, the AOI is always dynamic, as opposed to a static one that could be used for the analysis of pictures or text. This means that it requires manual adjustment in order to adapt to the movement of the two participants and thus match the position of the interlocutors’ eyes.

4

Future directions and conclusion

The potential applications of eye-tracking to the study of pragmatics are much more numerous than those currently being explored by researchers in the field and, at the same time, current applications are just beginning to scratch the surface of pragmatics. Overall, more studies are needed to confirm what we already know regarding pragmatic processing, and to account for language- and culture-specific effects. In the following paragraphs, some novel and promising areas of further research are outlined. Pupillometry, as a measure of complexity, has only started to be applied to pragmatic research, and further studies are needed to confirm whether and under what conditions pupil dilation matches pragmatic complexity. In the field of L2 pragmatics and the study of social interaction, it would be particularly relevant to combine pupillometry and fixation measures on the pragmatic target as a potential index of intake and/or uptake. Recent work on gestures, fixations, and uptake, for example, found no evidence that information uptake from gestures was associated with fixations on gestures, meaning that there can be uptake without fixations on target (in this case, the gesture), as well as fixations on target that do not result in uptake (Gullberg & Kita, 2009). Eye-tracking can also contribute to the study of discourse by providing access to online measures of turn-allocation behaviors, such as mutual gaze (i.e., when two people look at each other’s 525

Gironzetti

face) and eye contact (i.e., when two people look at each other’s eyes), as well as enabling researchers to explore behavioral (mis)alignment and (dis)agreement during face-to-face interactions. Mutual gaze and eye contact have been shown to signal the intention or willingness to start an interaction (Cary, 1978), regulate turn-taking (Beattie, 1978), and distribute conversational roles (Vertegaal, Slagter, van der Veer, & Nijholt, 2001). Eye movements are also affected by utterance type, cultural background, and conversational role (Kendon, 1967; Knackstedt & Kleinke, 1991), as well as race (Arizpe, Kravitz,Walsh, Yovel, & Baker, 2016) and culture (Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset, & Caldara, 2008; Caldara, Zhou, & Miellet, 2010; Miellet,Vizioli, He, Zhou, & Caldara, 2013). Research in interpersonal alignment showed that speakers tend to “change their affect, behavior, and cognition as a direct result of their interaction with another individual” (Paxton & Dale, 2013, p. 1121) by selectively aligning across modalities (Fusaroli et al., 2012; Fusaroli & Tylén, 2012), although to date, no studies have focused specifically on Spanish speakers. In the same vein, an interesting and recent avenue of research is the application of eye-tracking technology to the study of classroom discourse and interaction, by looking at the gaze behavior of experienced and novice teachers (McIntyre, Jarodzka, & Klassen, 2017; Pfeiffer, Vogeley, & Schilbach, 2013). From an instructional perspective, the debate regarding pragmatics instruction in an L2 has focused mostly on the benefits and limitations of explicit instruction and implicit learning, and has considered a variety of factors and contexts such as study abroad experiences, levels of language proficiency, cultural competence, and the use of technology, among others (see Taguchi & Roever, 2017; for Spanish, see Gironzetti & Koike, 2016). The role of gestures, however, has received virtually no attention. Gestures during speech have been shown repeatedly to have a positive effect on learning (Ping & Goldin-Meadow, 2008; Singer & Goldin Meadow, 2005; Valenzeno,Alibali, & Klatzky, 2003;Wakefield, Novak, Congdon, Franconeri, & Goldin-Meadow, 2018) by directing and moderating visual attention and grounding speech in the world, but no study has focused on pragmatics learning and/or Spanish as a second language to date. Rosegrant, Hearrington,Alvarado, and Keeble (2012) used wearable eye-tracking glasses to investigate students’ attention during a lecture, while more numerous studies focused on screen-based and computer-mediated instruction, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) or the use of emotional design (e.g., Brom, Stárková, Lukavsky, Javora, & Bromová, 2016; Sharma, Caballero, Verma, Jermann, & Dillenbourg, 2015; Sharma, Jermann, & Dillenbourg, 2014). Similarly, eyetracking could be applied to study how learners integrate the information provided by different instructional elements (e.g., board, images, written text, instructor’s face); the processing of different pragmatic strategies, including gestures and facial expressions; the use and expression of deixis in speech (see Chapter 3 on deixis, this volume), as well as in gesture and gaze; the relationship between gaze behavior and speech politeness (see Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness issues, this volume); or the processing of corrective feedback pertaining to pragmatics errors.These findings would contribute to our understanding of L2 pragmatic processing and, crucially, inform L2 classroom instruction and the design of pedagogical materials. Additionally, most current studies have focused on language processing by adult native speakers, with few exceptions comparing native and nonnative speakers of the language. Studies that include heritage speakers or young learners as participants are virtually nonexistent, despite these being important populations that are receiving a lot of attention in other areas within Spanish applied linguistics.Therefore, many questions remain to be asked regarding how these speakers process pragmatic aspects of Spanish, what multimodal elements they attend to under given circumstances, and whether, and how, they differ from adult, native, or L2 speakers. From a methodological perspective, while modern eye-tracking technology is praised for being nonintrusive, its applications and research design often are. Frequently, researchers provide a context (e.g., an image or a video) that forces the participant to make a choice, and the design 526

Eye-tracking applications

includes tasks that do not typically occur in real life. Therefore, the results may not be generalizable to everyday inferencing and could be an artifact of the research design.This limitation has already begun to be addressed by implementing social eye-tracking studies that research inferencing ‘in the wild,’ and by studies that apply eye-tracking without additional referents or forced tasks, without constraining participants (see Huette, Winter, Matlock, Ardell, & Spivey, 2014). Portable, unobtrusive eye-tracking technology has the advantage, for pragmatic research, of combining the analysis of online measures of cognitive processing, typically associated with experimental, unrealistic, laboratory studies, with naturally occurring (or naturalistic), contextualized interactions, thus allowing researchers to observe the fine-grained time scale of pragmatic processing as it occurs in real-life interactions. This advantage can also inform L2 pragmatics research and teaching practices as, for example, students’ processing of a variety of pragmatic features and types of instruction can be observed in the classroom, in real time. The proposed research avenues represent exciting opportunities for applying eye-tracking to the study of Spanish pragmatics within a multimodal perspective that moves away from a perspective seeing language mainly as phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures. Instead, the multimodal approach underscores the central role that gesture, facial expression, gaze patterns, and body posture play in the negotiation of meaning.The possibilities that modern eye-tracking provide— giving access to online measures of pragmatic processing in real-life scenarios, in a nonintrusive way, and in combination with other measures (e.g., ERP)—have the potential to reshape the field.

Notes 1 For more information on early eye-trackers, see the works of Delabarre (1898), Dodge (1900), Hering (1879), Huey (1898, 1900), Javal (1879), and Lamare (1892). 2 Although other, more invasive methods are still used, such as scleral search coils or limbus trackers. 3 Taguchi and Sykes (2013) wrote that “eye tracking has not yet been employed in pragmatic research, and we anticipate that happening sometime in the near future” (p. 272).

Further reading Brône, G., & Oben, B. (2018). Eye tracking in interaction: Studies on the role of eye gaze in dialogue. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. An edited volume on the role of gaze in different types of interaction.The chapters in this volume use eye-tracking to explore relevant topics within pragmatics, including turn-taking, deixis and joint attention, and language comprehension and acquisition. Conklin, K., Pellicer-Sánchez, A., & Carroll, G. (2018). Eye tracking. A guide for applied linguistics research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A practical read, suited for inexperienced readers, that integrates examples, case studies, and concrete recommendations for using eye-tracking to research reading and listening, as well as writing, translation, and language testing, among others. Godfroid,A. (2019). Eye tracking in second language acquisition and bilingualism.A research synthesis and methodological guide. London and New York: Routledge. A comprehensive and detailed volume on the use of eye-tracking in second language acquisition and bilingualism studies that integrates theory and practice to guide readers through the steps of designing, collecting, and analyzing eye-tracking data.

References Arizpe, J., Kravitz, D. J.,Walsh,V.,Yovel, G., & Baker, C. (2016). Differences in looking at own- and other-race faces are subtle and analysis-dependent: An account of discrepant reports. PLoS One, 11(2), e0148253. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148253 527

Gironzetti

Au-Yeung, S. K., Kaakinen, J. K., Liversedge, S. P., & Benson,V. (2015). Processing of written irony in autism spectrum disorder:An eye-movement study. Autism Research, 8, 749–760. Barisic, I., Timmermans, B., Pfeiffer, U. J., Bente, G.,Vogeley, K., & Schilbach, L. (2013). Using dual eye tracking to investigate real-time social interactions. In W. E. Mackay, S. Brewster, & S. Bødker (Eds.), Proceedings from SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Retrieved from http://gazeinteraction.net/wp-system/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/BTP+13.pdf Beattie, G. W. (1978). Floor apportionment and gaze in conversational dyads. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 17(1), 7–15. Blais, C., Jack, R. E., Scheepers, C., Fiset, D., & Caldara, R. (2008). Culture shapes how we look at faces. PLoS One, 3(8), e3022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003022 Brom, C., Stárková, T., Lukavsky, J., Javora, O., & Bromová, E. (2016). Eye tracking in emotional design research: What are its limitations? In S. Björk, E. Eriksson, M. Fjeld, S. Bødker , W. Barendregt, & M. Obaid (Eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth Nordic conference on human-computer interaction (Article 114). New York:Association for Computing Machinery. Brône, G., & Oben, B. (2015). Insight interaction: A multimodal and multifocal dialogue corpus. Language Resources and Evaluation, 49, 195–214. Brône, G., Oben, B., Jehoul, A.,Vranjes, J., & Feyaerts, K. (2017). Eye gaze and viewpoint in multimodal interaction management. Cognitive Linguistics, 28(3), 449–484. Broz, F., Lehmann, H., Nehaniv, C. L., & Dautenhahn, K. (2012). Mutual gaze, personality, and familiarity: Dual eye tracking during conversation. In IEEE RO-MAN: The 21st IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication (pp. 858–864). Paris: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2012.6343859 Buswell, G.T. (1935). How people look at pictures.A study of the psychology of perception in art. Chicago, IL:The University of Chicago Press. Caldara, R., Zhou, X., & Miellet, S. (2010). Putting culture under the spotlight reveals universal information use for face recognition. PLoS One, 5(3), e9708. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0009708 Carrol, G., & Conklin, K. (2017). Cross language lexical priming extends to formulaic units: Evidence from eye tracking suggests that this idea ‘has legs.’ Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(2), 299–317. Cary, M. S. (1978).The role of gaze in the initiation of conversation. Social Psychology, 41, 269–271. Cheng, S., Sun, Z., Ma, X., Forlizzi, J. L., Hudson, S. E., & Dey, A. (2015). Social eye tracking: Gaze recall with online crowds. In D. Cosley,A. Forte, L. Ciolfi, & D. McDonald (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 454–463). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. Conklin, K., Pellicer-Sánchez, A., & Carroll, G. (2018). Eye tracking. A guide for applied linguistics research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contemori, C., & Dussias, P. (2019). Prediction at the discourse level in Spanish-English bilinguals: An eye-tracking study. Frontiers in Psychology, 10,Article 596. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00956 Degen, J., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2016). Availability of alternatives and the processing of scalar implicatures: A visual world eye tracking study. Cognitive Science, 40(1), 172–201. Delabarre, E. B. (1898). A method of recording eye-movements. The American Journal of Psychology, 9(4), 572–574. Deliens, G., Antoniou, K., Clin, E., Ostashchenko, E., & Kissine, M. (2018). Context, facial expression and prosody in irony processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 99, 35–48. Dodge, R. (1900).Visual perception during eye movements. Psychological Review, 7, 454–465. Dussias, P. E. (2010). Uses of eye tracking data in second language sentence processing research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 30, 149–166. Filik, R., Brightman, E., Gathercole, C., & Leuthold, H. (2017).The emotional impact of verbal irony: Eye tracking evidence for a two-stage process. Journal of Memory and Language, 93, 193–202. Filik, R., Howman, H., Ralph-Nearman, C., & Giora, R. (2018). The role of defaultness and personality factors in sarcasm interpretation: Evidence from eye tracking during reading. Metaphor and Symbol, 33(3), 148–162. Filik, R., Leuthold, H.,Wallington, K., & Page, J. (2014).Testing theories of irony processing using eye tracking and ERPs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 811–828. Filik, R., & Moxey, L. M. (2010).The on-line processing of written irony. Cognition, 116, 421–436. Fusaroli, R., Bahrami, B., Olsen, K., Frith, C. D., Roepstorff, A., & Tylén, K. (2012). Coming to terms: An experimental quantification of the coordinative benefits of linguistic interaction. Psychological Science, 23(8), 931–939. 528

Eye-tracking applications

Fusaroli, R., & Tylén, K. (2012). Carving language for social coordination:A dynamical approach. Interaction Studies, 13(1), 103–124. Giora, R. (1997). Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 7, 182–206. Giora, R., Givoni, S., & Fein, H. (2015). Defaultness reigns:The case of sarcasm. Metaphor and Symbol, 30, 290–313. Gironzetti, E. (2017). Multimodal and eye-tracking evidence in the negotiation of pragmatic intentions in dyadic conversations:The case of humorous discourse (Unpublished dissertation). Texas A&M University-Commerce, Commerce, TX. Gironzetti, E., Attardo, S., & Pickering, L. (2016). Smiling, gaze, and humor in conversation. A pilot study. In L. Ruiz Gurillo (Ed.), Metapragmatics of humor: Current research trends. (pp. 235–254).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gironzetti, E., Attardo, S., & Pickering, L. (2018). Smiling and the negotiation of humor in conversation. Discourse Processes, 59(7), 496–512. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2018.1512247 Gironzetti, E., & Koike, D. (2016). Bridging the gap in Spanish instructional pragmatics: From theory to practice/Acortando distancias en la enseñanza de la pragmática del español: de la teoría a la práctica. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 89–98. Gironzetti, E., Pickering, L., Huang, M., Zhang,Y., Menjo, S., & Attardo, S. (2016). Smiling synchronicity and gaze patterns in dyadic humorous conversations. Humor, 29(2), 301–324. Gullberg, M., & Kita, S. (2009).Attention to speech-accompanying gestures: Eye movements and information uptake. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33(4), 251–277. Hering, E. (1879). Über Muskelgeräusche des Auges. [‘On muscle sounds of the eye’]. Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Klasse, 3(79), 137–154. Hessels, R. S., Niehorster, D. C., Nyström, M.,Andersson, R., & Hooge, I.T. C. (2018). Is the eye-movement field confused about fixations and saccades? A survey among 124 researchers. Royal Society Open Science, 5, 180502. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.180502 Ho, S., Foulsham,T., & Kingstone, A. (2015). Speaking and listening with the eyes: Gaze signaling during dyadic interactions. PloS One, 10, e0136905. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0136905 Holmqvist, K., Nyström, M., Andersson, R., Dewhurst, R., Jarodzka, H., & van de Weijer, J. (2011). Eye tracking:A comprehensive guide to methods and measures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huang, Y., & Snedeker, J. (2009). Online interpretation of scalar quantifiers: Insight into the semanticspragmatics interface. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 376–415. Huang,Y., & Snedeker, J. (2010). Logic and conversation revisited: Evidence for a division between semantic and pragmatic content in real-time language comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26(8), 1161–1172. Huette, S., Winter, B., Matlock, T., Ardell, D. H., & Spivey, M. (2014). Eye movements during listening reveal spontaneous grammatical processing. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2014.00410 Huettig, F., Rommers, J., & Meyer,A. S. (2011). Using the visual world paradigm to study language processing:A review and critical evaluation. Acta Psychologica, 137(2), 151–171. Huey, E. B. (1900). On the psychology and physiology of reading. The American Journal of Psychology, 11(3), 283–302. Huey, E. B. (1989). Preliminary experiments in the physiology and psychology of reading. The American Journal of Psychology, 9(4), 575–586. Javal, L. É. (1879). Essai sur la physiologie de la lecture. Annales d’Oculistique, 82, 242–253. Kaakinen, J. K., Olkoniemi, H., Kinnari,T., & Hyönä, J. (2014). Processing of written irony: An eye movement study. Discourse Processes, 51, 287–311. Kendon,A. (1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologica, 26, 22–63. Knackstedt, G., & Kleinke, C. L. (1991). Eye contact, gender, and personality judgments. The Journal of Social Psychology, 131, 303–304. Lamare, M. (1892). Des mouvements des yeux dans la lecture. Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société Française d’Ophtalmologie, 10, 354–364. Lew-Williams, C. (2017). Specific referential contexts shape efficiency in second language processing:Three eye-tracking experiments with 6- and 10-year-old children in Spanish immersion schools. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 37, 128–147. Macdonald, R. G., & Tatler, B. W. (2018). Gaze in a real-world social interaction: A dual eye tracking study. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(10), 2162–2173. 529

Gironzetti

McIntyre, N.A., Jarodzka, H., & Klassen, R. M. (2017). Capturing teacher priorities: Using real-world eye tracking to investigate expert teacher priorities across two cultures. Learning and Instruction, 60, 215–224. Miellet, S.,Vizioli, L., He, L., Zhou, X., & Caldara, R. (2013). Mapping face recognition information use across cultures. Frontiers in Psychology, 4,Article 34. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00034 Noh, E. J., Choo, H., & Koh, S. (2013). Processing metalinguistic negation: Evidence from eye tracking experiments. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 1–18. Olkoniemi, H., Ranta, H., & Kaakinen, J. K. (2016). Individual differences in the processing of written sarcasm and metaphor: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 433–450. Paxton, A., & Dale, R. (2013). Multimodal networks for interpersonal interaction and conversational contexts. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I.Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the cognitive science society (pp. 1121–1126).Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society. Pfeiffer, U. J.,Vogeley, K., & Schilbach, L. (2013). From gaze cueing to dual eye tracking: Novel approaches to investigate the neural correlates of gaze in social interaction. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 37(10 Pt 2), 2516–2528. Ping, R. M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008). Hands in the air: Using ungrounded iconic gestures to teach children conservation of quantity. Developmental Psychology, 44, 1277–1287. Rayner, K. (Ed.). (1992). Eye movements and visual cognition: Scene perception and reading. New York: Springer-Verlag. Rayner, K. (1997). Understanding eye movements in reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1(4), 317–339. Raz, A. (2004). Attention. In C. D. Spielberg (Ed.), Encyclopedia of applied psychology (pp. 203–208). Oxford and Boston: Elsevier Academic Press. Rogers, S. L., Speelman, C. P., Guidetti, O., & Longmuir, M. (2018). Using dual eye tracking to uncover personal gaze patterns during social interaction. Scientific Reports, 8, 4271. Rosegrant, D., Hearrington, D.,Alvarado, K., & Keeble, D. (2012). Following student gaze patterns in physical science lectures. In N. Sanjay Rebello, P.V. Engelhardt, & C. Singh (Eds.), AIP conference proceedings (Vol. 1413, pp. 323–326). Omaha, NE:American Institute of Physics. Sagarra, N., & Seibert Hanson, A. (2011). Eyetracking methodology: A user’s guide for linguistic research. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 4(2), 543–555. Salvucci, D. D., & Goldberg, J. H. (2000). Identifying fixations and saccades in eye tracking protocols. In A. T. Duchowski (Ed.), ETRA ’00 proceedings of the 2000 symposium on eye tracking research & applications (pp. 71–78). New York:Association for Computing Machinery. Schmidtke, J. (2018). Pupillometry in linguistic research. An introduction and review for second language researchers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40, 529–549. Schwarz, F. (2014). Presuppositions are fast, whether hard or soft. Evidence from the visual world. In T. Snider, S. D’Antonio, & M.Weigand (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th semantics and linguistic theory conference (pp. 1–22). New York: Linguistics Society of America. Sharma, K., Caballero, D.,Verma, H., Jermann, P., & Dillenbourg, P. (2015). Looking AT versus looking THROUGH:A dual eye tracking study in MOOC context. In O. Lindwall, P. Häkkinen,T. Koschmann, P.Tchounikine, & S. Ludvigsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th international conference of computer supported collaborative learning (Vol. 1, pp. 260–267). Gothenburg, Sweden:The International Society of the Learning Sciences. Sharma, K., Jermann, P., & Dillenbourg, P. (2014). How students learn using MOOCs: An eye tracking insight. In U. Cress & C. Delgado Kloos (Eds.), Proceedings of the second MOOC European stakeholders summit (pp. 147–154). Lausanne, Switzerland: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Singer, M.A., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Children learn when their teacher’s gestures and speech differ. Psychological Science, 16, 85–89. Siyanova-Chanturia, A., Conklin, K., & Schmitt, N. (2011). Adding more fuel to the fire: An eye tracking study of idiom processing by native and non-native speakers. Second Language Research, 27(2), 251–272. Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second language pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taguchi, N., & Sykes, J. (Eds.). (2013). Technology in interlanguage pragmatics research and teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632–1634. Titone, D., & Connine, C. M. (1999). On the compositional and noncompositional nature of idiomatic expressions. Journal of Pragmatics, 31(12), 1655–1674. Tromp, J., Hagoort, P., & Meyer, A. S. (2016). Pupillometry reveals increased pupil size during indirect request comprehension. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 1093–1108. 530

Eye-tracking applications

Țurcan,A., & Filik, R. (2016).An eye tracking investigation of written sarcasm comprehension:The roles of familiarity and context. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 42, 1867–1893. Valenzeno, L.,Alibali, M.W., & Klatzky, R. (2003).Teachers’ gestures facilitate students’ learning:A lesson in symmetry. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 28, 187–204. van Gompel, R. P. G., Fischer, M. H., & Murray, W. S. (2007). Eye-movement research. In R. P. G van Gompel, M. H. Fischer, W. S. Murray, & R. L. Hill (Eds.), Eye movements: A window on mind and brain (pp. 1–28). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Vertegaal, R., Slagter, R., van der Veer, G., & Nijholt,A. (2001). Eye gaze patterns in conversation:There is more to conversational agents than meets the eyes. CHI, 3(1), 301–308. Vranjes, J., Brône, G., & Feyaerts, K. (2018). On the role of gaze in the organization of turn-taking and sequence organization in interpreter-mediated dialogue. Language and Dialogue, 8(3), 439–467. Wakefield, E., Novak, M., Congdon, E., Franconeri, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2018). Gesture helps learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attention. Developmental Science, 21(6), e12664. https://doi. org/10.1111/desc.12664 Yarbus,A. L. (1967). Eye movements and vision. New York: Plenum Press. Zellin, M., Pannekamp, A.,Toepel, U., & van der Meer, E. (2011). In the eye of the listener: Pupil dilation elucidates discourse processing. International Journal of Psychophysiology: Official Journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology, 81(3), 133–141.

531

31 Pragmatics and digital discourse in Spanish research Patricia Bou-Franch

1

Introduction

Research into the use of Spanish in technology-mediated communication (henceforth,TMC) has attracted considerable attention among scholars over the last decades. This is hardly surprising if one considers that today we use the internet through computers, laptops, tablets, or smartphones for many different purposes.These include staying in touch with family and friends, universities, or businesses on social media, buying and selling through commercial platforms, reading the online press, looking for users’ recommendations about where to eat and sleep or what to visit when travelling, or looking for jobs in specific sites, among many others. Our digital life is increasingly varied and rich, and it is naturally and effortlessly intertwined with our offline life in a fluctuating interface that has changed and continues to change the contemporary social landscape. The sociologist M. Castells has characterized the latter in terms of a new “network society” in which “new information technologies allow the formation of new forms of social organization and social interaction” (Castells, 2000, p. 693). Indeed, digital technologies have created new spaces for social interaction and transformed the ways in which we communicate, take part in activities, and manage social relationships. The technological revolution is changing our ordinary lives and also challenging the ways in which discourse analysts think about texts, contexts, social interaction, and even about the nature of language itself (Jones, Chik, & Hafner, 2015). Therefore, existing pragmatics and discourse analysis theories and methods need to evolve and adapt to account for the familiar, emergent, and/or reconfigured social practices (Herring, 2013) of the network society. Herring (2004), for instance, pioneered this trend in her proposal of a ‘computer-mediated discourse analysis’ for the study of online language use, which was viewed as affected by medium and social variables. Androutsopoulos (2006), too, underlined the need to attend to variation and social diversity in dealing with what he dubbed “new media sociolinguistics.” For his part,Yus (2001, 2011) proposed “cyberpragmatics,” an area of study concerned with internet-mediated communication within cognitive pragmatics.The diverse terms used to refer to this area of research bring to bear different theoretical and methodological assumptions and highlight the multidisciplinarity of this vast field. After all, discourse in TMC has sparked the interest of linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, and communication and media scholars, among others. 533

Bou-Franch

This chapter deals with pragmatic and discursive approaches to the use of Spanish on the internet. The term ‘digital discourse analysis’ (Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011) will be used as an umbrella term to refer to the pragmatic and discursive study of the use of language and other meaning-making resources in TMC (Jones et al., 2015). Section 2 defines the object of research and then reviews the existing literature. First, it traces the evolution of the field in terms of three waves of TMC studies before moving on to the discussion of current issues on Spanish digital discourse organized around four areas of research interest (Androutsopoulos, 2006; GarcésConejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2019; Georgakopoulou & Spilioti, 2016; Jones et al., 2015). Section 3 includes methodological reflections regarding data, ethics and, especially, the use of extant, digitized, research methods and the development of new, natively digital frameworks; i.e., those specifically designed to research online communication (Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014a; Rogers, 2009).The chapter ends with suggestions for future research and some concluding remarks.

2

Review of existing research

Digital discourse analysis is a vast and multidisciplinary field of research that results from the interplay of the semiotic, social, and technological worlds.This means that the focus of study is on the linguistic and non-linguistic resources used for communicative purposes in specific social practices through a range of digital platforms.Thus, the study of digital discourse, or digital discourse analysis, is “concerned with how multimodal, semiotic resources are employed to enact identities, activities and ideologies in the digital world, as part of a larger social world” (GarcésConejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2019, p. 4).

2.1

Evolution of the field

The aim of this section is to trace the evolution of this vast and highly heterogeneous field with special attention to research on Spanish online discourse. However, this is not a simple task and, definitely, it is not one that can be done comprehensively within the limits of this chapter, which therefore aims at a representative, rather than comprehensive, review.The evolution of the field is generally discussed in terms of three waves of studies of computer-mediated communication or, more accurately, technology-mediated communication. These move from a focus on formal, linguistic approaches to the analysis of digital discourse to socially sensitive and, more recently, critical, multimodal perspectives (Androutsopoulos, 2006; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2019; Georgakopoulou & Spilioti, 2016; Herring, 2019). It is important to highlight that, on the one hand, research into Spanish digital discourse also has been claimed to follow this evolutionary path (Pano Alamán & Moya Muñoz, 2016) and, on the other, that waves are not clear-cut periods but porous stages of change.This means waves do not have clearly marked boundaries in time and, as will become clear, studies that can be assigned to different waves may overlap in terms of time.

2.1.1

First wave: Internet linguistics

The study of digital discourse is relatively new; the first scholarly papers were published during the 1990s and early 2000s in what is known today as the “first wave” or “the internet linguistics approach” to TMC (Androutsopoulos, 2006). At that time, researchers were confronted with new ways of using the language, and their efforts were directed at understanding and describing the linguistic features of this new form of communication (Herring, 1996). In the case of 534

Pragmatics and digital discourse

Spanish digital discourse, descriptions of the language of the internet, or “netspeak” (Crystal, 2001;Yus, 2001), were mainly rooted in comparisons of the ‘new’ language with written and oral modes of communication. More specifically, many studies of online Spanish compared electronic language with previous studies of Spanish face-to-face conversation and colloquial speech (e.g., Briz & Grupo Val.Es.Co, 2004; Gallardo Paúls, 1996). The predominance of oral features in written formats was discussed in terms of a form of oralized writing (Yus, 2001) or “graphic casual conversation” (Sanmartín Sáez, 2007, p. 84, my translation), and the language of the internet was described as generally informal and colloquial (Yus, 2001). First-wave, mediumbased studies mainly focused on the effects of technology on the use of language; however, they generally failed to question the assumed linguistic homogeneity of the language of the internet and neglected the study of the role of “the interplay of technological, social, and contextual factors in the shaping of computer-mediated language practices’’ (Androutsopoulos, 2006, p. 421; Bou-Franch, 2011). Early descriptions of electronic language drew from texts taken from what are known today as Web 1.0 technologies of both the synchronous and the asynchronous kinds (e.g., Galán, 2002, for instant messaging, or Laborda Gil, 2003, for emails). A number of studies focused on understanding the use of Spanish in chats (Llisterri, 2002), a digital space of interaction that exhibits hybridity “between the stability of the written format and the spontaneity and evanescence of speech” (Yus, 2001, p. 12, my translation).This interest in descriptions of the language of chats (and other technologies) continued during subsequent waves of TMC studies, through the production of socially situated research, a fact that makes the porosity of waves salient. Sanmartín Sáez (2007), for instance, carried out a socially situated analysis of a corpus of 14 chats on three levels; namely, (a) the discursive level, which revealed the turn-taking dynamism characteristic of face-to-face conversations, despite fragmented adjacency and apparent incoherence; (b) the typological level, which showed the predominance of oral features; and (c) the level of register, which provided evidence of its informality. Among the micro-linguistic features of chats, she identified: orthographic simplification (e.g., deleting “h” in ola ‘hello’ or asiendo ‘doing’); abbreviations like q or tb for que ‘what’ and también ‘too’; deletion of initial syllables or sounds, as in nas, tais for buenas ‘greetings’ and estáis ‘are’; English borrowings like ‘one’ or ‘bye.’Terms of address (tío, tía ‘guy’), discourse markers (pues bueno ‘well then’), abbreviations (peli, finde ‘movie,’ ‘weekend’), and textual emoticons reflected the informal use of Spanish in her data. The features of this “technological conversation” were further explained in terms of the “rapidez exigida para enviar mensajes” [that] “responden a los condicionamientos del propio medio o canal, que requiere mensajes breves y respuestas rápidas” ‘speed required to send messages [that] meet the conditions of the medium or channel, which requires short, quick responses’ (Sanmartín Sáez, 2007, p. 57, my translation). The use of abbreviations, shortened structures, and emoticons are commonplace in contemporary uses of Spanish in social media, as later studies show (e.g., Pérez-Sabater, 2019;Yus, 2011). This usage initially caused a range of contrasting attitudes and emotions. While some linguists and educators believed these features would corrupt the normative use of the language, other scholars underlined the creativity and even the attitude of resistance that ensued from mastery of digital literacy, and argued that such uses should not be considered from normative perspectives (Mancera Rueda & Pano Alamán, 2013a; Sanmartín Sáez, 2007).

2.1.2

Second wave: Social diversity and variability

Androutsopoulos (2006) called for attention to all three sets of factors initially identified by Herring (1996) (i.e., language, technology, and the sociocultural context), and, more specifically, to social diversity and variability, and the building of identities and communities on specific 535

Bou-Franch

electronic platforms.This moved the field toward its “second wave,” characterized by an increasing number of socially sensitive discursive studies. In line with this, Herring (2007) provided a list of technological and social factors that could affect TMC on different occasions.The interplay of the technological affordances and constraints with users’ agency in online interactions has always occupied center stage in digital discourse studies. As researchers’ interests became more discursive and socially oriented (Georgakopoulou & Spilioti, 2016), communication technologies continued to emerge, were reconfigured, or evolved (Herring, 2013) toward 2.0 systems, and rapidly created new opportunities for digital interaction that became the object of scholarly attention.Web 2.0 systems like YouTube, Facebook,Tuenti or Twitter, which center around usergenerated content, are also known as social networking sites or participatory websites, crucially characterized by their sociability, in that they support sharing and interacting with others and reconfiguring communities (Page, Barton, Unger, & Zappavigna, 2014;Yus, 2011). For boyd and Marwick (2011), four affordances of social networking sites play an important role in the social dynamics therein; i.e., in reconfiguring “public sociality” (p. 9).These include: (a) Permanence or persistence, since posts are automatically recorded and archived; (b) Replicability, as digital contents can be duplicated with ease; (c) Searchability, which means that texts can be accessed using search engines; and (d) Scalability, which underscores the potentially very large visibility of the discourse produced therein (boyd & Marwick, 2011, p. 9). Second wave studies in Spanish include new, sociolinguistic perspectives on extant technologies, like emails, blogs, or chats (Bou-Franch, 2011; Landone, 2012; Sanmartín Sáez, 2007) and analyses of interactions in emergent/evolving technologies like Facebook or WhatsApp (Cantamutto, 2017; Recio Diego & Tomé Cornejo, 2017; Sampietro, 2019), together with a focus on fine-grained descriptions of digital genres, which are no longer confused with the media. Thus, for instance, Bou-Franch (2011) argues against the assumed homogeneity of the language of emails, and specifically focuses on academic emails. She studies linguistic variability in opening and closing discursive patterns alongside power and social distance.Another socially situated study is that of Pérez-Sabater (2012), which looks at informality in interactions on Facebook university pages. Thus, digital discourse researchers became increasingly concerned with variability at the social and technological intersection.This has allowed for the comparison of online genres with the offline, original genres from which they evolve (Pano Alamán & Moya Muñoz, 2016). Comparisons between letter writing and emails, newspaper opinion articles and newspaper online comments, face-to-face service encounters and commercial websites/Facebook encounters, and between analogic and electronic university welcome letters, are cases in point (Bou-Franch, 2019; Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2020; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2008; López Alonso & Seré, 2006; Pérez Sabater & Moffo, 2018; Placencia, 2015).The study of Spanish for specific purposes also gained attention in descriptions of digital genres. In addition to the studies of academic, commercial, and journalistic genres, González and Sanmartín’s (2013) study of the use of Spanish for tourism on Facebook is another example. Section 3.3 looks more closely at studies that center on the reconceptualization of sociability practices in digital communication with a focus on digital genres and issues of face and identity, (im) politeness, and conflict. Finally, as explained in Section 3, second wave scholars critically engage in the methodological debate on digital discourse analysis and the research ethics involved in the study of online discourse. In sum, second wave studies moved the field from an interest in the medium or technology to a central focus on the user. Research methods from disciplines such as discourse analysis, pragmatics, and the ethnography of communication were used to examine digital discursive practices and placed an emphasis on social variability and diversity, identity performance, and the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relations within specific communities. 536

Pragmatics and digital discourse

2.1.3

Third wave: Critical perspectives and multimodality

Digital discourse analysis is currently moving toward a “third wave” of critical and multimodal studies (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2019; Georgakopoulos & Spilioti, 2016). On the one hand, there is a need to adopt a critical stance on the ways social media are used to reproduce discrimination because, although the communicative possibilities that the internet offers were initially understood in terms of a highly participatory and democratic process of contemporary society, discriminatory and unequal ideologies and discourses soon occupied a prominent place in network communications.This prompted a need for a critical understanding of the acclaimed democratization potential of the internet (Bou-Franch, 2013). Critical reflections should also include the examination of beliefs and attitudes toward digital language and the technologies themselves (Alcántara Plá, 2016;Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011), and the role of social media in the development of populist, post-truth discourses, and in mobilizing users into political action and discussion (Gallardo Paúls & Enguix Oliver, 2016). On the other hand, current studies are slowly but increasingly embracing multimodal, multisemiotic models and methodologies to account for digital communication. Herring’s (2019) proposal of a theory of multimodal computer-mediated discourse analysis is a case in point.The high multimodality of digital texts means that text-based frameworks can yield only partial accounts of digital practices and that further multimodal combinations need to be addressed (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2019; Georgakopoulou & Spilioti, 2016).

2.2 Current issues in digital discourse Within the view of digital discourse analysis adopted in this chapter, which is concerned with the linguistic and non-linguistic resources used for communicative purposes in specific social practices, Jones et al. (2015) argue that scholarly attention should focus on four levels of discourse; namely, (a) texts, (b) contexts, (c) actions and interactions, and (d) power and ideology. This section deals with current issues in these four areas by briefly reviewing some key works on Spanish digital discourse.

2.2.1

Texts

As far as texts are concerned, analysts need to examine how “different technologies of entextualisation allow us to combine semiotic elements to form socially recognisable texts that can be used to perform different kinds of socially recognised actions” (Jones et  al., 2015, p.  4). Multimodal texts combine a number of cohesive and interactional resources to achieve coherence. Herring’s (1999) early claim that much online interaction was incoherent due to lack of simultaneous feedback and disrupted adjacency opened an important academic debate on the (in)coherence of digital texts and the resources employed in text production and comprehension. Early work on Spanish digital discourse found an occasional lack of coherence in chats (Sanmartín Sáez, 2007). Asynchronous interactions like those afforded by YouTube were also considered largely incoherent. Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus, and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2012) developed a multilayered framework for the study of textual resources for coherence in YouTube digital comments. Their study examined the (lack of) adjacency of every comment in their data, turn-management devices, and cross-turn cohesive resources. Results revealed that textual commentary on YouTube is characterized by loose texture, which appeared to be, nevertheless, sufficiently cohesive and coherent on two levels, as regards the connections between the video clip and the comments triggered by it, and in relation to the connections established 537

Bou-Franch

among the textual comments themselves. In this sense, their study showed that digital interactions did not develop in a linear, orderly manner, as face-to-face, dyadic conversations usually do. Instead, the online polylogues under scrutiny unfolded in what they called “networked sequences.” Their study identified a number of discourse patterns of networked sequences. Similar patterns were found in other digital practices. In a recent corpus-linguistic study of WhatsApp conversations,Alcántara Plá (2014) identified networked interactions, a high degree of multimodality, and blurred conversational limits that posed challenges to coherence and conversational descriptions. Although this research addressed coherence only indirectly, it is of relevance in that the author argued for the need to redefine conversational units and digital interactions in their own terms, rather than as adaptations or manipulations of preexisting forms of conversation. Furthermore, the study paid attention to a range of multimodal resources. In a case study of Facebook interactions,Vela Delfa (2017) also examined cohesion, coherence, and conversational structure, underlined the topical development of networked sequences, and considered the role of intertextuality and multimodality alongside coherence. Further research that considers coherence and multimodality vis-à-vis digital interactional structure and management is currently scarce. Incidentally, the discursive processes of intertextuality and heteroglossia also deserve further attention, as technological affordances like copying and pasting, sharing, and hypertextual linking facilitate interconnecting, mixing, and mashing texts together. In this sense, De Cock and Pizarro Pedraza’s (2017) corpus-based analysis of Twitter examined the use of the hashtag #jesuis across languages, including Spanish (#jesuis #Refugee #SoyRefugiado Sobran las #palabras, hacen falta #hechos, p. 207). This hashtag was originally created as #jesuisCharlie following the 2015 attacks on a satirical French magazine.The authors demonstrate the changing meanings of the hashtag used initially to express support after this terrorist attack and employed later to express condolences following other acts of terrorism and other deaths, and as a marker of solidarity and alignment. De Cock and Pizarro Pedraza (2017) further argued that these hashtags index particular Twitter identities and that some users employed it mockingly, in order to disaffiliate with this kind of identity and/or this intertextual process. A final aspect of texts that needs further attention concerns their multimodality and multisemiocity (Herring, 2019; Jewitt, 2016).Technologies allow for combinations of semiotic modes in performing identities, building relationships, and enacting activities and ideologies, which in turn affect issues of texture and intertextuality in the production of texts.These likewise enter into a process of resemiotization as they are reproduced, shared, or embedded in new contexts.Within the Spanish digital discourse analysis tradition, a number of studies have focused on the use and functions of emoji and emoticons, and of text-image combinations in memes (Pérez-Sabater, 2019; Sampietro, 2019;Yus, 2014;Yus, forthcoming). Pérez-Sabater (2019), for instance, examined the effect of gender on the use of emoticons in WhatsApp conversations. Her data included men-only and women-only interactions, online questionnaires, and face-to-face interviews. Her findings showed the persistence of gender-based differences in WhatsApp conversations, with women making greater and more varied use of emoticons than men.

2.2.2

Context

Regarding context, digital discourse analysis focuses on the “social and material situations in which texts are constructed, consumed, exchanged and appropriated” (Jones et al., 2015, p. 4), alongside the cognitive dimension involved in text production and comprehension. Regarding cognitive pragmatics,Yus’ (2001, 2011) development of a relevance-theoretic approach to TMC (namely, cyberpragmatics) merits special attention.This approach has been fruitfully applied to 538

Pragmatics and digital discourse

the study of communication through early technologies like emails, chats, and blogs, as well as on social networking sites. Digital technologies have complicated and transformed our experiences and understanding of contextual aspects of time and space.The possibilities for synchronous and asynchronous communication offline and online,through different technologies,impact our social context (Marwick & boyd, 2010). Issues of decontextualization and recontextualization further gain prominence in TMC, as texts (and the identities, activities, and ideologies associated with them) travel across multiple devices, making it necessary to consider translocality, and local and global(ized) contexts of interaction (Jones et al., 2015;Tagg & Seargeant, 2014). Along this line, Alcántara-Plá (2017) addresses recontextualization and points to the blurred boundaries of digital interactions. The communicative availability of users through multiple devices, together with the ease with which they move from one device to another, complicate the analysis of digital interactions and bring to the fore the need to gain further insights into recontextualization practices. Another central question underlying participation in social networking sites involves examining the effects of ‘collapsed contexts’ (boyd & Marwick, 2011, Marwick & boyd, 2010); i.e., digital contexts that bring together (groups of) people with whom interaction would develop separately in offline communication. Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook “collapse diverse social contexts into one” (Marwick & boyd, 2010, p. 10). Accustomed to engaging in independent interactions with different interlocutors in different contexts, for different purposes, and drawing on different communicative styles, users now interact simultaneously with a number of social groups from different contexts.This fact constrains discursive practices.Androutsopoulos (2014) argues that in these situations, users orient to their audience and employ discursive strategies to select specific audiences within the networked publics of these sites (see also Tagg & Seargeant, 2014). Networked publics refer to the “imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology and practice” (boyd & Marwick, 2011, p. 7). Dwelling on the fact that a Facebook user will be unable to meet all the sociolinguistic expectations of a particular networked audience, Androutsopoulos (2014) elaborates on the idea that online practices include participants actively constructing interactional contexts that select and design for their audience on each occasion.The impossibility of accommodating to all audience members’ sociolinguistic expectations, however, brings about the potential for conflict and underlines the importance of investigating (im)politeness and relational practices online. Communicating through collapsed contexts will thus require changes in people’s relational practices.

2.2.3

Actions and interactions

Relational practices constitute an area of study at the level of actions and interactions. Jones et al. (2015) call for discourse analysts to pay attention to what “people do with texts, especially what they do with and to each other” (p. 4). Our everyday social practices have evolved and adapted to the digital world in different ways.As discussed earlier, many digital interactions involve complicated features, like networked users (Papacharissi, 2011) who communicate with their networked publics (Marwick & boyd, 2010), in interactions that unfold through networked sequences (BouFranch et al., 2012) in collapsed contexts, across technologies, and offline.The networked nature of actions and interactions has highlighted issues of sociability. In pragmatics, sociability has been addressed within theories of (im)politeness and relational work. Online (im)politeness has been the object of considerable research among Spanish digital discourse scholars. Digital relational practices have been examined across numerous genres and platforms (e.g., González & Sanmartín, 2013; Laborda Gil, 2003; Landone, 2012; Placencia, 2015).A number of studies have focused on the online realization of speech acts. Maíz-Arévalo (2013), for instance, compared responses to 539

Bou-Franch

compliments in face-to-face conversations and on Facebook. The systemic functional analysis of her data was complemented with netnographic observations and semi-structured interviews with some of the participants. Her study found that Facebook responses to compliments were contextually constrained by its asynchronous, disembodied nature, and the lack of intimacy of interactions, so new patterns of online compliment responses emerged. Studies on impoliteness and conflict in digital discourse deserve special attention due to the ubiquity of verbal aggression across social media. Online conflict is generally attributed to anonymity, which is also related to lack of retribution for those involved in impolite behavior (Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014a; Kaul de Marlangeon & Cordisco, 2014; Mancera Rueda & Pano Alamán, 2013b). In this sense, Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2014a) related conflict on YouTube to anonymity and the consequent depersonalized nature of the interaction, which lead to (extreme) group identification and polarization.These authors studied the unfolding of conflict sequences in a corpus of comments sent in response to a public service announcement and showed that simply applying existing, ‘digitized’ methods to online polylogues was insufficient to account adequately for YouTube conflict.They asserted that such methods needed to be supplemented with natively digital frameworks. Thus, they proposed a framework to explain how conflict begins, unfolds, and ends in online polylogues. For their part, Vivas Márquez and Ridao Rodrigo (2015) studied conflict by applying different taxonomies of impoliteness strategies to the analysis of two data sets from personal and public Facebook interactions.They found that the personal/public nature of the interactions played an important role in the occurrence and type of (im)politeness found in their data (see Chapters 20 and 21 on politeness and impoliteness, this volume). Additionally, while some studies have focused on notions of face and digital face-repairing strategies (Maíz-Arévalo, 2019), others have proposed a reconceptualization of the notion of relational work. Such is the case of Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2018), who argued for a more comprehensive understanding of relational work, initially conceived for verbal interaction, which will attend to the multimodal, networked interactions of social media.They therefore proposed a model for the study of unfolding, multimodal, networked polylogues that they used to explain Facebook wall interactions. In sum, pragmatic studies of relational work have proved important to describe and explain social relations in several areas like politics, journalism, or commercial encounters, to name a few (e.g. Bou-Franch, 2013; Kaul de Marlangeon & Cordisco, 2014; Mancera Rueda, 2009; Mancera Rueda & Pano Alamán, 2013b;Vivas Márquez & Ridao Rodrigo, 2015). Variational and contrastive pragmatics constitute other related aspects of action and interaction that are beginning to draw scholarly attention. Regarding variational pragmatics, studies have focused on regional and socioeconomic variation. Moya Muñoz and Carrió-Pastor (2018), for instance, examined variation in the intensifying devices used in a corpus of digital responses to Spanish and Chilean newspaper articles. Using corpus linguistics methods, they found a greater use of intensifying particles in responses to the Spanish broadsheet. Socioeconomic variation was the focus of Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich’s (2020) study of impoliteness in commercial encounters on the Facebook pages of two Spanish stores of different prestige levels. Sanmartín Sáez (2017), for her part, analyzed pragmalinguistic variation in Spanish and Chilean hotel reactions to negative online reviews. In her study, regional variation was related to hotel location and socioeconomic variation was accounted for in terms of hotel category, based on hotel star ratings. In all cases, online discursive patterns showed pragmatic variation. Finally, a number of contrastive studies have paid attention to different pragmatic and discursive features across digital platforms and genres.The realization of speech acts, like complimenting and jocular mockery, have come under scrutiny in Spanish and English Facebook groups (Maíz-Arévalo, 540

Pragmatics and digital discourse

2015; Maíz-Arévalo & García-Gómez, 2013). Other studies paid attention to similarities and differences in the English and Spanish comments of female and male users in online support groups (Pérez-Sabater, 2017). And informality in the online academic discourse of Spanish and English emails and Spanish and French websites was further subjected to contrastive analysis (Lorenzo-Dus & Bou-Franch, 2013; Pérez-Sabater & Moffo, 2018). These areas of study need further research, especially considering the importance of multilingualism and intercultural communication online.

2.2.4

Power and ideology

The last area of inquiry, power, and ideology involves analyzing how “people use texts to dominate and control others and to create certain ‘versions of reality’” (Jones et al., 2015, p. 4).This means adopting a critical perspective on digital practices, which will examine identities and the ways in which “micro-level practices construct social worlds and how macro-level structures and ideologies shape our communicative practices” (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2019, p. 11). Within the areas of power and ideology, studies of identity construction have received considerable attention.The special issue of Discurso y Sociedad on discourse and identity in Hispanic cyberspace (Placencia & Fuentes Rodríguez, 2014) illustrates this interest. Critical approaches to digital commentaries from YouTube and newspapers have focused on the discursive construction of gender and ethnic identities and ideologies (Bou-Franch, 2013; Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014b; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2014; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Bou-Franch, & Lorenzo-Dus, 2013). These studies consider the discursive formation of social identity and the processes of (dis)affiliation with the group as central to ideological analysis. Critical perspectives to the study of political discourse in online platforms have recently proliferated (Gallardo-Paúls & Enguix Oliver, 2016; Kaul de Marlangeon & Cordisco, 2014; Mancera Rueda & Pano Alamán, 2013b). In their study of political discourse, Gallardo-Paúls and Enguix-Oliver (2016), for instance, argue that in their corpus based on Twitter and Instagram, users engage in what they call “pseudo-political” discourse, which is far from the genuine political discourse that addresses governance for the common good. They explain pseudo-political discourse in terms of three sociological processes: (a) the sensationalization by the news media, which leads to a consideration of politics as spectacle; (b) the personalization of political actors, in which the politician becomes the message; and (c) processes of desideologización, or ‘citizens’ loss of ideological vision,’ which results in a rise in popular cynicism. The study of language ideologies constitutes another important venue for critical research on digital discourse. In this regard, the work of Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2019) examines the paradoxical status of Spanish within the Latino community in the U.S. in a corpus of digital comments. Drawing on the concept of shared narratives, this author analyzes how users narrate their stories about how their Latinidad is influenced by their knowledge of Spanish, or lack thereof. The analysis of comments in terms of five narrative themes shows the complex, conflictual dynamics of language and identity in her data. Finally,Thurlow and Mroczek (2011, p. xxiv) call for a critical stance on technologies themselves. They argue that technologies need to be “more critically, carefully theorized” prior to attempting to describe their role in human communication. In a similar vein, Alcántara Plá (2016) underlines the importance of critically examining not just the language used in digital platforms but also the language used to refer to the technologies.A focus on technological terms, he argues, will shed light on our critical understanding of the technologies and of their influence on contemporary social transformations.Thus, he examines neologisms regarding concepts like 541

Bou-Franch

red social or amistad/ ‘social network’ or ‘friendship,’ metaphors like escritorio/ ‘desk,’ terms for new, seemingly egalitarian roles like prosumidor/ ‘prosumer,’ or biology-based analogies like virus informático/ ‘computer virus.’ He considers the extent to which the terminology we employ to refer to technologies reflects and shapes how we relate to them, even when new terms are inaccurate and may lead to confusion and ambiguity. Hence, Alcántara Plá considers it essential to move beyond the formal, etymological analyses of neologisms and advocates for their contextual, critical assessment. He concludes that the “tendency to defend the use of already existing vocabulary to the detriment of borrowings can have a negative impact on how we relate in this world, in which information technologies are ubiquitous” (2016, p. 33, my translation). In sum, the critical analysis of digital practices in the Hispanic cyberspace has begun to address issues of identity and ideology.This is a key area of digital discourse analysis that needs further scholarly attention.

3

Methodological considerations

The methodological debate in digital discourse analysis is of central importance and has evolved with the changing interests and concerns of the field itself. Methodological reflections draw scholarly attention toward data compilation, research methods, and research ethics (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2019; Pano Alamán & Moya Muñoz, 2016;Tagg & Seargeant, 2014). Early descriptions of the language of Web 1.0 technologies did not always use systematically compiled corpora and used, instead, a small number of texts from different communication spaces on the internet (Pano Alamán & Moya Muñoz, 2016, p. 13). However, as analyses became increasingly socially situated and attention was paid to variability and diversity, issues like sociability, identities, and digital genres became the object of research. In fact, genre-based studies developed into a prominent approach to digital discourse. In describing digital genres, many second-wave studies draw from pragmatic models of (im)politeness and discursive approaches to identity in order to address the interpersonal level of online communication (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2014; Kaul de Marlangeon & Cordisco, 2014; Mancera Rueda, 2009; Placencia & Fuentes Rodríguez, 2014). It is important to note that during the second wave of digital discourse analysis, scholars critically engaged in the methodological debate surrounding digital discourse analysis that questioned the validity of applying existing research methods that were not originally designed to explain digital communication. In this sense, Rogers’ (2009) distinction between digitized and natively digital research methods is of interest. While existing methods and concepts of traditional (non-digital) discourse analysis will be useful in partially explaining digital interactions, it is important to be aware that they may need to be adapted or “digitized” before they can be fruitfully applied to online discourse.After all, extant methods were designed to account for written or spoken, (mostly) face-to-face, dyadic communication (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010; Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011). In order to account for the discourse produced within the interactional affordances and constraints brought about by technology, and for the blurring of important traditional dichotomies like private and public, personal and institutional/corporate and social, analysts will need not only to reformulate or digitize existing methods but also to formulate new, ‘natively digital’ frameworks specially designed for the study of digital discourse and communication. Previous studies of Spanish electronic discourse have shown the suitability of drawing from particular combinations of digitized and natively digital research methods (BouFranch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014b). More recently, within the third wave of digital discourse analysis, critical and multimodal methodologies have begun to develop and spread. Critical approaches draw from critical 542

Pragmatics and digital discourse

discourse analysis to explore media ideologies (Alcántara Plá, 2016; Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011), and multimodal perspectives draw from a range of frameworks that underline the fact that since digital discourse is highly multimodal, text-based approaches fail to provide sufficient explanatory tools. In addition to critical and multimodal frameworks, other research methods that scholars are currently employing include netnographic approaches (Maíz-Arévalo, 2015, 2019) or the triangulation of discourse analysis with ethnographic interviews (Pérez-Sabater, 2019). Furthermore, the use of corpus linguistics is also gaining prominence in the study of large corpora of digital data (Cantamutto & Vela Delfa, 2015; Pano Alamán & Moya Muñoz, 2015). Another important area within methodology concerns research ethics.As internet research developed, scholars began to consider the public/private context of the data in order to assess issues of privacy and make decisions regarding data gathering, storing, and analysis (Page et al., 2014, p. 64). The use of digital data from private domains, like emails or personal Facebook pages with privacy settings, requires the explicit consent from participants.The use of digital texts from public domains, for their part, still needs to be cautious.The public sharing of posts does not mean that senders have no expectations or perceptions of privacy (boyd & Marwick, 2011). Likewise, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Working Ethics Committee recommends taking steps to protect users’ identity and privacy (Markham & Buchanan, 2012). These generally involve deleting usernames, images, names of places, and any other identification information.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Within Spanish pragmatics, digital discourse studies constitute a fast-growing area of research in need of further academic scrutiny, not only due to the fact that communication technologies continue to evolve while new ones are developed, but also because of their great influence on contemporary social practices. The discussion of the evolution of the field strongly suggests the need for future research to adopt multimodal and critical perspectives to the analysis of digital practices. Within these perspectives, future venues for research include, among others, studies of intertextuality and heteroglossia, especially in relation to the affordances that facilitate interconnecting, mixing, and mashing texts together. Additionally, relational practices constitute central aspects of the discursive level of actions and interactions that need further scrutiny. In this sense, variational and contrastive studies have emerged as a growing area of interest in TMC.The study of conflict and (im)politeness in digital discourse and, more specifically, their role in ideological processes and social transformations, constitutes another important venue for research.The rapid pace of contemporary social transformation and technological evolution and the ways in which these areas of change are interconnected point to the need for continuing research in the area of Spanish pragmatics and digital discourse analysis.

Further reading Alcántara-Plá, M. (2014). Las unidades discursivas en los mensajes instantáneos de wasap. Estudios de Lingüística del Español, 35(1), 214–233. This paper looks at conversational units in a corpus of interactions on WhatsApp. Using corpus-based techniques, the author compares the interactional features of his data with those of face-to-face and other online interactions. He argues for the need to redefine interactional features in a bottom-up way, taking data as a starting point.Thus, he engages in the methodological debate that questions the validity of treating online interactions as modified, adapted, or even ‘deformed’ versions of existing communicative events. 543

Bou-Franch

Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2018). Relational work in multimodal networked interactions on Facebook. Internet Pragmatics, 1(1), 134–160. This paper argues that the notion of relational work needs to be expanded to be able to account for sociability in the networked interactions afforded by social media such as Facebook. Relational work is a framework originally developed for language analysis while networked interactions are highly multimodal.The authors adopt a multimodal perspective to the analysis of a Facebook wall interaction and show how central sociability functions are carried out by semiotic modes other than language.This study also shows that digital relational practices are highly intertwined in networked interactions. Giammatteo, M., Gubitosi, P., & Parini,A. (Eds.). (2017). El español en la red. Madrid: Iberoamericana. This recently edited volume contains a compilation of contributions dealing with the use of Spanish in TMC. The book first deals with digital genres and styles in technologies such as blogs, Twitter, and smartphones. It next addresses issues of online multilingualism and places an emphasis on codeswitching.The final part tackles a range of issues such as coherence and interactional structure, emoji and politeness, and different aspects of the institutional and noninstitutional contexts of TMC. Mancera Rueda, A., & Pano Alamán, A. (2013). El discurso político en Twitter: análisis de mensajes que “trinan.” Barcelona: Anthropos. This book addresses the co-construction of political discourses on Twitter, using a corpus of tweets posted by politicians and, to a lesser extent, journalists and citizens, during the 2011 political campaign in Spain. After a review of Spanish studies on technology-mediated discourse and, more specifically, of Twitter, the authors dwell on the socio-political context and explore the role of Twitter during political campaigns and the tension between politicians and journalists. A pragmalinguistic analysis of the data with a focus on discursive features like informality, verbal aggression, irony, or humor ends this comprehensive study.

References Alcántara-Plá, M. (2014). Las unidades discursivas en los mensajes instantáneos de wasap. Estudios de Lingüística del Español, 35(1), 214–233. Alcántara Plá, M. (2016). Neologismos tecnológicos y nuevos comportamientos en la sociedad red. Aposta. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 69, 14–38. Alcántara Plá, M. (2017). El contexto de los mensajes en la comunicación digital. In M. Giammatteo, P. Gubitosi, & A. Parini (Eds.), El español en la red (pp. 303–326). Madrid: Iberoamericana. Androutsopoulos, J. (2006). Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(4), 419–438. Androutsopoulos, J. (2014). Languaging when contexts collapse: Audience design in social networking. Discourse, Context and Media, 4–5, 62–73. Bou-Franch, P. (2011). Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1772–1785. Bou-Franch, P. (2013). Domestic violence and public participation in the media:The case of citizen journalism. Gender and Language, 3(3), 275–302. Bou-Franch, P. (2019). Relational practices in commercial Facebook wall interactions. In P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, L. Fernández-Amaya, & M. Hernández-López (Eds.),  Technology-mediated service encounters (pp. 435–478).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2014a). Conflict management in massive polylogues:A case study from YouTube. Journal of Pragmatics, 73, 19–36. Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2014b). Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 2(2), 226–248. Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2018). Relational work in multimodal networked interactions on Facebook. Internet Pragmatics, 1(1), 134–160. Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2020). Socioeconomic variation and conflict in Spanish retailer-consumer interactions on Facebook. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions (pp. 189–206). London and New York: Routledge Press. Bou-Franch, P., Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2012). Social interaction in YouTube text-based polylogues: A study of coherence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17(4), 501–521. 544

Pragmatics and digital discourse

boyd, d., & Marwick,A. E. (2011). Social privacy in networked publics:Teens’ attitudes, practices, and strategies. A decade in internet time: Symposium on the dynamics of the internet and society. Retrieved from https:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1925128 Briz,A., & Grupo Val.Es.Co. (2004). ¿Cómo se comenta un texto coloquial? Barcelona: Ariel. Cantamutto, L. (2017). Economía, claridad y expresividad lingüísticas: El estilo comunicativo digital del teléfono móvil en el espacio bonaerense. In M. Giammatteo, P. Gubitosi, & A. Parini (Eds.), El español en la red (pp. 93–119). Madrid: Iberoamericana. Cantamutto, L., & Vela Delfa, C. (2015). Problemas de recogida y fijación de muestras del discurso digital. CHIMERA: Romance Corpora and Linguistic Studies, 2, 131–155. Castells, M. (2000).Toward a sociology of the network society. Contemporary Sociology, 29(5), 693–699. Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Cock, B., & Pizarro Pedraza, A. (2017). From expressing solidarity to mocking on Twitter Pragmatic functions of hashtags starting with #jesuis across languages. Language in Society, 47, 197–217. Galán, C. (2002). En los arrabales de la comunicación: Los mensajes SMS. Anuario de Estudios Filológicos, XXV, 103–117. Gallardo Paúls, B. (1996). Análisis conversacional y pragmática del receptor.Valencia: Episteme. Gallardo Paúls, B., & Enguix Oliver, S. (2016). Pseudopolítica: El discurso político en las redes sociales. Valencia: Universitat de València. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2010). The YouTubification of politics, impoliteness, and polarization. In R. Taiwo (Ed.), Handbook of research on discourse behavior and digital communication: Language structures and social interaction (pp. 540–563). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2019). “You are shamed for speaking it or for not speaking it”: Paradoxical status of Spanish in the US Latino community. In L. Jeffries & J. O’Driscoll (Eds.), Handbook of language in conflict (pp. 398–416). London: Routledge. Garcés Conejos Blitvich, P., & Bou-Franch, P. (2008). Cortesía en las páginas web interactivas: El comercio electrónico. In A. Briz, A. Hidalgo, M. Albelda, J. Contreras, & N. Hernández-Flores (Eds.), Cortesía y conversación: De lo escrito a lo oral (pp. 468–487).Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, EDICE. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., & Bou-Franch, P. (2014). ‘¿!Hispano y Blanco?!’ Racialización  de la identidad Latina en YouTube. Discurso y Sociedad, 8(3), 427–461. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., & Bou-Franch, P. (2019). Introduction. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions (pp. 3–22). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., Bou-Franch, P., & Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2013). ‘Despierten, Latinos’ (‘wake up, Latinos’): Latino identity, US politics and YouTube. Journal of Language and Politics, 12(4), 558–582. Georgakopoulou, A., & Spilioti, T. (2016). Introduction. In A. Georgakopoulou & T. Spilioti (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language and digital communication (pp. 1–16). London: Routledge. Giammatteo, M., Gubitosi, P., & Parini,A. (Eds.). (2017). El español en la red. Madrid: Iberoamericana. González, V., & Sanmartín, J. (2013). Facebook y discurso turístico: Tenor functional y estrategias pragmalingüísticas en turismo Madrid y turismo Sevilla. In A. Cabedo Nebot, M. J. Aguilar Ruiz, & E. López-Navarro Vidal (Eds.), Estudios de lingüística: Investigaciones, propuestas y aplicaciones (pp. 243–253). Valencia: Universitat de Valencia. Herring, S. C. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Herring, S. C. (1999). Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 4(4). Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.html Herring, S. C. (2004). Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior. In S. A. Barab, R. Kling, & J. H. Gray (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning (pp. 338–376). New York: Cambridge University Press. Herring, S. C. (2007).A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@Internet, 4. Herring, S. C. (2013). Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, reconfigured, and emergent. In D.Tannen & A. M. Tester (Eds.), Discourse 2.0: Language and new media (pp. 1–25).Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Herring, S. C. (2019). The coevolution of computer-mediated communication and computer-mediated discourse analysis. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions (pp. 24–67). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Jewitt, C. (2016). Multimodal analysis. In A. Georgakopoulou & T. Spilioti (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language and digital communication (pp. 69–84). London: Routledge. 545

Bou-Franch

Jones, R. H., Chik, A., & Hafner, C. A. (2015). Introduction: Discourse analysis and digital practices. In R. H. Jones, A. Chik, & C. A. Hafner (Eds.), Discourse analysis and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age (pp. 1–17). London: Routledge. Kaul de Marlangeon, S., & Cordisco,A. (2014). La descortesía verbal en el contexto político-ideológico de las redes sociales. Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna, 32, 145–162. Laborda Gil, X. (2003). Estilo y cortesía en el correo electrónico. Tonos digital: Revista electrónica de estudios filológicos, 6. Retrieved from www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum6/estudios/Laborda.htm Landone, E. (2012). Discourse markers and politeness in a digital forum in Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(13), 1799–1820. Llisterri, J. (2002). Marcas fonéticas de la oralidad en la lengua de los chats: elisiones y epéntesis consonánticas. Revista de Investigación Lingüística, 2(5), 61–100. López Alonso, C., & Seré, A. (Eds.). (2006). Nuevos géneros discursivos, los textos electrónicos. Estudios de Lingüística del Español, 24. Retrieved from http://elies.rediris.es/elies24/ Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Bou-Franch, P. (2013).A cross-cultural investigation of email communication in Peninsular Spanish and British English:The role of (in)formality and (in)directness. Pragmatics and Society, 4(1), 1–25. Maíz-Arévalo, C. (2013).“Just click ‘Like’:” Computer-mediated responses to Spanish compliments. Journal of Pragmatics, 51, 47–67. Maíz-Arévalo, C. (2015). Jocular mockery in computer-mediated communication:A contrastive study of a Spanish and English Facebook community. Journal of Politeness Research, 11(2), 289–327. Maíz-Arévalo, C. (2019). Losing face on Facebook: Linguistic strategies to repair face in a Spanish common interest group. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions (pp. 282–309). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Maíz-Arévalo, C., & García-Gómez, A. (2013). ‘You look terrific!’ Social evaluation and relationships in online compliments. Discourse Studies, 15(3), 1–26. Mancera Rueda, A. (2009). Manifestaciones de descortesía y violencia verbal en los foros de opinión digitales de los diarios españoles. Discurso & Sociedad, 3(3), 437–466. Mancera Rueda,A., & Pano Alamán,A. (2013a). El español coloquial en las redes sociales. Madrid:Arco Libros. Mancera Rueda,A., & Pano Alamán,A. (2013b). El discurso político en Twitter:Análisis de mensajes que “trinan.” Barcelona: Anthropos. Markham,A., & Buchanan, E. (2012). Ethical decision-making and internet research. Recommendations from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0). Retrieved from www. aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf Marwick,A. E., & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately:Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. Moya Muñoz, P., & Carrió-Pastor, M. L. (2018). Estrategias de intensificación en los comentarios digitales sobre noticias en español: Un análisis de la variación entre España y Chile. Spanish in Context, 15(3), 369–391. Page, R. E., Barton, D., Unger, J.W., & Zappavigna, M. (2014). Researching language and social media:A student guide. London: Routledge. Pano Alamán,A., & Moya Muñoz, P. (2015). CorpusRedEs: Proyecto de creación y anotación de un corpus de comunicación mediada por ordenador en español. Chimera: Romance Corpora and Linguistic Studies, 2, 117–129. Pano Alamán,A., & Moya Muñoz, P. (2016). Una aproximación a los estudios sobre el discurso mediado por ordenador en lengua española. Tonos Digital, 30. Retrieved from www.tonosdigital.com/ojs/indexphp/ tonos/article/view/1434/834 Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.). (2011). A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites. New York: Routledge. Pérez-Sabater, C. (2012).The linguistics of social networking:A study of writing conventions on Facebook. Linguistik Online, 56(6–12), 83–91. Pérez-Sabater, C. (2017). Linguistic accommodation in online communication: The role of language and gender. Revista Signos, 50(94), 265–286. Pérez-Sabater, C. (2019). Emoticons in relational writing practices on WhatsApp: Some reflections on gender. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions (pp. 162–189). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pérez-Sabater, C., & Moffo, G. M. (2018). El discurso público de la universidad: Un estudio socio-pragmático contrastivo de Camerún, España y Francia. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 73, 177–196. 546

Pragmatics and digital discourse

Placencia, M. E. (2015). Address forms and relational work in e-commerce: The case of service encounter interactions in Mercado Libre Ecuador. In M. de la O. Hernández-López & L. Fernández Amaya (Eds.), A multidisciplinary approach to service encounters (pp. 37–64). Leiden: Brill. Placencia, M. E., & Fuentes Rodríguez, C. (Eds.). (2014). Discurso e identidad en el ciberespacio hispano/ Discourse and identity in Hispanic cyberspace. Discurso y Sociedad, 8(3). Retrieved from www.dissoc. org/ediciones/v08n03/ Recio Diego, A., & Tomé Cornejo, C. (2017). La realidad sintáctica de Twitter. Subordinación en 140 caracteres. In M. Giammatteo, P. Gubitosi, & A. Parini (Eds.), El español en la red (pp. 75–92). Madrid: Iberoamericana. Rogers, R. (2009). The end of the virtual. Digital research methods.Amsterdam:Vossiuspers UvA. Sampietro,A. (2019). Emoji and rapport management in Spanish WhatsApp chats. Journal of Pragmatics, 143, 109–120. Sanmartín Sáez, J. (2007). El chat. La conversación tecnológica. Madrid:Arco Libros. Sanmartín Sáez, J. (2017). La intervención reactiva de hoteles españoles y chilenos (o cómo minimizar una opinión negativa de un modo cortés). Lingüística Española Actual, XXXIX (2), 269–288. Tagg, C., & Seargeant, P. (2014).Audience design and language choice in the construction and maintenance of translocal communities on social network sites. In P. Seargeant & C.Tagg (Eds.), The language of social media: Identity and community on the internet (pp. 161–186). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thurlow, C., & Mroczek, K. (Eds.). (2011). Digital discourse: Language in the new media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vela Delfa, C. (2017). Coherencia, cohesión y estructura de la interacción en el discurso digital: Un análisis de los intercambios en la red social Facebook. In M. Giammatteo, P. Gubitosi, & A. Parini (Eds.), El español en la red (pp. 255–278). Madrid: Iberoamericana. Vivas Márquez, J., & Ridao Rodrigo, S. (2015). ‘Lo siento pero me parecen horribles!!!’ Análisis pragmalingüístico de la descortesía en la red social Facebook. Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna, 33, 217–236. Yus, F. (2001). Ciberpragmática. Barcelona: Ariel. Yus, F. (2011). Cyberpragmatics. Internet mediated-communication in context.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yus, F. (2014). Not all emoticons are created equal. Linguagem em (Dis)curso, 14(3), 511–529. Yus, F. (forthcoming). Pragmatics of humor in memes in Spanish. Spanish in Context.

547

32 Corpus pragmatics in first- and second-language research Jesús Romero-Trillo1 and Paula Gozalo

1

Introduction

‘Corpus pragmatics’ has been defined as “the science that describes language use in real contexts through corpora” (Romero-Trillo, 2017, p. 1).This straightforward definition captures the essence of the enormous and expansive possibilities of the description of language use; i.e., pragmatics in its broadest sense, through the use of corpora that portray how language is realized in real contexts.To achieve this goal, methods of data collection for corpora have had to incorporate modes of modern communication that include not only spoken language recordings, but also multimedia- and internet-mediated communication data. Although the connection between corpus linguistics and pragmatics seems quite established at present, it was not until a decade ago when the mutualistic relationship was made explicit, as the two disciplines were regarded “as parallel but often mutually exclusive” (Romero-Trillo, 2008, p. 2). Even though the object of study of the two disciplines is the use of language in context, their understanding of context is different: the static approach (quantitative), typical of corpus linguistics, versus the dynamic, meaning-construction perspective that is typical of pragmatics. As a result, Romero-Trillo concludes that “for many years Corpus linguistics and Pragmatics have represented two paths of scientific thought, parallel but often mutually exclusive and excluding” (Romero-Trillo, 2008, p. 3). In other words, the two philosophical approaches and their methodologies seemed paradoxically to have a different object of analysis even though language in use was their target. However, in recent years the two perspectives have found a common path, and there is an increase of literature showing the benefits of combining the approaches; e.g., Aijmer and Rühleman (2004) and Jucker, Schreier, and Hundt (2009). For this reason, corpus pragmatics demonstrates that linguistics is not only concerned with linguistics as an inner-circle science, but that it is also oriented toward the understanding of current developments in society, in the era of globalization and big data. In fact, the use of computerized data, the web-as-corpus data (Biber, Egbert, & Davies, 2015; Fletcher, 2012; Kilgarriff & Grefenstette, 2003), the pervasiveness of social networks, and the increasing use of voice-cum-video apps for communication, which are increasingly substituting texting alternatives, are changing the conception of traditional corpus linguistics, which used to be focused on the analysis of written controlled corpora.Therefore, the transition from the classical corpus-collection methodologies to the web-as-corpus perspective, and the multimodal 549

Romero-Trillo and Gozalo

data obtained from smartphones and other gadgets, demand new corpus-collection techniques and renewed pragmatic research not only in first language (L1)–L1 communication, but also in L1-second language (L2) intercultural communication (Romero-Trillo, 2018a). For this reason, multimodal pragmatic analysis has revamped the interest in prosodic pragmatics (Romero-Trillo, 2012) as a new discipline that can illuminate the subtleties of communication that can be considered face-to-face, but is not always carried out in the same geographical place. Increasingly, this research in prosodic pragmatics is making use of corpus linguistics techniques to validate and improve the theoretical tenets that were designed in the past. In fact, some specific corpus-pragmatics publications are devoted to the exploration of different topics of interest for linguistics and society that are subjected to the synergy of the two methodologies in an exploratory way vis-à-vis the new technological and scientific tools at the researchers’ disposal.2 This chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 concentrates on corpus typology and Spanish corpus pragmatics research as an L1. It explores the learner corpus perspective with some critical insights on L2 pragmatic development, an overview of corpus-based research in L2 Spanish pragmatics, and the analysis of corpus applications, with a special focus on the teaching and learning of L2 Spanish. Section 3 is devoted to offering methodological applications for future research with practical implications for both theoretical and applied linguistics. Finally, Section 4 suggests research avenues that may unveil how people learn to communicate in their L1.

2 2.1

Review of existing research Corpus design and pragmatics research in Spanish

Compared to English corpus linguistics, Spanish corpus linguistics started significantly later, but, in Rojo’s (2015) words, over the last two decades, it “has witnessed notable advances in the volume and characteristics of corpora compiled” (Rojo, p.  372), with a particular interest in middle- and large-sized corpora.3 We must state that the corpus size is not only a consequence of technological evolution but also of the quick and direct access to texts in electronic format.

2.2

Spanish native-speaker (NS or L1) corpora

Regarding corpus typology, Cruz Piñol’s (2012) review of the most commonly used categories used in native-speaker (NS) corpora can be summarized as follows. They are followed by examples of the main corpora for the Spanish language: a. b.

c.

550

Mode or medium: according to data collected, corpora can be spoken, written, mixed (spoken and written language), and multimodal (language and audiovisual material). Degree of representation: reference corpora offer a general representation of the language and serve as a basis for a wide range of linguistic studies. In contrast, sample corpora include a selection of texts representing a variety of categories. Nature and specificity of the text: corpora can be specialized (representing a given domain of language, such as scientific language, or a linguistic variety, such as diatopic or diastratic varieties), chronological (including texts limited to a certain period of time), diachronic or synchronic (according to the orientation toward language change).

Corpus pragmatics

d. e. f.

Text distribution and percentage: open or monitor corpora continue to grow with new texts while closed corpora remain identical once finished. Languages included: monolingual (texts in one language) and multilingual corpora (texts in two or more languages).4 Level of analysis: corpora can be raw (with no annotation) or annotated (omorphosyntactically tagged, pragmatically tagged, etc.).

We now present some examples of important Spanish L1 corpora that have contributed greatly to Spanish language research.5 a. b. c. d.

e. f. g.

Spoken corpora: C-Oral-Rom (Corpus Oral de Lenguas Románicas), Val.Es.Co. (Corpus anotado del Español Coloquial), AMERESCO (Corpus del Español Coloquial de América). Reference corpora: CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual), CE (Corpus del Español). Diachronic corpora: CORDE (Corpus Diacrónico del Español), CHARTA (Corpus Hispánico y Americano en la Red:Textos Antiguos). Specialized corpora on linguistic varieties: PRESEEA (Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y de América), COLA (Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente, COSER (Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural), AMERESCO. Closed corpora: CE,AnCora-Es (Annotated Corpora-Español). Monitor corpora: CORPES (Corpus del Español del siglo XXI), CREA. Multilingual corpora: the parallel trilingual corpus GRIAL and OPUS (an open- source Parallel Corpus).

Finally, regarding web-as-corpus resources, we may note other interesting examples such as the EsTenTen corpus, which belongs to the University of Leeds’ collection of Internet corpora.

2.3 Spanish learner corpora Learner corpora are specially designed to investigate language development, as Granger (2009) explains: Learner corpora are electronic collections of foreign or second language learner texts assembled according to explicit design criteria. The fact that they contain data from language learners makes them a very special type of corpus, requiring from the analyst a wider range of expertise than is necessary for native corpora. (Granger, 2009, pp. 14–15) In this sense we can distinguish between L1 developmental corpora, as for instance the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) corpus, whose Spanish section is called CHIEDE (Corpus de Habla Infantil Espontánea del Español), and foreign or L2 learner corpora, which are the main focus of the present chapter. As for learner corpora design, Alonso-Ramos (2016, pp. 6–7) follows the major categories suggested by Tono (2003) to show the most common features of Spanish learner corpora, summarized in this manner: a.

Language-related criteria (e.g., mode, genre, topic): written corpora, narrative and argumentative genres, and personal knowledge as a topic are the most frequent.

551

Romero-Trillo and Gozalo

b. c.

Task-related criteria (e.g., longitudinal vs. cross-sectional): mainly cross-sectional corpora and data elicited from written compositions. Learner-related criteria (e.g., age, sex, mother tongue): mostly young adults participating voluntarily, studying Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) in a school or university context, and whose mother tongue is English.

Table 32.1 offers an overview, based on Alonso-Ramos (2016, pp. 13–15), of those corpora that have generated most research, according to three of the aforementioned features: mode, L1 background, and data collection. Overall, the predominance of certain features above others (i.e., more written than spoken corpora) demonstrates the need for more spoken and multimodal corpora.Also, in terms of data collection, more longitudinal corpora need to be compiled.

Table 32.1 Spanish learner corpora overview Corpus name

Mode

L1 background 

Data collection

ANGLIA Anglia Polytechnic University Learner Spanish Corpus APRESCRIVLOV Aprender a Escribir en Lovaina CAES Corpus de Aprendices de Español CATE Corpus de Aprendices Taiwaneses de Español CEDEL2 Corpus Escrito del Español como L2 COMAPREND Corpus Multilingüe de Aprendices CORANE Corpus para el Análisis de Errores de aprendices de E/LE CORELE Corpus Oral de Español como Lengua Extranjera CORINÉI Corpus Oral Interlengua Español Italiano FONOELE LANGSNAP Languages and Social Networks Abroad Project SAELE Suecos Aprendices de Español Lengua Extranjera SCIL Spanish Corpus of Italian Learners SPLLOC Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpora SPT Spanish Corpus Profciency Level Training

Written

Multi-L1 (English included)

Cross-sectional

Written

Dutch and French

Cross-sectional

Written

Muli-L1 (English included)

Cross-sectional

Written

Chinese

Cross-sectional

Written

English and Spanish

Cross-sectional

Written

Portuguese

Cross-sectional

Written

Multi-L1 (English included)

Cross-sectional

Spoken

Multi-L1 (English included)

Cross-sectional

Spoken

Italian and Spanish

Cross-sectional

Spoken Spoken and written Written

Multi-L1 (English included) English

Cross-sectional Longitudinal

Swedish

Cross-sectional

Written

Italian

Spoken

English and Spanish

Longitudinal and cross-sectional Cross-sectional

Multimodal

English and Spanish

Cross-sectional

552

Corpus pragmatics

2.4 L1 Spanish corpus pragmatics research The use of Spanish corpora data, particularly spoken corpora, represents a valuable insight into different aspects of Spanish pragmatics; e.g., discourse markers, with a significant number of studies such as the corpus-based analysis developed by Travis (2005) on the use of these devices in Colombian Spanish. Other researchers, like Jørgensen (2009, 2012), worked with corpus data to analyze the pragmatic functions of markers such as en plan and como (both meaning ‘like’) in Spanish adolescent language using the COLA corpus. Also, Albelda and Álvarez (2010) thoroughly researched politeness in Spanish focusing on the pragmatic categories of mitigation and intensification in discourse corpora. María Jesús Barros (2012) carried out pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic analyses of the Val.Es.Co. corpus to describe the procedures of flattering politeness in Spanish colloquial conversation. Finally, Corpas (2013) presented a corpus-based identification, classification, and analysis of phraseological units in Spanish and other language corpora. Another important contribution to corpus-based linguistic research in the teaching of pragmatics is that suggested by Alonso-Almeida and Quintana (2015). The novelty of their work resides in their set of corpus-based activities for the teaching of pragmatic phenomena (politeness, cooperative principle, speech acts, and conversation analysis) for both the development of pragmatic competence in the EFL classroom and the teaching of pragmatics as a discipline for undergraduate students. All the activities are based on the use of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). In our opinion, this is still a quite unexplored field for Spanish linguistics that needs further development.

2.5 L2 Spanish pragmatics research and current applications 2.5.1

Pragmatic development from a learner corpus perspective

Regarding pragmatic development, we must consider that different languages realize pragmatic information differently and that learners need to know and adapt their L1 pragmatic conventions to the L2.This transfer is not always easy and is sometimes more demanding than the development of all other linguistic competences (e.g., grammatical, lexical, phonological), as it demands continuous contact with the target language context that is often impossible in the classroom.The consequence of the mismatch between pragmatic competence (Thomas, 1983) and the other linguistic competences results in what Romero-Trillo (2002) has described as “pragmatic fossilization.” Given this circumstance, which is usually incumbent in L2 development, we may question the role of corpus linguistics in L2 pragmatics. In the words of Romero-Trillo (2018a), “there is a premise in any L2 learning that it is impossible to master a language with full competence without being exposed to the corpus of real-life language use” (p. 113).Therefore, real language can be considered fundamental in L2 development and is the only means to achieve pragmatic competence, as defined by Thomas (1983): “the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose and to understand language in context” (p. 92). In this sense, to capture fully the essence of pragmatic development, we need to compare how pragmatic competence functions in the L1 and the L2. Romero-Trillo (2018a, pp. 117–118) described a polyhedric model of pragmatics, in which the speaker considers all the factors that intervene in a communicative act in the course of milliseconds.The polyhedric model in the L1 (Figure 32.1) shows that pragmatic competence is circular and multidimensional, in the sense that all the elements in it are mutually informative, and the information provided by each component has positive feedback and a cumulative effect on the other elements.

553

Romero-Trillo and Gozalo

In the case of L2 learners, the polyhedric pragmatic model has a continuum from the pragmatic competence of learners’ L1 to native-like competence.This development incorporates in each of its stages the richness of all the parameters that are specific to the L1, as illustrated in Figure 32.2.

Figure 32.1 The polyhedric pragmatic model for L1 speakers Source: Romero-Trillo, 2018a

Figure 32.2 The polyhedric pragmatic model for L2 speakers Source: Romero-Trillo, 2018a

554

Corpus pragmatics

The two complementary models show that in L1 pragmatics, the process from intention to the production of the intention is transparent, while in L2 pragmatics the L1 influences the communication and learners must frame the message within a new linguistic, cognitive, contextual, and social scenario.The challenge for L2 learners is that the pragmatic information is not necessarily represented through language, but also through context. As a result, sometimes the development of grammatical, lexical, and phonological knowledge in the L2 does not usually progress in tandem with the development of pragmatic competence in the L2.This phenomenon has been described as “pragmatic fossilization” (Romero-Trillo, 2002), which is often the consequence of the absence of (enough) exposure to authentic and contextualized language. In sum, learner corpora can provide genuine, representative, and contextualized discourse for language instruction (Romero-Trillo, 2017) to compensate for the absence of real language input (see Chapter 25 on pragmatics instruction in the L2 classroom, this volume). Interlanguage analyses based on learner corpora allow us to compare L2 learner data with those produced by native speakers, to evaluate not only overuse or underuse of linguistic features but also interference or transfer phenomena (Granger, 2009; McEnery & Xiao, 2010). In this respect, Campillos and Gozalo (2014) analyze the oral production of discourse markers by 40 learners of Spanish from nine L1 backgrounds as compared with native speakers’ usage and according to teaching guidelines for Spanish.The data, extracted from a learner corpus of oral interviews with university students, show a slight increase in the acquisition of these devices from A2 to B1 according to the levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe, 2001) and a difference in usage according to the L1. Other studies on discourse markers include Vázquez Veiga (2016), who examined the role of context in the use and functions of these devices in the interlanguage of L1 English learners of Spanish based on samples from the CEDEL2 and SPLLOC corpora.The study also highlights the influence of the learner’s L1 on the use of particular markers and considers lexical-pragmatic failures and their social repercussions. Anaphora resolution at the syntax-discourse interface was investigated by Lozano (2016) in the CEDEL2 corpus. His study reveals that very advanced learners of Spanish are pragmatically more redundant than ambiguous, since they produce redundant overt anaphors to mark topic continuity and they rarely produce ambiguous null pronouns to mark a shift in topic.This finding is explained in terms of a newly proposed pragmatics principles violation hypothesis. Solís and León (2017) describe how native Italian speakers of three levels of proficiency in L2 Spanish use operators of affirmative responses, such as sí ‘yes,’ vale ‘ok,’ claro ‘right,’ among others. The study is based on the interlanguage corpus ELEI (Español Lengua Extranjera en Italia) and two control corpora of native speakers.The results show a certain degree of fossilization in the use and frequency of these markers, even at the most advanced levels, and the need for explicit pedagogical techniques to promote a higher level of acquisition of this affirmative response microsystem. Finally, Enríquez and Díaz (2018) analyzed the use of politeness by three groups of speakers: Spanish L1, Spanish L2, and heritage speakers of Spanish facing a request-for-service task in the corpus StopELE, gathered specifically for this research. Results are useful for enhancing language instruction for both L2 Spanish and heritage Spanish learners.

2.5.2

Applications of native and learner corpora to the instruction of L2 Spanish pragmatics

According to McEnery and Xiao (2010), the use of corpora in teaching and learning can be indirect, focusing on what to teach, or direct, focusing on how to teach. Indirect uses have been an important factor in reference publishing, mainly corpus-based dictionaries and grammars,6 555

Romero-Trillo and Gozalo

syllabus design and pedagogical materials development, language testing, and teacher training. One of the most interesting works for Spanish language is the Diccionario de partículas discursivas del español (Briz, Pons, & Portolés, 2008), an online specialized dictionary of discourse particles, whose oral examples are extracted from different Spanish corpora such as CREA, CORPES, Val.Es.Co., and others. The direct use of corpora (data-driven learning) is restricted by a large number of factors related to the teaching-learning contexts and the participants (e.g., level and experience of learners, curricular requirements, access to resources). Successful application of computer corpora in language teaching implies not only the movement to inductive approaches and new methodologies such as the flipped classroom, student-centered learning, and autonomous learning, but also teacher guidance or pedagogical mediation. All types of corpora, including monolingual and multilingual7 L1 corpora and learner corpora, can be used directly or indirectly for applications to language teaching.8 They are useful tools to explore linguistic phenomena and raise learners’ linguistic awareness. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, there are obvious limitations for the use of corpora in the classroom. Granger points out that features of learner language uncovered by learner corpus research need not necessarily lead to targeted action in the classroom . . . whether the features are selected for pedagogical action or ignored depends on a variety of features, including learner needs, teaching objectives and teachability. (Granger, 2009, p. 22) Regarding the instruction of spoken language and pragmatic phenomena, corpora can provide realistic examples of language use, since the intuitions of native speakers are quite poor to provide a representative model of real language use. Corpora may also be used to inform the production of teaching materials and syllabus design in terms of frequency (McEnery & Wilson, 2001).9 Apart from some exceptions,10 in the case of Spanish, studies on the impact of corpora in curriculum design and materials development for the classroom are still lacking. Much work in Spanish must still be done in the analysis of learner pragmatic production. For instance, there is a need to describe what aspects of Spanish are typically learned at each proficiency level and to develop a Spanish profile similar to that created for English.11 Statistical data from both native speaker and learner corpora would also allow scholars to improve the inventories and specifications of the Plan Curricular del Instituto Cervantes (PCIC). Domínguez (2016) does precisely this in his investigation of the difference in the use of discourse markers in three different Spanish corpora and those included in the PCIC. Therefore, corpus data are essential for the selection and sequencing of pragmatic content. Spoken corpora are an excellent tool for the development in the classroom of pragmatic and discourse competences. The C-Oral-Rom corpus is used in Campillos, Gozalo, and Moreno (2008) and Gozalo (2013) to design a set of didactic proposals regarding the use of discourse markers and conversational management. Likewise, López-García (2014) explores different pedagogical applications of the COGILA oral corpus12 in the teaching of discourse phenomena. Regarding linguistic variation, Bailini (2015) suggests different activities using the PRESEEA corpus as a valuable resource for developing pan-Hispanic didactics.The author presents a proposal to work with diatopic pragmatic varieties in Spanish regarding directive speech acts or address formulas.The aim of the proposal is not for students to use the different geolects but to develop an awareness about different nuances. 556

Corpus pragmatics

Furthermore, the gap between corpus linguistics and language pedagogy can also be bridged with the creation of pedagogically oriented corpora.Two examples for the teaching of Spanish language are the C-Or-DiAL (Corpus Oral Didáctico Anotado Lingüísticamente)13 and the Columbia Corpus de conversaciones para ELE;14 these corpora are compiled with pedagogically enriching, relevant information (e.g., language level, key words, communicative functions, subjects), and activities. The assessment of L2 pragmatics is a very young field that needs further research and development (Kasper & Ross, 2013) and corpora have started to play an important role in this area.They have been used in language testing for various purposes: to archive examination scripts, develop test materials, optimize test procedures, improve the quality of test marking, validate tests, and standardize tests (McEnery & Xiao, 2010, p. 369). Another possibility to consider is the importance of learner corpora data for the design of language tests based on automated scoring methods, both for placement and proficiency assessment purposes (Callies & Götz, 2015), as well as the development of error-correction resources, as has been done in English (Alonso-Ramos, 2016). In this regard, several studies on pragmatic and discourse error tagging and analysis have been published in recent years (Campillos, 2014; Carrió & Mestre, 2013). Finally, The Spanish Corpus Proficiency Level Training video corpus is an excellent proficiency training tool for novice Spanish language teachers with little or no experience in evaluating learners’ proficiency levels in an accurate and consistent manner.This tool is useful for trainers and trainees, but also for teachers, researchers, learners of Spanish, and linguistics students, and the corpus can be used for classroom assignments or practice in correcting learner errors (Koike & Witte, 2016).

2.5.3

Applications to discourse and translation studies

It has been shown that corpus-aided translation produces a higher quality translation than that using traditional resources, and that, particularly,“the use of bilingual and multilingual corpora, with a variety of texts and a range of translators represented, increases both the validity and the reliability of the comparison” (Johansson, 2007, p. 5).Two stages are considered in the development of corpus-based translation studies (Laviosa, Pagano, Kemppanen, & Ji, 2017): the introduction of corpora in translation studies from 1993 to 2003 and the consolidation of corpora in translation studies from 2003 to 2013. Corpora have been considered useful not only in raising linguistic and cultural awareness, but also in developing translation strategies and as a reference tool and workbench. The types of corpora with more potential value for translation studies are comparable and parallel corpora, but monolingual, general, and specialized types are also frequently used (Laviosa, 2002; Zanettin, Bernardini, & Stewart, 2003).A parallel corpus15 contains source texts and their translations, which are aligned at different linguistic levels. They can be bilingual, multilingual, unidirectional, bidirectional, or multidirectional. However, a comparable corpus contains texts collected using the same sampling frame, similar balance, and representativeness; these texts are not translations but rather L1 samples in different languages.16 Both types present advantages and disadvantages for translation and contrastive studies (McEnery & Xiao, 2007): •

Parallel corpora are the most useful for translation studies, but they are not appropriate for contrastive studies when used as the only source of data or when the ‘translationese’ effect cannot be avoided.17 These corpora can help translators and trainees achieve precision in 557

Romero-Trillo and Gozalo

•

terminology and phraseology and offer translation strategies for those linguistic structures with no direct equivalent in the target language.They are an excellent resource to develop machine translation (MT) systems and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, such as translation memories, bilingual concordances, or translator-oriented word processors. Comparable corpora, in contrast, are less convenient for translation studies, but may be useful when combined with parallel corpora and fully comparable sampling frames.They can help students understand the source texts and produce translations more fluently.

Both types can also be used for translation evaluation and more objective feedback for students. Baumgarten (2017) established the different pragmatic phenomena that continue to be relevant since they pose difficulties for both human translation practice and (semi-) automatic systems: speech acts, text, inference, implied meaning, coherence, and the universality or cultural relativity of pragmatic concepts. Therefore, corpus-based research into pragmatics and translation can be useful in achieving systematic descriptions of meaning construction in communication for the evaluation of translation quality, the professionalization of human translation practice, and the development of computer-assisted translation and machine translation. Regarding the use of corpora in discourse analysis, Baker (2006) points out the advantages of a corpus-based approach to analyze discourse, such as the possibility of reducing researcher bias. For this author, the most useful types of corpora to analyze discourse are specialized corpora in order to study aspects of a particular genre or variety of language and diachronic corpora to investigate discourse development and change over time. Corpus pragmatics in discourse and translation studies involving Spanish language are relatively scarce but there has been a growing body of research in the last years. An example is the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, edited by Romero-Trillo (2015), with two interesting contributions: a metaphoric conceptualization of black and white colors, in English and Spanish, based on reference corpora (Molina, 2015), and a corpus-based cognitive-pragmatic account of translating Lewis Carroll’s novels within the relevance theory framework (Díaz-Pérez, 2015).

3

Methodological considerations

Regarding corpus-based research in Spanish as an L2, we must acknowledge the ground-breaking publication of the CAES learner corpus (Corpus de Aprendices de Español como lengua extranjera) by the Cervantes Institute (Rojo & Palacios, 2016).18 However, for both L1 and L2 corpus-based research in Spanish, it is obvious that despite the important contribution of corpora data to the linguistic description and study of the language learning process, there are some limitations in the study of pragmatic features. Communicative intentions, and paralinguistic and non-verbal traits, might be beyond the scope of corpus-based studies unless we consider the use of those corpora compiled with this sort of extralinguistic information or the use of multimodal corpora. Regarding data collection methods in pragmatics, a large number of interlanguage pragmatics studies are based on data-eliciting methods such as discourse completion tasks (DCTs);19 however, we assert that studies based on learner corpora are a good alternative for collecting pragmatic production data that must be enhanced.20 Corpus data have already been used to develop technological resources for the learning of pragmatics, such as the website Dancing with Words. Strategies for Learning Pragmatics in Spanish, which is found at the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at the University of Minnesota.21 Vacas (2018) shows the potential direct and indirect uses of a multimodal corpus for the teaching of pragmatics. C.O.R.E.M.A.H (Corpus Español Multimodal 558

Corpus pragmatics

de Actos de Habla)22 presents more than 150 hours of videotaped role play conversations between native speakers of Spanish and English learners of Spanish.The videos and their corresponding annotated and tagged transcriptions can be used to observe sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic features, non-verbal behavior, and strategies in the production of different speech acts.

4

Future directions and conclusion

Future research of L2 language from a corpus pragmatics perspective will necessarily follow a methodology similar to that employed in L1 corpus pragmatics, with the combination of a quantitative analysis of a large amount of data and a qualitative study of a small dataset (RomeroTrillo, 2008). In this sense, we would like to pinpoint the synergies that have recently emerged between L2 and L1 corpus pragmatics, and that will undoubtedly lead to new findings.A traditional difficulty of a pragmatic analysis based on corpora resided in the lack of a sufficient amount of information about social and textual contexts. However, in recent years, this drawback has been addressed with the inclusion of detailed descriptions about the social, geographical, and personal backgrounds of participants. This detailed annotation allows researchers to perform inferential statistics to determine whether L2 speakers overuse, underuse, or maintain the patterns of the pragmatic elements and functions under study in comparison with L1 speakers, or between different groups of L2 learners (Glabasova, Brezina, & McEnery, 2017). In other studies, several mathematical models such as the Specificity Index or Index of Pragmatic Use have been explicitly employed by combining qualitative and quantitative pragmatic information from corpus data (Romero-Trillo, 2001, 2018b).These mathematical models have an advantage over frequency counts because they interpret the reliability of the pragmatic data vis-à-vis their representation within a corpus and, sometimes, across corpora. Regarding the main research topics in L2 corpus pragmatics, there is an increasing interest in the realization of pragmatic markers concerning learners’ access to real language use. For example, Diskin (2017) investigated the pragmatic marker “like” in the speech of Polish and Chinese migrants in Dublin, regarding its frequency and position within the clause and its pragmatic function. Results showed that the length of residence has a more significant impact on the similar frequency of the marker in the two groups, while proficiency in English is not the significant factor. Buysse (2014) compared the use of “general extenders” in Dutch learners of L2 English with native English speakers’ use. The study explored how Dutch learners of English use ‘and stuff ’ and ‘or something.’ The results revealed the quantitative similarity between the two groups of speakers, but also discrepancies from a qualitative perspective.The reasons for this difference were L1 transfer, the intensity of exposure to the target language, and the learners’ restricted repertoire of pragmatic devices. Another significant area of future research are the implications of corpus pragmatics for teaching, with an emphasis on the need to raise L2 learners’ (meta)pragmatic awareness using corpora. Corpora can also serve to raise pragmatic awareness in teachers. Ifantidou (2013a) revised pragmatic awareness “in terms of an open-ended array of pragmatically inferred implicatures rather than a fixed set of routines (e.g., speech acts) or isolated implicatures” (p. 93). Her approach is further developed in Ifantidou (2013b) by highlighting the difference between pragmatic awareness, “the ability to retrieve (or produce) pragmatically inferred effects in the form of implicated conclusions” (p. 116) and metapragmatic awareness, “the ability to metarepresent the link between pragmatic effects retrieved and relevant linguistic markers used as a guide into pragmatic meaning by means of appropriate metalinguistic terms” (Ifantidou, 2013b, p. 117). 559

Romero-Trillo and Gozalo

In a similar vein, Llinares-García and Romero-Trillo (2008) carried out a study of pragmatic markers used by native and nonnative teachers in history classes of a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) program and compared their use with the markers used by native teachers of Spanish in history classes.The results show that L2 teachers in a CLIL context employ more markers than in their L1 teaching and three times more than CLIL English native teachers. In our opinion, these findings have clear applications for teacher-training courses and can provide insights for future cognitive pragmatics research because, as Taguchi and Roever (2017) indicate, formal teaching environments constitute the best L2 learning environments to date. Corpus linguistics can help teachers and learners in the systematic identification of pragmatic patterns, so they can be introduced in pedagogical materials and can even be tailored to students’ needs according to proficiency levels. Another crucial element in L2 pragmatics is the use of accurate prosodic patterns of tonality, tonicity, and tone as a fundamental tool for the understanding and creation of context, and to identify the speaker’s emotions, attitudes, and communicative intentions (Romero-Trillo, 2012). The mismatch between grammatical and prosodic choices often results in anomalous communication and misunderstanding. Teaching prosodic pragmatics through learner corpora can help L2 learners not only to acquire native-like competence in speaking but also to avoid miscommunication or any ‘performance insecurity’ when interacting with native speakers.Also, prosody can help L2 speakers process information correctly as shown, for example, in RiescoBernier and Romero-Trillo (2008) with the relationship between the assignment of tonicity and the identification of ‘given’ and ‘new’ information.This study showed that tonic elements in the class do not only convey ‘new’ information but that tonics also convey ‘given’ information in pedagogical discourse. For this reason, corpora can be an excellent tool to improve L2 pragmatic and prosodic competence (Trouvain, Zimmerer, Möbius, Gósy, & Bonneau, 2017), and the language class production can become a useful corpus to improve teaching practices and materials. Regarding the analysis of contextualized data, multimodality will undoubtedly play an essential role in corpus pragmatics (O’Halloran & Smith, 2014). However, we feel that there is still a need to develop multimodal annotated corpora that can incorporate pragmatic information with L2 purposes in mind (e.g.,Vacas, 2017), which can help to understand the process of understanding of L2 pragmatics, as in the case of implicatures (Köylü, 2018). However, multimodality should not only refer to the environmental circumstances that surround any interaction, but also the non-verbal signals that the participants in any interaction may use to predict and support, or contradict, the verbal message (Holler, Kendrick, & Levinson, 2017). In general, it is necessary to bridge the gap between L2 acquisition and corpus linguistics research to understand better not only the product but also the process of learning a foreign language. A balanced combination of explanatory and descriptive approaches and a collaboration between academics, teachers, and publishers is essential to develop the field of Spanish FL, as has been proven in the case of English as an FL. For this reason, we believe that the synergy between linguistics, anthropology, and technology will surely convey discoveries about the different elements of how humans learn how to communicate in their L1, thus indicating that corpus pragmatics is an indispensable tool for Spanish L2 teaching and learning in the future.

Notes 1 This research has been carried out with the support of the Project FFI2016–75160-R (First author). 2 See, for instance, the articles in the Journal of Corpus Pragmatics and Romero-Trillo’s edited series Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics. 3 The first Spanish corpora were compiled in the 1970s; nevertheless, they do not exactly fit the modern concept of corpus in size and format. 560

Corpus pragmatics

4 Multilingual corpora can be comparable and parallel, as shown in Section 2.5.3. 5 A deeper analysis of Spanish corpora can be found in Briz and Albelda (2009) and Rojo (2015). 6 Corpora can be useful tools to introduce pragmatic information in dictionaries (Guerra & Gómez, 2006). 7 The most useful multilingual corpora for teaching and learning are comparable as they constitute a reliable basis for contrastive analysis, whereas parallel corpora are not so useful since translated language is just a special variant of the target language that cannot be confused with the target language itself and mislead teachers and students (McEnery & Xiao, 2010). 8 See De Kock (2001b) for corpus-linguistics applications in Spanish. 9 Frequency is not the only factor to inform curriculum and material design and authenticity is not an absolute feature of corpora texts.They are more genuine than authentic (Widdowson, 2003). 10 An example is Español oral en contexto. Textos de español oral (Campillos, Gozalo, Guirao, & Moreno, 2010).This book presents a set of activities designed for a selection of speech samples from the corpus C-Oral-Rom. It also includes a consultation hypertext tool.This learning material is aimed at developing listening comprehension at levels B1 to C2, but also grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic aspects of Spanish language. 11 The English Profile is a research program conducted by Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English Language Assessment. 12 The COGILA corpus (Corpus del Grupo de Investigación de Lingüística Aplicada) comprises a set of 10 conversations along with a teaching guide, offering an orientation to pragmalinguistic aspects of oral discourse (P. Barros, 2012). 13 Retrieved from http://lablita.it/app/cordial/corpus.php 14 Retrieved from https://edblogs.columbia.edu/corpusdeconversaciones/ 15 An example of a parallel corpus is the aforementioned GRIAL (Section 22.2). 16 “The components representing the languages involved must match with each other in terms of proportion, genre, domain and sampling period” (McEnery & Xiao, 2007, p. 20). An example of comparable corpus is MULTIMÉDICA, containing texts from the medical domain in Spanish, English, and Arabic: Retrieved from http://labda.inf.uc3m.es/multimedica/ 17 The term ‘translationese’ is used to describe the special features that all translated texts share as a result of the translation process. 18 CAES “has filled an important gap in learner corpus research in line with well-known international projects such as ICLES (International Corpus Learner English)” (Rojo & Palacios, 2016, p. 80). 19 See Blum-Kulka (1982) and Ogiermann (2018). 20 Corpora provide naturalistic data; therefore they tend to be considered more reliable data collection methods than DCTs or role plays. See Jucker et al. (2018) and Félix-Brasdefer (2019) for an overview of different resources to collect L1 and L2 pragmatic data (see also Chapter 33 on research methods for pragmatics study, this volume). 21 Retrieved from http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html 22 Vacas Matos, M. (2017). COREMAH (Corpus Español Multimodal de Actos de Habla). [online] Coremah. com. Retrieved from www.coremah.com.

Further reading Jucker, A., Schneider, K., & Bublitz,W. (Eds.). (2018). Methods in pragmatics. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 10). Berlin: de Gruyter. The handbook provides a state-of-the-art-account of the different types of data, methods of data collection, and data analysis used in pragmatics research. It includes overviews of introspective, experimental, and observational methods.The fourth part is devoted to corpus-based methods, covering aspects such as corpus compilation, annotation, and data retrieval. Parodi, G., & Burdiles, G. (2019). Corpus y bases de datos. In J. Muñoz-Basols, E. Gironzetti, & M. Lacorte (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish language teaching. Metodologías, contextos y recursos para la enseñanza del español L2 (pp. 596–612). New York: Routledge. This chapter is devoted to the potential of corpora and databases as resources and tools for Spanish language teaching. It provides an overview of the different types of Spanish corpora currently available, as well as relevant methodological considerations and teaching guidelines. 561

Romero-Trillo and Gozalo

Rühlemann, C. (2019). Corpus linguistics for pragmatics. New York: Routledge. The volume explores the applications of corpus linguistics to the study of what can be considered essential areas within pragmatic research in recent years: speech acts, deixis, pragmatic markers, evaluation, conversational structure, and multimodality.The volume is conceived as a practical guideline for scholars looking for a theoretical-cum-practical approach to the use of corpus pragmatics in linguistic research.

References Aijmer, K., & Rühleman, C. (2004). Corpus pragmatics:A handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Albelda, M., & Álvarez, A. (2010). Los corpus discursivos en el estudio pragmático de la atenuación y de la intensificación. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana,VIII/2(16), 79–100. Alonso-Almeida, F., & Quintana, E. (2015). Corpus-based teaching of pragmatics. In J. B. Alonso, J. N. Canino, S. T. Pérez, A. G. Ravelo, D. Sánchez, & C. Travieso (Eds.), InnoEducaTIC 2015, II Jornadas Iberoamericanas de Innovación Educativa en el ámbito de las TIC (pp. 89–93). Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: ATETIC. Alonso-Ramos, M. (2016). Spanish learner corpus research: Achievements and challenges. In M. AlonsoRamos (Ed.), Spanish learner corpus research (pp. 3–31).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bailini, S. (2015). Los corpus como recursos didácticos para la enseñanza de las variedades diatópicas del español. Cuenca. In Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (Ed.), Biblioteca Virtual Redele, 16, 1–17. Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. London: Continuum. Retrieved from http://exchanges. state.gov/media/oelp/teaching-pragmatics/introms.pdf Barros, M. J. (2012). Cumplidos y ofrecimientos: actividades de cortesía valorizadora en la conversación coloquial. In J. Escamilla Morales & H.V. Grandfield (Eds.), Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 108–145). Barranquilla: Universidad del Atlántico-Programa EDICE. Barros, P. (Ed.). (2012). Cogila. Español oral conversacional: corpus y guía didáctica. Granada: Universidad de Granada. Baumgarten, N. (2017). Pragmatics and translation/interpreting. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 521–534). London and New York: Routledge. Biber, D., Egbert, J., & Davies, M. (2015). Exploring the composition of the searchable web:A corpus-based taxonomy of web registers. Corpora, 10, 11–45. Blum-Kulka, S. (1982). Learning how to say what you mean in a second language:A study of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language. Applied Linguistics, 3(1), 29–59. Briz, A., & Albelda, M. (2009). Estado actual de los corpus de lengua española hablada y escrita: I+D. In El español en el mundo.Anuario del Instituto Cervantes 2009 (pp. 165–226). Madrid: Instituto Cervantes. Briz, A., Pons, S., & Portolés, J. (Coords.). (2008). Diccionario de partículas discursivas del español. Retrieved from http:// www.dpde.es Buysse, L. (2014). ‘We went to the restroom or something.’ General extenders and stuff in the speech of Dutch learners of English. In J. Romero-Trillo (Ed.), The yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics: New empirical and theoretical paradigms (pp. 213–237). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Callies, M., & Götz, S. (2015). Language corpora in language testing and assessment. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Campillos, L. (2014).Análisis de errores pragmático-discursivos en un corpus oral de español como lengua extranjera. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 58, 23–59. Campillos, L., & Gozalo, P. (2014). Oral production of discourse markers by intermediate learners of Spanish: A corpus perspective. In J. Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics: New empirical and theoretical paradigms (pp. 239–259). New York: Springer. Campillos, L., Gozalo, P., Guirao, J. M., & Moreno, A. (2010). Español oral en contexto.Textos de español oral. Madrid: Ediciones UAM. Campillos, L., Gozalo, P., & Moreno, A. (2008). El corpus C-Oral-Rom en la enseñanza de ELE. In E. Balmaseda (Ed.), Las destrezas orales en la enseñanza de español (pp. 1115–1128). Logroño: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de La Rioja. Carrió, M. L., & Mestre, E. (2013).A proposal for the tagging of grammatical and pragmatic errors. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 1, 7–16. Corpas, G. (2013). Detección, descripción, y contraste de las unidades fraseológicas mediante tecnologías lingüísticas. In I. Olza & E. Manero (Eds.), Fraseopragmática (pp. 335–373). Berlin: Frank & Timme. 562

Corpus pragmatics

Council of Europe. (2001). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cruz Piñol, M. (2012). Lingüística de corpus y enseñanza del español como 2/L. Madrid: Arco/Libros. De Kock, J. (2001b). Lingüística con corpus. Catorce aplicaciones sobre el español. Salamanca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca. Díaz-Pérez, F. J. (2015). From the other side of the Looking Glass:A cognitive-pragmatic account of translating Lewis Carroll. In J. Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics. Current approaches to discourse and translation studies (pp. 163–194). New York: Springer. Diskin, C. (2017). The use of the discourse-pragmatic marker ‘like’ by native and non-native speakers of English in Ireland. Journal of Pragmatics, 120, 144–157. Domínguez, N. (2016). Bueno, pues, es que . . . en fin: ¿Qué marcadores discursivos enseñar? Revista SIGNOS. Estudios de Lingüística, 90, 3–24. Enríquez, N., & Díaz, L. (2018). Politeness in the oral discourse of L1, L2 and heritage Spanish speakers. Retrieved from www.researchgate.net/publication/327433817_Politeness_in_the_oral_discourse_of_L1_L2_ and_Heritage_Spanish_Speakers Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso y variación. London and New York: Routledge. Fletcher,W. H. (2012). Corpus analysis of the World Wide Web. In C.A. Chapelle (Ed.), Encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1339–1347). Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell. Glabasova, D., Brezina,V., & McEnery,T. (2017). Exploring learner language through corpora: Comparing and interpreting corpus frequency information. Language Learning, 67, 130–154. Gozalo, P. (2013). El marcador discursivo Bueno. Análisis y propuesta didáctica. Revista SIGNOS ELE, 7. Retrieved from http://p3.usal.edu.ar/index.php/ele/article/view/1165 Granger, S. (2009).The contribution of learner corpora to second language acquisition and foreign language teaching:A critical evaluation. In K.Aijmer (Ed.), Corpora and language teaching (pp. 13–32). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/scl.33.04gra Guerra, L., & Gómez, M. E. (2006). Pragmática y lexicografía: análisis de las marcas pragmáticas. In A.Álvarez, L. Barrientos, M. Braña,V. Coto, M. Cuevas, C. de la Hoz, A.Turza (Eds.), La competencia pragmática y la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera (pp. 353–362). Oviedo: Ediciones de la Universidad de Oviedo. Holler, J., Kendrick, K. H., & Levinson, S. C. (2017). Processing language in face-to-face conversation: Questions with gestures get faster responses. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25(5), 1900–1908. Ifantidou, E. (2013a). Pragmatic competence and explicit instruction. In E. Ifantidou & T. Matsui (Eds., special issue), Pragmatic development in L1, L2, L3: Its biological and cultural foundations. Journal of Pragmatics, 59, 93–116. Ifantidou, E. (2013b). Pragmatic awareness:An index of linguistic competence. In I. Kecskes & J. RomeroTrillo (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 105–144). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Instituto Cervantes. (2006). Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. Niveles de referencia para el español. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Johansson, S. (2007). Seeing through multilingual corpora. On the use of corpora in contrastive studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jørgensen, A. M. (2009). En plan used as a hedge in Spanish teenage language. In A. B. Stenström & A. M. Jorgensen (Eds.), Youngspeak in a multilingual perspective (pp. 95–115).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jørgensen,A. M. (2012). Funciones del marcador pragmático como en el lenguaje juvenil español y chileno. In M. E. Placencia & C. García (Eds.), Pragmática y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispanohablante (pp. 209–231).Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Jucker,A., Schreier, D., & Hundt, M. (Eds.). (2009). Corpora: Pragmatics and discourse. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kasper, G., & Ross, S. (2013). Assessing second language pragmatics: An overview and introductions. In S. Ross & G. Kasper (Eds.), Assessing second language pragmatics (pp. 1–40). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kilgarriff, A., & Grefenstette, G. (2003). Introduction to the special issue on the Web as corpus. Computational Linguistics, 29, 333–347. Koike, D., & Witte, J. (2016). Spanish proficiency level training website and corpus:An open-source, online resource for corpus linguistics studies. In M.Alonso-Ramos (Ed.), Spanish learner corpus research (pp. 169– 196).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Köylü,Y. (2018). Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L2 English. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15, 373–408. 563

Romero-Trillo and Gozalo

Laviosa, S. (2002). Corpus-based translation studies. Theory, findings, applications. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Laviosa, S., Pagano, A., Kemppanen, H., & Ji, M. (2017). Textual and contextual analysis in empirical translation studies. Singapore: Springer. Llinares-García,A., & Romero-Trillo, J. (2008).The pragmatic role of discourse markers of native and nonnative teachers in CLIL contexts. In J. Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: A mutualistic entente (pp. 191–204). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. López-García, M. P. (2014). Aplicaciones de los corpus orales a la didáctica de ELE: repertorios léxicos y pragmalingüísticos. In N. M. Contreras (Ed.), Actas del XXIV Congreso Internacional ASELE. La enseñanza del español como LE/L2 en el siglo XXI (pp. 385–397). Málaga:ASELE. Lozano, C. (2016). Pragmatic principles in anaphora resolution at the syntax-discourse interface:Advanced English learners of Spanish in the CEDEL2 corpus. In M. Alonso-Ramos (Ed.), Spanish learner corpus research (pp. 235–265).Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. McEnery, T., & Wilson,A. (2001). Corpus linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McEnery,T., & Xiao, R. (2007). Parallel and comparable corpora:What is happening? In M. Rogers & G.Anderman (Eds.), Incorporating corpora:The linguist and the translator (pp. 18–31). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. McEnery, T., & Xiao, R. (2010). What corpora can offer in language teaching and learning. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (pp. 364–380). London and New York: Routledge. Molina, S. (2015). White and black metaphors and metonymies in English and Spanish: A cross-cultural and corpus comparison. In J. Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics: Current approaches to discourse and translation studies (pp. 39–63). New York: Springer. Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 229–255). (Handbooks of Pragmatics;Vol. 10). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. O’Halloran, K., & Smith, B. A. (Eds.). (2014). Multimodal studies: Exploring issues and domains. London: Routledge. Riesco Bernier, S., & Romero-Trillo, J. (2008).The acoustics of ‘newness’ and its pragmatic implications in classroom discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 1103–1116. Rojo, G. (2015). Hispanic corpus linguistics. In M. Lacorte (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Hispanic applied linguistics (pp. 371–387). New York and London: Routledge. Rojo, G., & Palacios, M. (2016). Learner Spanish on computer: The CAES ‘Corpus de aprendices de español’ project. In M. Alonso-Ramos (Ed.), Spanish learner corpus research (pp. 55–87). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Romero-Trillo, J. (2001).A mathematical model for the analysis of variation in discourse. Journal of Linguistics, 37, 527–550. Romero-Trillo, J. (2002).The pragmatic fossilization of discourse markers in non-native speakers of English. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 769–784. Romero-Trillo, J. (Ed.). (2008). Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: A mutualistic entente. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Romero-Trillo, J. (Ed.). (2012). Pragmatics and prosody in English language teaching. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Romero-Trillo, J. (Ed.). (2015). Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics: Current approaches to discourse and translation studies. New York: Springer. Romero-Trillo, J. (2017). Editorial. Corpus Pragmatics, 1, 1–2. Romero-Trillo, J. (2018a). Corpus pragmatics and second language pragmatics: A mutualistic entente in theory and practice. Corpus Pragmatics, 2, 113–127. Romero-Trillo, J. (2018b). Prosodic modeling and position analysis of pragmatic markers in English conversation. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 14, 169–195. Solís, I., & León, M. (2017). La adquisición de respuestas afirmativas en ELE por parte de aprendices italianos. Revista MarcoELE, 24, 243–267. Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second language pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4, 91–112. Tono,Y. (2003). Learner corpora: Design, development and applications. In D. Archer, P. Rayson, A.Wilson, & T.  McEnery (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2003 corpus linguistics conference (pp.  800–809). Lancaster, UK: Lancaster University. Travis, C. (2005). Discourse markers.A study on polysemy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 564

Corpus pragmatics

Trouvain, J., Zimmerer, F., Möbius, B., Gósy, M., & Bonneau, A. (2017). Segmental, prosodic, and fluency features in phonetic learner corpora—introduction to the special issue. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 3(2), 105–118. Vacas, M. (2017). Diseño y compilación de un corpus multimodal de análisis pragmático para la aplicación a la enseñanza del español L2/L (Unpublished PhD thesis). Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Vacas, M. (2018). Multimodal corpus of Spanish speech acts: Main features and potential pedagogical uses. In F. Rosell-Aguilar,T. Beaven, & M. Fuertes (Eds.), Innovative language teaching and learning at university: Integrating informal learning into formal language education (pp. 89–97). Voillans: Research-publishing.net. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2018.22.779 Vázquez Veiga, N. (2016). Discourse markers in CEDEL2 and SPLLOC corpora of learner Spanish:Analysis of some lexical-pragmatic failures. In M.Alonso-Ramos (Ed.), Spanish learner corpus research (pp. 267–297). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Widdowson, H. (2003). Defining issues in English language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zanettin, F., Bernardini, S., & Stewart, D. (2003). Corpora in translator education. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

565

33 Research methods for Spanish pragmatics study Dale A. Koike

1

Introduction

A challenging aspect of any study is to design the data collection methods that will best reflect the goals of the research as well as draw the most accurately representative data possible (Jucker, 2009; Jucker, Schneider, & Bublitz, 2018). In pragmatics research, in which the object of study may be, for example, an implicature (see Chapter 1 on implicature, this volume) or a speech act (see Chapter 2 on speech acts, this volume) and can only be examined considering, among many factors, the context, the relationship between the interlocutors, the surrounding discourse, and even the history of their interaction and the participants’ mental states, the most appropriate research method can be difficult to identify. Whatever the focus selected, there must be a systematic approach to investigate it. Placencia and Márquez Reiter (2005) state in their short review of research methods for sociopragmatics that the field does not have a methodology of its own. Instead, they stress that “the way in which data are collected and analyzed depends on the pragmatic perspective adopted by the researcher, as well as on the object of study” (p. 213) (see Félix-Brasdefer, 2019, Chapter 10, for a recent description of methods for both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic research in Spanish). Pragmatics research can be initiated in many different frameworks, such as variational pragmatics, interactional pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics, and speech act studies.The quantitative and qualitative research methods presented in this chapter, addressing questions of native speaker, cross-cultural, and language learner pragmatics, are divided into those used to gather two types of data: elicited and naturally occurring.Within these two main categories, we examine commonly used qualitative and quantitative research methods. Studies that exemplify them are discussed, and there is a brief subsection on study participants. Finally, suggestions for future research are presented, including some methods of data analysis. All subsections include some examples of studies that illustrate the use of these methods, representing both native Spanish and second language (L2) acquisition investigations.The chapter concludes with a list of recommended readings and references.

567

Koike

2

Review of existing research

This section reviews current literature relevant to Spanish pragmatics research with a focus on the data-gathering methods commonly used in the field. It first presents discussion of quantitative Spanish pragmatics research and relevant methods to elicit data, followed by a review of qualitative research and methods to obtain naturally occurring data. In the following subsections, a review of methodological types frequently found in pragmatics research of both L1 and L2 data is presented, as well as mention of some current literature that can illustrate these methods.

2.1

Quantitative methods

In quantitative research, it is absolutely necessary for the researcher first to identify the focus and the research questions of the study to begin constructing a research design. Next, the methods are selected by which relevant data can be obtained. In the case of more identifiable, concrete categories, such as types of speech acts, it is easy to set up categories for study.The researcher must consider the two basic concepts of research design, which include ‘validity’ and ‘reliability.’ As Félix-Brasdefer (2018, p. 323) states, validity denotes “the degree to which an instrument (e.g., role plays) measures what it intends to measure, and consequently allows adequate interpretation of the results.”The author discusses three types of validity, which include (a) content, (b) criterion-related, and (c) construct validity. ‘Content validity’ refers to measurement of validity of the content through particular items employed, while ‘criterion-related validity’ correlates the results from one type of measurement with those of another. ‘Construct validity’ references the “internal structure of the instrument” (p. 324) and what it actually intends to measure. On the other hand, ‘reliability’ refers to the consistency of the measurement of a particular construct, across time, participants, items, etc.These traits form the basis of what all researchers should seek to establish in their quantitative studies. The most common form of gathering quantitative data is by means of elicitation, although it is possible to gather naturally occurring data and then apply quantitative measures to it; e.g., counting the occurrences of a given speech act in a service encounter. Here we examine elicited methods alone and reserve discussion of naturally occurring data for the section on qualitative methods, since the latter are most commonly examined qualitatively. Elicited data entail methods through means that would not occur by themselves (thus also considered ‘experimental methods’), such as two-party role plays, whether ‘structured’ or ‘unstructured.’ Schneider (2018) lists five criteria for such methods, in an order reflecting decreasing interactionality and increasing control by the researcher: • •

•

•

568

The language produced does not occur naturally; i.e., it does not arise from the genuine needs and desires of language users but occurs on the initiative of a researcher. The language produced is elicited under conditions determined by the researcher, sometimes referred to as “laboratory conditions.”That is to say, the researcher usually decides on time, place, and setting of the data elicitation. All language users serving as informants are consciously aware that they are involved in an experiment and that their language productions are recorded, not necessarily electronically, and then used for research purposes.To this, they have given their consent, and they participate voluntarily. All informants follow instructions and complete a task designed by the researcher.

Research methods for pragmatics study

•

At least in most cases, the language produced does not have any social consequences, unlike naturally occurring discourse.1 This lack of consequences contributes to the often bemoaned artificiality of the elicitation situations and the language produced therein. (pp. 57–58)

The last characteristic does have validity in the real world and the lack of social consequences creates artifcial conditions. However, Schneider mentions that if talk participants are instructed to interact in order to get to know each other, these conditions can lead to social consequences. Kasper and Dahl (1991) mention methods for the study of interlanguage pragmatics, including, on the production side, discourse completion tasks (DCT) (e.g., one-sided role plays), which could be completed in either oral or, more commonly, in written form. The DCT are also widely used to collect L1 data.To clarify, a two-party ‘unstructured,’ or ‘open’ role play, is one in which one participant interacts with another without restrictions by any researcher intervention. Sometimes in such role plays there is a prescribed outcome, while at other times there is not. Examples of role plays and DCT can be found in many books and articles, such as Jucker (2009) and Félix-Brasdefer and Hasler-Barker (2017), so they are not exemplified here. Questionnaires are another popular choice for elicitation, such as those sent through email requests or posted to an online website that others can access and answer. However, the questionnaire cannot be too long, or results become incomplete or truncated as respondents become tired. The DCT can also be used in such a format. An example is Pinto and Raschio (2007), which used an online DCT to collect request data from U.S. heritage Spanish speakers and two native speaker groups: Spanish speakers in Mexico, and English speakers in California, all of the same age range (18–36 years, mean of 21years). The DCT in all its forms has been criticized for its artificiality and the fact that it taps into what people think they would say even though they may not do so in reality (Golato, 2003). This criticism exists, although the consensus is that it is easy to collect data from DCTs. Another criticism is that the responses do not lend themselves easily to quantitative measures for pragmatic purposes.The researcher could define certain categories in the responses and count them, such as the use of a certain verb form or certain mitigating words (e.g., por favor), but those categorizations would probably not capture the pragmatic innovations in the expressions (for a more complete review of role plays, see Félix-Brasdefer, 2018; Félix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 2017, for use of role plays in a computer medium). Golato and Golato (2013) point out that participants need to be familiar with the roles assigned in these tasks, despite the fact that role plays in general still present problems, such as a lack of topic choice (since the researcher selects the topic), one-sided responses instead of a dialogue, or other constraints on the development of action for the participants. Comparisons have been made between results from the DCTs and ‘natural’ data (e.g., Yuan, 2001; Golato, 2003): most studies report that DCT results are generally “shorter in length, simpler in wording, less negotiatory, and less emotionally involved than naturally occurring language” (Placencia & Márquez Reiter, 2005, p. 14). Schneider (2018) points out other shortcomings of the DCT, such as a lack of features of oral communication (e.g., hesitations, repair), which raise questions about the validity of the data. He also identifies problems for written DCTs, such as that writers have more time to think and respond, and only single turns are elicited. Despite these and other criticisms, the DCT remains popular in the literature for ease in collecting data. Yet another option to gather data are interviews of various types that can require participants to do various tasks, such as tell narratives, describe pictures, or tell a picture story (e.g., Mir, 2001). However, depending on the restrictions placed on the format of the responses, the researcher could lose some control and the data could become qualitative to some degree. In

569

Koike

a dual quantitative/qualitative use of these tasks, Golato and Golato (2013) mention that these data can also be replayed to other participants for their reactions, commentary, and a recount of what they heard and remembered. Regarding language acquisition studies, Félix-Brasdefer and Hasler-Barker (2017) present a comprehensive overview of methods, both quantitative and qualitative, to elicit data.They review methods including structured interviews, production and perception instruments, and ways to evaluate pragmatic language comprehension, concluding with a discussion of validity and reliability as basic constructs. Bardovi-Harlig (1999) suggests that researchers should allow participants to opt out of selecting or expressing a given answer, and instead be able to delay giving an answer or not answering at all.This option does occur in authentic situations, so it should be an option in research as well. Finally, in designing a study for L2 learners, the author emphasizes the task must be appropriate for the learner’s proficiency level. A study that illustrates the use of a different, complex method involving U.S. heritage Spanish speakers, U.S. L2 Spanish learners, and a smaller native Spanish-speaker group regarding the production of apologies is Showstack (2016).The respondents completed a multiple-choice instrument (cf. Cohen, Shively, Emert, & Hoff, 2005) designed to look at the L2 acquisition of speech acts in various geographic regions. Students saw an anecdote and then produced an apology to fit the narrative, followed by a brief dialogue that included several answers by an interlocutor and blanks that the respondents had to complete.The instrument included five anecdotes covering different variables such as the interlocutors’ status (e.g., older person), the social distance between them (e.g., friend), and the seriousness of the offense (e.g., high, mid), all of which could be reflected in the apology. To categorize the responses, the author used a rubric of strategies (cf. Wagner, 2004), such as the type of mitigation used, recognition of responsibility, explanation, offer of repair, and a promise of forbearance. Up to this point, the focus has been on methods to gather data from situated interactions (real or imagined) between interlocutors of some type(s), but these are not the only kinds of pragmatics data that researchers may seek.We briefly mentioned perception studies earlier. For example, in a study on perceptions of appropriateness of pragmatic expressions, the study participants may be asked to listen to or read a set of such expressions and rank them on a scale from most to least acceptable or appropriate for the context.The Likert-type scale is still one of the most widely used measures for this purpose. Example (1) illustrates how a study participant might be asked to evaluate the appropriateness of the pragmatic options when requesting the favor of borrowing a friend’s car, rating the answer from 1 (not appropriate at all) to 5 (completely appropriate): (1)

Quisieras pedirle a tu amigo que te preste su coche para esta noche porque el tuyo está en el taller para reparaciones: a. Dame tu coche para esta noche, ¿OK? b. ¿Podrías prestarme tu coche para esta noche, ya que mi jefe nos brinda un evento social muy importante y no tengo manera de llegar allí? Está cerquita. c. ¿Me prestas tu coche si te lo devuelvo mañana o pasado mañana? d. ¿Qué tal si me prestas tu coche, ya que estoy tan apurado? (see Note2 for translation)

The respondent might also be asked to state why an option seemed appropriate or not, which then becomes a form of an online verbal report. Another data elicitation format in nonproduction form asks the participants to complete tasks primarily to measure reaction times (Golato & Golato, 2013). Depending on factors such as ambiguity or unexpectedness of what is to be targeted, subjects could show shorter or longer reaction times, which can indicate more or less difficulty with processing the information.And 570

Research methods for pragmatics study

as Kasper and Dahl (1991) point out, for perception studies in which a participant listens to a speech sample and evaluates it (e.g., friendly or unfriendly), ratings tasks (e.g., rating scales) are often used. An example of an L2 study based on perceptions is that of Félix-Brasdefer and McKinnon (2016), in which students wrote down their perceptions of impolite behavior they encountered during study abroad in Spain or Latin America.Those perceptions were found to present some kind of offense to their ‘quality face’ and ‘social identity face,’ following Spencer-Oatey’s (2008) model of politeness (see Chapters 20 and 21 on (im)politeness issues in Spanish research, this volume).The data were also analyzed for other features; i.e., topic, level of learner competence, and the target culture. The researchers then proposed some pedagogical recommendations for teaching to build the sociopragmatic awareness by Spanish L2 learners.The study of perceptions in Spanish pragmatics research is an understudied area that can add much to our understanding of how pragmatic meaning is interpreted by others. Overall, quantitative methods generally yield reliable and valid empirical data, and are easy to replicate for other studies to contribute to the overall body of research. However, the criticism of their use for pragmatics research is that they often lose the spontaneity of expressions that occur in pragmatics, and also yield end-products of meaning-making, instead of the co-construction of meaning that occurs, for example, in interactions between talk participants.

2.2 Qualitative methods Qualitative methods are usually considered the opposite of elicitation methods; in the case of naturally occurring data, the researcher presumably attempts to collect data that are largely not elicited, but rather occur due to natural circumstances. However, there are differing degrees of ‘naturalness.’Whatever the degree, these kinds of natural data can be gathered via observation but there are other methods (Schneider, 2018), as examined in this section. At the same time, it should be considered that any kind of recording device, or even the presence of a researcher or asking permission to obtain information, can render the data less natural than they would have been without these factors present in the context; a phenomenon called the “observer’s paradox” according to Labov (1972). And unlike quantitative methods, in some interaction studies, data are obtained and studied before the research questions are identified, as discussed ahead. Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (2005) stress that language samples should have the characteristics of ‘authenticity,’ ‘consequentiality,’ and ‘comparability.’ Comparability refers to the ability to compare the results of one participant to another in the same task, while consequential tasks are those that lead to some meaningful outcome for the participants. Finally, the authors state that researchers should make sure the modality they use (oral, written, etc.) matches their true research goals. Bardovi-Harlig (2018) makes an argument for matching the modality of data collection, especially regarding SLA, to the modality of the language event under study in experimental research. For example, if the goal is to observe pragmatics in talk, then a spoken event must be investigated using examples of speech; likewise, an interpretation of a spoken event must be examined by participants listening to speech samples. The author reviews several popular data collection methods (e.g., DCT, conversation), oral and written tasks, and authentic discourse such as classroom discourse and informal conversation. She also remarks on aspects of the task required; e.g., planning time allowed, a focus on form or communication, use of explicit or implicit knowledge. In addition, if conversation is the selected modality, the author considers whether talk is used in a study as a model, as a practice activity, or in production tasks to assess gains in pragmatic knowledge. The author provides a useful and critical review of such methods. 571

Koike

Friedman (2012) lists some characteristics of much qualitative research: open inquiry, inductive, naturalistic, interpretive, multiple perspectives, attention to context, and focus on the particular (pp. 182–183). However, not all are found in any particular study.Whereas the research questions are determined first in quantitative research, the author states that sometimes the questions in qualitative research are determined after examining the data to find patterns or other characteristics of interest. Naturally occurring data for L1 qualitative studies can be found, for example, in informal or formal talk, institutional discourse, letters, and computer-mediated discourse. It may be “written, monologic, dyadic, or multi-partied,” and in the computer-mediated context, it may be synchronous or asynchronous (Bardovi-Harlig, 2012, p. 155). Golato (2017) reminds researchers that ‘naturally occurring data’ are not directly elicited by anyone, but instead are data that are observed as they happen to occur. An important aspect is that these data may be unpredictable, in form or occurrence, so expectations of what will arise must be adapted. The author points out that, although some have argued for the ‘naturalness’ of role play data, they are still “only an approximation of actual conversation as they differ in significant ways from naturally occurring data” (p. 22) (for that reason, we discuss role play data under the category of experimental methods, mainly in connection with L2 studies). Sociolinguistic interviews (cf. Labov, 1972) also do not yield completely naturally occurring data, given that they are interviews guided by a researcher, but do reveal important data that indicate characteristics of natural talk. Several studies use a combination of different data collection procedures or data from various sources (known as ‘triangulation’) or both quantitative and qualitative methods (also known as ‘mixed methods’) to examine naturally occurring data, achieving a more in-depth look at the data (Bednarek, 2011; Schneider, 2018). For example, one might obtain quantitative data on the frequency of an expression of politeness from an interview, and also qualitative data in metacommentary after the same interview in the same study to see motivations behind some of those expressions. Ogiermann (2018) describes an open production questionnaire in the form of a DCT, in order to elicit more conversational turns within an expanded contextual situation. Supposedly, this more open scenario could be used as a qualitative method for data collection, although, again, in this way the method would elicit metapragmatic judgments of what one would say in a given situation instead of what one would actually say, which may be different. In this version of the DCT, after seeing and/or hearing a scenario, the informant can respond in any way. For example, a roommate needs to find her cell phone, and help is offered by the respondent (e.g., You notice your roommate frantically looking all over the apartment. She says:“I can’t find my phone!,’’ and the participants see something like “You:________________________,” to which they respond with whatever comes to mind). Next, the respondents could comment on the response and its appropriateness. Other studies have used the DCT in new ways. In a study on bilingual Mexican-American informants representing first- through fourth-generation Hispanics in Texas, Michno (2017) aimed to study greetings and leave-takings as expressed in an online survey to be answered in either English or Spanish. Informants saw three scenarios in which participants were asked to express (a) a rating on a Likert-type scale for 18 items, (b) a completion to the discourse prompts using greetings or leave-takings (DCT) in six items, and (c) a retrospective report to explain any similarities or differences in responses across the social settings. The data were reported as numerical results from the rating scale, qualitative responses from the DCT, and metalinguistic commentary from the retrospection; an illustration of a mixed-methods approach. Perhaps these qualitative studies based on the DCT circumvent some of the criticisms of this data collection instrument mentioned earlier. Regarding language acquisition studies, Félix-Brasdefer and Hasler-Barker (2017) present a comprehensive overview of methods to elicit data, both quantitative and qualitative. They 572

Research methods for pragmatics study

review methods such as structured interviews, evaluations of (im)politeness events,‘think-aloud protocols,’ and forced judgment tasks that require participants to choose between options, as well as ways to evaluate pragmatic language comprehension. In other SLA research, Cohen et al. (2005), examining the pragmatic development of requests and apologies by learners in Spain, Latin America, and France, elicited data via journal submissions that an experimental group turned in after an orientation session where they also received a guide on learning strategies. Bataller (2010) employed several elicitation measures, including an open role play of service encounters to allow for negotiation with an interlocutor, based on a group of learners in a study-abroad program as compared to another group of native Spanish speakers at the same Spanish university.They all interacted with the same Spanish native speaker who played the role of a server in a cafeteria and an assistant in a shoe shop. Such a format allows for a somewhat naturalistic scenario while the researcher still controls certain variables of the context, task, and participants. Like these studies, Félix-Brasdefer (2013) asked L2 Spanish learners abroad and at home in the U.S., as well as native Spanish speakers in Mexico, to respond to situations delivered via a Powerpoint presentation on a computer.The speech acts targeted refusals: after seeing a prompt, learners responded orally to them. Responses of refusal strategies were digitally recorded and transcribed. The author chose this type of computer delivery in order to reduce the effects of outside influences, such as the professional’s mood or tone, and included audio, visual, and written input. Data were collected before and after the program abroad. More unobtrusive qualitative methods include ethnographic observations and notes, in which field researchers report on what is occurring in the context according to their own perceptions and intuitions. Ideally, the researcher (a) is a member of the community under observation, (b) can have an ‘emic’ or ‘insider’s’ understanding of what is occurring in the context, and (c) can more easily obtain participants’ permission to do a study because they know the researcher (Schneider, 2018). Field notes have long served as a form of data collection and the basis of ethnographic research. There are many kinds of notetaking, and the degree of completeness will affect the analysis of the speech event. Since taking notes takes some time, there will be aspects that will remain unrecorded, unless the researcher has permission to tape record in some way following institutional regulations. Regarding field notes, Félix-Brasdefer (2019) notes that, although such methods yield highly authentic data, they must be recorded immediately after they occur or some details may be forgotten or missed.Also, if the aim is to observe speech acts, these may occur in multiple turns and in combinations (e.g., invitation plus response). As Placencia and Márquez Reiter (2005) point out, it is difficult to determine how natural the data are if reported through the eyes of another, but they stress that recording, in addition to field notes, should capture much of the data.Video-recorded data are ideal, but the act of using a camera or even an audiotape recorder may change the ‘natural’ quality of interaction, which should be considered. However, Kasper (2000) comments that, with the passing of time during the recording, subjects can forget they are being recorded and return to a more ‘natural’ way of interacting. Golato and Golato (2018) mention the use of audio-recorded telephone conversations that would occur without planned elicitation as an example of naturally occurring data. Even if a certain type of phenomena were targeted (e.g., apologies), the entire conversation would have to be recorded, which presents a drawback for this type of data collection. However, the body of recorded data could be utilized for other subsequent studies.They also mention data sources such as web chats or other computer-mediated communications, blogs, and newspaper archives, in addition to other existing corpora. An example of studies based on naturally occurring data can be found in Wagner (2004; Wagner & Roebuck, 2010). In the 2004 study completed via ethnographic field methods in 573

Koike

Cuernavaca, Mexico, as well as in the 2010 investigation that replicated the same field methods in Panama City, Panama, the author gathered a large corpus of 200 apology speech acts in both sites from live, natural encounters.The data were gathered from written field notes after they occurred and encoded on the basis of the CCSARP Coding Manual for Apologies (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989). In these studies of naturally occurring data, quantitative methods can also be used to categorize and quantify the results. Placencia (2012) illustrates a qualitative study of advice given in the online forum Yahoo! Respuestas, a site that allows users to access written questions asking for advice and written responses to them that were posted on the website itself or on other sites available for other Spanish-speaking countries.The advice was not given by experts but rather by other peer users. The study is innovative and revealing of the nature of advice-giving in these online, peer-topeer sites.The author described characteristics of this kind of peer-driven discourse (e.g.,A-B-A interactional structure, how competence to give advice is claimed) after reviewing many entries in a sample corpus.The data were discursive moves that were usually used in the advice-giving (e.g., conveying warm feelings; cf. Locher, 2006), and the adviser’s rapport management style (e.g., affiliation; matter-of-fact stance).These categories were then quantified in frequencies of occurrence. In the context of L2 studies, it is more common to eschew naturally occurring data due in part to the artificiality of finding situations in which native speakers and learners interact spontaneously, which also applies to the case of having two learners speak to each other naturally in the target language, and whether the talk occurs in or outside of the classroom.Also, those who want to examine a given pragmatic construct usually want a more targeted set of data to elicit the construct in quantitative terms.Thus, the preference in L2 studies has been to use elicited data that are focused on the variable in question, at times using mixed methods. Nevertheless, Kasper and Ross (2018) mention the use of interviews, focus groups, and qualitative questionnaires as valid contexts for naturally occurring data in SLA studies. In SLA research, the three contexts in which learners would most likely interact in natural (unelicited) talk with native speakers would be in (a) a service-learning situation (e.g., working in the community), (b) an encounter during a study abroad experience, or (c) a public place such as a service encounter in a market (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2015). However, it would be unlikely that the participants would be unaware in the first two cases that they were being observed, much less video- or audio-taped (in turn requiring internal review board ‘IRB’ approval).3 In the third situation in a public place, institutional permission would not be necessary but the learners would probably recognize the researcher if the encounter were captured through field notes. If recorded through video or audio recordings, then some kind of signage is usually posted to inform all that a recording was occurring. Shively’s (2011) longitudinal study on requests in the study abroad context asked seven students studying for one semester in Spain to carry audiotape recorders in their backpacks, purses, or other bags.They recorded themselves in 15 naturalistic service encounter contexts in order to gather request data. Shively notes that permission to record from the service providers was not required because the recordings were done in a public place and the participants remained anonymous. In addition, the researcher asked the learners to participate in semi-structured interviews with her, write about pragmatics in reflective journals, and complete a background questionnaire. Another example of data gathered through ethnographic observations and fieldnotes in the L2 acquisition context is seen in Shively (2008), which is a study of the development of politeness strategies and interactional skills by seven Spanish L2 students in service encounters while they were abroad.The study abroad context lends itself to naturally occurring encounters more easily than those that might occur in a country where Spanish is not the dominant language. 574

Research methods for pragmatics study

Likewise, Dings (2014) represents an important qualitative study that examines the development of interactional competence by a Spanish L2 learner studying abroad as she met with the same native speaker over the course of a year to chat informally in a home. Her goal was to look at the alignment activity that occurred between the two participants in videotaped conversation, such as their use of assessments (e.g., es triste ‘it’s sad’). Shively (2016) studied the audio recordings of six students who spent a semester studying abroad in Spain and lived with individual local host families.They each recorded eight 30-minute conversations on any topic, four with their host family and four with a native speaker peer (either a local language partner or a Puerto Rican student at the same school).The six students also wrote journal entries commenting on their language learning and encounters with the native speakers. Like the Dings (2014) study, this investigation also focused on the use of assessments over time. To examine cognitive frames and evidence of how speakers change them pragmatically during interaction, Koike (2015) based her study on interview-type encounters between intermediate- and advanced-proficiency Spanish learners and native speakers as they conversed on various topics.The data cannot be considered naturally occurring in the sense that the encounters were arranged by the researcher, and the native speakers were at least somewhat familiar to the learners and were chosen as co-participants by the learners, but the talk was unscripted. The initial questions they discussed were open but predetermined by the researcher (e.g., describe the most moving experience they had ever had).This method allowed the participants to express their narratives as they chose, but the encounter was established and framed by the researcher. Interviews can also have a second step, in which participants are questioned about things they said during the interview, known as ‘metapragmatic’ or ‘retrospective’ commentary, as mentioned for the Michno (2017) study.While it cannot be labeled as ‘authentic interaction,’ in the case of pragmatics, the commentary can reveal important motivations for why people said something or what they were thinking as they did so.Thus, the analysis of the speech event would not be based solely on the researcher’s interpretation but also what the participants said about it as well. Another example can be found in Koike and Blyth (2016), based on retrospective questioning. After inviting talk participants (a native Spanish speaker and a learner) to a given recording site and obtaining permission to record, they began to speak, using a set of prompts provided if needed.While they were aware they were being recorded, they did not know where the camera was, since it was not obvious in the room. It was actually functioning through the desktop computer sitting in front of them, but there was no sign that it was recording since the screen remained blank. After being recorded through a special software program (i.e., Screenflow®), they then observed their own recording with a facilitator who asked them retrospective questions directed to uncovering pragmatic motivations whenever he stopped the recording. The facilitator asked questions such as “And why did you smile just then?” or “What were you thinking at that moment when you said X?”These interactions with the facilitator were also recorded with the same software and viewed in a split-screen together with the original recording by the researcher. Retrospective questioning is not a new method to obtain linguistic data (see Gass & Mackey, 2013), but the use of this software and recording format enabled the researchers to gain different insights into the pragmatic motivations behind what people said and did. In all cases the researchers must assimilate into the group or community as much as possible, assuming an unobtrusive profile within the group.This question of ethics in data collection, as well as several other issues and an excellent discussion of methods of collection, is presented by Schneider (2018). Kasper and Ross (2018) also raise an important issue in these methods for naturally occurring data; namely, the role of the other participant in situations such as interviews. That is, since the researcher or other interactant shapes the talk of both parties in the interaction, 575

Koike

the production of both participants must be analyzed and weighed for the influence they have on each other’s talk. A valuable resource on methods for qualitative research for both researchers and students that should be mentioned is Friedman (2012). The author presents not only theories and methods for gathering qualitative data, but also methods of analysis, a topic briefly addressed in Section 3. Whereas the criticisms of quantitative methods are usually directed to the artificiality of data obtained, the criticisms of qualitative methods often reflect the fact that the data are obtained from few informants, which calls into question their generalizability and validity. Nevertheless, the study of pragmatics must use authentic, spontaneous forms of expression. All of the methods discussed here attempt to achieve this goal, to varying degrees of success. Perhaps at this point, one solution to use both types lies in using a mixed-methods approach to reporting data.

2.3

Study participants

Up to this point we have examined research methods in terms of procedures and types of data. But studies must also be clearly delineated regarding which groups of participants they will include. Participants for L1 studies may be native speakers in any context (e.g., service encounters in bars at breakfast time; Placencia & Mancera Rueda, 2011); in sociolinguistic studies, the subjects typically vary according to region (e.g., Michno, 2017), gender (e.g., Achugar, 2001), age (e.g., Padilla Cruz, 2019), socio-economic background, and education (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, 2009). Most L1 studies examine several variables at the same time (e.g., young adults ages 18–22, of both genders, who are of San José, Costa Rica, middle-class, and working as receptionists in a company), which helps to populate different categories but also may complicate efforts to find variations within groups, assuming that they represent a fairly homogeneous grouping. However, in some research that involves anonymity of the participants, such as Márquez Reiter’s (2008) investigation of service calls in Uruguay to a telephone service center for customer services (i.e., requests for equipment repair, or companion care for ill clients), the focus of the data analysis was strictly on the form and the strategies of the explanations used by the participants, and not the background information of the people.Therefore, they remained anonymous in the reporting of results. It is somewhat easier to assume similarities for NS participants of an L1 if they share many of the same characteristics, but there are many variables to consider in studies of L2 participants. For example, if a study aims to look at only one population (e.g., college students in a given Spanish class in the U.S.), other variables that also can affect the results must be specified; e.g., age, gender, education, social class, first-hand knowledge of other dialects, languages, and cultures, length of time studying the target language, Spanish heritage, knowledge by close contact with other languages and cultures (such as through close family members or friends, or lengthy stays in other countries). If more than one group is to be investigated, such as a comparative study of the pragmatic production by L2 learners and Spanish heritage learners of Spanish, then the groups must be matched as closely as possible, at least in proficiency level of the skill they are to perform. In a study by Barros and Bachelor (2018), three groups of second-semester Spanish students of the two types of learners just described were employed as participants to produce requests.The experimental groups completed both oral and written DCTs as pretests and posttests and received three instructional sessions on requests.They also saw some video clips on this speech act. A control group of L2 learners was included to see if the grammar and vocabulary instruction the first two groups received could possibly account for any growth in request strategies (n = 34 participants in total).The authors described their subjects as between 17–35 576

Research methods for pragmatics study

years old, and the heritage learners were mostly of Mexican heritage (87.5%).The other heritage subjects were from Honduras, Mexico-Guatemala, Mexico-Ecuador, and 2.5% other. All students received an ACTFL proficiency rating of Intermediate-high, a characteristic that would make the groups comparable in one dimension. However, due to factors such as the small number of participants, the lack of information on the intensity and length of contact with Spanish native speakers (even in the form of media), and the generation of the heritage speakers in the U.S., the claims can be questioned. The key issue regarding study participants when designing a study involve targeting exactly the population that the researcher wants to examine. In quantitative research, where groups of participants must be fairly large, information on the individuals should be collected and carefully considered to see if they really do form a valid group. For example, in an L2 study involving intact classes, some students may have to be eliminated from the study according to their background characteristics, or different groupings may have to be used. The issue of study participants is complex but must be defined clearly in the study design.

3

Methodological considerations

This chapter has presented the methods that are most commonly used in recent Spanish pragmatics research, focusing mostly on obtaining data from oral production. It did mention a few perception studies, which are increasingly used as researchers may want to verify their own intuitions and interpretations of/reactions to the data. One example is that of Locher and Watts (2008), in which participants viewed the description of a scenario and gave spontaneous evaluations online of the (im)politeness they perceived in the description. Other studies might present data through a popular online platform for such questionnaires, which is Qualtrics, a survey software available in many universities that can display the data and also offer a way for study participants to record their answers. Most of the studies reviewed in this chapter have researched pragmatic forms that are fairly easy to capture and display, such as speech acts. The studies present a context and background information by which participants can imagine how they are intended to be understood. Implicatures, on the other hand, are usually more difficult to capture, simply because they depend heavily on individuals’ background experiences and knowledge to understand and intuit meaning; a factor that can easily lead to misinterpretation of the speaker’s intent. More recently, implicatures have been examined in experimental studies with the use of eye tracking (see Chapter 30 on pragmatics and eye tracking, this volume) and neuroimaging equipment (e.g., see Clark, 2018) to tap cognitive processes, as well as exact means to measure prosody and other phonetic variations that reflect pragmatic expressions (see Chapter 8 on pragmatics and prosody, this volume).These technological advances open avenues to more elucidating research on pragmatics, especially in the realm of psycholinguistics and phonetics (see Jucker et al., 2018, for more discussion). And along with the use of technological tools to gather data, the researcher must also be trained adequately to categorize and measure the data that they yield.

3.1 Methods of data analysis Some mention at least should be given to methods of data analysis, which really merit discussion in a separate chapter. Moving beyond counting frequencies of occurrence, graphs, or tables displaying results of means in the data, for example, all of which reflect descriptive statistics, researchers must find other ways to validate (or not) their observations. Regarding both quantitative and qualitative analyses of pragmatics data, both could benefit from the application of 577

Koike

inferential statistical methods in order to infer beyond the sample data or make judgments about them. Inferential measures allow the researcher to use samples of data to generalize about the larger group of participants. Measures such as the t-test (e.g.Vanrell,Armstrong, & Prieto, 2017), analysis of variance (ANOVA) (e.g., Koike & Pearson, 2005), and inferential trees (e.g. Michno, 2019), among others, can provide the researcher with tools to draw conclusions and implications from the data through inference.There is no ‘best method of analysis’ because the particular means must reflect the goals of the study and fit the method(s) of data collection and results as closely as possible.

4

Future directions and conclusion

As recent work on pragmatics indicates, researchers must continue to search for new ways to study pragmatics in production and understanding. Since it is assumed that natural data are preferred over elicited data, or in terms of gradients, that the more natural the data are, the more valid they are, we must continue to seek ways to achieve the goal of obtaining naturally occurring pragmatic data. This type of data is the most reflective of what people say to others in real-life circumstances. Perhaps technology will help achieve this goal (e.g., see Chapter 31 on pragmatics and digital discourse, and Chapter 32 on corpus pragmatics, this volume). More discussion on the issue of data collection in the acquisition context can be found in Gudmestad (2018). Shively’s (2011) study using recording devices hidden in bags carried by students in public places, mentioned earlier, represents a way to obtain naturalistic recordings during interactions such as service encounters, even though there may be intervening factors such as background noise and quality control. Another challenge is ways to obtain naturalistic data from children, adolescents, and the elderly, who are vastly understudied in the pragmatics field, in a large part due to institutional protections against doing so.There should be more ways to obtain naturalistic recordings, and of many different populations, in the future.We should also make greater use of triangulated and mixed methods of study. The research questions themselves for pragmatics study may drive new innovations in methods. Koike (2015) and Gironzetti and Koike (2016) have proposed that one approach to pragmatics research should aim to draw connections between pragmatics and factors that motivate its realizations and interpretations. Koike (2015, 2018) suggested looking at expectations, and also at culture and communities. While others have discussed the connection between pragmatics and expectations (e.g.,Arundale, 1999), Koike (2018) suggested studying expectations connected to pragmatic behavior as guided by cultural norms (e.g., individualism in societies such as the North American society, as opposed to community orientations in societies as found in many Latin American countries, but keeping essentialist stereotypes in mind). Those norms may become internalized most efficiently in an immersion setting. In this way, the expression and interpretations of many pragmatic realizations in American English and Latin American Spanish may be traced to these norms and orientations. These expectations could be revealed in many forms, such as videotaped interactions as well as questionnaires. For both sociolinguistic and L2 studies of pragmatics, the variables of the participants can be expanded from the traditional ones of age, gender, education, and socioeconomic levels (and in the case of L2 pragmatics, years of study of a given language), which allow categorizations into groups fairly easily, to such individualistic characteristics as personality, cognition, emoting, self-image, and social networks (and overall L2 oral proficiency and individual cultural experience, where applicable). At the same time, studies of pragmatics can also be opened up to look 578

Research methods for pragmatics study

at communities, such as speech communities and communities of practice. Such changes in variables can promote new perspectives to the field. Finally, it is wise to heed the call of Kasper and Ross (2018) to find “resources for revising established research protocols and developing innovative alternatives” (p. 484), in order to move the field of pragmatics forward to discover new aspects of language and linguistics.

Notes 1 I interpret this as referring to building a subsequent social relationship with the other participant. 2 (1) You would like to ask your friend if you could use his car for the evening because yours is in the shop for repairs: a. Give me your car for tonight, OK? b. Would you consider lending me your car for this evening, since my boss is having a very important social event and I don’t have any way to get there? It’s close by. c. Can you lend me your car if I bring it back tomorrow or the next day? d. How about lending me your car since I am in such a bind? 3 Internal Review Board approval refers to U.S. federal guidelines for institutions, such as universities, to review and monitor research involving human subjects.

Further reading Barron,A., Gu,Y., & Steen, G. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge handbook of pragmatics. London: Routledge. A comprehensive look at general pragmatics in contexts of methods of data collection, verbal and non-verbal communication, variation, culture, linguistic pragmatics, cognition, interaction, and other disciplines such as translation, by well-known authors of the field. It represents areas of research where pragmatics interfaces have promoted an examination of new data in different perspectives and contexts. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso, y variación. London: Routledge. A clear and concise introductory textbook on Spanish pragmatics that would be useful to both undergraduate and graduate students of the discipline. Chapter 10 addresses methods of data collection and research projects in general. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2017). Elicited data. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 27–40). London: Routledge. This chapter goes into more detail on other methods of obtaining elicited data than those covered in the present chapter. Among those methods are structured interviews, politeness events, verbal reports, various judgment tasks, and physiological measures such as neuroimaging. Friedman, D. (2012). How to collect and analyze qualitative data. In A. Mackey & S. Gass, Research methods in second language acquisition:A practical guide (pp. 180–200). London: Blackwell. An excellent resource for various methods to collect and analyze qualitative data, along with discussion of several important theories related to them. It is applicable to all research, not only SLA. It also provides suggestions for student projects and review questions. Jucker,A., Schneider, K., & Bublitz,W. (Eds.). (2018). Methods in pragmatics. Berlin: De Gruyter. This is an excellent collection of many new perspectives in pragmatics research methods. There are chapters on data, methods, and ethics of data collection, transcription, introspective, and philosophical pragmatics, neo-Gricean pragmatics, experimentation, ways to observe pragmatics, and corpus pragmatics, among others.The chapter on methods and ethics by Schneider is particularly useful for an overview of pragmatics methods. Taguchi, N. (Ed.). (2019). The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and pragmatics. New York: Routledge. This volume comprises several chapters dedicated to research methods that, even though they are focused on second language acquisition and pragmatics, also are relevant for research in first language pragmatics.The valuable contribution by Ross and Hong on mixed methods is particularly noteworthy. 579

Koike

References Achugar, M. (2001). Piropos as metaphors for gender roles in Spanish speaking cultures. Pragmatics, 11(2), 127–137. Arundale, R. (1999). An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory. Pragmatics, 9, 119–153. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1999). Researching method. In L. F. Bouton (Ed.), Pragmatics and language Learning (Vol. 8, pp. 237–264). Urbana-Champaign, IL: Division of English as an International Language. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2012). Pragmatics in second language acquisition. In S. M. Gass & A. Mackey (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 147–162). London: Routledge/Taylor Francis. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2018). Matching modality in L2 pragmatics research design. System, 75, 13–22. Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Hartford, B. S. (2005). Chapter 1: Institutional discourse and interlanguage pragmatics. In K. Bardovi-Harlig & B. S. Hartford (Eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics: Exploring institutional talk (pp. 7–36). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Barron,A., Gu,Y., & Steen, G. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge handbook of pragmatics. London: Routledge. Barros, M. J., & Bachelor, J. (2018). Pragmatic instruction may not be necessary among heritage learners of Spanish:A study on requests. Journal of Foreign Language Education and Technology, 3(1), 163–193. Bataller, R. (2010). Making a request for a service in Spanish: Pragmatic development in the study abroad setting. Foreign Language Annals, 43(1), 160–175. Bednarek, M. (2011).Approaching the data of pragmatics. In W. Bublitz & N. Norrick (Eds.), Foundations of pragmatics (pp. 537–559). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.). (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Clark, B. (2018). Cognitive pragmatics: Relevance-theoretic methodology. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 185–218). Berlin: De Gruyter. Cohen, A., Shively, R., Emert, H., & Hoff, J. (2005). Maximizing study abroad through language and culture strategies: Research on students, study abroad program professionals, and language instructors. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Dings,A. (2014). Interactional competence and the development of alignment activity. The Modern Language Journal, 98(3), 742–756. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2009). Pragmatic variation across Spanish(es): Requesting in Mexican, Costa Rican, and Dominican Spanish. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(4), 473–515. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2013). Refusing in L2 Spanish:The effects of the context or learning during a shortterm study abroad program. In O. Martí Andándiz & P. Salazar-Campillo (Eds.), Refusals in instructional contexts and beyond (pp. 147–173).Amsterdam: Rodopi. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). The language of service encounters:A pragmatic-discursive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2018). Role plays. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 305–331). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2019). Pragmática del español: contexto, uso, y variación.Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2017). Elicited data. In A. Barron (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 27–40). London: Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & McKinnon, S. (2016). Perceptions of impolite behavior in study abroad contexts and the teaching of impoliteness in L2 Spanish. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 99–113. Friedman, D. (2012). How to collect and analyze qualitative data. In A. Mackey & S. Gass (Eds.), Research methods in second language acquisition:A practical guide (pp. 180–200). London: Blackwell. Gass, S., & Mackey,A. (2013). Stimulated recall methodology in second language research. London: Routledge. Gironzetti, E., & Koike, D. (2016). Bridging the gap in Spanish instructional pragmatics: From theory to practice. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 89–98. (special issue, edited by Gironzetti and Koike). Golato, A. (2003). Studying compliment responses: A comparison of DCTs and recordings of naturally occurring talk. Applied Linguistics, 24, 90–121. Golato, A. (2017). Naturally-occurring data. In A. Barron,Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 21–26). London: Routledge. Golato,A., & Golato, P. (2013). Pragmatics research methods. In C. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1–6). Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell. Golato,A., & Golato, P. (2018). Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 367–394). Berlin: DeGruyter. 580

Research methods for pragmatics study

Gudmestad, A. (Ed.). (2018). Critical reflections on data in second language acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jucker, A. (2009). Speech act research between armchair, field and laboratory. The case of compliments. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 1611–1635. Jucker,A., Schneider, K., & Bublitz,W. (Eds.). (2018). Methods in pragmatics. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 316–341). London: Continuum. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13(2), 215–247. Kasper, G., & Ross, S. (2018).The social life of methods. Applied Linguistics Review, 9(4), 475–486. Koike, D. (2015). Changing frames in native speaker and learner talk. Moving toward a shared dialogue. In D. Koike & C. Blyth (Eds.), Dialogue in multilingual and multimodal communities (pp. 253–285). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Koike, D. (2018, November). La adquisición de pragmática por estudiantes de L2 y de herencia: expectativas, cultura y comunidad. Keynote talk at Feria Internacional del Libro 2018, Guadalajara, México. Koike, D., & Blyth, C. (2016).A metadialogic approach to intercultural dialogue: Uncovering hidden motivations for language use. Language and Dialogue, 6(2), 223–253. Koike, D., & Pearson, L. (2005). The effect of instruction and feedback in the development of pragmatic competence. System, 33(3), 481–501. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Locher, M. (2006). Advice online: Advice-giving in an American internet health column. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Locher, M., & Watts, R. (2008). Relational work and impoliteness: Negotiating norms of linguistic behaviour. In D. Bousfeld & M. A. Locher (Eds.), Impoliteness in language: Studies on its interplay with power in theory and practice (pp. 77 − 100). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Márquez Reiter, R. (2008). Intra-cultural variation: Explanations in service calls to two Montevidean service providers. Journal of Politeness Research, 4, 1–30. Michno, J. (2017). Greeting and leave-taking in Texas: Perception of politeness norms by MexicanAmericans across sociolinguistic divides. Spanish in Context, 14(1), 1–27. Michno, J. (2019). Gender variation in address form selection in corner-store interactions in a Nicaraguan community. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 77–98). London: Routledge. Mir, M. (2001). Un modelo didáctico para la enseñanza de la pragmática. Hispania, 84, 542–549. Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 229–255). Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton. Padilla Cruz, M. (2019).Verbal humor and age in cafés and bars in Seville, Spain. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 169–188). London and New York: Routledge. Pinto, D., & Raschio, R. (2007). A comparative study of requests in heritage speaker Spanish, L1 Spanish, and L1 English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(2), 135–155. Placencia, M. E. (2012). Online peer-to-peer advice in Yahoo! Respuestas. In H. Limberg & M. Locher (Eds.), Advice in discourse (pp. 281–305).Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Placencia, M. E., & Mancera Rueda, A. (2011). Vaya, qué chungo! Rapport-building talk in service encounters:The case of bars in Seville at breakfast time. In N. Lorenzo-Dus (Ed.), Spanish at work:Analysing institutional discourse across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 192–207). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Placencia, M. E., & Márquez Reiter, R. (2005). Research methods in sociopragmatics. In M. E. Placencia & R. Márquez Reiter (Eds.), Spanish pragmatics (pp. 213–230). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schneider, K. (2018). Methods and ethics of data collection. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 37–93). Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton. Shively, R. (2008). Politeness and social interaction in study abroad: Service encounters in L2 Spanish (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Shively, R. (2011). L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A longitudinal study of Spanish service encounters. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1818–1835. Shively, R. (2016). Development of assessments in L2 Spanish during study abroad. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 157–170. Showstack, R. (2016). La pragmática transcultural de los hablantes de herencia de español: análisis e implicaciones pedagógicas. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3(2), 143–156. 581

Koike

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008). Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (2nd ed.). London: Continuum. Vanrell, M.,Armstrong, M., & Prieto, P. (2017). Experimental evidence for the role of intonation in evidential marking. Language and Speech, 60(2), 242–259. Wagner, L. (2004). Positive- and negative-politeness strategies: Apologizing in the speech community of Cuernavaca, Mexico. International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies, 13(1), 19–27. Wagner, L., & Roebuck, R. (2010).Apologizing in Cuernavaca, Mexico and Panama City, Panama. Spanish in Context, 7(2), 254–278. Yuan,Y. (2001). An inquiry into empirical pragmatics data-gathering methods:Written DCTs, oral DCTs, field notes, and natural conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(2), 271–292.

582

Index

acá 58–60, 62, 69 accessibility 130–132; and first person 171; and grammatical person 136–137; and subject realization 134–136; and word order 138 address 296; forms of 290; honorific 289, 294, 298; nominal 289, 298, 300; pronominal 289–290; Spanish systems 290; verbal 289, 295 allá 56–59, 62, 70 Alvarado Ortega, M. B. 215 anti–politeness 372 apologies 46–47 argumentation 219 assessment 508–509; of L2 pragmatics 557 backward design 504 bilingualism 141–143 Brenes Peña, E. 375 censorship 237–238 coalition 241 code-switching 338 coherence 535, 537–538 commissives 47–48 conceptual 95–96, 98, 275 confrontation 219–222, 227, 229, 232 constructions 140–141 conventional expressions 203–205, 208–210, 212–213, 215; candidate conventional expressions 209–213; instruction of 205, 208–210, 213 conventional implicature 22–23, 30 conversational humor 404–405 conversational implicature 15–22; criticisms of 23–24; features of 17–19; generalized (GCI) 18–19, 25, 28, 32–34; particularized (PCI) 18–19, 32; reformulations of 24–26; scalar 18–19, 25, 27–28, 33 corpus/corpora: formulaic language in 209, 213–214; multilingual, comparable 557–558; parallel 557–558 cross–cultural pragmatics 306–307 curricular frameworks 470–473, 481

Dancing with words 462 deictic: center 55, 57; forms/markers 59, 63–64 De la Mora, J. 69 descriptive/attributive 99–100 development 428–430 discourse markers 185, 555 discourse referentiality 131; and noun phrase realization 133–135; and specificity 132 elicited data 567, 569, 571–574, 578 epistemic: modality 111, 115, 122, 124; stance 150, 153, 156, 162–163 everyday and scientific concepts 476 evidentiality: inferential 112, 115–116, 119–121; reportative 114–115, 117–119, 122 exophoric functions 63–64, 66, 69 experimental data 568, 571–572 felicity conditions 38 first-wave politeness in Spanish 357–360, 364 FL instruction/instructed 485–491, 493–494, 497 focus 75–76 function 187–188, 190–196 fustigation 372, 376–377 gaze: aversion 523; behavior 523; mutual 525–526 genre 372, 374, 376–378 globalization 309, 314 grammar: conceptualization of 443 grammaticalization 185–186, 189, 192–193, 197 heritage speakers 506–507; definition of 455; monolingual norm 457; multilingual settings 456–457 human cognition 92–93, 100–101 humor translation 405–406, 411 hybridity 329, 331 identity 534–539, 541–542; contextual 175; socioprofessional 175; speaker 159 ideology 219, 224, 233, 534, 537–539, 541–543 illocutionary: act 38; force 38; point 39

583

Index

illocutionary act conditions 39 implicature/explicature 92–96 (im)politeness 539–540, 542–543; and conflict 536, 540; and relational work 539; strategies 540 indirect speech acts 40 informal (register) 186, 194–196 information structure 73, 85–86, 150, 153, 162 informativeness 171; in expressed subjects 171–172; related to textual coherence 177n5 input 443; naturalistic 450 Inquisition 242 instructional activities 509–510 instructional models 442; instructional steps 446; pedagogical models 444 intercultural: communication 305, 307–309; politeness 361; pragmatics 307–308 interlanguage pragmatics 423 interpreters 251, 253, 255, 258–261 irony 150, 157 jokes 406, 408–409 L2 acquisition theories 424–425, 433 language choice 337 learning outcomes 505 levels of pragmatic analysis 273; actional 274; formal 274; interactional 274–275; non-verbal 276; organizational 275; prosodic 276; stylistic 275; topic 275 lingua franca 322–323, 325–326 macrosocial factors 271–273 make-sense frame 408, 415 Maldonado, R. 69 Martín Noguerol, M. 216n7 Márquez Reiter, R. 311 maxims of conversation 16–19; criticisms of 23–24; manner 17, 20–21, 23–24; operationalization of 19–22; quality 17, 19–21, 23, 31; quantity 16–21, 23, 25–26, 29; relation 17, 20–21, 23 metapragmatics 380; metapragmatic analysis 443; metapragmatic information 450 microsocial factors 271–273 mitigation 294, 359; definition 387–389; depersonalization as 294; functions 387, 389–391; linguistic variables 389–390, 393–394; motivations 393; pluralization as 294; second language 394; variation 391–392 mitigation theory: cognitive and emotional 393; politeness 388–389, 396; speech act 388–389; terms 387, 389, 396 multilingual corpora: comparable corpora 557–558; parallel corpora 557–558 multilingual pragmatics 335–337 multimodal 523, 526, 534, 537–538, 540, 542–543 native and nonnative speakers 470, 475, 479–481 naturalistic 485–486, 488–489, 492–493 584

naturally occurring data 567–569, 571–575, 578 neo-Gricean theory 24–26; Horn’s 24–25, 27–29; I[informativeness]-principle 26, 29–31; Levinson’s 25–26, 28–31; M[anner]-principle 26, 30–31; principles 24–26; Q[uantity]principle 24–28, 30; R[elation]-principle 24 perlocutionary act 38 piropos 44 politeness 78, 150, 153, 157–159, 291, 253–254, 256, 261, 353–355, 553; first-order vs. secondorder approaches 354; first-wave in Spanish 357–360, 364; intercultural 361; negative and positive 291–292; third-wave in Spanish 360–361, 364; waves of research 355–360, 373 position 190–191, 194, 197 power 251, 253–255, 258–259; solidarity 291 pragmadialectics, dialectic 220–221, 227 pragmatic: competence 425; fossilization 553–560; marker(s) 559–560; routines 203–205, 209–210, 212–213; strategies 339–340; variable 272 pragmatics curriculum 506 procedural meaning 93–99, 282 pronominal subjects 77–78 prosodic pragmatics 550, 560 prosody 149–150, 153, 156–162 proximal-distal contrast 58, 65 pupillometry 521–522, 525 qualitative methods 567–577 quantitative methods 568–572, 574, 576–577 rapport 253–255, 260, 262 recantation 246 refusals 47 relevance 91–93; relevance theory 403, 408 reliability 568 rhetoric 219–223, 232–233 salience 171; as a cognitive conceptualization 177n6; in omitted subjects 172; as perceptibility, autonomy, and accessibility 177n6 second language acquisition theories 424–425, 433 second-wave politeness in Spanish 360, 364 self-censorship 241–242 social interaction 522–523, 525 sociocognitive perspective 441, 447 sociocultural theory 470, 475–476, 481 speech act(s) 37, 39; speech act theory 37–38 strategy, strategies 219, 221–223, 228–232 study abroad 463–464, 485–497 superdiversity 329, 331 task-based language teaching 431–432 teacher education 469–471, 474–481 text deixis 55, 64–65, 68 third-wave politeness in Spanish 360, 364

Index

topicality 137–138; and constructions 140–141; and word order 138–140 topicalization 85–86 traer 57 translanguaging 329, 331, 341 transnational settings 309, 312, 315 triadic interaction 239 validity 568–570, 576 variation 208–210, 213, 215; age 269; discourse 271; geographical 175; national 272; regional

269; pragmalinguistic 270; pragmatic 271, 272, 274; situational 272; social 175; socioeconomic 270; sociolinguistic 271–272; sociopragmatic 270–271; stylistic 275, 277; subnational 272 variational pragmatics 174, 273 variationist sociolinguistics 271, 282 venir 56–57 visual: attention 526; cognition 518; world paradigm 518–521 vocative 296–298 voices 252–254, 260–261

585