The first substantial textbook on pragmatics to focus on Spanish. The authors discuss key theories within the Anglo-American tradition of pragmatics, concentrating on the relationship between language use and socio-cultural contexts, and their uptake by Hispanists. Drawing on research by foremost scholars in the field, with reference to a wide range of 'Spanishes', including a first treatment of 'sociopragmatic variation'. Concepts throughout are illustrated with real language examples taken from different Spanish corpora. The book is carefully structured to be appropriate for upper-level undergraduate, as well as postgraduate, students.
This collection of essays on Spanish pragmatics can be understood in its broadest sense in Iacob L. Mey's words as «the study of the conditions of human language use in a societal context.» The essays, which can be read independently from one another, revolve around three key areas within the Anglo-American school of pragmatics: speech acts, conversation, and politeness as sociocultural manifestations of communication. The first part of the book emphasizes the study of politeness in different Spanish-speaking communities, paying special attention to the realization of polite speech acts and their cross-cultural and cross-linguistic implications, as well as the face-work that interlocutors conduct in casual conversations and other communicative settings. The second part expands the topic of politeness strategies to the study of new contexts (such as echo questions and conversational repairs) and addresses other language phenomena that can be best explored from a pragmalinguistic perspective, such as evidentiality, mitigation, contrastive emphasis, and topicality and discourse salience. The examples (with the exception of a few literary quotes) proceed from naturally occurring data or were collected through questionnaires, and represent a wide range of colloquial «Spanishes, » from Peninsular to Latin American, from monolingual to bilingual, and from native to heritage to second language learners' varieties. The empirical nature of Aspects of Spanish Pragmatics will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in the use of Spanish for real-life communicative interactions, as well as in the topic of intercultural communication and the teaching of authentic language to students of Spanish in the United States.
"Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish" provides the reader with a representative spectrum of current research in the most dynamic areas of the pragmatics of Spanish. It brings together a collection of academic essays written by well-established as well as emerging voices in Hispanic pragmatics. The essays include applications of pragmatic concepts to sub-fields of (Spanish) linguistics (i.e., pragmatics and grammar; pragmatics and applied linguistics; pragmatics and cross- and inter-cultural communication), studies of traditional topics in pragmatics (i.e., discourse markers, politeness, metaphor, humour) as well as a proposal to amalgamate the dominant pragmatic approaches, namely socio-pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics, into one comprehensive model. The essays in this collection represent both new theoretical and empirical research and as such they constitute a valuable contribution to the field of pragmatics in general and an essential reference to those researching the pragmatics of Spanish.
L2 Spanish Pragmatics is a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of current research into pragmatics and Spanish language teaching. It presents the research on the teaching of pragmatics and Spanish language as a multifaceted discipline. Written by an international cohort of scholars, the breadth of topics includes innovative topics in the teaching of Spanish, such as genre analysis, discourse markers, politeness and impoliteness, nonverbal communication, irony, and humor, as well as web-based pragmatics resources. Key features: An overview of new trends in Spanish pragmatics research and the growing need for instruction in intercultural communication; Insights derived from important theoretical and empirical works that may contribute to integrate pragmatics in the teaching of the language; Explanations with great clarity, plenty of examples and references, as well as connections to language teaching and learning; Tasks and activities that can help teachers move from a traditional curricular approach to a more innovative and engaging one; Descriptions of numerous activities or guidelines for the classroom, supplemented with additional materials; A bilingual glossary of terms in pragmatics that will help teachers in their implementation of activities to teach L2 Spanish pragmatics. L2 Spanish Pragmatics constitutes a reference book on current research on learning and teaching Spanish pragmatics. It will be of interest to university lecturers, researchers, and graduate students. It will also be an excellent resource for language educators and K-16 teachers willing to expand their knowledge and apply the teaching of pragmatics as an integral component in the teaching of the Spanish language.
This study provides a consistent description and explanation of the syntax, the semantics and the pragmatics of Spanish mood. A major focus of attention is the central role of the truthfunctional categories of realis, potentialis and irrealis as parameters relevant to mood selection in both subordinate and non-subordinate clauses. Furthermore, a proposal is offered for a new typology of clause-embedding predicates. The framework chosen stems from the insight that complement-taking predicates share the property of providing information on the set of mental processes which characterize intentional human behavior. At the level of pragmatic analysis, mood selection is examined from a variety of angles. Thus, specific research is conducted within the framework of speech act theory, relevance theory, politeness theory and the theory of Gricean maxims.
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. Thirty-three 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.
This book reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic markers in written discourse in a third language (English) by secondary students living in the bilingual (Spanish and Catalan) Valencian Community in Spain. It examines pragmatic transfer, specifically positive transfer, in multilingual students from a holistic perspective, taking into account their linguistic repertoire and using ecologically valid classroom writing tasks in a longitudinal study. It tackles the issue of task-based language teaching from a multilingual perspective by presenting a study which takes place in natural classroom contexts where real classroom tasks are used to explore the interaction between languages in multilinguals. The book combines a focus on multilingual language development and pragmatics and discusses the resources multilingual learners take to the classroom.
This investigation analyzes pragmatic ways in which Spanish is used to achieve persuasion in television advertising. The author applies pragmatic models to commercials for products and services from three countries--Chile, Spain, and the United States. She addresses the questions: (1) Which pragmatic devices occur most frequently? (2) How are these devices linguistically coded? (3) Are any differences evident between regional varieties of Spanish? and (4) How are pragmalinguistic features of television advertising used to effect persuasion? The most representative variables include speech acts, indexicals, politeness, implicatures, violations of Grice's Maxims, and speaker considerations. The study contributes to the cross-linguistic understanding of pragmatics and of persuasion in Spanish by (1) offering a procedure that may be replicated; (2) addressing multiple pragmatic categories; and (3) examining the relationship between pragmatic strategies and persuasion among Spanish speakers. Given the vital role of the media in society, Spanish television advertising reflects the pragmatic communication of persuasion by and to Spanish speakers. Pragmática de discurso persuasivo de publicidad de television en español. Esta investigación analiza las maneras pragmáticas en las cuales se usa el español para persuadir en la publicidad de televisión y contribuye al entendimiento lingüístico de pragmática y persuasión en español. El libro está escrito en inglés.
New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics brings together varying perspectives in second language (L2) pragmatics to show both historical developments in the field, while also looking towards the future, including theoretical, empirical, and implementation perspectives. This volume is divided in four sections: teaching and learning speech acts, assessing pragmatic competence, analyzing discourses in digital contexts, and current issues in L2 pragmatics. The chapters focus on various aspects related to the learning, teaching, and assessing of L2 pragmatics and cover a range of learning environments. The authors address current topics in L2 pragmatics such as: speech acts from a discursive perspective; pragmatics instruction in the foreign language classroom and during study abroad; assessment of pragmatic competence; research methods used to collect pragmatics data; pragmatics in computer-mediated contexts; the role of implicit and explicit knowledge; discourse markers as a resource for interaction; and the framework of translingual practice. Taken together, the chapters in this volume foreground innovations and new directions in the field of L2 pragmatics while, at the same time, ground their work in the existing literature. Consequently, this volume both highlights where the field of L2 pragmatics has been and offers cutting-edge insights into where it is going in the future.
Evidentiality in communication is better investigated in delimited and recognizable contexts where the multiple levels of meaning in interactional practices are manifested. Taking this viewpoint, the present volume explores the interrelations between evidentials and textual genre in Spanish. Adopting a discursive perspective, all of the chapters examine how the functional category of evidentiality is brought into discourse, which set of linguistic strategies evidentiality makes explicit, what counts as evidence in certain contexts and in certain textual genres, and what particular pragmatic meanings these mechanisms acquire, invoke and project onto the on-going discourse. In particular, this book is concerned with the relationship between evidential expressions and the pragmatic meaning(s) triggered by those expressions, and the role of genre in shaping the evidential meanings. The volume is addressed to both theoretically and empirically minded scholars in the disciplines of Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Communication Studies, and Psychology.
