Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish

Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor Andreas H. Jucker University of Z...

Author: Rosina Marquez Reiter | Maria Elena Placencia

99 downloads 2012 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor Andreas H. Jucker University of Zurich, English Department Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]

Associate Editors Jacob L. Mey University of Southern Denmark

Herman Parret Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Jef Verschueren Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board Shoshana Blum-Kulka Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni University of Lyon 2

Jean Caron Université de Poitiers

Claudia de Lemos University of Campinas, Brazil

Robyn Carston University College London

Marina Sbisà University of Trieste

Bruce Fraser Boston University

Emanuel Schegloﬀ University of California at Los Angeles

Thorstein Fretheim University of Trondheim

Deborah Schiﬀrin Georgetown University

John Heritage University of California at Los Angeles

Paul O. Takahara Kansai Gaidai University

Susan Herring University of Texas at Arlington

Sandra Thompson University of California at Santa Barbara

Masako K. Hiraga St.Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Teun A. Van Dijk Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

David Holdcroft University of Leeds

Richard J. Watts University of Berne

Sachiko Ide Japan Women’s University

Volume 123 Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish Edited by Rosina Márquez Reiter and María Elena Placencia

Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish Edited by

Rosina Márquez Reiter University of Surrey

María Elena Placencia Birkbeck College, University of London

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish / edited by Rosina Márquez Reiter, María Elena Placencia. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 123) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Spanish language--Discourse analysis. 2. Spanish language--Spoken Spanish. 3. Pragmatics. I. Márquez-Reiter, Rosina. II. Placencia, María E. (María Elena) III. Pragmatics & beyond ; new-ser. 123. PC4434.C87 2004 460.1’41-dc22 isbn 90 272 5365 X (Eur.) / 1 58811 520 8 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2004047623

© 2004 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microﬁlm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

xi

I. The pragmatics of Spanish to date Chapter 1 Spanish pragmatics: Whence, where, whither? Leo Hickey Chapter 2 The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

3

15

II. Pragmatics and other disciplines Pragmatics and grammar Chapter 3 The Spanish subjunctive: Procedural semantics and pragmatic inference Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

35

Chapter 4 The Conditional: A grammaticalised marker of politeness in Spanish Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

57



Table of contents

Pragmatics and applied linguistics Chapter 5 Role-plays and the assessment of oral proficiency in Spanish Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

79

Chapter 6 Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness Miranda Stewart

99

Pragmatics and cross- and inter-cultural communication Chapter 7 Displaying closeness and respectful distance in Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia Chapter 8 Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning: Requests and promises in intercultural communication in Oaxaca, Mexico Martina Schrader-Kniffki

121

157

III. Common topics in pragmatics Discourse markers Chapter 9 Procedural constraints on context selection: Siempre as a discourse marker Carmen Curcó Chapter 10 Discourse markers in the construction of the text, the activity, and the social relations: Evidence from courtroom discourse Isolda E. Carranza

179

203

Table of contents 

Politeness Chapter 11 Coercion and cooperation: A case study of Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands Carmen García Chapter 12 Politeness as face enhancement: An analysis of Spanish conversations between friends and family Nieves Hernández-Flores

231

265

Metaphor Chapter 13 Quarrelling about metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

287

Humour Chapter 14 Pragmatics of humorous strategies in El club de la comedia Francisco Yus

319

IV. Towards an integrated pragmatic theory Chapter 15 Norms and principles: Putting social and cognitive pragmatics together Victoria Escandell-Vidal

347

Contributors

373

Index

379

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:11/05/2004; 9:37

F: PB123AC.tex / p.1 (ix)

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to several colleagues and institutions for making this project possible. Our thanks go firstly to all the contributors of this volume and to those who for neither money nor merit anonymously participated in the peer-reviewed process of the individual chapters that comprised the original manuscript. We would also like to extend our gratitude to two anonymous reviewers from John Benjamins for their comments on the volume. Last but not least, we would like to express our appreciation to the institutions that financially supported the ‘First UK Hispanic Linguistic Symposium’ (April, 2002, University of Surrey), organised by Birkbeck College, University of London, and the University of Surrey where some of the papers selected for this volume were first presented. The institutions are: the British Academy, Instituto Cervantes (London), the Spanish Embassy (London), the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture, Birkbeck College, University of London, and the Department of Linguistic, Cultural and International Studies, University of Surrey.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 8:21

F: PB123PR.tex / p.1 (xi)

Preface Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

This volume as indicated by its title, Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish, brings together a collection of academic essays on the most prevalent approaches to the study of the pragmatics of Spanish(es), primarily from an Anglo-American tradition (cf. Levinson 1983; Verschueren 1999). The motivation for compiling this volume stems from the proliferation of studies in the pragmatics of Spanish in recent years. The interest in the pragmatics of Spanish is not only evidenced by the array of studies into ‘traditional’ domains of pragmatics (e.g. studies of speech acts and discourse markers in different varieties of Spanish to mention but a few), but also by the application of pragmatics concepts to the study of other areas of Spanish linguistics such as applied linguistics, grammar, and cross- and inter-cultural communication. At present there are no collections on the pragmatics of Spanish written in English, and the few essays written in Spanish are now dated as well as limited in terms of the pragmatic domains and Spanish varieties covered. The ongoing interest in the pragmatics of Spanish has not yet been reflected by the publication of a volume into the aforementioned areas. This volume seeks to fill this lacuna by bringing together the work of scholars working in the various sub-fields of the pragmatics of Spanish in one publication. The essays in this volume either represent those areas of the pragmatics of Spanish that have received a great deal of attention, or point specifically to areas of increasing interest. The book therefore provides the reader with a representative spectrum of current research in the most dynamic areas of the pragmatics of Spanish. The chapters of this book not only contribute to our knowledge of the pragmatics of Spanish but also to pragmatics in general. With respect to the latter, the contributions both represent new theoretical and/or empirical research in their respective sub-fields and address, amongst others, the suitability of some pragmatic constructs (e.g. procedural meaning as a constraint on contex-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 8:21

F: PB123PR.tex / p.2 (xii)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

tual effects; the functions of discourse markers as applications specific to types of speech events; Anglo-American politeness theory; etc.); the role of pragmatics in evaluating both communicative competence and the giving of feedback by tutors; the study of cross- and inter-cultural communication tackling issues of methodology and the place of pragmatics in the study of languages in contact; and the need for an integrated pragmatic theory encompassing both social and cognitive pragmatics. In terms of the contributions to the pragmatics of Spanish, this book brings together the work of well established as well as emerging voices in Spanish pragmatics working in academic institutions in Europe (Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Spain), Latin America (Argentina, Mexico), and the United States. Secondly, the essays cover a wide range of varieties of Spanish, namely Argentinean (Buenos Aires, Córdoba), Ecuadorian (Quito), Peninsular (Galicia, Madrid and Valencia), Mexican (Mexico City, Oaxaca), and Uruguayan (Montevideo), and include the analysis of both spoken and written language in non-institutional and institutional contexts. Thirdly, the volume contains two chapters that give an overview of the work that has been carried out in the pragmatics of Spanish in Spain and beyond Spain, thus bringing together the work of Spaniards, (Latin) Americans, and other Hispanists working in Spanish pragmatics. Last but not least, the essays include applications of pragmatic concepts to new research contexts thus furthering our knowledge of Spanish pragmatic phenomena, and explorations into the (in)applicability of pragmatic constructs to the study of specific pragmatic themes. The volume contains invited contributions and some selected (plenary) presentations given at the First UK Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, April 13–17 2002, University of Surrey. The essays testify, in our view, to the healthy diversity of themes in current studies on the pragmatics of Spanish, while still preserving the common thread of the object language and, more importantly, the most established topics in the field. The fifteen essays in this book are organised into topical sections illustrating the areas that have received most attention and those of growing interest. Readers should keep in mind that some papers could fit into other sections due to the inevitable overlap in the perspectives employed in some of the studies. The essays were arranged according to whether they represent applications of pragmatic concepts to sub-fields of Spanish linguistics or studies of ‘traditional’ topics in pragmatics. Part I, Introduction: The pragmatics of Spanish to date, presents an overview of the major contributions published to date in Spanish pragmatics. One of its objectives is to provide an overarching picture that will allow readers

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 8:21

F: PB123PR.tex / p.3 (xiii)

Preface 

to see how the studies in this collection contribute to the field. It opens with Leo Hickey’s seminal essay: ‘Spanish pragmatics: Whence, where, whither?’ focusing on the research published in Spain and questioning the extent to which one should talk about a Spanish School of Pragmatics or rather about pragmatic approaches to the study of Spanish. Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia’s chapter, ‘The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain’ concentrates on the research published in the rest of Europe, (Latin) America, and Australia and confirms Hickey’s claim that despite the increasing interest in the pragmatics of Spanish, one cannot talk about a Spanish School of Pragmatics, but rather about pragmatic approaches to the study of Spanish. To the best of our knowledge, these two chapters are unique in affording a comprehensive summary of the research carried out in the sub-fields of pragmatics represented in this volume. Part II, Pragmatics and other disciplines, provides the reader with six chapters dealing with the interface between pragmatics and other disciplines. While the task of including all possible interfaces between pragmatics and other linguistic disciplines goes beyond the scope of this book, the essays in Part II reflect the areas where most work has been carried out. Part II is divided into three sections. The first section, Pragmatics and grammar, aims to contribute to a better understanding of two aspects of Spanish mood: the subjunctive and the conditional with two essays representing different approaches to its study. While Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti’s essay explores the use of the subjunctive vis à vis the indicative from a relevance theoretic perspective, Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch examines the grammaticalisation of the conditional in the encoding of politeness from a Gricean implicature perspective. Despite the range of studies into Spanish applied linguistics, particularly in the United States, few of the studies produced so far seem to explicitly incorporate pragmatic theory as such (cf. Lafford 2000). The two essays in the second section, Pragmatics and applied linguistics, are illustrative of the role of pragmatics in evaluating foreign language learning. Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara’s chapter focuses on the suitability of using data collection instruments employed in pragmatics research for the assessment of L2 oral proficiency; Miranda Stewart, on the other hand, analyses the pragmatic strategies employed by tutors to provide written feedback. The third section, Pragmatics and cross- and inter-cultural communication, illustrates two attempts to characterise the linguistic norms employed in face-to-face interactions by specific cultural groups in specific social contexts and varieties of Spanish. While Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 8:21

F: PB123PR.tex / p.4 (xiv)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Placencia’s contrastive chapter does so by analysing the strategies employed by salespersons in service encounters in two urban varieties of Spanish, Martina Schrader-Kniffki’s examines the strategies of a rural indigenous group based in Mexico in a conflicting intercultural interaction with a speaker of Spanish. Methodologically, both essays depart from the dominant trend in Spanish cross- and inter-cultural communication of using semi-naturalistic data (Fant 1989; Grindstead 1995) to the use of ‘natural data’ collected in situ. Part III, Common topics in pragmatics, contains six chapters offering a representative sample of the topics that have received the greatest attention in Spanish pragmatics, as highlighted in the essays of Part I. As in the case of Part II, it is outside the scope of this volume to include every single pragmatic topic that has been applied to the study of the pragmatics of Spanish. The two empirical chapters on discourse markers, one of the most fruitful topics of research in the pragmatics of Spanish, offer knowledge of previously unexamined discourse markers in the varieties of Spanish spoken in Mexico City (Mexico) and Córdoba (Argentina). Carmen Curcó provides a relevance theoretic analysis of siempre, arguing that it encodes a procedural constraint on context selection, and Isolda Carranza explores the use che, qué sé yo, ah, ¿no es cierto? and the combination bueno pero in terms of how they contribute to the oral text and social context of courtroom discourse. Both essays also question the (in)applicability of existing pragmatic frameworks for the study of discourse markers, thus taking the study of discourse markers a step further. The essays contained under the heading of politeness represent original contributions to the ever-increasing sub-field of politeness studies. While Carmen García’s chapter gives further support to Brown and Levinson’s (1987) seminal work by focusing on a speech event not previously studied in the Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Nieves Hernández Flores’s study claims the inapplicability of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model to the study of Spanish familial conversations and suggests a further function of politeness. The essay on metaphor and the one on humour examine the role of figurative language in Peninsular Spanish (Madrid, Valencia) interactions. Eduardo Urios’s essay focuses on an argument between a couple, integrating cognitive and discursive perspectives in his analysis of metaphor. Francisco Yus offers a relevance theoretic analysis of humour in the context of a televised comedy performance, showing how humorous effects rely on both discursive and cultural aspects of the performance examined. Finally, Part IV, Toward an integrated pragmatic theory, brings the volume to a close with a long awaited theoretical essay in which Victoria EscandellVidal proposes a way of amalgamating the dominant approaches in the study of

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 8:21

F: PB123PR.tex / p.5 (xv)

Preface

pragmatics in the field and represented by the studies in this collection, sociopragmatics and cognitive pragmatics, into one comprehensive model. The present volume offers comprehensive coverage of the field of Spanish pragmatics at present and it is hoped that it will encourage further research in the future. The book, however, is not intended to be exhaustive since an attempt to compress all current studies under Spanish pragmatics would be neither viable nor desirable, bearing in mind the purpose of this compilation. While it might have been useful to include other contemporary topics of interest such as irony and argumentation, space constraints did not permit this option. Likewise, it was not possible to include a larger number of studies examining more varieties of Spanish. As such, the present volume should be seen as a continuing project awaiting new developments in the pragmatics of Spanish.

References Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fant, Lars (1989). “Cultural mismatch in conversation: Spanish and Scandinavian communicative behaviour in negotiation settings”. Hermes Journal of Linguistics, 3, 247–265. Grindsted, Annette (1995). “Politeness and disagreement in business negotiations”. In K. Ehlich & J. Wagner (Eds.), The Discourse of Business Negotiation (pp. 273–348). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lafford, Barbara (2000). “Spanish applied linguistics in the twentieth century: A retrospective and bibliography (1900–99)”. Hispania, 83, 711–732. Levinson, Stephen (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verschueren, Jef (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:9/02/2004; 11:51

F: PB123P1.tex / p.1 (1)

P I

The pragmatics of Spanish to date

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18

F: PB12301.tex / p.1 (3)

Chapter 1

Spanish pragmatics Whence, where, whither? Leo Hickey

The phrase Spanish pragmatics in the title of this paper has at least three meanings, namely contributions to our knowledge and understanding of pragmatics written in Spanish, contributions to the pragmatics of Spanish, and contributions to pragmatics made by Spaniards or Hispanists. Each of these categories will be treated at least to some extent but the main focus will be on contributions to the pragmatics of Spanish made by Spaniards or Hispanists in Spanish. One factor they have in common, however, has to do with impact. For the past several years, the Western academic world has been paying special attention to impact, that is the criterion that research should be, not just known to others, but influential, in the sense of producing repercussions, reactions, and reverberations. No matter how intrinsically interesting or original a publication, if it fails to stimulate or contribute to debate, it is deemed to be of little value. With this in mind, it might be said that Spanish pragmatics starts with an important handicap. Whether we like it or not, Spanish, though spoken by some 400 million people, is not read by 400 million people, it is not always well marketed, and its influence is not always strong. While English-language sources are read by many Spanish academics, the opposite is not equally true. Furthermore, when Spanish academics are not writing in Spanish, they sometimes write in poor English and may not have had their drafts properly revised. Spaniards, of course, have no obligation whatever to know any English, much less to know it well, but if they throw themselves on the mercy of English readers, then one consequence may be that their English readers may not be competent or willing to make the effort necessary to work out what is being said. This means that some English readers may throw the content out with

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18



F: PB12301.tex / p.2 (4)

Leo Hickey

the language: if the latter is obscure or even irritating, the former may never be given a fair chance. Even when non-Spanish scholars are capable of reading Spanish academic work, they often find it more cumbersome, complex, and abstract than their own cultural traditions would favour. Someone has written that, if the world had continued to use Roman numerals, mathematics would not have developed and such things as the computer would never have been invented. Similarly, one may wonder what, if pragmatics, like the submarine, had been invented in Spain, would be its present position? Let us take an example like Víctor Sánchez de Zavala’s book, translated by himself from English as Hacia la pragmática (psicológica) (Sánchez de Zavala 1997), which seems to have some intrinsically interesting comments to make on the defects of the dominant suppositions in pragmatics and sets out to replace them with a new model, but this is so obscure that it is difficult to assess it fairly. He writes: “Por desgracia, si se adhiere uno al enfoque usual, a mi entender excesivamente simple, aparecen dificultades por doquier” (1997: 18), going on to postulate his own approach in such abstract and complex terms as to be virtually impenetrable, tempting a reader to wonder whether it is not the ‘simplicity’ per se of current models that is being assailed. One would also like to be able to evaluate fairly what an article like Tomás Albaladejo’s wordy “Aspectos pragmáticos y semánticos de la traducción del texto literario” (1992) is aiming to contribute to our knowledge or understanding of the subject. Coming now to a factor which Spanish pragmaticists share and which their pragmatics displays, we can say with some confidence that in general they have settled themselves unambiguously into the European School as against the Anglo-American school (cf. Verschueren 1987). If we distinguish the European trend, which tends to regard as pragmatic any approach, perspective, or study of language in use or as used, from the Anglo-American trend, which treats a limited number of fairly specific areas (perhaps those dealt with in Levinson 1983 or Leech 1983), then Spanish pragmatics is ultra-European, going beyond the European model specifically in areas like discourse analysis and the study of spoken language. The word pragmatics seems to be in fashion in Spanish research nowadays and it appears in titles of works and in texts whose content often seems to have little to do with pragmatics in any sense, however broad. For example, in Darío Villanueva’s edited work Avances en Teoría de la literatura (Estética de la Recepción, Pragmática, Teoría Empírica y Teoría de los Polisistemas) (1994), in which the volume title and the titles of three chapters include the word pragmática, it is difficult to find much that genuinely adds to our knowledge of pragmatics,

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18

F: PB12301.tex / p.3 (5)

Spanish pragmatics

despite the fact that, in one of them, there is an attempt to associate literary realism with speech acts and, in another, a wide sweep of pragmatics from the fifth century B.C. to the present day. Perhaps also, in the context of the term pragmatics attached to works that do not transparently or directly contribute to our knowledge or understanding of that subject, we could refer to Introducción a la pragmática del español by Julio Calvo Pérez (1994), about which one reviewer (Haverkate 1996) wrote that, of the three types of pragmatics treated by the author, the third “finally introduces us to the field to which pragmaticists usually devote their attention” (Haverkate 1996: 300), while the second part of the book is not concerned with pragmatics at all but with linguistic or semantic objects of analysis. Speaking of the author’s “idiosyncratic conception of pragmatics”, called “Pragmática Topológico-Natural”, the reviewer states that he “has not succeeded in showing the theoretical relevance and the empirical validity of this encylopedic enterprise” (Haverkate 1996: 301). Despite some unclear uses of the term pragmatics, the fashionableness of the term has led to, or at least has not impeded, some very positive concentration on a number of fields. In selecting these fields for comment, the criteria that might be used are: (1) the degree of impact the works or authors have had or deserve to have had, (2) some evaluation of their intrinsic academic importance, in so far as this may be distinguished from their impact, (3) the amount of work done on any particular point, and (4) the importance of specific authors in the general picture of Spanish pragmatics. These four criteria will be kept in mind in what follows, though without necessarily being applied rigorously in every case. Let us start with the work done on discourse markers and connectors by authorities like María Antonia Martín Zorraquino, Estrella Montolío Durán, Victoria Escandell Vidal, José Portolés, and some of the contributors to Lengua, discurso, texto (I Simposio Internacional de Análisis del Discurso) edited by José Jesús de Bustos Tovar et al. (2000), because this is probably the area, with or without discourse analysis, in which Spanish authors have made their most significant contribution. Some of the authors mentioned (and these five are among the most outstanding in Spanish pragmatics) explain that the special interest in discourse markers, though dating from Nebrija (1492), taken up by Gregorio Garcés (1791), and given a modern impetus in 1943 by Samuel Gili Gaya, took off in 1987 with the publication of Enlaces extraoracionales by Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez, who is one of the main authorities on the subject. In 1998 María Antonia Martín Zorraquino and Estrella Montolío Durán edited Los mar-



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18



F: PB12301.tex / p.4 (6)

Leo Hickey

cadores del discurso: Teoría y análisis, which is an excellent introduction to the theory and use of discourse markers, with detailed studies of about fifteen examples, such as es más, vamos, no obstante, oye, es que, and en cambio. It is interesting to note that their preface refers to the study of linguistics being “cada vez más orientada hacia un enfoque pragmático” (1998: 9), a trend (namely to include a pragmatic dimension in any study of language) which emerges again and again. Apart from their joint work, these two authors are also, individually, at the forefront of this research and perhaps a flavour of Montolío’s own work can be gathered from the title of her article “Si nunca he dicho que estuviera enamorada de él” on this use of si (1999). In 1998 also, one of the collaborators in the joint work just mentioned, José Portolés Lázaro, published his own study Marcadores del discurso. This extremely readable work defines discourse and discourse markers, paying special attention to argumentation theory (as developed by the French school of Anscombre and Ducrot only), which is not an area that always appears, at least by name, in Anglo-American pragmatics. The author classifies discourse markers into five categories: information structurers (pues, en primer lugar, por cierto. . . ), connectors (además, incluso, encima. . . ), reformulators (o sea. . . ), discourse operators (en realidad, en el fondo. . . ), and contact control markers (hombre/mujer, mire. . . ), studying over fifty examples. In her study Introducción a la pragmática, Victoria Escandell Vidal (1993) deals, among other points, with argumentative markers, which she divides into argumentative operators (discussing the difference between poco and un poco) and argumentative connectors (así que. . . ), and the conjunction y. Here again we find a treatment of argumentation theory as (if it were) a mainstream part of pragmatics, concentrating on the French school and paying little, though some, attention to the Amsterdam school led by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst. These three studies are on mainstream pragmatics, while the monumental work Lengua, discurso, texto (I Simposio Internacional de Análisis del Discurso) mentioned above, with its two volumes and nearly 3000 pages, has sections on discourse, discourse and grammar, discourse markers including chapters on Basque and Catalan, oral markers, argumentation, text typology and textuality, literary texts, discourse and oral interaction, discourse and the media, political discourse, publicity, scientific, popular, and didactic discourse. Apart from the nearly two hundred separate chapters, an important aspect of this work for our purposes is that it and its editors consider these areas to be within or near pragmatics throughout.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18

F: PB12301.tex / p.5 (7)

Spanish pragmatics

The work on discourse markers reaches a new level of detail in a 162page chapter by Martín and Portolés in Volume 3 of the highly important Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española edited by Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte (1999). Their chapter follows the authors’ earlier classification of discourse markers but deals with an even greater number of examples: Dicho esto, Pues bien; Incluso, De ahí; O sea, Más bien; En todo caso, En fin; En el fondo; Vale and about eighty others. It is clear that Spanish pragmatics is now closely associated with the best grammar and grammars. On discourse analysis itself, one might also mention works like the special edition of Caplletra (1989: 7) devoted to this subject, in which the guest editor, Vicent Salvador, describes discourse analysis as lying somewhere between orality and writing, and this close relationship is where Spanish pragmatics lies on this particular subject. It would be agreeable to be able to claim that these studies of discourse markers and discourse analysis, at least five of them of enormous intrinsic merit, have contributed to the knowledge and understanding of discourse markers and discourse analysis on a universal front, but we have seen little evidence to suggest that this has been the case. Let us now mention other important fields to which Spanish pragmaticists have contributed. The reference to Salvador Vicent has just hinted that the study of spoken and colloquial language has aligned itself closely with discourse analysis. This connection is pursued in works like El español coloquial: Actas del I Simposio sobre Análisis del Discurso Oral (1995) edited by Luis Cortés Rodríguez in which, among other contributions, Antonio Briz writes on colloquial attenuators as a pragmatic category and refers to pragmatics “entendida en forma amplia como lenguaje en uso” (1995: 106). Both for his own research and for his team leadership, Antonio Briz is an outstanding figure in the study of spoken language and its close links with pragmatics. The following year, he edited with others Pragmática y gramática del español hablado: Actas del II Simposio sobre análisis del discurso oral (Cortés Rodríguez 1995). This work includes studies of the semantics and pragmatics of mainstream pragmatic areas like deixis, word order and speech acts (treated by Estrella Montolío), side by side with over thirty other chapters on specific aspects of oral communication, such as its syntax or studies of the Spanish spoken in the Basque Country, Valencia, and Barcelona, which are more akin to dialectology or sociolinguistics. Shortly afterwards, he published El español en la conversación. Esbozo de pragmagramática del español hablado (1998), which displays his interest in integrating pragmatics with grammar.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18



F: PB12301.tex / p.6 (8)

Leo Hickey

Beatriz Gallardo Paúls (1996) studies speech acts in a work which deals with pragmática enunciativa, to be understood as the pragmatics of the receiver. Speech acts are also examined very significantly by Joaquín Garrido Medina (1999) in Bosque and Demonte’s Grammar. Jesús-Manuel Nieto García (1995) treats sociopragmatic aspects of spoken discourse and the subject of word order has been taken up by María Luisa Zubizarreta (1999) in her chapter “Las funciones informativas: Tema y foco” in Bosque and Demonte’s Grammar. Not exactly word order, but the concept of theme, has also been investigated by researchers such as Rosa Lorés (2000), Tomás Jiménez Juliá (2000), and Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez (1997a). Two other areas of Spanish pragmatics have received significant treatment and merit some attention here, namely politeness theory and intercultural pragmatics. On politeness, Henk Haverkate published his important study La cortesía verbal in 1994, stopping just short of declaring Spanish to be a positivepoliteness language, something which had been proposed in 1991 (Hickey), and has been generally accepted from then on. Haverkate has also published several other articles in this area, including one on politeness in dialogues in the Quijote in the interesting, though somewhat unbalanced, special edition of Oralia (2001) on politeness. In this volume, eight chapters deal with specific questions, such as politeness and irony or politeness in Argentinean colloquial Spanish, and there is a fascinating article by María Elena Placencia on the politeness of Social Security officials in Ecuador, in which she discusses what persons approaching such civil servants (may) expect in the way of courtesy. The volume also contains a 263-entry bibliography on politeness in Spanish, two chapters on the state of politeness studies, important book reviews, and a list of 293 references on spoken Spanish. One of the stalwarts of politeness theory in Spanish is Victoria Escandell Vidal, whose 1993 book devotes a chapter to the subject and who, among other contributions, has proposed, in the special issue of the Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (1998) devoted to relevance theory, that the concept of social adequacy should replace that of strategy in studies of politeness within a relevance theory framework. More recently, Francisco José Ballesteros Martín (2001) has compared one aspect of English and Spanish politeness within a pragmalinguistic perspective. Under the heading of intercultural pragmatics, the volume Pragmática intercultural, edited by Antonia Sánchez Macarro and others (1998), identifies intercultural pragmatics as being based on linguistic relativism and discusses its application to second language teaching, translation and the sociology of

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18

F: PB12301.tex / p.7 (9)

Spanish pragmatics

culture, with a particularly interesting chapter on how to ask the way in a Spanish or Italian street, by Carmen González Royo. A year later, Carlos Hernández Sacristán published his rather abstract Culturas y acción comunicativa: Introducción a la pragmática intercultural (1999), which discusses the connection between linguistics and cultural or social anthropology within an intercultural communication framework. Concentrating on situations in which one culture meets another, it singles out speech acts, deixis, reported speech, implicatures, conversational strategies, and politeness. It is now worth surveying, however briefly, some of the other, perhaps less extensive, contributions to our subject. Mention has been made of the special issue on relevance theory of the Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (1998), which has a preface by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and articles on English modality, translation of poetry, humour in advertising language, rhetorical questions, miscommunication, definite descriptions, and other aspects of relevance theory, followed by a useful bibliography. Other researchers have also worked to some extent on, or within, relevance theory, such as Eduardo Varela Bravo (1992–1993), who has situated himself firmly within this school in writing, for example, on Peter Carey’s fiction, or Francisco Yus Ramos, in his Cooperación y relevancia: Dos aproximaciones pragmáticas a la interpretación (1997a). This researcher has also published on other areas of pragmatics, including analyses of English comics (Yus Ramos 1997b), while María Ángeles Torres Sánchez has investigated the pragmatics of humour (1999). Eduardo Bustos and Miguel Metzeltin use pragmatics in their teaching books Pragmática del español: negación, cuantificación y modo (1986) and Semántica, pragmática y sintaxis del español (1993), respectively. Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez (1997b) has provided pragmatic commentaries on such areas as publicity texts while María Marta García Negroni and Marta Tordesillas have edited a volume of the Revista Iberoamericana de Discurso y Sociedad (1999) on “Estudios de semántica pragmática”, which aims to integrate pragmatics and semantics. Pragmatics has also been integrated into the study of translation by a number of researchers, among them Enrique Alcaraz (1996) and Leo Hickey (1998). Some Hispanists have made useful comparisons between Spanish and other languages in particular areas, such as Diana Bravo’s interesting work on laughter in Spanish, Mexican and Swedish speech (1998). Contributions have also been made to minority areas of pragmatics, such as pragmastylistics or the pragmatics of style (Hickey 1987; Hickey 1990), a sub-discipline further developed in the special issue of Caplletra (2000), devoted to pragmastylistics, with articles on its application to Catalan and to translation. There is even a



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18



F: PB12301.tex / p.8 (10)

Leo Hickey

monograph on the pragmatic analysis of Catalan riddles (Bassols i Puig 1990). Apart from Peninsular Spanish, work has been done on the Spanish of other countries, such as Rosina Márquez Reiter’s highly important monograph on politeness in Uruguay and Britain (2000). There have been a number of more general works on pragmatics. The very readable 1990 volume by Graciela Reyes, La pragmática lingüística, provides an overview of the general area, with an interesting section on the imperfect of Spanish verbs; the same author has more recently produced a popular ‘ABC’ of the subject (2000); Victoria Escandell Vidal’s 1993 book does not limit itself to introducing the subject but includes detailed chapters on interrogatives, metaphor, pragmatics and literature and pragmatics and linguistic theory. There are also volumes on specific aspects of pragmatics, such as José A. Mayoral’s edited book Pragmática de la comunicación literaria (1987), which attempts to situate literature within a communicative framework, or Juan Antonio Vicente Mateu’s study La deixis: Egocentrismo y subjetividad en el lenguaje (1994). Apart from the names of authors, books, articles and journals (and it would be impossible even to mention them all in a brief chapter such as this), reference must now be made of two centres of excellence in our subject, namely those in Zaragoza and Amsterdam. The work done at the University of Zaragoza, whether by members of staff, such as Martín Zorraquino, or produced in collaboration with others, has been consistent and important. We may select just three volumes which have appeared since 1998. Perspectivas Pragmáticas en Lingüística Aplicada, edited by Ignacio Vázquez Orta and Ignacio Guillén Galve (1998) has over 70 chapters under the headings of sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics, discourse analysis, second language acquisition, lexicology and lexicography, LSP, and translation. If one were to focus on just one feature of special interest in this work, it would be its insistence, once again, that pragmatics is a perspective on every aspect of language. The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding, edited by Beatriz Penas (1998), in which about half the contributors are Spanish and half are not, is a typical example of an excellent collective work, dealing consistently with misunderstanding in various media, which nevertheless seems to have had little impact on any wide front. The third example is Transcultural Communication: Pragmalinguistic Aspects, edited by Pilar Navarro Errasti and others (2000), which offers some very interesting studies under the headings of translation, relevance theory, English for Special Purposes and Contrastive Studies, including an excellent article by

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18

F: PB12301.tex / p.9 (11)

Spanish pragmatics

José Portolés and Ignacio Vázquez on how the use of hombre/mujer mitigates direct commands in Spanish. Of similar interest is the series entitled Diálogos Hispánicos published in Amsterdam, notably numbers 12, on the pragmalinguistics of Spanish, and 22, on the linguistic pragmatics of Spanish, both edited by Henk Haverkate et al. (1993, 1998), and the journal Foro Hispánico, also published in Amsterdam, No. 8 of which, edited by Elsa Dehennin and Henk Haverkate (1994), focuses on Text Stylistics and Linguistics and includes an article by Victoria Escandell (Escandell 1994) on style within relevance theory. So where is Spanish pragmatics now? We may posit that it is in the interesting position of having been incorporated into virtually every aspect of the study of language and linguistics and has become, in particular, a part of grammar, especially descriptive grammar. Here we may allude to the early work by Victoria Camps entitled Pragmática del lenguaje y filosofía analítica (1976) and to the chapters on speech acts, semantic and pragmatic aspects of interrogatives, discourse markers, and theme and focus and the informative functions in Bosque and Demonte’s Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española. It happens that some years ago we were complaining in a brief article entitled “Pragmatics to the aid of grammar” (Hickey 1993) that Spanish grammarians frequently attempted to investigate Spanish grammar without having proper recourse to pragmatic principles, which we considered to be essential on points like word order and topicalisation, passive voice, tú and usted, use of subject pronouns, position of adjectives, and clefting. So we cannot but be delighted to see that pragmatics has now indeed come to the aid of grammar. With regard to the third question in the title of this chapter – whither Spanish pragmatics? – what can one say apart from praying for the emergence of a Spanish Austin, Grice, or Sperber and Wilson to come along and take the ‘Spanish’ out of ‘Spanish pragmatics’. But, then, such an authoritative figure may already be among us (perhaps in the person of the author of any of the numerous doctoral theses submitted within our area in Spanish and other universities virtually every year), but has simply not had the impact of their namesakes.

References Albaladejo, Tomás (1992). “Aspectos pragmáticos y semánticos de la traducción del texto literario”. Koiné, II(1–2), 179–200.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18



F: PB12301.tex / p.10 (12)

Leo Hickey

Alcaraz, Enrique (1996). “Translation and pragmatics”. In R. Álvarez & C.-A. Vidal (Eds.), Translation, Power, Subversion (pp. 99–115). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ballesteros Martín, Francisco José (2001). “La cortesía española frente a la cortesía inglesa. Estudio pragmalingüístico de las exhortaciones impositivas”. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, 9, 171–207. Bassols i Puig, M. Margarida (1990). Anàlisi pragmática de les endevinalles catalanes. Bellpuig: Abadia de Montserrat. Bosque, Ignacio & Demonte, Violeta (Eds.). (1999). Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 3 Vols. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Bravo, Diana (1998). “¿Reírse juntos?: un estudio de las imágenes sociales de hablantes españoles, mexicanos y suecos”. In H. Haverkate et al. (Eds.), Aproximaciones pragmalingüísticas al español, Diálogos Hispánicos 12 (pp. 315–364). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Briz Gómez, Antonio (1998). El español coloquial en la conversación. Esbozo de pragmagramática. Barcelona: Ariel. Briz Gómez, Antonio et al. (Eds.). (1996). Pragmática y gramática del español hablado. Actas del II Simposio sobre análisis del discurso oral. Zaragoza: Pórtico. Bustos, Eduardo (1986). Pragmática del español: Negación, cuantificación y modo. Madrid: UNED. De Bustos Tovar, José Jesús et al. (Eds.). (2000). Lengua, discurso, texto (I Simposio Internacional de Análisis del Discurso), 2 Vols. Madrid: Visor. Calvo Pérez, Julio (1994). Introducción a la pragmática del español. Barcelona: Península. Camps, Victoria (1976). Pragmática del lenguaje y filosofía analítica. Barcelona: Península. Cortés Rodríguez, Luis (Ed.). (1995). El español coloquial: Actas del I Simposio sobre Análisis del discurso oral. Almería: Universidad. Dehennin, Elsa & Haverkate, Henk (Eds.). (1994). Lingüística y estilística de textos, Foro Hispánico 8. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Escandell Vidal, María Victoria (1993). Introducción a la pragmática. Barcelona: Anthropos. Escandell Vidal, María Victoria (1994). “La noción de estilo en la teoría de la relevancia”. Foro Hispánico, 8, 55–64. Escandell Vidal, María Victoria (1998). “Politeness: A relevant issue for relevance theory”. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 11, 45–57. Fuentes Rodríguez, Catalina (1987). Enlaces extraoracionales. Sevilla: Alfar. Gallardo Paúls, Beatriz (1996). Análisis conversacional y pragmática del receptor. Valencia: Epistema. Garcés, Gregorio (1791). Fundamento del vigor y elegancia de la lengua castellana, expuesto en el propio y vario uso de sus partículas. Edited by M. Ballesteros (1852). Madrid: Rivadeneyra. García Negroni, María Marta & Tordesillas, Marta (Eds.). (1999). Revista Iberoamericana de Discurso y Sociedad: Estudios de semántica y pragmática, 2, 3. Garrido Medina, Joaquin (1999). “Los actos de habla. Las oraciones imperativas”. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 3879– 3928). Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Gili y Gaya, Samuel (1943). Curso superior de sintaxis española. Mexico: Minerva.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18

F: PB12301.tex / p.11 (13)

Spanish pragmatics

González Royo, Carmen (1998). “Preguntar por una dirección en la calle. Sobre la expresión del espacio en español e italiano”. In A. Sánchez Macarro (Ed.), Pragmática intercultural. Quaderns de filologia: Estudis lingüístics IV (pp. 171–184). València: Universitat. Gutiérrez Ordóñez, Salvador (1997a). Temas, remas, focos, tópicos y comentarios. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Gutiérrez Ordóñez, Salvador (1997b). Comentario pragmático de textos publicitarios. Madrid: Marco/Libros. Haverkate, Henk (1993). La cortesía verbal. Madrid: Gredos. Haverkate, Henk (1996). “Review of Julio Calvo Pérez, Introducción a la pragmática del español”. Journal of Pragmatics, 25(2), 298–302. Haverkate, Henk (2001). “Cortesía y descortesía en los diálogos del Quijote. Análisis de la representación de las imágenes positiva y negativa de los protagonistas”. Oralia, 4, 129– 148. Haverkate, Henk et al. (Eds.). (1993). Aproximaciones pragmalingüísticas al español. Diálogos Hispánicos 12. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Haverkate, Henk et al. (Eds.). (1998). La pragmática lingüística del español: Recientes desarrollos. Diálogos Hispánicos 22. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hernández Sacristán, Carlos (1999). Culturas y acción comunicativa: Introducción a la pragmática intercultural. Barcelona: Octaedro. Hickey, Leo (1987). Curso de pragmaestilística. Madrid: Coloquio. Hickey, Leo (Ed.). (1990). The Pragmatics of Style. London: Routledge. Hickey, Leo (1991). “Comparatively polite people in Spain and Britain”. ACIS Journal, 4(2), 2–6. Hickey, Leo (1993). “Pragmatics to the aid of grammar”. Donaire, 1, 14–17. Hickey, Leo (Ed.). (1998). The Pragmatics of Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Jiménez Juliá, Tomás (2000). “Tema en español y en inglés: dos conceptos enfrentados”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, LXXVII, 153–176. Leech, Geoffrey N. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lorés, Rosa (2000). “The pragmatic function of theme: The case of the conditional subordinates”. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 13, 107–121. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2000). Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Martín Zorraquino, María Antonia & Montolío Durán, Estrella (Eds.). (1998). Los marcadores del discurso: Teoría y análisis. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Martín Zorraquino, María Antonia & Portolés, José (1999). “Los marcadores del discurso”. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 4051–4213). Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Mayoral, José A. (Ed.). (1987). Pragmática de la comunicación literaria. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Metzeltin, Miguel (1993). Semántica, pragmática y sintaxis del español. Wilhelmsfeld: Egert. Montolío Durán, Estrella (1999). “¡Si nunca he dicho que estuviera enamorada de él! Sobre construcciones independientes introducidas por Si con valor replicativo”. Oralia, 2, 37– 69. Navarro Errasti, Pilar et al. (Eds.). (2000). Transcultural Communication: Pragmalinguistic Aspects. Zaragoza: Anubar.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:18



F: PB12301.tex / p.12 (14)

Leo Hickey

Nebrija, Antonio de (1492). Gramática de la lengua castellana. Edited by Ig. GonzálezLlubera (1926). London: Oxford University Press. Nieto García, Jesús-Manuel (1995). Introducción al análisis del discurso hablado. Granada: Universidad. Penas, Beatriz (Ed.). (1998). The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding. Zaragoza: Universidad. Placencia, María Elena (2001). “Percepciones y manifestaciones de la (des)cortesía en la atención al público. El caso de una institución pública ecuatoriana”. Oralia, 4, 177–212. Portolés Lázaro, José (1998). Marcadores del discurso. Barcelona: Ariel. Portolés Lázaro, José & Vázquez Orta, Ignacio (2000). “Mitigating or Compensatory Strategies in the expression of Politeness in Spanish and English? “Hombre”/“mujer” as Politeness discourse Markers Revisited”. In P. Navarro Errasti et al. (Eds.), Transcultural Communication: Pragmalinguistic Aspects (pp. 219–226). Zaragoza: Anubar. Reyes, Graciela (1990). La pragmática lingüística: El estudio del uso del lenguaje. Barcelona: Montesinos. Reyes, Graciela (2000). El abecé de la pragmática. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Salvador, Vicent (1989). “L’anàlisi del discurs, entre l’oralitat i l’escriptura”. Caplletra, 7, 9–31. Sánchez Macarro, Antonia et al. (Eds.). (1998). Pragmática intercultural. Quaderns de filologia: Estudis lingüístics IV. València: Universitat. Sánchez de Zavala, Víctor (1997). Hacia la pragmática (psicológica). Madrid: Visor. Torres Sánchez, María Ángeles (1999). Estudio pragmático del humor verbal. Cádiz: Universidad. Varela Bravo, Eduardo (1992–1993). “Relevancia de una respuesta: análisis de un pasaje de Oscar and Lucinda”. Stylistica, 2(3), 105–114. Vázquez Orta, Ignacio & Guillén Galve, Ignacio (Eds.). (1998). Perspectivas pragmáticas en lingüística aplicada. Zaragoza: Anubar. Verschueren, Jeff (1987). Pragmatics as a Theory of Linguistic Adaptation. Antwerp: IPrA. Vicente Mateu, Juan Antonio (1994). La deixis: Egocentrismo y subjetividad en el lenguaje. Murcia: Universidad. Villanueva, Darío (Ed.). (1994). Avances en teoría de la literatura (Estética de la Recepción, Pragmática, Teoría Empírica y Teoría de los Polisistemas). Santiago: Universidad. Yus Ramos, Francisco (1997a). Cooperación y relevancia: Dos aproximaciones pragmáticas a la interpretación. Alicante: Universidad. Yus Ramos, Francisco (1997b). La interpretación y la imagen de masas: Un modelo pragmático aplicado al discurso del cómic inglés. Alicante: Instituto Juan Gil-Albert. Zubizarreta, María Luisa (1999). “Las funciones informativas: Tema y foco”. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española (pp. 4215–4244).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56

F: PB12302.tex / p.1 (15)

Chapter 2

The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Following on from Hickey’s chapter on the contributions to the pragmatics of Spanish made by Spaniards in Spanish, in this chapter we provide an overview of the contributions to the pragmatics of Spanish published in English and/or Spanish outside Spain. The selection of studies, which form part of this chapter is based on the criteria employed by Hickey (Chapter 1, this volume); namely the degree of impact the works or authors have had, some evaluation of their intrinsic academic worth, the amount of work done in a particular area, and the importance of some scholars. Most of the work in Spanish pragmatics outside Spain has been carried out in Holland, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and the United States with a lesser amount of studies carried out in Australia, Germany, Argentina, and a few other Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. The ‘themes’ which have received most attention lie within the Anglo-American tradition (Levinson 1983; Verschueren 1999) and deal with speech acts and conversational organisation, and in the vast majority, attempt to uncover the underlying norms of politeness of a particular cultural group. The application of pragmatics to applied linguistics, which we characterise here as the body of work mediating between theory and pedagogy (Allen & Corder 1975) has also received some attention outside Spain, particularly in the United States. In the interface between pragmatics, grammar, and sociolinguistics (see Verschueren 1996) we find, amongst others, studies into Spanish mood and the grammaticalisation of politeness as well as three areas of growing interest, namely, the study of discourse markers, deixis with particular emphasis on person deixis, and anaphora. As indicated in the preface, readers should keep in mind that research ‘themes’ are often intertwined and thus, some of the studies reported here may be placed in more than one area due to the unavoidable overlap in the perspectives employed.1

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56



F: PB12302.tex / p.2 (16)

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Within the area of speech acts, the work of Haverkate (1979, 1984, 1998) (see also Chapter 1) has been of paramount importance. The Dutch Hispanist has not only made a contribution to the study of the realisation patterns of different speech acts in Peninsular Spanish but to the theory itself in that he proposed a new classification for impositive speech acts based on Searle’s propositional criterion and on the impact the acts in question have on the hearer. He also reclassified expressives and commissives as inherently polite as they benefit the hearer, and assertives and exhortatives as inherently impolite (see Haverkate 1979, 1994). Although his classification has not been widely adopted, some scholars publishing outside Spain, have found it useful in explaining the linguistic realisation of orders and requests in northern Andean Spanish (Bustamante-López & Niño-Murcia 1995), requests in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish (Curcó 1998), and directives in general in Peninsular Spanish (Mulder 1993, 1998). An analysis of the different speech acts categories based on Haverkate’s notion of impositives in Chilean, Peninsular, and U.S. Spanish can be found in Hardin’s Pragmatics of Persuasive Discourse in Spanish Television Advertising (2001). Haverkate’s latest contribution to Spanish pragmatics and to speech act theory can be found in his latest book The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood (2002). Also, within the realm of speech acts although with a slightly different objective in mind, namely the characterisation of the communicative style of different cultural groups, we find the work of García (1989a, 1989b, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1996a, 1999, 2002). García’s empirical work on the politeness patterns of Argentineans, Peruvians, Venezuelans, and Americans as reflected in the realisation patterns of apologies, invitations, reprimands, and requests makes use of Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) distinction between negative and positive face and Scollon and Scollon’s (1983, 1985) deference and solidarity strategies. The work of García (1989a, 1989b, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1996a, 1999, 2002) – together with the ground-breaking study of Blum-Kulka (1982) and Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) – can be described as having set the scene for other speech act studies into the politeness patterns of other varieties of Spanish. García’s methodological procedures, in particular the employment of a structured role-play (Olshtain & Cohen 1983), and analysis of data have been adopted, adapted, and cited in numerous studies of speech acts produced thereafter. Similar orientations to that of García can be found in the work of Cordella (1990), Mir (1992), and Márquez Reiter (2000, 2001, 2002). Márquez Reiter (2000, 2001, 2002) studied the politeness patterns of a group of British and Uruguayan speakers as reflected in the realisation of requests and apologies.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56

F: PB12302.tex / p.3 (17)

The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain

Unlike García’s, Márquez Reiter’s analysis is based on Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) differentiation between negative and positive face, and on an adaptation of Blum-Kulka’s et al.’s (1989) taxonomy. While García (1989a, 1989b, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1996a, 1999, 2002) makes use of a structured role-play to gather the bulk of her data, Márquez Reiter (2000, 2001, 2002) employs an unstructured role-play. Mir’s (1992) and Cordella’s (1990) studies, however, (implicitly) follow García’s elicitation method though they do not relate their analysis of Peninsular Spanish and American English apologies and Chilean and Australian English apologies, respectively, to politeness since this was not the main objective of their studies. Following Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), and based on the administration of a discourse completion test (cf. Levenston 1975; Blum-Kulka 1982) and questionnaires – in some cases – we find the work of Curcó (1998) and that of Curcó and De Fina (2002) on requests in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish; Le Pair’s (1996) on requests in Dutch and Peninsular Spanish; Ruzicokva’s (1998) on apologies in Cuban Spanish; de los Heros’s (2001) on compliments in Peruvian Spanish; and Lorenzo-Dus’s (2001) on compliments in British English and Peninsular Spanish. Other studies on compliments worth mentioning, though not necessarily related to Brown and Levinson’s face distinctions or to the administration of a discourse completion test, are Valdés and Pino’s (1981) on Mexican monolinguals and Mexican-American bilinguals, employing field notes from participant observation and recordings of (in)formal conversations; Yañez’s (1990) on Chicano Spanish, through field notes from participant observation; Cordella et al.’s (1995) on Australian English and Southern Cone Spanish using role-plays; Placencia and Yépez’s (1999) on Ecuadorian Spanish based on field notes from (non) participant observation; Alba-Juez’s (2000) on Argentinean and Peninsular Spanish, based on native speaker’s knowledge and intuitions; and, Achugar’s (2001, 2002) on Uruguayan and other varieties of Spanish, employing data from anthologies, questionnaires, and interviews. Interestingly, research on advice, complaints, insults, suggestions, and offers have received considerably less attention. Hernández Flores (1999) studied the giving of advice based on recordings of interactions amongst family and friends with the aim of unravelling the politeness patterns of Peninsular Spanish speakers. Bolívar (2002) examined the realisation of complaints by female speakers of Venezuelan Spanish using discourse completion tests, as well as insults (2001) in Venezuelan political discourse, based on a corpus of newspaper articles, while Ocampo Álvarez (2001) analysed the place of insults within Leech’s (1983) and Haverkate’s (1993) taxonomy. Koike (1994, 1998) investigated the role of negation as a mitigating effect in suggestions and requests



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56



F: PB12302.tex / p.4 (18)

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

elicited via an oral questionnaire performed by speakers from Cuernavaca, Mexico and the realisation of suggestions in Mexican Spanish based on recordings of pedagogical feedback sessions in an American university, respectively. Finally, Chodoroskwa-Pilch (2002) looked at the realisation of recorded spontaneous offers in Peninsular Spanish from a grammatical perspective. The above mentioned investigations represent new research into the realization of speech acts not analysed before in Spanish; as such they contribute to our knowledge of pragmatic aspects of different varieties of Spanish. Theoretically, they are based on different approaches to the study of language use. In terms of data collection, as mentioned earlier, the studies range from the administration of discourse completion tests and the use of recorded (un)structured role-plays, to field notes, recordings of interactions gathered from (non) participant observation, and the recording of television advertisements. Methodologically, they replicate instruments of data collection employed in pragmatics in general with the exception of Márquez Reiter (2000) where an unstructured role-play, combining two speech acts within the same scenario is employed. The use of this type of role-play represents an advance in the examination of speech acts and in the data collection methods employed in pragmatics. Research on conversational organization stemming from the work of conversation analysts (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974; Schegloff [1968] 1972; and Schegloff & Sacks 1973) have mainly dealt with aspects of turn-taking and the overall organization of conversation in different contexts such as business negotiation, informal discussions among students, telephone interactions among friends and family, and service encounters in public institutions. The majority of these works are cross-cultural and aim to characterise the communicative style of the cultural groups examined. Descriptions of conversational behaviour in these studies are combined with explanations drawn from social psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Studies in the area of cross-cultural business negotiation discourse can be found in the work of Fant (1989), which has been a point of departure for subsequent investigations such as Fant (1992, 1993, 1995), Grindsted (1995), Fant and Grindsted (1995a), Villemoes (1995), and Bravo (1996, 1998). Based on videotaped comparable simulations conducted as part of a professionally managed course on business negotiation in Mexico, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden, the research carried out focused on differences in the communicative style of the participants, and mainly dealt with: aspects of turn-taking, backchannelling, and initiative/response patterns (Fant 1989), verbal and nonverbal signals employed in the regulation of turn-taking and feedback (Fant

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56

F: PB12302.tex / p.5 (19)

The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain

1992, 1995); negotiation strategies (Fant 1993); argumentative patterns (Fant & Grindsted 1995a); preferences in sequencing patterns (Grindsted 1995); politeness strategies (Villemoes 1995); and the use and interpretation of laughter (Bravo 1996, 1998). The same methodological procedures were employed by Fant and Grindsted (1995b) to study business interactions from an intercultural perspective, this time focusing on Danes and Swedes interacting with Mexicans and Spaniards in the context of responses given to mismatches in value orientations. Also within the work carried out in Scandinavia on business discourse, Kjaerbeck (1998) studied negotiation strategies in Mexican Spanish and Danish in simulated interactions. Surprisingly, Kjaerbeck makes no mention of any of the studies described above. This is perhaps because Kjaerbeck’s is a strictly conversation analytical study aimed at describing similarities and differences in the use of some conversational mechanisms, namely, turn-taking in the production of argumentational discourse units in the two languages examined, without making any attempts to provide explanations for pragmatic differences in the linguistic behaviour observed. More recently, cross- and inter-cultural studies of the communicative style of Spaniards and Swedes in the context of elicited students’ informal discussions can be found in the work of Hispanists in Scandinavia. These studies mainly dealt with similarities and differences in the communicative style of Spaniards and Swedes concerning aspects of turn-taking and the use of verbal and nonverbal channels of communication (Bravo 2000); divergence in the statement of opinions (Häggkvist & Fant 2000), argumentative patterns (Gille 2001), and the use of topic management strategies (Häggkvist 2002). To the best of our knowledge, scholars in Scandinavia were the first to study business negotiation in different varieties of Spanish. They were among the first Hispanists to employ a conversation analytic approach to the study of interactions (see also Placencia 1992, 1995, 1996, 1997a), thus providing knowledge about aspects of Spanish conversational structure. Most of these studies have been published in Denmark and Sweden and seem to have had very little impact outside Scandinavia, probably due to the difficulty in accessing the publications outside the region. Beyond Scandinavia, studies employing a conversation analytic approach include Placencia’s work on the overall structure of recorded telephone conversations in Ecuadorian Spanish (1996, 1997a), and in contrast with British English (1992, 1995) – constituting the first studies of telephone talk in Spanish – and Valeiras Viso’s (2002) contrastive study of messages left on answer phones in London and Madrid. Most of these studies ultimately aim to char-



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56



F: PB12302.tex / p.6 (20)

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

acterise the communicative style of the groups examined for which purpose reference is made to Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) model of politeness. A conversation analytic approach has also been employed to examine service encounters as in Ciapusco and Kesselheim’s (1997) study based on recordings of interactions between foreign migrants seeking advice at a migration office in Buenos Aires and institutional representatives. Placencia’s (1998, 2001) contrastive work on requests for information at hospital reception desks in Madrid and Quito (1998), and requests for services at public institutions in La Paz (2001) is based on recordings and field notes from non-participant observation. These studies contribute to our knowledge of Spanish interaction in other contexts. Within the application of pragmatics to Spanish applied linguistics, an area which has received less attention (Lafford 2000), two main strands can be identified, namely the acquisition and/or development of sociolinguistic (Canale & Swain 1980) and pragmatic competence (Fraser, Rintell, & Walters 1980) and the application of pragmatics to foreign language pedagogy.2 With respect to the first strand, a number of the studies have examined the linguistic realisation of speech acts in English (L2) by native speakers of Spanish (L1). Rintell (1981) was the first scholar to examine the strategies of Latin American Spanish-speaking learners in English (L2) in the performance of requests and suggestions, whereas García (1989b) was the first to study the strategies employed by native speakers of Venezuelan Spanish realising apologies in English as well as the strategies employed by Venezuelans when requesting in English (García 1992). Cordella (1991) and Mir (1992) examined the apologising strategies employed in English (L2) by native speakers of Chilean and Peninsular Spanish (L1), respectively. Koike (1989), on the other hand, was the first scholar to examine the perception of requests, apologies, and commands by speakers of English learning Spanish (L1) as well as their production of requests in both English (L1) and Spanish (L2), while Le Pair (1996) studied the performance of requests in Spanish by native speakers of Dutch. In this respect, Cordella (1996) compared the confrontational styles employed in arguments of three groups of informants residing in Australia with varying levels of communicative competence in Spanish: a group of Argentinean and Chilean speakers, a group of Anglo-Celtic students who had spent a year in a Hispanic country, and a group of Anglo-Celtic students who had not been to a Hispanic country. Concerning the second strand, a number of studies have highlighted the importance of the incorporation of sociopragmatic aspects into foreign language instruction (Moore 1996; Klee 1998; Placencia 1998, among many oth-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56

F: PB12302.tex / p.7 (21)

The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain

ers). There are also a few studies that set out to propose ways of teaching sociopragmatics in the foreign language classroom such as Stewart’s (1990) with an approach to increase learners’ awareness of the social appropriateness of different directive forms, García’s (1996b) with a model for the teaching of speech act performance, Márquez Reiter’s (1997) with suggestions for sensitising learners to variation in politeness norms across languages and cultures, and Mir’s (2001) proposal of activities geared towards heightening learners’ pragmatic sense in interaction with reference to requests. Studies into the pragmalinguistics of Spanish have received considerably less attention in comparison to Spain (see Hickey, this volume). Amongst these we have Haverkate et al.’s (1993) edited volume Aproximaciones pragmalingüísticas al español, to which Hickey refers to in Chapter 1 and Haverkate’s (2002) latest contribution to which we referred earlier, The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood which, as indicated by its title, examines the Spanish modal system from different theoretical frameworks, namely, speech act theory, implicature, and politeness. Also on mood, more specifically, on the Spanish indicative/subjunctive contrast we find the work of Jary (2002) from a relevance-theoretic perspective (see also Ahern & Leonetti in this volume). Additional studies of interest in this area are: Niño-Murcia’s (1992) on the mitigating function of the future in northern Andean Spanish requests, based on field notes from participant observation, and Chodoroswka-Pilch’s (2001) on the grammaticalisation of politeness, previously mentioned (see also Chodorowska-Pilch, this volume). Concerning the area of discourse markers, of interest are, amongst others, Garcés’ (1992) work on pues in Peninsular Spanish (Madrid), based on sociolinguistic interviews taken from Esgueva and Cantarero (1981); Schwenter’s (1996) on o sea in Peninsular Spanish (Alicante, Madrid, and examples taken from Cortés Rodríguez 1991) in the context of recorded conversations; Cepeda and Poblete’s (1996) work on various conversational markers in Chilean Spanish (Valdivia), based on informal interviews; Fraser and Malamud-Makowski (1996) on a variety of English and Spanish contrastive discourse markers without specifying the source of their data; Chodorowska-Pilch’s (1997, 1999a, 1999b, 2001) on a number of discourse markers in Peninsular Spanish (Galicia, Comunidad de Madrid), based on recorded service encounters; De Fina’s (1997) on the discourse marker pues in the context of teacher-student interaction at an American university; Carranza’s (1998) study of pragmatic expressions in Argentinean Spanish (Córdoba), based on recorded conversations among friends; Boretti’s (1999) on the discourse marker ¿me entendés? also in Argentinean Spanish (Rosario) and in the context of recorded informal inter-



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56



F: PB12302.tex / p.8 (22)

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

actions; Álvarez Muro (2002) on ahí and así in Venezuelan Spanish (Mérida), based on sociolinguistic interviews; and Zavala’s (2001) on the use of pues in Andean Spanish (Ayacucho) by Quechua/Spanish bilingual speakers, based on sociolinguistic interviews. Also, based on interviews with speakers of Spanish in Catalonia is the work of Busquets, Koike, and Vann (2001) and Koike, Vann, and Busquets (2001) on the use of no, sí. With respect to the study of deixis and, as previously pointed out, the vast majority of studies in this area focus on person deixis, as in Barrenechea and Alonso’s (1973) work on personal pronouns in Argentinean Spanish (Buenos Aires), based on an existing corpus collected via sociolinguistic interviews; Uber’s (1985) on pronouns of address in Colombia (Bogotá), based on field notes from participant observation and discussions with Colombian informants; Uber’s (2000) on pronouns of address in Puerto Rico (San Juan), based on field notes from participant observation and recordings of business interactions; Davidson’s (1996) on the use of tú and yo in Spain (Madrid), based on the Cervantes spoken corpus on the language of Madrid; Placencia’s (1997b) on pronouns of address, among other address forms, in Ecuadorian Spanish (Quito), based on recordings of telephone conversations; Stewart’s (2000) on the use of yo, based on recordings of business meetings in Spain (Valladolid) as well as Stewart’s (2003) study on the use of tú based on Briz’s (1995) corpus of naturally-occurring conversations as well as on the business meetings referred to above. The study of personal deixis in political discourse has also received some attention, as evidenced by the works of Bolívar (1999) and Blas Arroyo (2000), as has the examination of spatial deixis, as in the work of Sacks (1954) on aquí, acá, and allá, Hottenroth (1982) on the use of aquí, acá, allá, ese, and aquel based on constructed examples, and Hardin (2001) on person, place, and time deixis in television adverts in Chile, Spain, and the U.S. Finally, regarding anaphora, Blackwel’s (1998, 2000, 2001) studies, based on recorded conversations by speakers of Peninsular Spanish from Aragon, examine the use of anaphora from a neo-Gricean perspective building on the work of Levinson (1987) and Huang (1991, 1994). Blackwel’s latest contribution to the field can be found in Implicatures in Discourse: The Case of Spanish NP Anaphora (2003). While the present overview is not exhaustive, it provides the reader with an overall picture of the array of studies that have been carried out in the pragmatics of Spanish in both the areas that have received attention and those of increasing interest outside Spain. As remarked before, the vast majority of the studies mentioned in this chapter are based on the Anglo-American, as against the European tradition of pragmatics. As in the case of the studies carried out in

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56

F: PB12302.tex / p.9 (23)

The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain

Spain (see Chapter 1), very few of them make theoretical and/or methodological contributions to pragmatics in general. They do, however, make important contributions to our knowledge of pragmatic aspects of different varieties of Spanish, with the examination of communicative style as the most prominent area of research. It is hoped that the collection in this volume will not only contribute to knowledge of the pragmatics of Spanish but to pragmatics in general.

Notes . For example, data on speech acts have been employed to study second language acquisition, the Spanish modal system, and politeness systems. At the same time, studies of discourse markers, speech acts, grammar, and foreign language teaching may touch upon issue of politeness. . It has to be stressed, however, that leaving the application of pragmatics aside, Spanish applied linguistics is a well-developed area, as Lafford’s review indicates.

References Achugar, Mariana (2001). “Piropos as metaphors for gender roles in Spanish speaking cultures”. Pragmatics, 11(2), 127–137. Achugar, Mariana (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. Alba-Juez, Laura (2000). “Some discourse strategies used to convey praise and/or positive feelings in Spanish everyday conversation”. In H. Campos, E. Herburger, A. MoralesFront, & T. I. Walsh (Eds.), Hispanic Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium. Papers from the 3rd Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 364–380). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Allen, J. P. B. & S. Pit Corder (1975). Papers in Applied Linguistics. The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Álvarez Muro, Alexandra (2002). “La expresión del consenso en dos marcadores venezolanos”. Oralia, 5, 7–28. Barrenechea, Ana María & Alonso, Alicia (1973). “Los pronombres personales sujetos en el español hablado en Buenos Aires”. In K. Korner & K. Rühl (Eds.), Studia Iberica: Festschrift für Hans Flasche (pp. 74–91). Bern: Francke Verlag. Blackwel, Sarah (1998). “Constraints on Spanish NP anaphora: The syntactic versus the pragmatic domain”. Hispania, 81, 607–618. Blackwel, Sarah (2000). “Anaphora interpretations in Spanish utterances and the neoGricean pragmatic theory”. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 389–424.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56



F: PB12302.tex / p.10 (24)

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Blackwel, Sarah (2001). “Testing the neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora: The influence of consistency constraints on interpretations of coreference in Spanish”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(6), 901–941. Blackwel, Sarah (2003). Implicatures in Discourse: The Case of Spanish NP Anaphora. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Blas Arroyo (2000). “Mire usted Sr. González. . . Personal deixis in Spanish political-electoral debate”. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1–27. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (1982). “Learning to say what you mean in a second language: A study of Hebrew as a second language”. Applied Linguistics, 3, 29–59. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, House, Juliane, & Kasper, Gabriele (Eds.), (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bolívar, Adriana (1999). “The linguistic pragmatics of political pronouns in Venezuelan Spanish”. In J. Verschueren (Ed.), Language and Ideology, Vol. 1 (pp. 56–69). Selected papers from the 6th International Pragmatics Conference. Antwerp: IPrA. Bolívar, Adriana (2001). “El insulto como estrategia en el diálogo político venezolano”. Oralia, 4, 47–73. Bolívar, Adriana (2002). “Los reclamos como actos de habla en el español de Venezuela”. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 37–53). Munich: LINCOM Europa. Boretti, Susana H. (1999). “A propósito de ¿me entendés? en el español de la Argentina”. Oralia, 2, 139–154. Bravo, Diana (1996). La risa en el regateo: Estudio sobre el estilo comunicativo de negociadores españoles y suecos. Stockholm: Akademitryck AB, University of Stockholm. Bravo, Diana (1998). “¿Reírse juntos?: Un estudio de las imágenes sociales de hablantes españoles mexicanos y suecos”. In H. Haverkate, K. Hengeveld, & G. Mulder (Eds.), La pragmática lingüística del español. Recientes desarrolos. Diálogos Hispánicos 22 (pp. 315–364). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bravo, Diana (2000). “Aspectos contrastivos en conversación: la comunicación no verbal”. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Stockholm Studies in modern Philology New Series 12: Contrasts in Languages, 71–86. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Briz, Antonio (1995). La conversación coloquial. Materiales para su estudio. Valencia: Universitat de València. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1978). “Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena”. In E. Goody (Ed.), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction (pp. 56–310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Busquets, Joan, Koike, Dale A., & Vann, Robert (2001). “Spanish no, sí: Reactive moves to perceived face-threatening acts, Part I: Discourse relations and cognitive states”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 701–723. Bustamante-López, Isabel & Niño-Murcia, Mercedes (1995). “Impositive speech acts in northern Andean Spanish: A pragmatic description”. Hispania, 78(4), 885–897. Canale, Michael & Merrill, Swain (1980). “Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing”. Applied Linguistics, 1, 1–47.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56

F: PB12302.tex / p.11 (25)

The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain

Carranza, Isolda (1998). Conversación y deixis de discurso. Córdoba: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Cepeda, Gladys & Poblete, María Teresa (1996). “Marcadores conversacionales: Función pragmática y expresiva”. Estudios Filológicos, 31, 105–117. Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna (1997). “On the polite function of ¿me entiendes? in Spanish”. Journal of Pragmatics, 28, 355–371. Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna (1999a). “On the polite use of vamos in Peninsular Spanish”. Pragmatics, 9(3), 343–355. Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna (1999b). “Si quieres as a grammaticalized politeness marker in Peninsular Spanish”. In S. J. Hwang & A. R. Lommel (Eds.), LACUS Forum 25 (pp. 151–160). Fullerton, CA: LACUS. Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna (2001). “Si quieres como marcador gramaticalizado de cortesía”. In H. Ferrer & S. Pons (Eds.), Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Lingüístics VIL La pragmática de los conectores y las partículas modales (pp. 81–92). Valencia: Universitat de València. Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna (2002). “Las ofertas y la cortesía en español peninsular”. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 21–36). Munich: LINCOM Europa. Ciapuscio, Guiomar & Kesselheim, Wolfgang (1997). “‘Usted, ¿qué es?’: Categorizaciones y contexto institucional”. In K. Zimmerman & C. Bierbach (Eds.), Lenguaje y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispánico (pp. 105–130). Frankfurt: Vervuert. Cohen, Andrew & Olshtain, Elite (1981). “Developing a measure of socio-cultural competence: The case of apology”. Language Learning, 31, 113–134. Cordella, Marisa (1990). “Apologizing in Chilean Spanish and Australian English: A crosscultural perspective”. ARAL, 7, 66–92. Cordella, Marisa (1991). “Spanish speakers apologizing in English: A cross-cultural pragmatics study”. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 14(2), 115–138. Cordella, Marisa (1996). “Confrontational style in Spanish arguments: Pragmatics and teaching outlook”. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 9(2), 148–162. Cordella, Marisa, Large, Heather, & Pardo, Verónica (1995). “Complimenting behavior in Australian English and Spanish speech”. Multilingua, 14(3), 235–252. Cortés Rodríguez, Luis (1991). Sobre conectores, expletivos y muletillas en el español hablado. Málaga: Editorial Librería Ágora. Curcó, Carmen (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. Curcó, Carmen & de Fina, Anna (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 Europa. Davidson, Brad (1996). “‘Pragmatic weight’ and Spanish subject pronouns: The pragmatic and discourse uses of ‘tú’ and ‘yo’ in spoken Madrid Spanish”. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 543–565.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56



F: PB12302.tex / p.12 (26)

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Domínguez Mujica, Carmen Luisa (2002). Sintáxis de la lengua oral. Ensayos de descripción. Mérida: Universidad de Los Andes. De Fina, Anna (1997). “An analysis of Spanish bien as a marker of classroom management in teacher-student interaction”. Journal of Pragmatics, 28(3), 337–354. De los Heros, Susana (2001). Discurso, identidad y género en el castellano peruano. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Esgueva, M. & Cantarero, M. (1981). El habla de la ciudad de Madrid. Materiales para su estudio. Madrid. Fant, Lars (1989). “Cultural mismatch in conversation: Spanish and Scandinavian communicative behaviour in negotiation settings”. Hermes Journal of Linguistics, 3, 247–265. Fant, Lars (1992). “Scandinavians and Spaniards in negotiation”. In I. A. Sjögren & L. Janson (Eds.), Culture and Management in the Field of Ethnology and Business Administration (pp. 125–153). Stockholm: Stockholm School of Economics and The Swedish Immigration Institute and Museum. Fant, Lars (1993). “‘Push’ and ‘pull’ moves in Hispanic and Swedish negotiation talk”. Hermes Journal of Linguistics, 11, 27–47. Fant, Lars (1995). “Negotiation discourse and interaction in a cross-cultural perspective: The case of Sweden and Spain”. In K. Ehlich & J. Wagner (Eds.), The Discourse of Business Negotiation (pp. 177–201). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Fant, Lars M. & Grindsted, Annette (1995a). “Conflict and consensus in Spanish vs. Scandinavian negotiation interaction”. Hermes Journal of Linguistics, 15, 111–141. Fant, Lars M. & Grindsted, Annette (1995b). “Responses to value mismatch in intercultural negotiation interaction”. Text, 15(4), 561–588. Fraser, B. & Malamud-Malowski, M. (1996). “English and Spanish contrastive discourse markers”. Language Science, 18(3), 863–881. Fraser, Bruce, Rintell, Ellen, & Walters, Joel (1980). “An approach to conducting research on the acquisition of pragmatic competence in a second language”. In D. LarsenFreeman (Ed.), Discourse Analysis in Second Language Research (pp. 75–91). Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Garcés Gómez, María Pilar (1992). “El operador discursivo pues en el español hablado”. Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 43, 261–276. Garcés Gómez, María Pilar (1996). “Los marcadores discursivos en español”. In A. Gil & C. Schmitt (Eds.), Kohäsion, Kohärenz, Modalität in Texten romanischer Sprachen (pp. 125–147). Bonn: Romanistischer. García, Carmen (1989a). “Disagreeing and requesting by Americans and Venezuelans”. Linguistics and Education, 1, 299–322. García, Carmen (1989b). “Apologizing in English: Politeness strategies used by native and non-native speakers”. Multilingua, 8(1), 3–20. García, Carmen (1992a). “Refusing an invitation: A case study of Peruvian style”. Hispanic Linguistics, 5, 207–243. García, Carmen (1992b). “Responses to a request by native and non-native English speakers: Deference vs. camaraderie”. Multilingua, 11, 387–406. García, Carmen (1993). “Making a request and responding to it: A case study of Peruvian Spanish speakers”. Journal of Pragmatics, 19, 127–152.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56

F: PB12302.tex / p.13 (27)

The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain

García, Carmen (1996a). “Reprimanding and responding to a reprimand: A case study of Peruvian Spanish speakers”. Journal of Pragmatics, 26(5), 663–697. García, Carmen (1996b). “Teaching speech act performance: Declining an invitation”. Hispania, 79(2), 267–277. García, Carmen (1999). “The three stages of Venezuelan invitations and responses”. Multilingua, 18, 391–433. García, Carmen (2002). “La expresión de camaradería y solidaridad: Cómo los venezolanos solicitan un servicio y responden a la solicitud de un servicio”. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 55–88). Munich: LINCOM Europa. Gille, Johan (2001). Pautas argumentativas en el diálogo espontáneo. Un estudio de conversaciones intra e inter-culturales. Stockholm: University of Stockholm. Grindsted, Annette (1995). “Dyadic and polyadic sequencing patterns in Spanish and Danish negotiations interaction”. In K. Ehlich & J. Wagner (Eds.), The Discourse of Business Negotiation (pp. 203–221). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Häggkvist, Cilla (2002). “Ya hemos pasado deportes y estudios . . . ” La gestión temática en el diálogo intercultural. Stockholm: Akademitryck AB, University of Stockholm. Häggkvist, Cilla & Fant, Lars (2000). “El intercambio de opiniones en conversaciones intra e interculturales”. Oralia, 3, 95–111. Hardin, Karol J. (2001). Pragmatics of Persuasive Discourse in Spanish Television Advertising. Texas: SIL International and The University of Texas at Arlington. Haverkate, Henk (1979). Impositive Sentences in Spanish: Theory and Description in Linguistic Pragmatics. Amsterdam: North Holland. Haverkate, Henk (1984). Speech Acts, Speakers, and Hearers. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Haverkate, Henk (1993). “Acerca de los actos de habla expresivos y comisivos en español”. In H. Haverkate et al. (Eds.), Aproximaciones pragmalingüísticas al español. Diálogos Hispánicos 12 (pp. 149–80). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Haverkate, Henk (1994). La cortesía verbal. Estudio pragmalingüístico. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Haverkate, Henk (1998). “La contextualización discursiva del acto de habla interrogativo”. In H. Haverkate et al. (Eds.), La pragmática lingüística del español. Recientes desarrollos. Diálogos Hispánicos 22 (pp. 173–209). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Haverkate, Henk (2002). The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hernández Flores, Nieves (1999). “Politeness ideology in Spanish colloquial conversations: The case of advice”. Pragmatics, 9(1), 37–49. Hottenroth, Priska-Monika (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. Huang, Yan (1991). “A neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora”. Journal of Linguistics, 27, 301–335. Huang, Yan (1994). The Syntax and Pragmatics of Anaphora: A Study with Special Reference to Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56



F: PB12302.tex / p.14 (28)

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Jary, Mark (2002). “Mood in relevance theory: a re-analysis focusing on the Spanish subjunctive”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 14, 157–187. Kjaerbeck, Susanne (1998). “The organization of discourse units in Mexican and Danish business negotiations”. Journal of Pragmatics, 30(3), 347–362. Klee, Carol A. (1998). “Communication as an organising principle in the national standards: sociolinguistic aspects of Spanish language teaching”. Hispania, 81, 339–351. Koike, Dale A. (1989). “Pragmatic competence and Adult L2 Acquisition: Speech acts in interlanguage”. Modern Language Journal, 73(3), 279–289. Koike, Dale A. (1994). “Negation in Spanish and English suggestions and requests: Mitigating effects?” Journal of Pragmatics, 21, 513–526. Koike, Dale 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, Dale A. (1998). “La sugerencia en español: Una perpectiva comparativa”. In H. Haverkate, G. Mulder, & C. Fraile Maldonado (Eds.), La pragmática lingüística del español. Recientes desarrollos. Diálogos Hispánicos 22 (pp. 211–235). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Koike, Dale A., Robert E. Vann, & Joan Busquets (2001). “Spanish no, sí: Reactive moves to perceived face-threatening acts, Part II”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(6), 879–899. Lafford, Barbara (2000). “Spanish applied linguistics in the twentieth century: A retrospective and bibliography (1900–1999)”. Hispania, 83, 711–732. Leech, Geoffrey (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. Le Pair, Rob (1996). “Spanish request strategies: A cross-cultural analysis from an intercultural perspective”. Language Sciences, 18(3–4), 651–670. Levenston, E. (1975). “Aspects of testing the oral proficieny of adult immigrants to Canada”. In L. Palmer & B. Spolsky (Eds.), Papers on Language Testing 1967–1974. Washington: TESOL. Levinson, Stephen (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Stephen (1987). “Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora: A partial pragmatic reduction and binding and control phenomena”. Journal of Linguistics, 23, 379–434. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria (2001). “Compliment responses among British and Spanish university students: a contrastive study”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(1), 107–127. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (1997). “Sensitizing Spanish learners of English to cultural differences: The case of politeness”. In M. Pütz (Ed.), The Cultural Context in Foreign Language Teaching (pp. 143–155). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2000). Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2001). “The case of apologies in English and Spanish”. In A. Moreno & V. Colwell (Eds.), Perspectivas recientes sobre el discurso, CD rom. León: AESLA. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2002). “A contrastive study of conventional indirectness in Spanish: Evidence from Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish”. Pragmatics 12(2), 135–151. Mir, Montserrat (1992). “Do we all apologize the same? An empirical study on the act of apologizing by Spanish speakers learning English”. In L. Bouton & Y. Kachru (Eds.), Pragmatics and Language Learning 3 (pp. 1–19). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56

F: PB12302.tex / p.15 (29)

The pragmatics of Spanish beyond Spain

Mir, Montserrat (2001). “Un modelo didáctico para la enseñanza de la pragmática”. Hispania, 84, 542–549. Moore, Zena (1996). “Teaching culture: A study of piropos”. Hispania, 79, 113–120. Mulder, Gijs (1993). “¿Por qué no coges el teléfono?: Acerca de los actos de habla indirectos”. In H. Haverkate, K. Hengeveld, & G. Mulder (Eds.), Aproximaciones pragmalingüísticas al español. Diálogos Hispánicos 12 (pp. 181–207). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Mulder, Gijs (1998). “Un estudio empírico de los actos de habla directivos en español”. In H. Haverkate, G. Mulder, & C. Fraile Maldonado (Eds.), La pragmática lingüística del español. Recientes desarrollos. Diálogos Hispánicos 22 (pp. 237–275). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Niño-Murcia, Mercedes (1992). “El futuro sintético en el español andino: Caso de mandato atenuado”. Hispania, 75, 705–713. Ocampo Álvarez, Denise (2001). “El insulto como acto de habla expresivo: Un intento fervoroso aunque aún no preciso”. Sapienta, 1 (http://www.uh.cu/facultades/flex/ revista.htm). Olshtain, Elite & Cohen, Andrew (1983). “Apology: a speech act set”. In N. Wolfson & E. Judd (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition (pp. 18–35). Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Placencia, María E. (1992). “Politeness in mediated telephone conversations in Ecuadorian Spanish and British English”. Language Learning Journal, 6, 80–82. Placencia, María E. (1995). “Explicitness and ellipsis as features of conversational style in Ecuadorian Spanish and British English”. IRAL, XXXIII(2), 129–141. Placencia, María E. (1996). “ Politeness in Ecuadorian Spanish”. Multilingua, 15(1), 13–34. Placencia, María E. (1997a). “Opening up closings. The Ecuadorian way”. Text, 17(1), 53–81. Placencia, María E. (1997b). “Address forms in Ecuadorian Spanish”. Hispanic Linguistics, 9, 165–202. Placencia, María E. (1998). “Pragmatic variation: Peninsular vs. Ecuadorian Spanish”. Spanish Applied Linguistics, 2(1), 71–106. Placencia, María E. (2001). “Inequality in address behavior in public institutions at La Paz, Bolivia”. Anthropological Linguistics, 43(2), 198–217. Placencia, María E. & Yépez L., Mariana (1999). “Compliments in Ecuadorian Spanish”. Lengua, 9, 83–121. Rintell, Ellen (1981). “Sociolinguistic variation and pragmatic ability: A look at learners”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 27, 11–34. Ruzickova, Elena (1998). “Apologies in Cuban Spanish”. In J. Gutiérrez-Rexach & J. del Valle (Eds.), Proceedings of the First Hispanic Linguistics Colloquium (pp. 126–149). Columbus, OH: Ohio State University. Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel, & Jefferson, Gail (1974). “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation”. Language, 50(4), 696–735. Sacks, Norman P. (1954). “Aquí, acá, and allá”. Hispania, 27, 263–266. Schegloff, Emanuel (1972 [1968]). “Sequencing in conversational openings”. In J. Laver & S. Hutcheson (Eds.), Communication in Face-to-Face Interaction (pp. 374–405). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Schegloff, Emanuel A. & Sacks, Harvey (1973). “Opening up closings”. Semiotica, 8, 289– 327.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:7/07/2004; 11:56



F: PB12302.tex / p.16 (30)

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Schwenter, Scott A. (1996). “Some reflections on o sea: A discourse marker in Spanish”. Journal of Pragmatics, 25(6), 855–874. Scollon, Ron & Scollon, Suzanne (1983). “Face in interethnic communication”. In J. C. Richards & R. W. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and Communication (pp. 156–190). New York: Longman. Scollon, Ron & Scollon, Suzanne W. (1985). Intercultural Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Stewart, Miranda (1990). “Using authentic video materials with advanced learners”. ACIS, 3(1), 17–23. Stewart, Miranda (2000). “Hedging your bets – the use of yo in face-to-face interaction”. Web Journal of Modern Language Linguistics, 4, 1461–1499. Stewart, Miranda (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. Uber, Diane (1985). “The dual function of usted: forms of address in Bogotá, Colombia”. Hispania, 68, 388–392. Uber, Diane (2000). “Addressing business in Puerto Rico: Tú vs. Usted”. In Ana Roca (Ed.), Research on Spanish in the United States: Linguistic Issues and Challenges (pp. 310–318). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla. Valdés, Guadalupe & Pino, Cecilia (1981). “Muy a tus órdenes: Compliment responses among Mexican-American bilinguals”. Language in Society, 10, 53–72. Valeiras Viso, Jesús (2002). “‘Deja tu mensaje después de la señal’: Despedidas y otros elementos de la sección de cierre en mensajes dejados en contestadores automáticos en Madrid y Londres”. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 209–232). Munich: LINCOM Europa. Verschueren, Jeff (1996). “Contrastive ideology research. Aspects of a pragmatic methodology”. Language Sciences, 18(3–4), 589–603. Verschueren, Jeff (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold. Villemoes, Anette (1995). “Culturally determined facework priorities in Danish and Spanish business negotiation”. In K. Ehlich & J. Wagner (Eds.), The Discourse of Business Negotiation (pp. 291–312). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Yañez, Rosa H. (1990). “The complimenting speech act among Chicano women”. In J. J. Bergen (Ed.), Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic Issues (pp. 9–85). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Zavala, Virginia (2001). “Borrowing evidential functions from Quechua: the role of pues as a discourse marker in Andean Spanish”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(7), 999–1023.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:9/02/2004; 12:53

F: PB123P2.tex / p.1 (31)

P II

Pragmatics and other disciplines

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:9/02/2004; 12:55

Pragmatics and grammar

F: PB123P21.tex / p.1 (33)

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.1 (35)

Chapter 3

The Spanish subjunctive Procedural semantics and pragmatic inference* Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

.

Introduction

Among the many and varied observations that have been brought to light in studies on the contrast between the indicative and subjunctive in Spanish, those that make an attempt at clarifying the nature of the pragmatic inferences associated with these grammatical moods are particularly noteworthy. In Bustos (1986) and Bustos and Aliaga (1996), for example, a pragmatic approach to the distribution and interpretation of mood is presented using the Gricean notion of conversational implicature to describe its contribution to utterance interpretation.1 In Rouchota (1994), on the other hand, the subjunctive in Modern Greek is investigated from a Relevance Theoretic (RT) viewpoint and the pragmatic inferences that are derived from it are shown to be mechanisms that enrich the basic semantics of mood and contribute to the explicatures of the utterance. Nevertheless, whatever theoretical perspective one adopts, an explanation of the appearance of pragmatic inferences brought about by the use of each mood is a fundamental step towards understanding indicative/subjunctive alternation as a particular case of the interaction between semantics and pragmatics that simultaneously creates syntactic effects. In this paper, our objectives are twofold: firstly, to show that mood is procedural, in the sense of Wilson and Sperber (1993), basing our argumentation on the type of inferences that it leads to, and secondly, to offer an explanation, following from the first point, for certain problems related to the distribution of the subjunctive in Spanish. We also hope to illustrate the role of pragmatic theory in offering solutions to problems that are difficult to resolve in purely grammatical terms. Once we have presented some basic notions of RT in Section 2, we will take a look at the problem of the use of the subjunctive in

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.2 (36)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

subordinate relative clauses in extensional contexts (Section 3), and that of mood alternation in subordinate argument clauses (Section 4), to finish up with some general conclusions (Section 5).

. Theoretical background The pragmatic theory expounded by Sperber and Wilson (1986/95) is based on the idea that relevance is an organising factor in linguistic communication. They propose that a central characteristic of linguistic communication is that, being an instance of ostensive behaviour, the production of an utterance causes the hearer to expect that the speaker, by demanding his (the hearer’s) attention, in some way guarantees that processing her utterance is going to positively affect his cognitive environment.2 This idea is summed up in the Communicative Principle of Relevance: “Every act of ostensive communication (e.g. an utterance) communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance”. This presumption is what makes the hearer assume that the utterance which was directed at him was meant to offer him at least a satisfactory range of cognitive effects in relation to the effort made to recover them. Utterance interpretation, according to RT, crucially involves the use of this principle by the hearer in order to carry out inferential tasks such as reference assignment, disambiguation, recovery of ellipsed material, and resolution of vagueness; the combination of which enable him to construct the truth evaluable representation that he may reasonably assume the speaker intended to convey. One of the most noteworthy characteristics of this theory is, thus, the fundamental role attributed to inferential processes in the construction of both the propositional representation being explicitly communicated – the explicature – and the implicit content – implicatures – that may be derived. Among the postulates developed from the theoretical basis provided by RT in relation to the cognitive processes involved in utterance interpretation is the distinction between two ways that linguistic meaning contributes to pragmatic inference: linguistic expressions can encode either conceptual representations, or procedural information on how to carry out inferential interpretation processes.3 In other words, some expressions encode concepts, whereas others encode instructions on how to arrive at an appropriate interpretation. According to this perspective, procedural expressions encode cognitive content that does not correspond to any concept, but rather informs the hearer on how to manipulate the conceptual representations and how to access the adequate contextual assumptions in order to construct the intended interpretation. Func-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.3 (37)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

tional categories such as Tense, Mood, Focus, and Definite Determiners, as well as discourse markers, are examples of procedural expressions. In accordance with the communicative principle of relevance, interpretive processes are guided by the expectations of the hearer, as mentioned above, of deriving positive cognitive effects from the communicated content. Procedural expressions help the hearer to identify the intended effects by restricting the construction of either the explicatures or the implicatures of the utterance. In the case of verbal mood, its semantic content contributes to the specification of explicatures, mainly those known as higher-level explicatures, in which the speaker’s propositional attitude and communicative intention are represented.4 As is typically the case with procedural expressions, the semantic content of the grammatical moods is minimal compared to the range of interpretive effects that the use of one or the other can convey: their stable, unitary semantic content leads to a variety of diverse interpretive effects depending on the context they are used in (i.e. their semantic content underdetermines the range of possible interpretations that they may obtain). What enables the hearer to identify the intended interpretation for each utterance is the communicative principle of relevance: the expectation that an utterance will lead to positive cognitive effects without any unjustified processing efforts. Among the reasons why mood is best classified as a procedural expression, we might mention the following: on one hand, the indicative and subjunctive morphemes make up a closed group of units, and on the other, the content that they express is not easily describable in conceptual terms, nor accessible to introspection (for similar arguments see Rouchota 1994). As we shall see, there are also other facts that are in favour of this point of view. To describe the semantics of the subjunctive mood in Spanish, we refer to an idea that has often been considered in the Hispanic tradition, at least since Bybee and Terrell (1974): that the subjunctive marks the proposition as a nonassertion. In procedural terms, this implies that the subjunctive contains the instruction that can be paraphrased as Construct the propositional representation as non-asserted information. This semantic content underlies all the uses of the subjunctive, and is a valid analysis for both non-factual, or irrealis, and factual, or thematic subjunctive contexts, i.e. contexts in which the use of the subjunctive has the effect of backgrounding factual information.5 Although this kind of approach presents the advantage of bringing together such apparently diverse uses under a single, abstract semantics, which can be easily adapted for comparative purposes, it does come up against an important difficulty: that of precisely defining the sense in which assertion or non-assertion should be understood. In the present study, the approach we would like to put



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.4 (38)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

forth is based on a notion of assertion compatible with the ideas presented in Mejías-Bikandi (1994). Rather than linking assertion exclusively with the truth of a proposition according to the speaker, or the speaker’s attitude of belief, this author points out that speakers mark as assertions those propositions which they intend to express as information regarding some individual’s view of reality.6 Thus, the use of the indicative corresponds to assertion in the sense that it can either be related to the foregrounding of the information expressed in a proposition, that is, with the intention of the speaker to inform the hearer of the propositional content, or with the truth of the proposition according to some individual. In any case, our objective is not so much to argue in favour of treating the subjunctive as an indicator of non-asserted information (which we attempt to do only in an indirect way), as to show that its content is procedural, and this is in principle independent of the particular characterisation of the subjunctive chosen.7 Our interest, therefore, is centred on the pragmatic inferences that the use of the subjunctive activates in the interpretative process of constructing the explicatures of utterances.

. The subjunctive in relative clauses in extensional contexts The examples reproduced in (1), taken from Quer (1998), pose a problem for grammatical explanations of the distribution of the subjunctive in Spanish, since the relative clauses they contain appear in extensional, or referentially transparent, contexts,8 which normally only allow the indicative, as is shown by the contrast in (2), taken from Pérez Saldanya (1999: 3259): (1) a.

Le regalamos un libro que lo {entretuvo / To-her/him we-gave a book that her/him entertained (ind) / entretuviera} entertained (sub) ‘We gave him a book that entertained (ind) him / to entertain (sub) him.’ b. Se aprobó una ley que {corregía / corrigiera} el cl approved a law that corrected (ind) / corrected (sub) the agravio comparativo. injustice comparative ‘A law was passed that corrected (ind) / to correct (sub) the injustice by comparison.’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.5 (39)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

(2) Leo un libro en el que se {analiza / *analice} el I-read a book in the which cl analyse (ind) / analyse (sub) the modo en las oraciones de relativo. mood in the clauses of relative ‘I am reading a book that analyses mood in relative clauses.’

If sentence (2) is an extensional context that guarantees the existential interpretation of the indefinite NP, both the subjunctive mood of the relative clause and the corresponding nonspecific interpretation of the NP are excluded. But precisely for this reason, the acceptability of the subjunctive in (1) is surprising, and another version of (2) can unexpectedly become grammatical just by adding a simple modifier, as in (3): (3) {Por fin / Finalmente} leo un libro en el que se Finally I-read a book in the which cl analice el modo. . . analyse (sub) the mood. . . ‘I am finally reading a book that analyses mood in. . . ’

In order to understand why (1) and (3) are well-formed sentences we must start by admitting that the subjunctive is not merely a formal reflection of the sentential contexts in which it appears, and not only because in relative clauses it is not required by a hierarchically superior predicate, but also because its presence can actively condition the context of interpretation – understood as the set of assumptions used to interpret an utterance. This ability, as we shall see, is a typical characteristic of procedural expressions. Let us begin with the case illustrated by (3). Intuitively, the difference in the acceptability of the subjunctive between sentences (2) and (3) is due to the fact that in the latter, by inserting the modifier we create a sentential context that is compatible with the semantic content of the mood in the relative clause. We might say that por fin and finalmente are intensionality-creating expressions, since they force the addressee to understand the situation described in (3) as the culmination of a long wait, search, or desire for a book with certain characteristics; in other words, these expressions create an opaque context, just as verbs like necesitar, buscar, and desear (need, look for, and desire). Opacity often licences, as is well known, the appearance of the subjunctive, and facilitates the satisfaction of the requisite that this mood encodes (i.e. the interpretation of the relative clause as non-asserted information). Having established this, it is not hard to see that the subjunctive in examples (1) also activates a purpose component, or one of pursuing a goal, in the



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.6 (40)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

relation between two situations: giving a book, and entertaining the receiver with it in (1a), and in (1b), passing a law and that the law should undo the injustice (Quer 1998; Pérez Saldanya 1999). On the one hand, it is significant that this feature of purposefulness and goal-directedness of the action is not necessarily present in the indicative version, in which the connection between the two events may be casual or unintended, and on the other, that when this feature is incompatible with the sentential context, the subjunctive turns out to be unacceptable, as is shown in (4) and (5): (4) Por casualidad le regalamos un libro que lo By chance to-him we-gave a book that him {entretuvo / *entretuviera} entertained (ind) / *entertained (sub) ‘We gave him a book that happened to entertain him.’ *hiciera} (5) Me desperté con una fiebre que me {hacía / I woke with a fever that me made (ind) / *made (sub) temblar tremble ‘I awoke with a fever that made me tremble.’

In (4), again found in Quer (1998), the modifier por casualidad is the element that blocks out the intentional or purpose reading, and therefore the presence of the subjunctive; in (5), the semantics of despertarse con fiebre, as well as the difficulty of imagining a situation in which someone intentionally manages to wake with a high fever, prevents replacing the indicative with the subjunctive. Likewise, the subjunctive is incompatible with contexts where the relative clause refers to a time span that occurred before that of the matrix, since this prevents the purpose interpretation, as in Le regalamos un libro que lo hubiera distraído esos días ‘We gave him a book that would have (SUB) entertained him then’. What is surprising is that the subjunctive should behave the same way in (3), where it seems to be licensed by the presence of the modifier, and in (1), where there is no operator or intensionality-creating element to supply an appropriate sentential context. The relevant generalisation seems to be the following: the subjunctive is acceptable in relative clauses to the extent that it is possible to create an interpretation with intensional content. But why, then, is it possible in (1)? Intuitively, the presence of the subjunctive is the crucial factor. This implies sustaining that mood itself is the element that creates an appropriate context to legitimate its own appearance. The idea may seem paradoxical, but it is exactly what we want to propose. In sentences like (1), the

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.7 (41)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

subjunctive, far from being incompatible with the sentential context, is capable of imposing a reinterpretation of the sentence in an intentional/purpose sense. This is due to the procedural nature of mood, and in particular, to the fact that procedural content functions by activating assumptions which are integrated into the interpretation process. When the sentential context does not in itself satisfy the conditions that normally bring about the presence of the subjunctive in the embedded clause, the choice of this mood can activate the assumptions needed. The semantics encoded by the subjunctive, when applied, as in (1a), to a clause that is not within the scope of any intensional operator, leads us to infer that the relation that the matrix holds with the embedded proposition is one of purpose: i.e. that the book was given to someone with the intention that it should entertain them. Likewise, in example (1b), we infer that the law was passed in order to correct the injustice. In other words, the assumptions in (6) are integrated into the interpretation process as a necessary consequence of the presence of the subjunctive: (6) a. The purpose of giving him the book was to entertain him. b. The purpose of passing the law was to correct the injustice by comparison.

So the procedural semantics of mood is what activates the inferential process in every case, and the only feature that differentiates the data in (1) from the canonical uses of the subjunctive in relative clauses (typically, in intensional contexts) is that in the latter, the linguistic information of the sentence is in itself sufficient to make the subjunctive compatible and to lead to a natural interpretation of it, whereas in the former, the hearer makes an adjustment to the set of assumptions that form the context. As long as this operation can be carried out without leading to any incoherence in the interpretation, the string will be acceptable. The requisite of contextual coherency is, in fact, the only restriction that the interpretation of mood in relative clauses must obey, in accordance with this point of view, and with what Bustos (1986: 227) also claimed: El carácter obligatorio que en ocasiones tiene la opción entre uno de los dos modos se explica apelando a la necesidad de la consistencia contextual. Tal “obligación” está determinada en última instancia por la exigencia de racionalidad en la conducta lingüística que se concreta en el requisito de no manifestar creencias inconsistentes mediante tal conducta. Por otro lado, cuando en determinadas construcciones subsiste la optatividad, tal subsistencia se explica por la ausencia de inconsistencias en la elección de uno u otro modo.9



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.8 (42)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

The perspective adopted by Bustos (1986) is a clearly pragmatic approach to the indicative/subjunctive contrast, and is applicable both in contexts of mood alternation and in those where only one mood can appear. It is important to appeal to the need to maintain contextual coherence to explain why mood’s capability to activate inferences is not enough to make either mood acceptable in all contexts. Therefore, it is the decisive factor for restricting mood distribution, and is absolutely necessary if such powerful mechanisms as those shown to be at work in examples such as (1) are to be proposed – that is, if a procedural element like subjunctive mood can force the necessary assumptions to be added to the context in order to facilitate its own interpretation. What is actually the case is that we have before us a well known and studied phenomenon, especially in relation to presuppositional expressions such as the definite article: accommodation is what makes it possible for a hearer to easily accept (7) even if he has never known that the speaker has a dog, simply because hearers accommodate this assumption in order to interpret such an utterance, or in other words, they add it to the common ground of the conversation (Kadmon 2001: 17): (7) My dog is at the door.

Just as in (7) we have to suppose that the speaker owns a dog in order to carry out the semantic instruction encoded by the article (i.e. the requisite of a unique referent), in (1), one must suppose that the actions described included an intentional component in order to carry out the semantic instruction encoded by the subjunctive (i.e. the requisite of taking the proposition to be non-asserted information). The interpretative mechanism is systematic, and characteristic of procedural expressions. As Kadmon (2001: 18) puts it: Our wish to see our fellow speakers as saying something interpretable and felicitous will generally drive us to assume (ceteris paribus and within certain limits) that the presupposition of their utterances hold. Very often, this will involve adding information to our common ground.

The limitations on the process of accommodation, as we have mentioned, are related to the coherence of the assumptions that make up the context and to the inferential processing effort made to carry out the contextual readjustment. In our opinion, the origin of this process is to be found both in the communicative principle of relevance, responsible for the search for cognitive effects the hearer of the utterance carries out in order to interpret it, and in the nature of procedural semantics, which gives priority to the assumptions activated even when this leads to modifying or adjusting the lexical and contextual in-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.9 (43)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

formation used in the interpretation of the utterance. This last aspect is what particularly interests us as proof that mood is procedural. Since accommodation is a general phenomenon, it is not surprising that we should encounter other instances in which the subjunctive seems to induce it, specifically in constructions that allow mood alternation. Two obvious examples are (8) and (9): (8) El que fuera presidente en el exilio. . . ‘He that was (sub) president in exile. . . ’ (9) Habló de forma que todos {pudieron / pudieran} S/he-spoke in way that everyone could (ind) / could (sub) entender su explicación. understand his/her explanation ‘She spoke in such a way that everyone could understand her explanation.’

In (8) we find a use of the subjunctive imperfect tense which has been noted on many occasions and is subject to very specific restrictions: the use in which this form behaves as if it were an indicative preterite. If we accept the assumption that fuera is actually a subjunctive (Lunn 1989; Pérez Saldanya 1999: 3283), we are again confronted with the same problem encountered in (1), that is, the presence of a subjunctive in a relative clause within an extensional context, this time with a meaning similar to that of a mark of evidentiality; in fact, what the subjunctive adds to the interpretation of the definite NP of (8) is the assumption that the information expressed by the relative clause is already known, or should be understood as a quotation, in a loose sense, of discourse that is already present in the context.10 This case differs from those like (1) in that it shows a different way of satisfying the requirement made by the semantics of the subjunctive: here, the relative clause is unasserted information because it reproduces old or backgrounded information, as occurs in thematic or presupposed subjunctive contexts;11 whereas in (1) the information is not asserted because it ‘survives’ thanks to the possibility of inferring an intensional element. Obviously, grammatical conditions such as the obligatory definiteness of the NP, as correctly noted by Quer (1998), are what determine that the instruction indicated by mood must be resolved in a reading of given information, rather than an interpretation which characterises the situation represented in any other way, such as those we have been discussing in relation to the previous examples. Although we are unable to develop this point further, we do consider that from what has been said so far, sufficient arguments have been mustered to support the idea that (8) is yet another example of how the procedural se-



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.10 (44)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

mantics of the subjunctive can bring about an accommodation process, or in other words, cause an adjustment of the assumptions included in the context used to interpret the utterance, as long as this adjustment does not lead to any kind of incoherence. As for example (9), taken from Pérez Saldanya (1999: 3296), it shows how the subjunctive can alternate with the indicative and introduce a purpose reading, so that the subordinate consecutive clause expresses the objective to be achieved. Although this data is not related to relative clauses, it can be seen to involve the same type of effect as those shown in example (1), i.e. the subjunctive mood activates an inference, through which a purpose component is accommodated in the relationship between the main and the subordinate clauses. If we are on the right track, this seems to be an argument in favour of the procedural nature of mood, and at the same time, a tool for explaining a number of grammatical problems. In the next section we study some additional data on mood alternation, this time related to argument clauses.

. Double mood selection It has often been observed that a number of verbs in Spanish take sentential complements in both indicative and subjunctive moods, although the mood of the complement has certain effects on the way these verbs are interpreted (Porto Dapena 1991: 130). (10) a.

Dice que {pones / pongas} mucha sal. S/he-says that you-put (ind) / put (sub) much salt ‘He says you put in lots of salt (ind)’. ‘He tells you to put in lots of salt (sub)’. b. He pensado que {pones / pongas} mucha salt. I-have thought that you-put (ind) / put (sub) much sal ‘I thought that you put in lots of salt (ind)’. ‘I’ve decided that you should put in lots of salt (sub)’.

In examples like these, the subordinating verbs are interpreted as reporting directive utterances when they appear with subjunctive subordinate clauses as their complements. One explanation for this fact that has been put forward is that we are dealing here with verbs that have more than one lexical entry, each having different selection properties; or in other words, that this is a case of lexical ambiguity.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.11 (45)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

In principle this might seem to be a reasonable idea, but it runs into difficulties when the data are examined in detail (cf. Manteca Alonso-Cortés 1981: 54–60): (11) Avisa que viene el tren a su hora y que vaya el He-warns that comes the train at its time and that go (sub) the taxi a recogerle. taxi to collect-him ‘He says the train is coming on time and for the taxi to go and collect him.’

The fact that two subordinate clauses, one in indicative and the other in subjunctive, can be coordinated as complements of the same verb shows that the meaning of avisar is not ambiguous, or in other words, that this verb does not represent two separate concepts, each having its own lexical entry. On the other hand, a purely lexical solution does not explain why the same contrast between a directive reading with the subjunctive and a non-directive one with the indicative occurs systematically across an entire group of verbs such as gritar (shout), escribir (write), repetir (repeat), indicar (indicate), and advertir (notify). The alternative solution (as already proposed by Alarcos 1978 and Manteca Alonso-Cortés 1981) is to attribute the interpretative effects observed in the subordinating verb to the mood of the subordinate clause. This is exactly the idea that we would like to take up again. However, it is admittedly problematic because it brings up a number of questions that are difficult to answer from a grammatical point of view: How can it be possible that an element in the subordinate clause should be able to determine the interpretation of the matrix verb, when the opposite would ordinarily have to be the case? What mechanism links the mood of the subordinate clause to the semantics of the governing clause? Can this proposal be considered compatible with the commonly accepted assumption that predicates select the mood of their complements? And why is the final interpretation of verbs with subordinate subjunctive complements always directive? As is apparent, these questions are not easy to answer if we are to maintain a strictly grammatical approach. Nonetheless, by working with a pragmatic theory, a plausible solution does seem to be within reach. Bosque (1990: 45) clearly sums up the essence of the problem: No debemos dejar de preguntarnos, sin embargo, por qué los verbos de comunicación se reinterpretan como verbos de influencia, y no en cambio como verbos de cualquier otro tipo. La respuesta puede estar en una “implicatura conversatoria” (en el sentido de Grice), probablemente la misma que lleva a interpretar las declaraciones como sugerencias o las preguntas como peticiones.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.12 (46)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

(. . . ) Pero aunque el origen del fenómeno esté en un principio pragmático, debe insistirse en que el problema afecta a la semántica léxica, en cuanto que es una clase léxica la que se ve involucrada, con efectos patentes en la sintaxis. (. . . ) tenemos, pues, no tanto un caso de homonimia como un tipo de polisemia que tiene su origen en un efecto discursivo.12

The double selection problem, from this point of view, can be seen to be tied to some of the issues discussed in the previous section. As we pointed out, the use of the subjunctive in grammatical contexts where the indicative is the mood that would ordinarily be expected can be described as inducing the hearer to carry out a process of accommodation, a process that requires an adjustment of the contextual assumptions used to interpret the utterance. Bosque describes this effect as the production of a Gricean implicature which is related to the lexical semantics of the subordinating verb; we propose a similar idea, but based on the analytical tools provided by Relevance Theory. In the cases we mentioned earlier of relative clauses in extensional contexts, a relationship of purpose is inferred as holding between the situation described in the main clause and the content represented by the subordinate relative clause. In the examples we are looking at here, on the other hand, it can be said that the same sort of process is at work: the semantic content expressed by the subjunctive, showing that the clause is not asserted, encourages the addressee to infer that the communication predicate is to be interpreted as introducing an imperative utterance, that is, an utterance marked as a description of a state of affairs regarded as potential and desirable.13 In relation to the point made by Bosque, the hearer takes it that he must appeal to contextual assumptions in order to interpret correctly the sense of marking the situation represented by a subjunctive clause as non-assertion, as otherwise, insufficient cognitive effects would be obtained: the mere fact that the situation represented by the subordinate clause is not being asserted. Instead, the hearer’s expectations of relevance lead him to assume that the communication of the state of affairs described, though not asserted, must obey some reasonable motivation; namely, in order to show that it is desirable from the speaker’s or the hearer’s point of view (when interpreted as a command or suggestion, respectively), just as a question is interpreted as a request when the contextual assumptions involved in its interpretation imply that it would not lead to any positive effect if interpreted as an attempt to obtain information.14 This kind of reinterpretation of subordinating verbs is a typical instance of the interaction between procedural expressions (i.e. mood) and conceptual meaning (the subordinating verbs). As we have seen, this process of interac-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.13 (47)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

tion is characterised by a number of particular traits, such as the fact that the processing instructions communicated by procedural expressions are carried out, even when carrying them out leads the hearer to elaborate and adjust lexical and contextual information in the interpretation process. Many authors (cf. Carston 1996) have pointed out that utterance interpretation frequently requires hearers to adapt lexical meaning by processes of enrichment, or loosening, of conceptual representations depending on the context. The limits of the communicated concepts are inferentially adapted by restriction, loosening or other modifications; and this is the type of process that leads to a directive reading of a predicate of communication. But these processes affect conceptual semantics, not procedural content. So another general characteristic of the interaction between these two types of meaning is that the priority of including the assumptions activated by procedural content in the interpretative process, together with the plasticity of conceptual meaning, lead to phenomena such as coercion and, as noted above, accommodation.15 As mentioned earlier, however, the powerful mechanism we are claiming mood can put into action must have some sort of limitation. In the case of argument clauses, the limitation could be said to be the need for coherence;16 a clause marked as a non-assertion cannot be used as a complement of a verb whose lexical semantics include the concept of assertion itself, such as afirmar (*María ha afirmado que tengas (SUB) razón.*María has affirmed that you are (SUB) right). Likewise, it is not possible to interpret a clause marked as an assertion by the use of the indicative functioning as the complement of a verb that presupposes that its complement refers to a necessarily unrealised or prospective situation, and which therefore requires non-assertion in Spanish, such as pedir (*Pide que sales a la pizarra. *S/he asks that you come (IND) to the blackboard). In these cases, the meaning of the subordinating predicate includes an element – namely, it imposes a restriction on the types of complement it can appear with – which is simply incompatible with the instruction conveyed by the use of the indicative mood, and thus renders the string uninterpretable. But there are, on the other hand, a number of verbs that do not encode any restriction as to whether or not their complements must be assertions, such as verbs of communication in general. The inferences that are derived from the use of these verbs with subjunctive complements lead to directive readings. This is a mechanism that has been extended to other verbs that would not normally be described as communication predicates, but can also be accommodated to a directive reading: such is the case of mirar in examples like Fue a mirar que los niños estuvieran dormidos (S/he went to see that the children were (SUB) asleep). The directive reading obtained here is taken to be the one



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.14 (48)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

intended by the speaker both as a result of the hearer’s search for any positive cognitive effects derivable from understanding the proposition expressed by the subordinate clause as a non-assertion, and due to the fact that the lexical properties of the verb mirar do not include any specification that would enter into contradiction with a directive use. The question that immediately comes to mind at this point is: why does the subjunctive lead to a directive reading, in which the subordinate clause is understood to be a command, suggestion, request, or advice, rather than an interpretation of, for example, hypothesis, possibility, or doubt, all of which could also be considered compatible with the semantics we are proposing? In fact, it seems significant that when in principle the subordinating clause should not be able to obtain a directive reading, the hearer tends to force or coerce this reading, even if it means enriching the interpretation with contextual assumptions not normally required, rather than opting for a non-directive reading. For instance, (12) would not be interpreted as meaning “The director says that the actress is perhaps blond”, or “The director says that the actress might be blond”, but rather, “The director says that a blond actress is needed”, once a reading such as “The director requests/demands the actress should be blond” is excluded (as the subordinate clause describes what is normally an inherent property, it is incompatible with being the object of a demand):17 (12) El director dice que la actriz sea rubia. The director says that the actress is (sub) blond ‘The director says that the actress should be blond.’

Note that the reinterpretation of decir generated by the subjunctive even affects the definite NP la actriz, forcing a non-specific reading such as “the actress that plays in the scene, whoever she may be”, as a result of the fact that an intensional context is created by inference in the interpretation process. The reasons why a directive interpretation should be the preferred one extend far beyond the cases of double mood selection we have been considering. The same kind of interpretation is also produced systematically in utterances with independent uses of the subjunctive, that is, when no grammatical element is available to impose or facilitate other readings, as can be seen in examples such as: (13) a.

¡Maldita sea! Damned it-is (sub) ‘Damn!’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.15 (49)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

b. ¡Que venga! That s/he-come (sub) ‘Let him come!’ c. Que te mejores. That you improve (sub) ‘Get well soon.’ d. Que te sea leve. That to-you it-is (sub) light ‘Hope it is easy for you.’

The utterances in (13) are taken to be expressions of requests, wishes or commands, and in general are interpreted as expressing directive illocutionary force; they are used to represent situations that are understood to be desirable from the point of view of either the speaker or the hearer.18 Data related to independent uses of the subjunctive are relevant to the point we are making because they can be said to represent the default interpretation of this mood.19 And as we have seen, the interpretations obtained both from the subjunctive in relative clauses and from its appearance in argument clauses with verbs of communication share the general pattern of describing a situation that is desirable in terms of the fact that its realisation would lead to the achievement of some aim – or in other words, an action that is intentionally directed at achieving a particular purpose. Therefore, the readings obtained by the use of one or another mood in so-called double selection verbs turn out to be just one particular instance of a much more general problem, which we are unable to study in greater depth in this paper: the question of how the search for relevance leads to developing the basic semantics of the subjunctive into a directive interpretation, in the absence of other factors of influence.20 If this is true, then we have at least a partial answer to another far-reaching question: How can it be explained that some of the verbs that allow the indicative in their sentential complements are also acceptable with subjunctive, while others are not? We have mentioned that the lexical semantics of the subordinating verb may either specify properties related to the assertive status of its complement, thus being incompatible with complements in one mood or another, or alternatively, be general enough to accept complements of either kind. Based on this premise, we are prepared to explain why contrasts such as the one in (14) occur: (14) a.

Dice que pongas mucha sal. S/he-says that you-put (sub) lots of salt



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.16 (50)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

b. *Cree que pongas mucha sal. *S/he-thinks that you-put (sub) lots of salt

One of the factors involved in the different behaviour of decir and creer must be the fact that the first verb (as well as the other similar ones) denotes an intentional action, whereas the second denotes a mental state. This implies that decir is naturally reinterpretable as a verb of influence when it is made to satisfy the requisites of the subordinate subjunctive clause, whereas creer is not, due to the difficulty of readjusting the lexical content of a stative verb to a directive sense (leaving aside the fact that the verbs corresponding to creer seem to have different properties in other Romance languages). To sum up, our proposal for explaining the phenomena related to double mood selection as an effect of the procedural semantics of the subordinate mood on the conceptual semantics of the matrix verb, and therefore as a result of the pragmatic inferences generated in the construction of the explicatures of utterances, has a number of advantages with respect to alternative, purely lexical or syntactic approaches: a. In contrast to an approach based on lexical homonymy, this solution cannot be seen as unmotivated, nor does it complicate the description of verbal lexical entries. b. It explains data that a lexical solution cannot give an answer for: for example, the fact mentioned above that subordinate complements in different moods can be coordinated under a single verb. c. It is compatible with what is known about the effects of procedural semantic content on interpretation, and with the requirements of compositionality. d. It can be extended to several other problems related to the distribution of the subjunctive. We have attempted to show that the appearance of the subjunctive in subordinate adjunct clauses in extensional contexts depends on the same mechanism, and that the notions we have appealed to (accommodation, coercion, enrichment, and loosening) are independently necessary in order to explain many phenomena that are apparently unrelated to those we have analysed here. Naturally, we must admit that this proposal is not risk-free. The foremost danger is that of the unlimited power to condition utterance interpretation that procedural elements seem to possess. It is well known that unrestricted mechanisms should be avoided in grammatical argumentation. But in fact, we have addressed this issue and claimed that procedural semantics are restricted: their

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.17 (51)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

limitation lies in the necessity to avoid producing contradictions or incoherence among the assumptions used in the interpretation process, and to avoid causing unjustified processing effort. Other risks that ought to be minimised include the use of unrefined procedures for predicting possible readings for an utterance and the substitution of strictly grammatical notions with pragmatic ones that can be considered too vague. To avoid this, a careful examination would be needed of the particular cases in which the inferential processes described can affect lexical meaning in order to determine the available interpretations, and to what extent they affect it; this task is left for future research. As for the choice of pragmatic explanations over grammatical ones, we feel it is justified at least in some cases: for example, the idea of grammatical selection or government of mood by a predicate, which is habitually used in grammatical descriptions, should be substituted, as suggested in Bustos (1986) and Bustos and Aliaga (1996), by a simple relationship of semantic compatibility between a predicate and a subordinate mood, subject to the accommodation processes we have been discussing. This seems to be the only way that the fact that predicates that select the indicative should allow the subjunctive when they are negated can be explained: true government or subcategorisation phenomena are not affected by the presence of negation nor by the insertion of contextual assumptions into the interpretation process.21

. Conclusions By revising the cases where the subjunctive appears when the indicative would be expected, we have been able to show how pragmatic inference plays an important role in grammatical explanation, and simultaneously reaffirm that the procedural, and hence, solid and undeformable nature of the semantics of verbal mood is what leads to the inferences considered, whilst avoiding unacceptable results. Our starting points were the distinction between conceptual and procedural semantics as defined within RT, the semantic content of the subjunctive as non-assertion, and the notions of accommodation and the enrichment and loosening of lexical meaning recently developed within pragmatic theory. By adopting these theoretical tools, we have been led to propose a single solution for two apparently different phenomena: that of the use of the subjunctive in relative clauses in extensional contexts, and so-called double mood selec-



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.18 (52)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

tion in subordinate argument clauses. In both cases, we propose the following interpretive mechanism: a. the sentential context does not seem to favour the appearance of the subjunctive, nor the interpretation of the subordinate clause as non-asserted information; b. however, the subjunctive itself forces us to interpret this context in a sense that can satisfy the semantics it contributes, and to infer the assumptions needed to reconstruct a directive interpretation in the majority of cases (although this is not necessarily the only possibility); c. this operation of inferential adjustment is possible to the extent that no incoherence is produced in the search for relevance in the overall interpretation; and d. the trigger of the process is the priority given to carrying out instructions conveyed by procedural content. The theoretical consequences of our analysis are diverse. In the first place, the relationship between procedural semantics and accommodation allows us to recognise in the use of the subjunctive mood phenomena comparable to those that have traditionally been associated with definite determiners and in general with presuppositional expressions (although this does not imply that mood should also have to be considered a presuppositional element). In the second place, the predominant role we have attributed to procedural content facilitates seeing the processes known as accommodation, coercion, and enrichment (which do not necessarily depend on procedural semantics in every case) as different effects, both on context and on conceptual content, produced by a single cause.22 And finally, the perspective from which we have analysed the distribution of the subjunctive in Spanish turns out to be applicable to a variety of data, such as for instance the relationship between the subjunctive and negation. If we wonder about the difference in meaning between Juan no vio que Pedro saliera (Juan did not see that Pedro went (SUB) out) and Juan no vio que Pedro salía (Juan did not see that Pedro went (IND) out), an important point to take note of is that with the subjunctive saliera, what attracts the focus of negation (i.e. what is being denied) is the subordinate clause; whereas with the indicative, salía, the negation is associated with the matrix verb. The explanation for the fact that only the subjunctive should attract negation is that it is the most immediate way to satisfy the requisite that the subordinate clause should be interpreted as non-asserted information. The relationship between the subjunctive and negation should therefore be no more than a result of the

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.19 (53)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

kind of content introduced by mood. A global explanation of the functioning of verbal mood could, therefore, be based on the approach we have proposed, if elaborated in greater detail.

Notes * We would like to thank the audience at the First Symposium of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Surrey and the participants of the UCL Linguistics Department Pragmatics Reading Group for their valuable comments and discussion of the contents of this article. We also thank Deirdre Wilson and Mark Jary for their detailed comments and insights on a previous draft, and finally, thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their observations. The research for this work has been funded by the Spanish Department of Education, project PB98-0707 “Gramática e interpretación en la teoría de la relevancia”. . I.e. pragmatic inferences derived from the conversational maxims. . For convenience, the Speaker will be referred to as she, and the Hearer, he. . Blakemore (1987); Wilson and Sperber (1993); Escandell and Leonetti (2000); Leonetti and Escandell (2003). . For instance, a simple statement such as (a) can communicate a variety of higher level explicatures, such as (b), (c), or (d), depending on the contextual assumptions that are used in its interpretation: a. b. c. d.

The sun rises in the East. The speaker concludes that (a). The speaker suggests that (a). The speaker insists that (a).

. See also Ahern (2001); Escandell and Leonetti (2000); Lunn (1998); Mejías-Bikandi (1994); Pérez Saldanya (1999); and Ridruejo (1999). . This general definition of assertion does not cover, nonetheless, many cases of non-literal use of language, such as metaphor and irony: see Wilson and Sperber (1988). . For another proposal within the relevance theoretical framework, which regards the subjunctive mood as signalling that the proposition is not relevant in its own right, see Jary (2002). . Extensional contexts are created by predicates which induce the existential interpretation of their object NPs, disallowing nonspecific readings of the NP. They also allow the substitution of co-referring terms while preserving their truth value. In contrast, in intensional contexts, the object NP can receive a nonspecific interpretation, no existential presupposition is activated, and finally, the sentence does not preserve its truth value if its object is substituted with a co-referential term. . “The obligatory character that the choice between one or another mood occasionally takes on can be explained by appealing to the need for contextual consistency. This ‘obligation’ is ultimately determined by the demand for rationality in linguistic behaviour, which



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.20 (54)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

is spelled out in the requisite to avoid manifesting inconsistent beliefs. On the other hand, when in certain constructions optionality remains open, it can be explained by the absence of inconsistency in the choice of one mood or another”. . The idea that the verb form under discussion is actually subjunctive, and not a variant of the pluperfect indicative, is not uncontroversial, although for the sake of the present discussion we shall assume that it is correct. . I.e. for example in subordinate clauses that function as the arguments of factive-emotive predicates like alegrarse de, lamentar, etc.: Lamentamos que sea tan poco económico (We regret that it-is (SUB) so uneconomical). . “We cannot but ask ourselves, however, why verbs of communication are reinterpreted as verbs of influence, but not as verbs of any other kind. The answer may lie in a ‘conversational implicature’ (in the sense of Grice), probably the same one that brings us to interpret declarations as suggestions, or questions as requests (. . . ). But although the origin of the phenomenon may be in a pragmatic principle, it must be remembered that the problem affects lexical semantics, in that it is a lexical class that is involved, with clear effects in the syntax. (. . . ), this is, therefore, not so much a case of homonymy as a kind of polysemy that has its origin in a discourse effect”. . See Wilson and Sperber (1988) regarding the relationship between the semantics of imperative mood and illocutionary force. . E.g. in well-known examples such as Can you pass the salt? . See also Leonetti and Escandell (2001, 2003). . As pointed out by Bustos (1986) (see quotation above). . This is because one of the conditions under which an utterance with directive force is felicitous is that it should be within the hearer’s power to voluntarily carry out the action described. However, since being blond can also be understood as a property that is not necessarily inherent, the reading mentioned (“The director demands the actress should be blond”) may be derivable if we understand ‘be blond’ as equivalent to ‘bleach her hair blond’. . For an analysis of the relation between mood and force in relevance-theoretic terms, see Wilson and Sperber (1988). . The element that induces the directive reading is the subjunctive mood itself, clearly in contrast with the indicative (cf. ¡Que viene! S/he is coming!); this proposal, as can be observed, is not compatible with analyses that postulate the presence of an underlying illocutionary verb, as suggested by an anonymous reviewer. . Rouchota (1994) studies this matter in great detail. . This occurs with epistemic predicates such as creer, saber, pensar, (believe, know, and think, respectively) and the like. . This point is developed more in-depth in Leonetti and Escandell (2001).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15

F: PB12303.tex / p.21 (55)

Spanish subjunctive: Semantics and inference

References Ahern, Aoife (2001). Aspectos semánticos y pragmáticos del modo en español. Unpublished manuscript, UNED. Alarcos, Emilio (1978). Estudios de gramática funcional del español. Madrid: Gredos. Blakemore, Diane (1987). Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Bosque, Ignacio (1990). “Las bases gramaticales de la alternancia modal. Repaso y balance”. In I. Bosque (Ed.), Indicativo y subjuntivo (pp. 13–56). Madrid: Taurus. Bustos, Eduardo de (1986). Pragmática del español. Negación, cuantificación y modo. Madrid: UNED. Bustos, Eduardo de & Aliaga, Francisco (1996). “Indicative, Subjunctive and Context”. In J. Gutiérrez-Rexach & L. Silva-Villar (Eds.), Perspectives on Spanish Linguistics, Vol. I (pp. 15–33). UCLA: Department of Linguistics. Bybee, Joan & Terrell, Tracy (1974). “Análisis semántico del modo en español”. In I. Bosque (Ed.), Indicativo y subjuntivo (pp. 145–163). Madrid: Taurus. Carston, Robyn (1996). “Enrichment and Loosening: Complementary Processes in Deriving the Proposition Expressed”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 205–232. Escandell, María Victoria & Leonetti, Manuel (2000). “Categorías funcionales y semántica procedimental”. In M. Martínez Hernández et al. (Eds.), Cien años de investigación semántica: de Michel Bréal a la actualidad, Vol. I (pp. 363–378). Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas. Escandell, María Victoria & Leonetti, Manuel (2002). “Coercion and the Stage/Individual Distinction”. In J. Gutiérrez-Rexach (Ed.), From Words to Discourse. Trends in Spanish Semantics and Pragmatics (pp. 159–180). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Jary, Mark (2002). “Mood in Relevance theory: a re-analysis focusing on the Spanish Subjunctive”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 14, 157–187. Kadmon, Nirit (2001). Formal Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell. Leonetti, Manuel & Escandell, María Victoria (2001). Los fenómenos de coacción y la interfaz Semántica/Pragmática. Manuscript. Leonetti, Manuel & Escandell, María Victoria (2003). “Semántica conceptual / Semántica procedimental”. Actas del V Congreso de Lingüística General de la Universidad de León. Madrid: Arco. Lunn, Patricia (1989). “Spanish mood and the prototype of assertability”. Linguistics, 27, 687–702. Manteca Alonso-Cortés, Ángel (1981). Gramática del subjuntivo. Madrid: Cátedra. Mejías-Bikandi, Errapel (1994). “Assertion and speaker’s intention: A pragmatically based account of mood in Spanish”. Hispania, 77, 892–902. Papafragou, Anna (2000). Modality: Issues in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface. Oxford: Elsevier. Pérez Saldanya, Manuel (1999). “El modo en las subordinadas relativas y adverbiales”. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, Vol. II (pp. 3209–3251). Madrid: Espasa. Porto Dapena, José Álvaro (1991). Del indicativo al subjuntivo. Madrid: Arco. Quer, Josep (1998). Mood at the Interface. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:15



F: PB12303.tex / p.22 (56)

Aoife Ahern and Manuel Leonetti

Ridruejo, Emilio (1999). “Modo y modalidad. El modo en las subordinadas sustantivas”. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, Vol. II (pp. 3253–3322). Madrid: Espasa. Rouchota, Villy (1994). The Semantics and Pragmatics of the Subjunctive in Modern Greek: a Relevance-Theoretic Approach. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University College London. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 1995). Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan (1988). “Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences”. In J. Dancy et al. (Eds.), Human Agency: Language, Duty and Value (pp. 229–234). Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Reprinted in A. Kasher (Ed.). (1998). Pragmatics: Critical Concepts, Vol. II (pp. 262–289). Routledge: London.) Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan (1993). “Linguistic form and relevance”. Lingua, 90, 1–25.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.1 (57)

Chapter 4

The Conditional A grammaticalised marker of politeness in Spanish* Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

.

Introduction

Pragmatic uses of the Conditional form conveying politeness are so frequent that in some languages pragmatic examples of modal verbs outnumber genuine hypothetical examples (Coates 1983). Similarly, in Spanish, the RAE (1989) points out the polite use of the Conditional form in some utterances. The frequency of this special pragmatic usage has earned for the Conditional the name of conditional of politeness.1 The present approach intends to demonstrate that the non-canonical (non-irrealis) use of the Conditional to convey politeness is not a random phenomenon but rather a motivated process which can take place in specific linguistic contexts. This paper analyses the usage of the Conditional form as a linguistic device to encode politeness in natural conversations recorded in two travel agencies near Madrid (17 hours) in the summer of 1994 and one in Galicia (4 hours) in January of 1995. Out of 190 tokens discerned during the analysis, only a small number (all from the Madrid area except for example (31)) were chosen for this paper. The method of collecting data was the same in all travel agencies.2 The main purpose of the present study is to analyse the usage of a specific linguistic strategy (the Conditional) by the speakers of Spanish in determined contexts. Therefore, we will not consider the gender or number of clients and agents. In particular, the first objective of this paper is to show that the use of the Conditional is not limited to requests, but rather can be found in other speech acts, which might be considered impositive due to the nature of interactions between travel agents and clients. The second objective is to establish the

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23



F: PB12304.tex / p.2 (58)

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

kinds of verbs which undergo the process of grammaticalisation of politeness through the Conditional in Spanish. The use of the Conditional is examined here in situations in which the speaker (S) chooses this form as opposed to the present form in order to distance himself/herself from an act which may be perceived as impositive or forceful for the hearer/addressee (H), or in the S’s opinion requires modification; compare (1a) with (1b). Am3 ¿Me puedes pasar con la reserva? ‘Can you transfer me to Reservations?’ b. Am ¿Me podrías pasar con Francisco R.? ‘Could I talk with Francisco R.?’

(1) a.

In both examples (1a, 1b), a male agent makes a request to another agent. The two requests are mitigated by the use of a modal verb poder and the interrogative (instead of the imperative) mood of the utterance. In addition, in (1b) the agent uses the Conditional form, which seems to distance the moment of the utterance, creating an inference of interpersonal distance (politeness, respect, deference, consideration, etc.). Following Hopper and Traugott (1993), the encoding of distance between an S and an H could have originated through a metonymic association of temporal distance with a respectful attitude towards an H. However, at the synchronic level, the end product of that ‘contextinduced’ reinterpretation of the Conditional may be perceived as a metaphor of interpersonal distance (cf. Fleischman 1989).4 Although one could argue that perhaps both examples (1a) and (1b) should be considered formulaic expressions due to the use of the same modal verb poder (Blum-Kulka 1987), the degree of politeness and/or attenuation is still greater due to the distance created by the Conditional (future in the past) in (1b) in comparison with the simple present in (1a). In addition, the argument in this paper is not based on just one verb type, but the same pattern will be shown in specific verb types, proposed in the following sections. Furthermore, it appears that such non-canonical use of the Conditional form invokes Lakoff ’s (1973) politeness maxims (Don’t impose, Give options) and Brown & Levinson’s (1978/87) concept of negative face. The latter’s derivative, negative politeness is avoidance-based, and “realizations of negativepoliteness strategies consist in assurances that the speaker recognises and respects the addressee’s negative-face wants [‘freedom of action and freedom from imposition’]” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 61, 70). Thus the choice of the S in (1b) seems to be motivated by negative face considerations. Following Brown and Levinson, the S avoids threatening the negative face of the H in

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.3 (59)

The Conditional

the request (1b) which represents a type of an impositive speech act in his/her approach. Naturally, requests are not the only impositive speech acts and they might not be considered impositive in some contexts (see Hernández Flores 1999 on advice). Although we will refer to such concepts as impositive acts, they will not be considered in a strict sense (Searle 1969). The terminology and meaning might coincide in some cases, as in requests or suggestions. Here, however, the term impositive act means an act that might sound forceful and too direct for the H in the S’s view. Therefore, the S has the option of using a strategy to convey his/her utterance in a grammatically more mitigated manner. It should also become clear from this paper that, although some concepts from Brown & Levinson’s theory are useful for the present approach, we do not consider particular speech acts to be face-threatening per se. Our concept of linguistic politeness is based on the encoding of interpersonal distance between the participants of a conversation “with the purpose of conveying respect or a modification of a speech act to attenuate the force of an utterance” (Chodorowska 1997: 357). Such a conceptualisation of politeness includes both positive and negative politeness, as described in Brown & Levinson (1978, 1987). Thus, it is proposed here that the Conditional form used instead of the present form in impositive situations is a grammaticalised marker to encode politeness.

. Theoretical considerations Various studies indicate the polite use of the Conditional in Spanish (RAE 1989; Fleischman 1989, 1995; Koike 1989, 1992; Haverkate 1990; King 1992; Escandell Vidal 1995). However, none of the studies proposes a systematic analysis of the Conditional in context of politeness. Even in Brown & Levinson’s (1987) account, the consideration of the Conditional is confined to requests. The intention of this study is to demonstrate that the non-canonical use of the Conditional to convey politeness is not a random phenomenon but rather a motivated process. In addition, we argue that the conventionalised implicature (in Gricean terms) of politeness (interpersonal distance between interlocutors), obtained through the use of the Conditional, is achieved in contexts of mitigation. Bearing in mind its metonymic origin, the Conditional of politeness can be conceptualised as a metaphor of temporal distance at the synchronic level (cf. Fleischman 1989). That is, the leading force in the polysemic



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23



F: PB12304.tex / p.4 (60)

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

use of the Conditional form is the metonymy, but the end result may be viewed as a metaphor of the interpersonal distance between interlocutors.5 Our argument regarding the grammaticalisation of politeness through this verbal form is based on the frequent implicature of politeness which comes about through the usage of the Conditional in contexts of imposition and/or attenuation (Hopper & Traugott 1993). Before we turn to the analysis of the polite usage of the Conditional, we should also recall the plausible types of verbs, proposed in ChodorowskaPilch (1998), which may serve to encode politeness through such grammatical devices as the Conditional. They are as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Desiderative verbs, e.g. querer ‘to want’, preferir ‘to prefer’, etc. Modal auxiliaries, e.g. poder ‘can’, deber ‘should’, tener que ‘have to’, etc. Performative verbs, e.g. pedir ‘to ask, to request’, aconsejar ‘to advise’, etc. Transactional-situation verbs, e.g. pagar ‘to pay’, coger ‘to take’, decir ‘to say’, etc.

This classification is based on two criteria that motivate encoding of politeness in a given situation. The first criterion may be triggered by the potentially impositive force of utterances (e.g. requests, suggestions, etc.). The second one might be motivated by particular semantic features of certain verbs (desiderative, modal, performative) that require attenuation in order to soften the impositive propositional content of these verbs. The category of transactionalsituation verbs depends on the transactional nature of the speech acts in which they are used. These verbs serve to convey transactions (for example, obtaining information) between interlocutors in specific situations. Concerning potentially impositive speech acts, their classification combines two levels of representation of speech acts. One refers to the sentencelevel and the other to the utterance-level.6 Generally speaking, while referring to a sentence-level, it will be thought of as a sentence type (e.g. declarative, interrogative, and exclamative). In contrast, the utterance-level will refer to the illocutionary force carried by a sentence in a specific context. For example, if we take an impositive statement, it will be a statement at the sentence-level, while at the utterance-level, its illocutionary force may be a question or a request. Such a statement may also convey exasperation, presentation of a problematic situation, or other impositive declarations. In the case of other potentially impositive speech acts, such as direct and indirect questions, requests, indirect requests, suggestions, explanations, offers, and promises, it will always be the combination of two levels of representation of speech acts (cf. ChodorowskaPilch 1998). In particular, at the sentence-level, direct questions take a form

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.5 (61)

The Conditional

of an interrogation, and indirect questions may be represented as a statement followed by a question or other sentential forms whose illocutionary force resembles direct questions at the utterance-level.

. Polite uses of the Conditional in specific verb types . Desiderative verbs The analysis of the data, both in Madrid and Galicia, has revealed numerous examples of querer used in the Conditional form. Speakers showed their preference by using this verb in the Conditional in direct questions, as in examples (2) and (3). (2) Am ¿Qué querrías? ‘What would you like?’ Cw Quería información sobre los viajes al sur. ‘I wanted some information about trips to the South.’ (3) Aw

¿Para qué fechas querríais? ‘Which days would you like?’ Cw Si lo que quiero que me digas si hay plazas. ‘I want you to tell me if there are vacancies.’

In (2) and (3), the Conditional is used in direct questions and not in impositive statements. For instance, in (2) a male agent poses a question employing the Conditional form of querer in a direct question. His intent in using this form is not to use it in a canonical manner (hypothetical meaning), but rather to create an interpersonal distance between him and the client. The use of the Conditional appears to attenuate the interrogative force of the question. In (3), a female agent poses a direct question using the Conditional form of querer in order to mark her deferential attitude towards her client. The client, however, does not choose to express her wish in a more mitigated manner. Her utterance also displays the contrast between a more polite manner of expressing wishes by clients (through the use of the Imperfect form of querer), as in (2) and less polite or neutral manner (the present form of querer) as in (3). In the case of gustar in the Conditional, Ss show a tendency to use this form in impositive statements, as in (4) to (6). (4) Cw Es que quiero. Me gustaría algo así, pero . . . ‘Well, I want. I’d like something like this, but . . . ’



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23



F: PB12304.tex / p.6 (62)

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

(5) Cm Quería saber dos cosas. Primero me gustaría saber qué vuelos hay a Lyon. ‘I wanted to know two things. First, I’d like to know what flights are there to Lyon.’ (6) Cw Estos son a los que me gustaría ir ¿eh? ‘These are the ones to which I’d like to go OK?’

A female client in (4) starts her utterance attempting to express her wish by using the present form of querer. She immediately corrects herself and conveys her wish by using the Conditional of gustar. In (5), a male client starts an impositive statement using the Imperfect of querer. When he proceeds to an indirect question, he chooses the Conditional of gustar. In (6), similarly to (4) and (5), the use of the Conditional allows an impositive statement to sound like a wish. It seems to be the case that gustar is chosen instead of querer due to the different semantic and syntactic nature of the former.7 That is, the semantic subject of utterances with gustar is marked as an indirect object. Therefore, semantically and syntactically utterances with gustar in the Conditional may seem to mark more distance and thus less imposition. Moreover, gustar in the Conditional seems to be a choice made instead of querer in the Present in this context. Thus, such use might be considered conventionalised or in some approaches formulaic. Less frequent use of gustar in the Conditional in comparison with a similar use of querer in the Imperfect (cf. Chodorowska-Pilch 1998) is found in direct questions as in (7). (7) Aw

¿Un Malasia, Israel, algo así te gustaría? ‘A Malaysia, Israel (tour), would you like something like this?’

By the same token, a female agent poses a direct question employing the Conditional which appears to create a meaning of tentativeness. The latter may be interpreted in this case as politeness since the S chooses the Conditional as a strategy to mitigate the imposition of her question. In (8), there is an example of an impositive act with preferir in the Conditional. (8) Cw Quería dos billetes para Mallorca. Preferiría para por la mañana. ‘I wanted two tickets to Mallorca. I would prefer them for the morning.’

Example (8) in many ways resembles example (5), the salient difference being the use of the verb preferir instead of gustar. Both verbs serve to encode defer-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.7 (63)

The Conditional

ential distance between interlocutors in impositive statements. Thus, desiderative verbs tend to encode politeness in direct questions (querer or gustar) and impositive statements (gustar, necesitar, preferir). . Modal verbs Regarding the modal verb poder, Haverkate remarks that verbs such as poder and querer, “by virtue of their lexical meaning, are appropriate devices for reinforcing mitigation”. He also suggests that “assertives typically select poder, and directives querer” (Haverkate 1990: 127). In contrast to Haverkate’s study, it is shown here that the Conditional of poder is employed in directives as well as in other utterances to express politeness in Spanish. (9) Am ¿Podría ayudar a uno de vosotros? ¿Qué queríais? ‘Could I help any of you? What did you want?’ (10) Cw Quería pedirte información. ¿Me podrías decir si . . . es lejos de . . . ? ‘I wanted to ask you for some information. Could you tell me if . . . is far from . . . ?’

In (9), a male agent directs a polite question marked by the Conditional form of poder to waiting clients. From the context, we can infer that his utterance is an offer encoded in the form of a direct question. The agent could have simply used the Present form of poder to ask the same question. In this case, his attitude towards Hs would have been marked in a less polite manner. Thus example (9) seems to contradict Leech’s (1983) or Haverkate’s (1994) statements that some speech acts are inherently polite or non-impositive, respectively, and therefore the S does not need to encode politeness in offers. In this approach, there are no inherently polite or non-impositive utterances, and thus Ss can always resort to grammatical devices to convey their respectful attitude towards their Hs. If we followed Brown & Levinson, we might say that linguistic politeness is encoded not only to save negative face, but to enhance positive face as well. However due to the length of this paper, the consideration of face work cannot be elaborated further here. Conversely in (10), a female client initiates her utterance with the Imperfect of querer which seems to be a polite introduction to the following question.8 The latter is marked by the Conditional of poder which enhances the polite inference of the client’s utterance. The utterances (11) to (13) in some way resemble examples presented by Haverkate (1990) with respect to the use of the Conditional in impositive speech acts.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23



F: PB12304.tex / p.8 (64)

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

(11) Am Pues, la que tiene 5 años . . . [] Lo que podríamos hacer es meter a uno con la tarifa de 13.800 y al otro . . . a uno de 5 años, por ejemplo, con la tarifa de 10.000. Porque vais en total ¿cuántos adultos? ‘So, the one who is 5 years old . . . [] What we could do is to place one with the rate of 13.800 [] and the other 5-year-old, for example, with the rate of 10.000 []. Because, how many of you going are adults?’

A male agent in (11) makes a suggestion to his client. In order to make his utterance more tentative and less forceful, he resorts to a linguistic strategy. Namely, the agent distances the propositional content by encoding it through the Conditional which is allocated from the time of utterance. In this manner, the illocutionary force of the suggestion is mitigated since this strategy allows the S to avoid the direct confrontation between the agent and the client. Example (12) shows an interesting use of poder and other distancing techniques by a male agent. (12) Am (a) Allí nos pueden intentar este hotel. (b) El hotel Parragatas (sic) podría intentar. (c) El Parragatas lo podemos intentar. (d) El Osiris se puede también. (a) ‘They can try this hotel for us there. (b) I could try the hotel Parragatas. (c) We can try the Parragatas. (d) One can also try the Osiris.’

In (12) the agent appears to play with different uses of poder. One of the crucial observations to be made is the fact that the S refers to himself in the first-person singular form only in (b), where he also resorts to the Conditional of poder. In (a) and (c), he covers his identity under the first-person plural reference (an inclusive form in order to show consideration and/or commitment); and poder is employed in the present form. In addition, the recurrent use of the same verb intentar in (a) to (c) makes his suggestion more tentative. Finally, in (d) the agent suppresses his identity through the impersonal se and the verb poder. The latter components of mitigating strategies may interact with the Conditional forms as in (13). (13) Am ¿El viernes por la tarde se podría decir? ‘Could one say Friday afternoon?’

In (13), a male agent is in the middle of a conversation with reservations. He needs from his clients the exact days of their trip, but the information is still unavailable. Thus, the agent poses a direct question to them asking for the day on which they would be able to provide him the necessary information. The ques-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.9 (65)

The Conditional

tion may seem impositive to the clients. Therefore, he applies three modes of mitigation in the situation which is perceived by him as face-threatening. First, thanks to the use of the modal verb poder the S distances him/herself from the expression of the objectivity of the propositional content. Secondly, by temporal dislocation from the time of the utterance (the Conditional instead of the Present) the S seems to achieve the attenuation of the impositive illocutionary force of the direct question. Thirdly, thanks to the syntactic distance carried out through the impersonal se the impact of the S’s verbal act appears to be diminished. A case of the conditional hypothetical reading pressed into service of politeness is in (14). (14) Cw Y para hacerlo para ir allí, si quisiéramos ir en el tren, en el AVE ese también me lo podríais vosotros gestionar? ‘And in order to set it up to go there, if we wanted to go by train, on that “AVE”, could you also arrange it for me?’ (15) Am Te lo podría gestionar. Si lo veremos con tiempo sí, no hay ningún problema. ‘I could arrange it for you. Yes, if we see to it in time, there is no problem.’

A woman in (14) seems to embed her direct question marked by the Conditional of poder in an impositive statement containing the apparent protasis (si quisiéramos) of the conditional sentence. It should be mentioned that the canonical conditionals are based on the truth conditions (if p then q). In contrast, in (14), the use of the conditional hypothetical structure is employed as a strategy to encode politeness between the client and the agent. The remoteness of realisation of the condition serves to create a metaphor of interpersonal distance. Another interesting use of the conditional construction is evidenced in the agent’s utterance. Namely, the apodosis is expressed by poder in the Conditional form, whereas the protasis is marked by the future (instead of the canonical present) as if it were an open conditional. Similarly to the client, the agent seems to embed his promise in this pseudo-conditional utterance. It is obvious that these distancing strategies serve the same purpose; i.e. the linguistic manifestation of politeness by Ss towards Hs. In the case of tener que ‘to have to’, considered an auxiliary verb which introduces a meaning of obligation into the propositional content (Hernández Alonso 1986; RAE 1989), the meaning of obligation or imposition seems to be suppressed or attenuated, especially when used in the Conditional or in the



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23



F: PB12304.tex / p.10 (66)

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

Imperfect (cf. Sirbu-Dumitrescu 1988). See examples (16)–(17) concerning the modal use of tener que in the Conditional form. (16) Aw

Tendríais que hacerlo, si quieres y las quieres y hay plazas mañana o pasado mañana, o sea mañana o el lunes, es decir reservar mañana y emitir mañana o el lunes y emitir el martes. ‘You should do it, if you want to, and you want them and there are vacancies tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, that is, tomorrow or Monday, that is, to make reservations tomorrow and issue (them) tomorrow or on Monday and issue (them) on Tuesday.’

A female agent in (16) makes a suggestion to her clients using the Conditional of tener que. The canonical meaning of obligation of tener que is mitigated in the following manner. First, the Conditional appears to displace the imposition directed towards clients producing an inference of distance between the agent and her clients. Secondly, the agent explicitly indicates through a lexical expression (si quieres) that her suggestions do not mean to be impositive for the clients. The realisation of the agent’s suggestions is dependent upon her clients’ will. In this manner, the agent also complies with Lakoff ’s maxims of politeness. The utterance in (17) illustrates an impositive statement which contains three verbs displaced from its neutral temporal reference. (17) Aw

Ya, o sea, tendría que elegir un poco la zona y el precio y luego ya te pediría de de estas características lo que hay y luego ya se le diría si . . . ‘I see, that is to say, I should choose a little the place and the price and then I would ask you for the actual characteristics and then one would tell her/him whether . . . ’

Regarding tener que, the agent in (17) could have used the Present form of the verb. In that case, the utterance would have sounded less tentative and more impositive for the S. Concerning haber que used as a modal verb (cf. Sirbu-Dumitrescu 1988), see examples in (18) and (19). (18) Am Bueno, {} posiblemente, lo más lógico es que no llevarán ningún tipo de descuento ¿eh? Al tener ya tres años. Habría que consultar con la compañía de todas formas. ‘Well, {} it’s possible, it is to be expected that they won’t have any kind of discount OK? Because they are already three years old. In any case, one would need to consult the company.’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.11 (67)

The Conditional

(19) Am El billete de avión habría que cerrarlo. Tanto la ida como la vuelta. ‘One would need to close the plane ticket. Both ways.’

Both utterances exemplify the use of haber que whose impositive meaning of the suggestion in (18) and of the impositive statement in (19) is mitigated by the Conditional form. The impersonal reference of the verb provides an additional component of the face-saving strategy. Thus the verb in question may be considered a possible linguistic device which encodes politeness between interlocutors when used in the Conditional. . Performative verbs Another type of verbs which tend to trigger the encoding of politeness are performative verbs; their lexical meaning may represent an imposition for the H and therefore the S needs to attenuate their propositional force in order to observe politeness maxims. In Searle’s (1976) terminology, the speech act in which the verb recomendar ‘to recommend’ is used would be classified as directive. In general, directives are attempts by the S to cause the H to do something. Their illocutionary force may convey the force of requesting, questioning, ordering, etc. Thus the use of recomendar in the context of travel agencies may be perceived as an imposition, especially in situations in which the agent advises the client to do something not as beneficial as the client would want it to be. Consider examples (20) and (21). (20) Am Pero, vamos. Yo el que te recomendaría sería el que más te . . . Algunos son [] pesetas, pero te cubre si tienes que volver antes puedes volver antes [] ‘But, let’s see. The one I would recommend to you would be that . . . Some cost [] pesetas, but it covers you if you have to come back earlier, you can come back earlier.’ (21) Aw

Si vas a estar, lo que es . . . siempre en el hotel, yo te recomendaría hacer el . . . ‘If you are going to stay, which is . . . always in the hotel, I would recommend you doing the . . . ’

A male agent in (20) and a female agent in (21) try to convince their clients about advantages of the suggestions made by agents. Both agents use recomendar in the first-person form and additionally emphasise their suggestions with



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23



F: PB12304.tex / p.12 (68)

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

the pronoun yo. In order to mitigate the imposition of their utterances, the agents apply the Conditional as a marker of politeness. Another performative verb (pedir ‘to ask’) in the Conditional has been shown in example (17). The Conditional of this verb apparently achieves similar effects at the level of utterance. In addition, Haverkate (1990) mentions rogar ‘to request, to beg’ in the Conditional form as a directive performative, which belongs to the same verb type. . Transactional-situation verbs In contrast to desiderative verbs, modal auxiliaries, and performative verbs, the category of transactional-situation verbs is not defined in terms of lexical and syntactic properties, but in terms of certain pragmatic effects that may be produced by their use. In particular, for a given verb to engage in the process of grammaticalisation of politeness, the character of the transaction between interlocutors has to be impositive. This category will contain a wide range of verbs (stative, motion, enunciation, and others). A frequently occurring stative verb in the Conditional is ser ‘to be’, as in (22) and (23). (22) Aw

Mire. Sería esta columna. Dependiendo del hotel que quiera serían los precios. ‘Look (P). It would be this column. The prices would depend on the hotel you (P) want.’

(23) Aw

El 22, ¿a qué hora sería? ‘On the 22nd, at what time would it be?’

A female agent in (22) indicates to her client a piece of information in a catalogue. Her utterance represents an impositive statement addressed to the client. In order to indicate her polite attitude towards the H, she first refers to him/her in the respectful third-person form, and secondly makes use of the Conditional form of ser in order to reduce the assertiveness of the utterance. Example (23) is similar in this respect. In this case, however, it is the illocutionary force of the direct question which is mitigated by ser in the Conditional. The second stative verb is estar ‘to be’ which has been found in direct questions, as in (24). (24) Cm Y luego el tema de traslado. ¿Cómo estaría eso? ‘And then the transfer. How would that be?’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.13 (69)

The Conditional

It is obvious that in (24) a client could have used the Present form of estar in its neutral meaning with relation to politeness. Among motion verbs, ir ‘to go’ has the capacity to encode politeness in impositive statements and direct questions, as in (25). (25) Am Vamos a ver. ¿En qué fechas irías a Damasco? ‘Let’s see. When would you go to Damascus?’

The agent in (25) could have said: ¿En qué fechas quieres ir a Damasco? ‘When do you want to go to Damascus?’. In fact, such a possibility occurs in (26). It seems that Ss in (25) and other similar examples purposely use the Conditional in order to encode polite attitude towards their interlocutors. The Conditional in (25) is not used canonically due to the fact that this is a real question without an expressed condition. The Conditional of salir ‘to leave’ has been found in direct questions addressed to Hs as illustrated in (26). (26) Am ¿Que día saldría? ¿Qué día quiere ir? ‘Which day would you (P) leave? Which day do you (P) want to go?’

In (26), a male agent overtly displays his politeness strategy. First, he uses the Conditional of salir encoding his polite attitude towards his client, and, secondly, repeats his question employing the Present form of querer + ir. The latter question is more direct than the former one. Thus, the agent asks for the same information in both utterances, but conveys different levels of politeness due to the use of different temporal forms. In (27) and (28), the enunciation verb decir ‘to say, to tell’ appears in impositive statements. (27) Aw

Esos son todos los precios que hay aquí. Y ya te diría que, no sé cómo están las playas de por allí. ‘These are all the prices that there are here. I would tell you that, I don’t know about the beaches over there.’

(28) Am Venga, vale. Pues entonces te lo diría el viernes por la tarde. ‘Come on, OK. So I would tell you this on Friday afternoon.’

In (27), a female agent is in a problematic situation. She cannot provide the information her client wants to know. In order to save her face, she applies the Conditional of decir which apparently mitigates her inability to accommodate the client. (28) is comparable in a way with the only difference that the utterance is a promise to a reservation agent. Here, the agent attempts to reduce the force of the promise in case something happens and he will not be able to



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23



F: PB12304.tex / p.14 (70)

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

fulfil the promise. In both utterances, agents make use of the Conditional in order to diminish the responsibility for their acts and finally to encode politeness towards Hs. A similar example of the Conditional of decir has been noted in (17). It should be mentioned that in (27) and (28) the distancing strategy used by the Ss appears to be more of a face-saving device for Ss rather than Hs. However, due to the length of this paper, it cannot be further elaborated here. Generally, other verbs may encode polite distance between interlocutors in direct questions, indirect requests or impositive statements. Consider utterances in (29) and (30). (29) Cw ¿Me harías una reserva para Madeira? ‘Would you make me a reservation for Madeira?’ (30) Cw Me interesaba un viaje económico para dos personas mayores de 60 años. Lo cogería mañana por la mañana si es posible. ‘I was interested in an inexpensive trip for two sixty-year old people. I would take it tomorrow morning if it’s possible.’

The example in (29) represents an indirect request. Here, a woman attempts to attenuate the imposition of her request using the Conditional of hacer. Indirect requests seem to occur in utterances whose grammatical subject refers to the H. In (30), the client’s polite attitude is also marked by the imperfect of interesar (interesaba). In the case of impersonal verbs (e.g. haber), the Conditional may be employed in direct questions as a marker of politeness (31). (31) Aw

¿Habría alguna posibilidad de meterlo en taxi o algo? ‘Would it be possible to put him in a taxi or something?’

This last example, taken from the data recorded in Galicia, also shows the same pattern of use of the Conditional in Spanish, regardless of any possible claims that there might be an influence of Galician on Castilian in Galicia. It simply shows how widespread this phenomenon is in Peninsular Spanish, which may be considered a proof of an ongoing tendency in this language. . Summary of verbs used in the Conditional conveying politeness Table 1 gathers the verbs and the speech acts present in the analysis, which may encode polite attitude between interlocutors (cf. Chodorowska-Pilch 1998). Table 1 indicates the following information: (1) the Conditional form is applied in six kinds of speech acts (direct question, impositive statement, indirect request, offer, promise, and suggestion); (2) there are twelve most frequently utilised verbs in the analysed data, employed to encode politeness; (3) the use

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.15 (71)

The Conditional

Table 1. Verb types and speech acts in the Conditional of politeness (abbreviations: DQ – direct question, IS – impositive statement, IR – indirect request, SG – suggestion, OF – offer, PR – promise) Speech acts Verbs

DQ

IS

1. QUERER 2. GUSTAR 3. PREFERIR* 4. PODER 5. TENER QUE 6. HABER QUE 7. RECOMENDAR 8. PEDIR 9. SER/ESTAR 10. IR/SALIR 11. DECIR 12. HACER 13. OTHER

+ + + +

+ + + + + +

+ +

+ + +

IR

OF

PR

SG

+

+

+

+ + + +

+

+

+

+ + +

* Also necesitar.

of the modal verb poder stands out among all the verbs in Table 1. Thus, it also has great significance in the grammaticalisation of politeness. The usage of modal verbs in general (poder, tener que, haber que) as well as the stative transactional-situation verbs is significant in the Conditional (see Table 2). In addition, the use of querer in the Conditional (only in DQ and IS) compared with poder in the Conditional used in six speech acts (DQ, IS, IR, SG, OF, PR) shows greater importance of one type of verb over the other. Moreover, previously presented analysis of this verb has revealed numerous structures in which poder may encode interpersonal distance through the Conditional. In conclusion, all verbs in Table 1 (excluding recomendar, pedir, hacer) have a tendency to encode politeness in impositive statements. Most verbs (excluding two modal verbs – tener que, haber que –, recomendar, and decir) may express polite distance in direct questions. All modal verbs and recomendar are able to convey respect in suggestions. . Types of verbs used in the Conditional Based on the analysis of verbs in the Conditional and Table 1, the following types of verbs used to encode politeness in impositive contexts are established. Consider the listing in (1–4):



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23



F: PB12304.tex / p.16 (72)

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch

1. Desiderative verbs: querer ‘to want’, desear ‘to wish’, gustar ‘to like’, preferir ‘to prefer’, necesitar ‘to need’. 2. Modal verbs: poder ‘can, to be able to’, tener que ‘to have to’, haber que ‘to need to’. 3. Performative verbs: recomendar ‘to recommend’, pedir ‘to ask’, rogar ‘to beg’. 4. Transactional-situation verbs: (a) stative: ser ‘to be’, estar ‘to be’; (b) motion verbs: ir ‘to go’, salir ‘to leave’; (c) enunciation verbs: decir ‘to say’; (d) other, e.g., hacer ‘to do’, coger ‘to take’, etc. Table 2 illustrates the number of tokens and the percentages of each verb type used to encode politeness in the Conditional in the data from travel agencies discussed above. Table 2. Frequency of each verb type in the Conditional of politeness (abbreviations: D – desiderative, M – modal, P – performative, T – transactional-situation, e – enunciation, m – motion, s – stative , o – other) Verb types

Total

D

M

P

Tm

Te

Ts

To

Tokens %

190 100

21 11

53 28

5 2.6

18 9.5

4 2.1

65 34.2

24 12.6

It should be pointed out that the classification obtained in the above listing (1–4) and the percentages of the occurrence of certain verbs in Table 2 are based on interactions which took place in travel agencies during a limited time. Therefore, on the one hand, this classification might not reflect the whole range of verbs that have the capacity to encode S’s polite attitude. On the other hand, due to the specific nature of interactions in travel agencies, the collected data might overstate the importance of some of these verbs and speech acts. Therefore, we need more systematic studies on the encoding of politeness from different kinds of interactions in order to account for all possible verbs which may encode interpersonal distance in Spanish and other languages. Nevertheless, the frequency of such usage of the Conditional in Spanish clearly indicates a motivated and systematic process of grammaticalisation of politeness.

. Conclusion In this paper, we have tried to show that the Conditional may function as a marker to encode politeness in impositive situations in Spanish. Based on the

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.17 (73)

The Conditional

analysis of relevant examples, four types of verbs have been found crucial in the encoding of interpersonal distance. Also, we have discerned six types of speech acts in which the expression of politeness is necessary due to the nature of speech acts. Furthermore, we have argued that the Conditional is a suitable device to encode politeness. That is, the temporal distance grammatically marked in this form (i.e., future in the past) creates the metaphor of distance between interactants. We have also claimed that the Conditional is a grammaticalised device to convey politeness. First, the canonical meaning of the Conditional is exploited to express deference in determined contexts. Secondly, the frequency of such use may be considered as evidence for the underlying process of grammaticalisation. Further research should investigate whether similar types of verbs and speech acts are relevant in the process of grammaticalisation of politeness in other languages which have the Conditional as a grammatical form to express hypotheticality.9

Notes * This paper is a significantly reduced version of what is proposed in Chodorowska-Pilch (1998). I am grateful to Bernard Comrie for comments and suggestions on previous versions of this material and for the opportunity to stay at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig in June of 2002, where this paper was modified to its present form. I gratefully acknowledge the Del Amo Fellowship which allowed me to collect the data in the summer of 1994. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for comments to improve this paper. Naturally, any shortcomings are my responsibility. . Haverkate (1994) proposes to change the traditional denomination for “el condicional de mitigación” as the polite use of the Conditional achieves an effect of attenuation. . Interactions between travel agents (four in each travel agency) and clients were recorded with a small micro-cassette placed on the desk completely out of their sight for a period of about one month. Occasionally, telephone conversations between travel agents and tour operators were recorded. Only the travel agents were aware that their conversations with clients were being recorded. The agents were informed that the recordings would be used to study natural language usage, and were assured that their names would not be disclosed. Only the parts relevant for our analysis were transcribed and later analysed. . The following notations have been introduced: A: agent, C: client, m: man, w: woman; . . . : noticeable pause or break in rythm without falling intonation, []: part irrelevant for the analysis, [a], [b], etc.: letters marking crucial places for the analysis. . See Schwenter and Traugott (1995) and Chodorowska-Pilch (1998) for discussions of the metaphor and the metonymy in grammaticalisation.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23



F: PB12304.tex / p.18 (74)

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch . Compare with Sweetser’s (1990) claim about metaphorically motivated acquisition of secondary senses by a linguistic form. . See Searle (1969) for a discussion of speech acts and the structure of illocutionary acts. . I owe this observation to Larry Romans. . It has been pointed out to me that it is also a grounder or a pre-request. . See Polish and other Romance languages in Chodorowska-Pilch (1998).

References Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (1987). “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics, 11, 131–146. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1978). “Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena.” In E. Goody (Ed.), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction (pp. 56–289). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chodorowska, Marianna (1997). “On the polite function of ¿me entiendes? in Spanish.” Journal of Pragmatics, 28, 355–371. Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna (1998). Encoding of Politeness in Spanish and Polish: A CrossLinguistic Study. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International. Coates, Jennifer (1983). The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm. Escandell Vidal, María Victoria (1995). “Cortesía, fórmulas convencionales y estrategias indirectas”. Revista Española de Lingüística, 25(1), 31–66. Fleischman, Suzanne (1989). “Temporal distance: A basic linguistic metaphor”. Studies in Language, 13(1), 1–50. Fleischman, Suzanne (1995). “Imperfective and Irrealis”. In J. L. Bybee & S. Fleischman (Eds.), Modality in Grammar and Discourse (pp. 519–551). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Haverkate, Henk (1990). “Politeness and mitigation in Spanish: A morpho-pragmatic analysis. Unity in diversity”. In H. Pinkster & I. Genee (Eds.), Papers Presented to Simon C. Dik on his 50th birthday (pp. 107–131). Dordrecht/Providence: Foris. Haverkate, Henk (1994). Cortesía verbal. Estudio pragmalingüístico. Madrid: Gredos. Hernández Alonso, César (1986). Gramática funcional del español. Madrid: Gredos. Hernández Flores, Nieves (1999). “Politeness ideology in Spanish colloquial conversations: The case of advice”. Pragmatics, 9(1), 37–49. Hopper, Paul J. & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1993). Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, Larry D. (1992). The Semantic Structure of Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Koike, Dale A. (1989). “Requests and the role of deixis in politeness”. Journal of Pragmatics, 13, 187–202. Koike, Dale A. (1992). Language and Social Relationship in Brazilian Portuguese. The Pragmatics of Politeness. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:23

F: PB12304.tex / p.19 (75)

The Conditional

Lakoff, Robin (1973). “The Logic of Politeness; or, Minding Your P’s and Q’s”. Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 292–305. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society. Leech, Geoffrey N. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. Real Academia Española (RAE) (1989). Esbozo de una nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Schwenter, Scott A. & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1995). “The semantic and pragmatic development of substitutive complex prepositions in English”. In Andreas H. Jucker (Ed.), Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English (pp. 243– 273). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Searle, John (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John (1976). “A classification of illocutionary acts”. Language in Society, 5, 1–23. Sirbu-Dumitrescu, Domnita (1988). “Contribución al estudio de los verbos modales en español”. Hispania, 71, 139–147. Sweetser, Eve (1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:9/02/2004; 13:17

F: PB123P22.tex / p.1 (77)

Pragmatics and applied linguistics

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.1 (79)

Chapter 5

Role-plays and the assessment of oral proficiency in Spanish Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

.

Introduction

How can we best assess how well someone speaks a second language? There is, as the research reported in this article shows, no easy answer to this question for the assessment of oral proficiency involves an interrelated set of validity, reliability, authenticity, and competence constructs. However, whilst complex, it is also a fascinating task and one that it is, in our view, best approached from an integrative standpoint. This is what we have done here, analysing Spanish oral proficiency examinations using quantitative (especially, lexical description) and qualitative (discourse analytic) frameworks. We focus upon one task within the examination practice, the so-called role-play, and look at learner and examiner talk in its opening stages. The emphasis on learner and examiner talk is justified by the fact that, although it is only the learner who is ultimately being assessed, the object of assessment, i.e. the language being generated, is locally co-constructed by all participants.

. Role-plays and the assessment of oral proficiency One of the assumptions underlying language proficiency interviews is that in order to assess learners’ ability in speaking a second language (L2) one needs to get them to speak with a proficient speaker of that second language – the examiner. We wanted to test if this was indeed the case, to which end we selected Spanish as the second language and role-plays as the particular parts of the interview upon which to focus. Formally stated, therefore, our principal research question was: How do the role-plays under investigation allow for an assess-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.2 (80)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

ment of (various aspects of) learners’ oral proficiency in Spanish? This was premised upon our belief that by examining the actual discourse structures of the role-plays we would be able to understand better the practice of assessing speaking ability in Spanish as a second language. As Celce-Murcia states: Although there exists a literature on using interviews for the assessment of second language oral proficiency, until very recently studies of LPIs [language proficiency interviews] ignored the central validity issue of oral proficiency assessment – namely, the ways in which the LPI is accomplished through discourse. (Celce-Murcia 1998: ix. Our emphasis)1

Celce-Murcia’s point regarding validity in LPIs can be applied to our data. After all, these role-plays are assessment tools that are implemented in and through the discourse generated by the parties involved. As such, they both sample and produce the abilities that they attempt to measure. For instance, the examiner’s reactions to the candidate’s performance during the role-play affect not only the amount of information provided by the candidate but also the way in which he/she provides it. Moreover, just as in many LPIs, so in our data the role-plays involved interaction between a proficient speaker (the examiner) and a learner (the candidate). The reason for selecting role-plays within the examination was two-fold. Firstly, they are increasingly being considered as optimal methods of oral proficiency assessment. Over the last ten years, research has strongly suggested that role-plays are better indicators of learners’ ability in speaking a second language than other, more traditional, tasks such as non-scripted interviews or picture description (cf. Shohamy 1988; Di Pietro 1989; Kormos 1999; Salaberry 2000). Since LPIs constitute asymmetric interactions, in which rights and duties are unequally distributed (van Lier 1989), the use of role-plays, where candidates can perform different – and more equitable – social roles, is believed to contribute to minimising the asymmetries of the test situation. Needless to say, this can only be so if the candidates are asked to enact roles with which they are reasonably familiar in their own language. For instance, unless they were medical students or doctors, and had received proper second language training in this field, it would be inappropriate to ask them to perform the role of a brain surgeon discussing with colleagues a high-risk operation. Secondly, role-plays have been said to yield authentic, real language from the learners. By authentic/real it is meant that the characteristics of role-play tasks during examinations and of comparable non-test tasks in the second language correlate reasonably well. This is believed to be particularly the case when open role-plays are used. They include a set of instructions that specify

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.3 (81)

Role-plays and oral proficiency

players’ roles, the initial situation and at least one player’s communicative goal without either prescribing conversational outcomes or including information about how to negotiate such outcomes. However, even in open role-plays, and as Kasper and Dahl (1991: 228) argue, “the language generated is only ‘real’ in the context of the play, since some outcome needs to be negotiated.”2 We agree with Kasper and Dahl’s view and regard the language of role-plays as authentic/real only within the play in which it occurs. This play is in itself embedded in an assessment situation and, hence, bound by specific constraints. This is not to say that role-plays are inappropriate assessment methods. As noted above, they can help minimise asymmetries in interaction. Crucially, too, they can provide insightful information about particular aspects of learners’ interactional competence (Kramsch 1986; Kasper & Dahl 1991). We would like to indicate at this juncture our preference for the term interactional competence rather than that of communicative competence (Canale & Swain 1980). Interactional competence adds to pragmatic, discourse and strategic competence learners’ competence in (at least) the following five aspects (He & Young 1998): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

sequences of speech acts or “rhetorical scripts” (Ranney 1992); lexis and syntactic structures; strategies for managing turns (Young 1995a); management of topics (Young 1995b); boundaries signalling strategies.

Demonstrating competence in these features is contingent upon the particular context in which interactants find themselves. For example, with regards to point 5 above, Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig’s (1992) study of closing sequences in ordinary conversations and in academic advising sessions between tutor and student shows that it is not legitimate in the latter to re-invoke topics that have already been dealt with, whereas in ordinary conversation re-invocations are legitimate closing strategies since they signal that no new topics will be introduced and, hence, that the conversation is about to end. Interactional competence is therefore local and practice-specific. As such, it is not something that can be ascribed to one participant. It is instead a joint endeavour – something that is being co-constructed by all participants in a here and now of talk.3 As Hall argues: talk is comprised of interactive practices, structured moments of face-to-face interaction – differently enacted and differently valued – whereby individuals



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.4 (82)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

come together to create, articulate, and manage their collective histories via the use of sociohistorically defined and valued resources. (Hall 1995: 207–208)

The role-plays that comprise our corpus belong to the type of face-to-face interaction described by Hall above. During them examiner and candidate coconstruct interaction, since both contribute linguistic and pragmatic resources to the interactive practice at hand. The examination context in which role-plays are embedded is first and foremost an interactive practice between two persons who influence each other and react in relation to each other. This being the case, we feel that descriptive analyses of the language being used by either the examiner or the candidate need to be complemented by an analysis of their interactional competence. This is what we have attempted here and will go on to analyse, after providing necessary background information.

. Background Our data consisted of role-plays from a set of Spanish oral proficiency examinations (Intermediate Level) conducted in the United Kingdom by a professional examining body. Candidates were all adults and of both sexes. The type of roleplay used in this examination was a closed role-play in which candidates and examiners were given a set of instructions regarding the overall structure of the role-play task prior to the examination (cf. Appendix).4 These included details of the communicative goals that they should achieve and how to negotiate some conversational outcomes. The candidates’ brief brought candidates’ attention to the fact that their aim was “to question the effectiveness of the actual occupation and then to argue that the Spanish government’s economic policies will have more success in combating unemployment than radical protest” (our emphasis). And the examiners’ brief was equally explicit about their position as being one in which they had to “defender la ocupación y para rebatir los argumentos sobre el bienestar de la economía española, pero concédale (al/ a la candidato / a) amplia oportunidad para exponer su posición” [“defend the occupation and to refute arguments concerning the good performance of the Spanish economy, but give him/her (the candidate) ample opportunity to present his/her position.”] (our emphasis). The role-plays followed a short presentation made by each of the candidates, and an unscripted interview between the examiner and the candidate on different issues raised during the presentation. In the role-play, the examiner assumed the role of a spokesperson for a radical group that had occupied an

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.5 (83)

Role-plays and oral proficiency

official building in order to draw attention to the problem of unemployment in Madrid. The candidate played the role of a London journalist who had been sent to Madrid to interview the spokesperson for the radical group (i.e. the examiner). The analysis reported here focuses on the first half of the role-play, paying special attention to its opening stages. There are two main reasons for this. The first one is that the opening stages of any face-to-face interaction are often one of its most uncertain elements, especially when interactants do not know each other well. This is because the purpose of talk is often unclear, interactional goals are being established, the topic may be sensitive to one or both of the participants, etc. It is also so because participants have to make decisions vis-à-vis the degree of (in)formality, level of (in)directness, etc. on the basis of their knowledge of the micro-and macro-structural context of talk in which they find themselves. These considerations all have implications for the ways in which turns are yielded and taken, topics are introduced and abandoned, and so forth. The second reason stems from research on examiner performance in L2 assessment (Meara & Babí 2001). In these authors’ study, a set of examiners were asked to assess picture descriptions by English L1 learners of Spanish, noting the specific points at which they felt confident enough to make a judgement about the candidates. The results suggested that such decisions were made surprisingly quickly, often from as few as twenty words in the description, and were thereafter very resistant to change. Our consequent concern thus was to ascertain what type of information about the candidates’ speaking ability examiners could derive on the basis of the talk produced during the initial moments of the role-play.

. The lexical range of candidates and examiners In view of the above, our first analysis concerned how much vocabulary was generated in these role-plays, and what proportion of it corresponded to the examiner and to the candidate. This involved undertaking a quantitative, descriptive analysis of our corpus. In order to do this, we first transcribed the tape recordings. Since, as noted earlier, we were concerned with the role-play as an interactive practice (Hall 1995), we transcribed the data using an adapted version of Atkinson and Heritage’s (1984) version of Jefferson’s conventions5 and, for the purposes of the descriptive lexical analysis, subsequently tidied up the transcripts, omitting false starts, fillers, pauses, etc. and analysing the remaining items using computer software that allowed us to examine the vocabulary



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.6 (84)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

that was being used by each of the participants. To do so, we standardised the transcriptions to the first five minutes of the role-plays and then looked at the total number of words in the transcriptions (word tokens). This analysis revealed that, on average, the examiners exceeded 50% of total contribution to the role-play, that mark being specifically cited in the examination instructions as the maximum permitted for their input (cf. Table 1 – Appendix). In order to avoid the effect of word repetition in the data, which cannot be detected by word token measurements, we conducted a second analysis, this time based on the number of word types (i.e., the number of different words in the transcriptions) generated by examiners and candidates. These data can be found in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.7 (85)

Role-plays and oral proficiency

This analysis revealed that the examiners again played a dominant role in the conversations, at least in terms of verbal input. In most cases, the examiners contributed well over 50% of the word types used in the texts, and the candidates’ contributions were severely limited. In the worst case (Number 1 in Figure 1), the candidate used only 34 words which were not also used by the examiner – a mere 20% of the total type count. In the best case (Number 10 in Figure 1), the candidate used 85 words is that were not used by the examiner, but even this was only 41% of the total type count. These figures raise interesting questions about the data that examiners can draw upon when they come to assess how well candidates speak Spanish. In five minutes of interaction, 85 word types is not very much to go on, and 34 is even less. What is more, these figures need to be treated with caution. Table 1 below shows a complete list of the 34 words that were used by candidate 1 independently of examiner 1. Of these 34 words, only 6 words (if the two errors – projecto and crezar – are excluded) lie outside the first 1,000 words of Spanish, as listed in the Diccionario de Frecuencias de las Unidades Lingüísticas del Castellano (Alameda & Cuetos 1996). From the descriptive analysis of the lexis used by examiners and candidates in our data it is difficult to single out one decisive reason why candidates’ production of Spanish was so limited. However, the type of role-play used and the parts allocated within this appear to be crucial factors. First, by casting candidates in the role of interviewers, they were effectively being asked to encourage their interviewees (the examiners) to provide information, thus reducing their own potential input. Second, the posing of questions can often entail repeating at least part of what the interviewee has said thereby reducing the likelihood of candidates using new word types. And third, we feel that the role of interviewer was inappropriate for intermediate level candidates. More advanced candidates would probably have been better able to perform this role in ways that allowed them to demonstrate lexical richness and adequate register even within the interactional limitations of the role. Even within the constraints of the close role-play format, they might, for example, have been able to reformulate – rather than repeat – part of the interviewee’s answers in order to guarantee a smooth transition between topics within the interview.

. Role expectations by candidates and examiners Having undertaken the above analysis, we decided to go beyond the issues of how many and which words candidates were using. We decided to examine



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.8 (86)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

the various and heterogeneous ways in which candidates and examiners interacted with one another during the opening stages of the role-plays. To do so, however, we needed to know first the circumstances surrounding the role-play. This meant looking at the actual contextualisation of the role-play task, both for candidates and examiners. The aim of the role-play, as presented in the examiners’ task brief, was to assess candidates’ ability to: 1. understand given information and apply it relevantly during the discussion; 2. make apposite and positive contributions to the discussion/negotiation and to respect the social and cultural norms of the situation; 3. use accurate language and clear and acceptable pronunciation; and 4. use appropriate register and range of structures. These four goals suggest that the role-plays were indeed geared towards testing not only the candidates’ communicative but also their interactional competence. For example, in 4 reference to appropriate register and range of structures entails not only aspects of pragmatic and discourse competence but also competent use of certain obligatory speech acts in a certain sequence (i.e., rhetorical scripts) within the journalist interview in the role-play. Likewise, making apposite contributions includes both appropriate use of politeness strategies and knowledge of how and when to access the speaking floor or when to yield it to the other party and of how to manage topic shifts and to signal boundaries within the interview. Unfortunately, any further specificity as to what exactly constituted an (in)adequate display of competence beyond the linguistic level was absent from the assessment guidelines. In 2 reference is made to the need to respect the social and cultural norms of the situation. However, this information is rather vague and may lead to different interpretations by the examiners. Does it refer to the candidates’ awareness of the degree of familiarity to be exhibited between interactants (e.g. use of T or V forms)?; Does it point to the interviewing style required of them in their assumed role of journalists? For example, how (in)direct are they expected to be and how is this expected to affect the ways in which they signal boundaries between different parts of the interview, shift topics through interruptions or otherwise, adhere to pre-allocated interviewer turns, and so forth? Moreover, instructions within the examiners’ brief were not always consistent with those given to the candidates. For instance, the examiners’ brief task indicated that a pass candidate would “deal with opposing arguments ca-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.9 (87)

Role-plays and oral proficiency

pably but without aggression or discourtesy”. Yet, nowhere in the candidates’ brief task did it say that they must adopt the role of self-restrained and courteous journalists. In fact, it actually encouraged them to argue their position strongly: “Be prepared to respond to any points the spokesperson might make to defend his/her position. Remember that you are trying to discover where the truth lies: with the Spanish government or with the protesters?” (Appendix. Emphasis added). This may have compromised the candidates’ task, unknown to them, of appearing suitably courteous since they most likely tried to defend their position and, as they were asked to do, to find the truth. Both of these tasks are more confrontational and face-threatening in nature than, say, those of compromising or of accepting the other’s version of the facts. Consequently, they require the display of different turn taking and floor management strategies. These are important aspects to bear in mind in the assessment, especially since the candidates’ role involved displaying skills specific to the interactive practice of an interview embedded within a role-play assessment context. Consider Extract 1 below, where the candidate (C03) is clearly at a loss with regard to the degree of formality required of her as an interviewer in the role-play:

Extract 1 01 E03 hola puedo ayudarte con algo? ‘hi how can I help you?’ 02 C03 (4.0) sí hola hola erm:: (.) ah te le puedo tutear? ‘(4.0) yes hi hi erm:: (.) ah may I use tú with you?’ 03 E03 yo soy una okupa me puedes [hablar de tú ‘I’m a squatter you may [use tú’ 04 C03

[ah vale pues tú entonces QUE PASA AQUI ‘[ah ok tú it is then WHAT’S UP

05

TIO? porque mira se parece aquí una marimorena para toda la gente (.) MATE? it looks as if these people are really worked up over all this (.)

06

hay grupos militares hay facciones radicales (.) um qué está pasando there are military groups there are radical factions (.) um what’s going on

07

aquí? [. . . ] here? [. . . ]’



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.10 (88)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

Extract 1 illustrates the potential of role-plays in the assessment of oral proficiency beyond the traditional realms of grammar and vocabulary. On this occasion, and after checking with the examiner in 02 the degree of familiarity to be assumed, the candidate opts for an extremely casual register which is inappropriate in the context of the role-play. Whilst the candidate’s knowledge of the colloquial terms tío and marimorena is commendable within the context of an intermediate level examination, journalists would not use them with their interviewees. And it is the role-play format that allows candidates like C03 to display their (lack of) depth of knowledge of these terms, their awareness of register, forms of address, etc. so that these can be assessed by the examiners. However, for role-plays to make use of their full potential as assessment tools, they need, amongst other things, to be adequately contextualised. C03’s use of inappropriate register in 04–05 may well be due to lack of appropriate pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic skills in the context of an interview, even to her desire to show her command of colloquial register. Yet, it may also be due to uncertainty as to what exactly is expected of her role as a journalist. (Note, in this respect, the very long pause in 02, which precedes her taking the speaking floor to introduce the first topic within the interaction.) After all, a journalist-protester interview of the type to be conducted in our data belongs to a context of talk where both instrumental and relational goals are locally regulated. In this case, the candidate knows only that she is a journalist from a London newspaper in search of the truth. She is expected to bring along to the role-play, and bring about during it, a particular rhetorical script that fits specific institution-based goals and sanctioned socio-cultural norms. Yet, whilst the examiner has been appropriately briefed, the candidate is disadvantaged. She has not been provided with information about the particular norms visà-vis (in)formality, (in)directness, management of turns, and topics, etc. that operate in the context she is being presented with, which may have enabled her to handle this interaction in a more competent way.

. Examiner-candidate co-construction of interaction As noted in Section 3, the opening stages of face-to-face encounters are often uncertain and may pose particular difficulties for interactants who do not know each other well or at all, as is the case in the role-plays in our data. This may give rise to a number of potential variables that can affect candidate performance in the examination. For example, different scripts for the role-plays impact differently upon the conversational structure of the exams and, pre-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.11 (89)

Role-plays and oral proficiency

sumably, on examiners’ assessments of candidates’ oral proficiency (Kormos 1999). Also, examiners and candidates are expected to produce performances in which they play previously specified characters, rather than themselves, and with which they may have little empathy.6 Performances will therefore generally be better where clear information is given vis-à-vis the expectations of each role and the exact moment at which to begin the performance. Furthermore, the type of co-constructed interaction to unfold in the role-plays, and hence the candidates’ performance, is positively or negatively shaped by the style in which examiners introduce and set the scene, as it were, of such an interaction. This is doubly significant in that the smooth or otherwise flow of talk in the role-plays’ initial stage may impact critically upon subsequent parts of the oral examination. For instance, confidence to speak in the examination is highly influential upon outcome, is often easily lost in an awkward or unclear opening, and is frequently difficult to recover satisfactorily given that in our data the role-play task lasted only a maximum of 10 minutes. The opening turns of the role-plays in our data revealed a number of those variables in practice. They did not, for example, always follow similar patterns of interaction. Instead, there was some inconsistency vis-à-vis the time spent and information provided by the examiners in their opening turns, which may have affected (positively or negatively) candidates’ display of their speaking ability. Some examiners used the first minute of the role-play to introduce the aims of the task, the situation and the characters performed by each party. Others went straight into the opening question, which only sometimes included information about the characters, the setting, the aims of the performed interaction, etc. Consider, in this light, Extracts 2 and 3 below, which are typical of two different approaches to the role of interviewee (played by the examiner) during the opening stage of the role-play. Extract 2 offers an example of just how important an appropriate contextualisation of both situation and participation framework is for the candidate’s performance:

Extract 2 01 E07 muy bien (.) pues éste es el final de la primera tarea (.) vamos a empezar con ‘OK (.) then this is the end of task one (.) let’s start with 02

la segunda task two’



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.12 (90)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

03 C07 OK ‘OK’ 04 E07 task two (.) buenos días (.) creo que es usted periodista y que le gustaría ‘task two (.) good morning (.) I think that you are a journalist and would like 05

hacerme algunas preguntas sobre la ocupación (.) no? to ask me some questions about the ocupation (.) right?

06 C07 sí pues he leído unos artículos y:: he conseguido una información ‘yes well I’ve read some articles a::nd I’ve had some information 07

que ustedes tienen erm una ocupación en el instituto nacional de that you have occupied the instituto nacional de

08

empleo aquí en Madrid = empleo here in Madrid =’

09 E07 = sí ‘= yes’ 10 C07 y me gustaría saber si usted cree que: sus medios tienen éxito? ‘and I’d like to know if you think that your means are successful?’ 11 E07 pues en principio erm es una forma de: llamar la atención del gobierno [. . . ] ‘well in principle it’s a way to draw the government’s attention [. . . ]’

The exchange above is well balanced and allows the candidate (C07) to settle into her role. The examiner (E07) takes the trouble to spell out the transition between tasks within the exam (01–02), thus creating some time for C07 to adjust to the new skills/demands placed upon her in the role-play. Once E07 is certain that C07 is happy with the transition (03), he then reminds the latter of her own involvement within the new task (04–05). Although the exchanges in 01–05 are actually only a matter of 20–25 seconds, they appear beneficial to the candidate, who in 06 shows no signs of uncertainty regarding what to do next, namely to take the floor that has been yielded to her through the interviewer’s use of the question tag “no?”(05) and to begin to perform her role as a journalist. In 06–08 she prefaces her subsequent question (10) with the type of background information that is characteristic of questions in public discourse settings, especially news interviews (Clayman 1992), thus showing adequate introduction of a subtopic within the interview.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.13 (91)

Role-plays and oral proficiency

In contrast to the above, in Extract 3 the examiner does not provide sufficient cueing and/or background information to help the candidate settle into her role:

Extract 3 01 E02 buenas tardes (.) podrí- me gustaría mucho saber exactamente qué es lo que ‘good afternoon (.) coul- I’d really like to know exactly what is it that 02

usted quiere saber (.) me gustaría que me aclare esto you want to find out (.) I’d like you to explain this’

03 C02 [risa] erm (4.0) bueno había una ocupación del INEM (.) y::: también se ‘[laughs] erm (4.0) well the INEM was occupied (.) a:::nd 04

reunieron próximamente mil quinientos otras personas [erm soon one thousand five hundred other people also gathered [erm’

05 E02 06

[bueno sí eso es lo ‘[yeah well that’s que estamos haciendo aquí (.) no?= what we are doing here (.) isn’t it? =’

07 C02 = sí [risa] ‘= yes [laughs]’ 08 E02 pero yo quiero saber (.) usted viene a preguntarme a saber a aclarar nuestra ‘but what I want to know (.) is here to ask me to find out to clarify our 09

posición (.) qué es lo que usted quiere saber de nosotros (.) sí esto ya lo sé position (.) what is that you want to find out about us (.) yes I already know

10

(.) nosotros estamos aquí that (.) we are here’

11 C02 [risa] erm no veo mucho (.) a: a qué lleva toda esta ocupación ‘[laughs] erm I don’t quite see (.) wh- what the point of this occupation is’ 12 E02 bueno para nosotros la ocupación es importante porque [. . . ] ‘well we feel the occupation is important because [. . . ]’

In the above extract, two aspects of the interaction are particularly noteworthy: the candidate’s difficulties in introducing the first topic of the interview (i.e., the reason for it) in a satisfactory manner and the examiner’s negative



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.14 (92)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

reaction to it. In 03 and 04 C02 is unsure of how to begin her contribution. This is evident from the initial nervous laughter, the hesitation, and the long pause (a 4 second pause is hardly unnoticeable in an ordinary conversation and may convey a very negative impression of the candidate’s ability). Rather than producing a turn in which she asks for information, C02 provides information from the press digest that she has been given as preparation for the role-play. This may indicate that she is unsure at which point of the role-play they are (i.e., does she have to treat this point as given or new information?). Alternatively, it may show that she is buying time to structure her contribution. Whatever the case may be, however, C02’s hesitations cannot be solely attributed to poor competence on her part at this stage of the role-play. Instead, one needs to look also at the co-construction of the interview at this stage by both the examiner and the candidate. In this respect, the information and introduction provided in 01–02 by the examiner is scant, limiting itself to a general question, and hardly constituting a useful prompt that may help the candidate to settle into the interaction. That the examiner perceives the candidate’s turns as irrelevant/inappropriate is evident – both to herself and, unfortunately, to the candidate – from her words in 05–06 and 08–10. When in 04 C02 hesitates for a second time, the examiner interrupts (05) to inform her that she is not managing topics adequately for she is stating the obvious rather than entering the question-answer dynamic of an interview. Yet, hesitations, false starts, reformulations, “semantically irrelevant talk” (in the sense of Grice 1975) and so forth are precisely the type of features that characterise face-to-face interaction. The effect on C02 of the examiner’s utterance in 05–06 is negative, as confirmed by the former’s nervous laughter (07), which reflects embarrassment. What is more, rather than helping C02 regain the thread of her argument, in 08–10 EO2 simply reminds C02 that she is there to ask about their “posición” (again an abstract prompt) and that her contributions thus far have been irrelevant (“sí esto ya lo sé (.) nosotros estamos aquí”). The examiner laughs as she utters this sentence, perhaps in an attempt to minimise its face-threat. Unsurprisingly, C02’s performance of her first speech act-turn (to question the effectiveness of the actual occupation) is rather poor: “erm no veo mucho (.) a: a qué lleva toda esta ocupación”.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.15 (93)

Role-plays and oral proficiency

. Conclusions Our interest in developing a suitable methodology for investigating the discursive strategies and phenomena that take place during the course of L2 oral proficiency examinations led us to undertake a case study of role-plays. The work reported on here is work in progress and in future we intend to incorporate also video-recordings of language proficiency interviews and ethnographic interviews with candidates and examiners about role-play tasks. However, despite its limited size and our being unable to ascertain the final marks awarded to specific candidates, our study has already raised a number of important issues relating to the effectiveness or otherwise of role-plays as a means of assessing L2 oral proficiency. On a positive note our analysis identifies various benefits of role-plays. Firstly, they provide micro-contexts of interaction in which candidates can display aspects of their L2 speaking ability beyond lexis and grammar, which can in turn be adequately evaluated by the examiners. Secondly, candidates can signal the boundaries of the local interactive practice that they are co-constructing by performing openings, re-openings, closings, and pre-closings in appropriate ways. And thirdly, they can also display their ability to establish and change topics; hold and yield the floor; backchannel; interrupt and collaborate; as well as recognise and produce adjacency pairs. These are indicative of candidates’ management of topics and turns – both of which are important aspects of their interactional competence. Moreover, role-plays allow candidates to show whether or not they can apply the appropriate rhetorical scripts to the context of the talk at hand. However, our analysis also suggests that the effectiveness of role-plays can be compromised at both their design and implementation stages. For example, the data indicates that the allocation of roles to examiner and candidate needs to be such that candidates have real opportunities to display their interactional competence. Within this, candidates’ level of proficiency should be factored in better than the case study in question, with lower level examinations using roleplays in which candidates’ roles both are as close as possible to the candidates’ life circumstances and entail plenty of opportunities for speaking. Likewise, as co-constructed exercises, the impact of the examiner in roleplays such as the ones investigated here needs to be considered carefully since the type of performance that they make will greatly influence that of the candidate (and vice versa). Our analysis points in particular to the need for the standardisation of examiners’ contributions and the benefits of rich contextual information prior to the exam and during the opening stages of the role-plays.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.16 (94)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

In those cases where the latter was provided in our study, candidates were seen to display better interactional skills, even if their grammar and lexis may not have been at the same level. Our research also leads us to believe that references to the degree of formality of the situation, the levels of verbal confrontation to be expected in the discussion/negotiation, etc. should be included in the candidates’ brief. After all, in real life candidates would have such information readily available to them. Furthermore, test circumstances are by nature artificial and often stressful and it would make sense to avoid creating additional difficulties. Whilst by no means suggesting that candidates be spoon-fed, our research certainly underlines the dual imperative of clarifying exactly what is expected of them and ensuring that this information is consistently provided by examiners.

Notes . See also Lazaraton (2002: 2) who considers the introduction of qualitative research methodologies, in particular conversation analysis, to the design, description and validation of language tests as “the most important development in language testing over the last ten or so years.” . For a similar position see also Oreström (1983) and Stenström (1984). A comprehensive study that uses role-plays as elicitation techniques to investigate the communicative behaviour of L2 learners is the Bochum project (cf. Edmonson et al. 1984). We are grateful to the anonymous referees for bringing this point to our attention. . The term co-constructed is to be interpreted as jointly constructed rather than necessarily affiliatively or supportively constructed. Arguments, for example, are also instances of coconstructed talk. . For an overview and explanation of different types of role-plays see Márquez Reiter (2000). . Transcription conventions: [ ] (( )) WORD [ = (.) (2.0) [. . . ] um, erm ?

Non-verbal, paralinguistic, prosodic and contextual information Unintelligible or uncertain transcript Increased loudness Simultaneous starting talk Overlapping talk with no discernible break between utterances Short pause (half a second or under) Longer pause, in seconds Lines omitted from transcript Filled pauses, hesitations or exclamations Speech act having the illocutionary force of eliciting information; also rising intonation

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.17 (95)

Role-plays and oral proficiency

an::d wor-

Prolongation (“stretching”) of prior syllable Word cut off abruptly

. As we mentioned earlier, role-plays should put candidates (and examiners) in roles in which they can envisage themselves relatively easily. In the case of the candidates, in particular, roles should also be selected bearing in mind their overall linguistic level and, as far as possible, life experiences.

References Alameda, José Ramón & Cuetos, Fernando (1996). Diccionario de frecuencias de las unidades lingüísticas del castellano. Vol. 1 y 2. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo. Atkinson, J. Maxwell & Heritage, John (1984). “Jefferson’s transcript notation”. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. ix–xvi). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Canale, Michael & Swain, Merrill (1980). “Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing”. Applied Linguistics, 1, 1–47. Celce-Murcia, Marianne (1998). “Preface”. In R. Young & A. W. He (Eds.), Talking and Testing. Discourse Approaches to the Assessment of Oral Proficiency (pp. ix–x). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Clayman, Stephen (1992). “Footing and the achievement of neutrality: The case of news interview discourse”. In P. Drew & J. Heritage (Eds.), Talk at Work (pp. 163–198). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Di Pietro, R. (1989). Strategic Interaction: Learning Languages through Scenarios. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edmonson, Willis, House, Juliane, Kasper, Gabriele & Stemmer, Brigitte (1984). “Learning the pragmatics of discourse: A project report”. Applied Linguistics, 5, 113–127. Grice, H. Paul (1975). “Logic in conversation”. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Volume III: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press. Hall, Joan K. (1995). “(Re)creating our worlds with words: A sociohistorical perspective of face-to-face interaction”. Applied Linguistics, 16, 206–232. Hartford, Beverly S. & Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen (1992). “Closing the conversation: Evidence from the academic advising session”. Discourse Processes, 15, 93–116. He, Agnes W. & Young, Richard (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. 1–24). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kasper, Gabriele & Dahl, Merete (1991). “Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Kormos, Judit (1999). “Simulating conversations in oral-proficiency assessment: A conversation analysis of role-play and non-scripted interviews in language exams”. Language Testing, 16, 163–189.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.18 (96)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

Kramsch, Claire (1986). “From language proficiency to interactional competence”. Modern Language Journal, 70, 366–372. Lazaraton, Anne (2002). A Qualitative Approach to the Validation of Oral Language Test [Studies in Language Testing 14]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2000). Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Meara, Paul M. & Babí, Antonia (2001). “Just a few words: How assessors evaluate minimal texts”. IRAL, 31, 75–83. Oreström, Bengt (1983). Turn-Taking in English Conversation [Lund Studies in English 66]. Malmo, Sweden: CLK Gleerup. Ranney, Susan (1992). “Learning a new script: An exploration of sociolinguistic competence”. Applied Linguistics, 13, 25–50. Salaberry, Rafael (2000). “Revising the revised format of the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview”. Language Testing, 17, 289–310. Shohamy, Elana (1988). “A proposed framework for testing the oral language of second/ foreign language learners”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15, 147–163. Stenström, Anna-Brita (1984). Questions and Responses in English Conversation [Lund Studies in English 68]. Malmo, Sweden: CLK Gleerup. van Lier, Leo (1989). “Reeling, writhing, drawling, stretching, and fainting in coils: Oral proficiency interviews as conversation”. TESOL Quarterly, 23, 489–508. Young, Richard (1995a). “Conversational styles in language proficiency interviews”. Language Learning, 45, 3–42. Young, Richard (1995b). “Discontinuous interlanguage development and its implications for oral proficiency rating scales”. Applied Language Learning, 6, 13–26.

Appendix Candidate’s task brief – Task two [summarised] Role: Journalist working for a London newspaper on an article on the Spanish economy. While in Madrid working on the article, the spokesperson of one radical group, which has occupied an official building in Madrid to draw attention to the problem of unemployment in the country, agrees to be interviewed by you. Your aim during the interview is to question the effectiveness of the actual occupation and to argue that the Spanish government’s economic policies will have more success in combating unemployment than radical protest. A great deal of information has appeared in the press about the occupation and also about the performance of the Spanish economy. Use the digest of press information provided to argue that the occupation is pointless and the Spanish economy is doing well. Be prepared to respond to any points the spokesperson might make to defend his/her position. Remember that you are

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27

F: PB12305.tex / p.19 (97)

Role-plays and oral proficiency

trying to discover where the truth lies: with the Spanish government or with the protesters? (Preparation time: 30 minutes. The interaction will last a maximum of 10 minutes.)

Examiner’s task brief – Task two [summarised] Rol: Portavoz de un grupo de protesta que ha ocupado la oficina INEM en Atocha, Madrid. Durante esta parte del examen, un/una periodista (el candidato) que trabaja para un periódico londinense le hará preguntas sobre las posibles razones de la ocupación del INEM. Haciendo uso de las notas que se dan a continuación, debe defender la ocupación y rebatir los argumentos sobre el buen funcionamiento de la economía española que el/la periodista le dé. Debe conceder al / a la candidato amplia oportunidad para exponer su posición, evitando que la discusión se detenga demasiado tiempo en un punto. Vd. no debe hablar demasiado, ciertamente no más del 50% del tiempo de la interacción. Sin embargo, si el candidato pierde la iniciativa, dirija Vd. la discusión a un nuevo punto.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:27



F: PB12305.tex / p.20 (98)

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Paul Meara

Appendix

Table 1. Words used by candidate 01 and not used by examiner 01 Word

Word class

Frequency

Within 1,000 (Alameda y Cuetos 1996)

al o sólo así esta eso nada estás algo tiene otros mejor esto va algunos tú gente saber algunas quiero sabes tienes europea casas española comunidad

Prep. + article Conjunction Adverb Adverb Determiner Determiner Adverb Verb Adverb Verb Adjective Adjective Determiner Verb Adjective Pronoun Noun Verb Adjective Verb Verb Verb Adjective Noun Adjective Noun

12,290 8,945 2,883 2,515 2,369 2,163 2,097 2,050 1,969 1,671 1,383 1,194 1,164 879 800 726 597 572 481 388 268 230 223 216 204 172

Outside 1,000 (Alameda y Cuetos 1996)

construcción cuándo trabajos economía trece doscientos

Noun Adverb Noun Noun Noun Adjective

142 124 92 90 44 32

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.1 (99)

Chapter 6

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness* Miranda Stewart

.

Aims and background

This study forms part of a larger project which is currently looking at different types of feedback, tutor to student and monitor to tutor; across different modes (written and spoken); and in different languages (currently native and non-native British English and Peninsular Spanish), with the possibility of extending the study to other languages (e.g. French) and other varieties of language (e.g. Mexican Spanish). The aim of the present chapter is to give an intra-cultural,1 socio-textual (Hatim 1998: 72) account of politeness in a given context, that is, of a tutor providing written feedback in Spanish to a non-native speaker student; this may later allow for intercultural comparisons, notwithstanding the evident problems inherent in designing valid cross-cultural studies of naturally-occurring data. Consequently, we shall be examining what Sell (1991) has referred to as the politeness of the text. Sell sees “all interaction, and all language, as operating within politeness parameters” (1991: 215) and is concerned with the essential interactivity of written texts noting that neither Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) nor Leech (1983) discuss the politeness dimension to these and concentrate rather on face-to-face spoken interchanges. Further, while there are studies of politeness concerned with politeness in texts that is “relationships between personae and characters dramatised within the world of mimesis” (Sell 1991: 217), there are fewer concerned with the politeness of texts, that is with the relationship between the writer and the reader(s) and the essential interactivity of the text. Useful examples of the former are Sifianou (1992) and Simpson (1989 in Sell 1991) who apply politeness theory to literary texts and of the latter, Myers (1989), and McLaren (2001) who have

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.2 (100)

 Miranda Stewart

applied it to English language scientific articles and French language promotional literature respectively. Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) influential work aims to provide an explanatory model for the motivations which lead speakers to diverge from Gricean (1975) ‘maximal efficiency’ in conversation. While Brown and Levinson clearly allow within their model for strategies designed to protect the face of the speaker, the majority of work carried out within this model has focussed on other-politeness, that is strategies designed to pay attention to the positive and negative face of the Hearer. This has led Chen (2001) to build a model of self-politeness within Brown and Levinson’s theory whereby speakers call on a range of strategies to protect their own face in conversation. Consequently, in the data we will be as concerned with strategies which may save the face of the Speaker as with those potentially designed to save the face of the Hearer. Our approach to the data will be essentially at two levels; the level of the text; and the level of the utterance, or in the case of written text, the clause, the sentence or the word. The former is what Sell (1991: 221) would call “presentational politeness” which operates at the level of the text and where the reader’s awareness of the scenarios or schemata which relate to this particular text-type enables him or her to decode the text effectively. He uses “selectional politeness” to refer to instances where individual face-Threatening Acts (FTAs) are identified and carried out through selected linguistic expression.

. Data and methodology The corpus for this paper is drawn from a larger database of feedback in spoken and written English and Spanish and consists of 58 items of written feedback (7,000 words) in Peninsular Spanish by 6 native speakers, a typical text being 100–150 words in length. All tutors were educated women from Spain aged between 25 and 55. This feedback is in two broad areas; linguistic, that is on the student’s ability to use accurately and appropriately the target language; and conceptual, on the ability to use appropriate academic skills to present a body of knowledge. The latter is a new and additional requirement at this stage in the language course. The core potentially face-threatening act is one of giving feedback on the student’s performance; this, if negative, is potentially damaging to the student’s positive face; and, if it is designed to bring about changes in performance, is potentially damaging to the student’s negative face. It also threatens the positive face of the Speaker (S) in the case of negative feedback and both S’s positive and negative faces may further be threatened were the

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.3 (101)

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness 

Hearer (H) to decide to challenge the feedback. If positive, the feedback may maintain or enhance the face of either S or H or both. The potential effects of negative feedback are summarised in Figure 1 below. In terms of participation framework, while these texts essentially constitute an interaction between addresser and addressee, in terms of Bell’s (1984, 2001) audience and referee design, there is also potentially the presence of a third party “auditor” whose presence is known and ratified by the speakers. In this case it is the institution itself which, in the interests of quality control, chooses to monitor a proportion of the correspondence between tutor and tutee. Consequently, tutors are aware that what they write may be read by others in addition to the principal addressee. Furthermore, within Bell’s framework, the institution can also act as a referee with the tutee positioning him or herself in relation to it and adopting the house style, in this case an Anglo-American style of institutional feedback. There are a number of contextual variables which could potentially impact on the expression of the feedback, relating to Brown and Levinson’s contextual variables of power (P) (e.g. age, gender, status, knowledge), distance (D) (e.g. the extent to which the student and tutor had met previously), and the weight of the FTA (Wx) (e.g. the degree of perceived shortcoming of the student). Of these, power is arguably the most important; the tutor is deemed, as a representative of the distance learning institution, to have the authority to provide suitable feedback. And yet this perception of power may not be entirely shared by the tutor who, while feeling qualified through education and background to teach the Spanish language, feels less prepared to teach the new element of the course – conceptual skills. Distance is, to a certain extent ‘fixed’ by the institutional nature of the exchange; and yet it is to an extent variable. On the one hand, the ongoing correspondence assignment/feedback between tutor and tu-

FTA Negative feedback on performance

H Threatens H’s positive face as criticism attacks positive self-image. Threatens H’s negative face, if changes in performance are required, through predicating future action of H.

S Threatens S’s positive self-image as S is constrained to be bearer of bad news. If challenged, S’s positive self-image is also threatened. If challenged, S may be required to change view, thus potentially threatening S’s negative face.

Figure 1. Potential threat to face of negative feedback

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.4 (102)

 Miranda Stewart

tee will build up a relationship; also, it is possible that tutor and tutee have met face-to-face in one of the optional tutorials offered to students. The expression of this distance is clearly affected by user variables reflecting geographical conventions with the T (tú) pronoun more commonly used by Spanish Peninsular speakers and the V (Vd.) pronoun by some of the Latin American tutors (not included within the group studied here). The weight of the FTA is also an important variable in the sense that the student has actively invited feedback (by enrolling voluntarily for the course) and may welcome its assistance in attaining course objectives. By enrolling on the course they have also accepted the power or authority of the tutor to provide suitable feedback. Consequently, the face-threatening potential of providing feedback is considerably reduced. However, P and Wx, I shall argue, intersect in an interesting fashion; while it is relatively non-face-threatening for the tutor to give feedback on linguistic performance, with students largely aware of their shortcomings and anxious to rectify them and tutors, as educated native speakers, recognised experts in this domain, the same cannot always be said for conceptual skills. Here feedback is directed at the student’s way of thinking (rather than proficiency in a language which is clearly, in most cases, not their own) and consequently, I would argue, is potentially more threatening for the student’s positive self-image; furthermore, while the tutor is a recognised teacher of the target language, his or her claim to authority is less apparent in the conceptual domain, especially when a number of the students have recognised qualifications (further degrees) attesting to their proficiency in the use of academic skills. Consequently, the tutor, potentially lacking authority in this area, may feel his or her own positive face under double threat: for having to threaten the face of the student and, should the feedback be challenged on quality grounds, for having given inappropriate feedback. Consequently, I would like to argue that that while the giving of feedback on purely linguistic matters is likely to be relatively unproblematic (the main variables here being the frequency and type of errors made); the giving of feedback on conceptual skills is considerably more fraught, not only for the student but for the tutor. It is likely, therefore, that tutors will expend considerable effort at both presentational and selectional levels to protect their own face, or positive self-image.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.5 (103)

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness 

. Analysis So what evidence is there that tutors engage in more face work in addressing the conceptual than the linguistic skills of their students and that, further, this is predominantly designed to protect their own face rather than that of the student? Firstly, at presentational level, there is a greater tendency to justify, exemplify, and appeal to higher authority, indeed to engage in much greater face-work than is the case for the purely linguistic feedback; and secondly, at the selectional level, there is greater evidence of hedging, presupposition (criticism being presented as advice), and defocusing of the agent (the student). . Presentational strategy To illustrate presentational politeness, we could point to a commonly shared textual convention of this particular type of feedback; the overwhelming tendency in speakers to engage in considerable face-work designed to enhance the positive face of the Hearer (mainly through commenting on all the positive features of the student’s work) before presenting any criticism or suggestion for improved practice, a threat for the Hearer’s positive and negative face. This coincides with Brown and Levinson’s positive politeness strategies of “claiming common ground” (1987: 102ff.). As a macro-strategy this occurred in 100% of texts: all these texts start with positive feedback before, if desired, providing implicit or explicit criticism. It is also observable locally within the text where there is a clear tendency for positive feedback to precede negative feedback. Thus politeness is, as Hatim (1998) has persuasively argued, a powerful organiser of the rhetorical structure of texts as can clearly be seen in the ordering of texts (1) and (2) below where positive feedback is clearly fronted. (1) Has presentado una gran variedad de ejemplos para ilustrar el impacto de los avances tecnológicos en la vida cotidiana, aunque en algún caso hay referencias demasiado literales de las fuentes usadas. PS1/1 ‘You have presented a wide variety of examples to illustrate the impact of technological progress on daily life, although on occasion there are overly literal references to the sources consulted.’2 (2) A nivel de lengua tu texto está muy bien, como siempre, y sólo vale la pena mencionar que “dudo que” va seguido del subjuntivo, y que los idiomas van precedidos de artículo (normalmente). PS2/1 ‘As for language your text is very good, as always, and it is only worth men-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.6 (104)

 Miranda Stewart

tioning that “dudo que” is followed by the subjunctive and that languages (normally) take the article.’

In the examples above, there is clear attention to the positive face of the Hearer (una gran variedad. . . , está muy bien, como siempre,. . . ) before the FTA is attempted, that is the criticism whether explicit or implicit of linguistic shortcomings. In both cases, this is accompanied by hedges minimising the potential threat to face. These hedges (en algún caso, sólo vale la pena mencionar) operate at selectional level. All texts followed a standard format whereby feedback was first given on conceptual performance and then on linguistic performance. As a micro-strategy, it is interesting to note that while the tendency to front positive feedback predominated in the language feedback, nonetheless in some 29% of this there was no positive attention paid to face and linguistic performance was criticised directly. (3) En cuanto a la lengua ¡ay, ay, ay! ¡Cuántos errores tontos! PS3/4 ‘As for language, ay, ay ay! So many silly mistakes!’ (4) Tu texto presenta problemas de lengua. PS2/7 ‘Your text presents language problems.’

However, while this might provide some evidence for our claim that tutors invested more in face-preservation in the conceptual rather than the linguistic domain, it is not possible to compare directly these feedbacks as the feedback on conceptual skills is text-initial while the feedback on linguistic skills, coming within the body of the text, could already be said to have been hedged by the previous section. A further observation, at presentational level, was the tendency (71%) by all tutors to end on a good note as can been seen in extract (5). (5) . . . Y mejorará la fluidez de tu escrito que ahora a veces es un poco cortante. Usas muy bien el vocabulario, los marcadores temporales y los conectores. PS3/5 ‘And it will improve the fluency of your writing which is on occasions a little jerky. You make very good use of vocabulary, temporal markers and connectors.’

. Self-justification as face-protection In feedback on language there is much greater evidence of the use of bald-onrecord (Brown & Levinson 1987) strategies in the frequent use of imperatives,

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.7 (105)

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness 

deontic modality, and “metaphorical urgency” where “S speaks as if maximum efficiency were very important” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 96) using, for example, attention-getters or direct demands. Obvious implicatures that can be drawn from this usage are that the authority of the tutor is not in question and/or that the potential FTA has little or no weight. For example, the following imperatives are typical of the corpus: (6) Busca en el diccionario. . . ten en cuenta la expresión. . . usa ejemplos. . . PS2/5 ‘Look in the dictionary. . . bear in mind the expression. . . use examples. . . ’ (7) No te olvides de repasar . . . PS3/8 ‘Don’t forget to revise. . . ’ (8) ¡Por favor, fíjate más! Ojo a los presentes regulares. La expresión tiende a ser floja. No es buena idea pensar en inglés. Recurre al diccionario cuando tengas. . . PS3/9 ‘Please, pay more attention. Watch out for regular presents. Expression tends to be weak. It’s not a good idea to think in English. Go to the dictionary when you have to. . . ’

Not only do the tutors use imperatives (the negative imperative in Spanish being realised through the present subjunctive mood no te olvides) but there is also evidence of the use of exhortatives such as ¡por favor! and ¡ojo!. In the examples below, the tutor uses deontic modality (using the verbs deber and necesitar) to indicate clearly to the student what he or she is to do and only in the last example is this mitigated by the modal use of the conditional: (9) Debes revisar la cuestión de puntuación y ortografía PS4/1 You should/must revise the area of punctuation and spelling (10) Necesitas poner mucha más atención en. . . PS3/11 ‘You need to pay a great deal more attention to. . . ’ (11) Deberías consultar. . . PS5/1 ‘You should consult. . . ’

In these final examples, the student is enjoined with metaphorical urgency (often through the use of ellipsis and abbreviation) to attend to linguistic deficiencies. (12) Los puntos a revisar en la gramática son:. . . PS4/2 ‘The grammatical points to revise are:. . . ’ (13) Cuidado también con por/para PS2/1 ‘Careful also with por/para’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.8 (106)

 Miranda Stewart

(14) Ojo con no escribir mayúsculas donde no se debe. PS5/3 ‘Watch out not to put capitals where you should not.’ (15) Mira tb. el sub. (Mira también el subjuntivo) PS4/1 ‘Look also (abbreviation) at the subjunctive (abbrevation)’

The use of the imperative was rare in the case of conceptual feedback (occurring in approximately 12% of texts compared with 36% of texts for linguistic feedback) and frequently took the form of reminders of course objectives. For example, (16) Recuerda que no se puede sobrepasar el número de palabras PS6/4 ‘Remember that you cannot exceed the number of words’ (17) Recuerda que debes indicar cuando citas una fuente. . . PS1/2 ‘Remember that you must indicate when you use a source. . . ’ (18) No olvides, sin embargo, de citar las fuentes de información PS5/6 ‘Don’t forget, nonetheless, to cite the sources. . . ’

Here, the presupposition is that the student knows these academic skills but has merely forgotten to display them in this instance. Consequently, the emphasis is displaced from the tutor as repository of knowledge to the tutor as one providing a simple prompt or reminder (which in Brown & Levinson’s (1987) terms would act as a threat to H’s negative face). Nevertheless, as I shall argue later, the presentation of criticism through the use of reminders and advice can function to protect the face of both speaker and hearer. Metaphorical urgency, likewise, was very rare in the case of cognitive feedback with just one clear example: (19) En lo que se refiere a destrezas académicas mi comentario más urgente es sobre tu introducción que parece más una conclusión – le das un sentido de finalidad (sobre todo por los pretéritos perfectos “he comparado” “he demostrado”) que se corresponde más con una conclusión no un principio. PS3/11 ‘As for academic skills my most urgent comment is about your introduction which looks more like a conclusion – you give it a sense of finality (especially with your use of perfect tenses “he comparado” “he demostrado”) which are more appropriate for a conclusion and not a beginning.’

Here, however, at a presentational level, there is considerable face-protection at work; the criticism is made (the introduction looks more like a conclusion) and then justified with close reference to the student’s work (e.g. use of tenses). This face-work, as we shall argue later, appears aimed more at protecting the face of

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.9 (107)

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness 

the speaker than on mitigating the effects of this face threat on the student. At selectional level, the use of hedging (parece) reduces the Speaker’s commitment to the proposition (i.e. the criticism that the introduction is worded more like a conclusion). Deontic modality, however, was present to a small extent in feedback about conceptual skills, for example: (20) Deberías mencionar las fuentes de las citas (de la definición del bilingüismo, por ejemplo), y mejorar algunas de las transiciones entre párrafos/temas. PS2//2 ‘You should mention the sources of quotations (for the definition of bilingualism for example), and improve some of the transitions between paragraphs/topics.’

As in example (20) above, a presentational strategy used by many of the tutors in providing feedback on conceptual skills was to provide the criticism and then to justify it whether in relation to the student’s own performance or to commonly shared course criteria. For example, (21) Presentas y desarrollas bien tu argumento pero la conclusión me parece demasiado sucinta. Ya que una de las destrezas que tenías que demostrar era “resumir un argumento”, creo que podrías haberlo rematado de forma más completa y efectiva (¿con una cita apropiada por ejemplo?). PS2/6 ‘You present and develop your argument well but the conclusion seems to me too succinct. As one of the academic skills you were to show was “summing up an argument”, I think you could have finished it off in a more complete and effective fashion (using an apposite quote for example?).’

Here we have evidence of self-protection of face by the tutor at both presentational and selectional levels. At presentational level, the (hedged) criticism is made (la conclusión me parece demasiado sucinta), then the relevance of the criticism to the course objectives is established and then advice aimed at enabling the student to improve is provided. The tutor protects her face against any potential accusations that her criticisms are misguided by invoking the ‘power’ of the institution of which she is a representative, establishes an agreed need for advice to the student, and then provides that advice thus enhancing her own positive face. At selectional level, the tutor uses a cognitive quality hedge (me parece) which provides an ‘out’ or ‘deniability potential’ (Weizmann 1993), allowing her view to be cancellable as it ostensibly invites reasons why her view may be untenable. By defocusing the criticism from the student as agent (presentas, desarrollas) to the conclusion as patient, she mitigates threat to

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.10 (108)

 Miranda Stewart

the student’s face. She presupposes (ya que) agreement on what skills were to be tested by the exercise, and then hedges her criticism of the student’s shortcomings with another cognitive hedge (creo que) and the conventional indirectness couched in the modality of tense “podrías haberlo rematado”. Her final concrete advice on how a better conclusion could have been achieved is in the form of a question, on the one hand, inviting agreement and on the other providing a further ‘out’ in the event that her interlocutor disagrees with her assessment of the problem. While there is evidence in this extract of the tutor paying attention to the face of the student, what is more striking is the amount of face work expended in protecting the face of the speaker. No such face-work is present in her ensuing comment on language performance Cuidado con los pretéritos en primera persona (be careful with first person preterites). In example (22) below we also see a tutor vigorously protecting her face at both presentational and selectional levels: (22) (Name) muy buen trabajo pero demasiado largo – lo siento pero debes ceñirte a los límites establecidos porque en este caso las últimas 100 palabras no te van a contar con lo cual te quedas sin conclusión y es una pena. PS4/7 ‘(Name) very good work but too long – I am sorry but you must keep to the set limits because in this instance the last 100 words are not going to count for you with the result that you are left without a conclusion and it’s a pity.’

At the presentational level, the tutor criticises the student’s failure to adhere to word limits, points to agreed procedures, and outlines the implications this failure will have for the assessment as a whole pointing to external authority (P) (límites establecidos) to justify her face-threatening decision to criticise/penalise the work for excessive length. At selectional level, she implicates metaphorical urgency through the use of ellipsis (pero (es) demasiado largo –), apologises for her face-threatening actions (lo siento), points out how this will affect the student (no te van a contar, te quedas sin conclusión), and reiterates how sad she feels about this (es una pena), effectively communicating sympathy with H (positive politeness strategy 2, Brown & Levinson 1987). By reiterating her regret for this situation and locating responsibility for it in the hands of the student (debes ceñirte) and those who set the word limits, she effectively protects her own face from any dissent. Additionally, by referring to institutional aims and through the urgency of her advice, she lays claim to power in terms of the exchange. In (23) below we see a further example at both presentational and selectional level.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.11 (109)

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness 

(23) Has hecho un buen trabajo en el que muestras haber entendido los orígenes y los elementos que contribuyen a la identidad gitana en España y también los cambios en su modo de vida a lo largo de la historia. Sin embargo, te has basado principalmente en un solo estímulo (Texto A) y dedicas poca atención a los otros dos. De esta manera tu conclusión de discriminación parece un poco parcial; fíjate que el texto A nos avisa de que no es objetivo (último párrafo); no mencionas la música gitana, el duende, el mestizaje actual del flamenco, así que tú misma te delimitas porque no valoras factores de integración muy importantes. PS3/5 ‘You have done a good piece of work where you show that you have understood the origins of and the factors which contributed to the identity of the gypsies in Spain and also the changes to their way of life over history. Nonetheless, you have based (your work) on just one stimulus (Text A) and you pay little attention to the other two. Thus your conclusion about discrimination seems a little partial; note that text A warns us that it is not objective (last paragraph); you do not mention gypsy music, the “duende”, the current hybrid nature of flamenco, and so you limit yourself as you do not take into consideration some very important factors for integration.’

The core face-threatening act is the tutor’s criticism that the student has not supported her final conclusion in an appropriately academic manner. Following the presentational pattern we have already seen, the tutor starts by praising the positive. Then she states that the student has focused predominantly on one source to the virtual exclusion of the other two. Here the student must draw an implicature, namely that all sources should have been consulted. Then the student is informed that this failure to consult all sources is the reason for the possible shortcomings of her conclusion. Then the tutor draws attention to the unreliability of the one source used (giving a precise finding reference), points out the elements the student has omitted by not referring to the other sources, and finally places the responsibility for these shortcomings squarely on the student’s shoulders as a logical outcome of this faulty research process. The effect of presenting the student’s shortcomings as a given, dependent on her failure to carry out a specified and implicated series of steps, effectively distances the tutor from the face-threatening act. If challenged, the tutor can deflect the challenge onto the mutually agreed procedures for carrying out research and not onto her own subjective assessment. While the text contains evidence of selectional strategies for the negotiation of face (for example the negatively polite quality hedge parece which limits the tutor’s commitment to that particular, face-threatening proposition, or the positively polite use of the first person plural nos implicating solidarity and shared views), it appears to me

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.12 (110)

 Miranda Stewart

that it is at the presentational level that face is predominantly being negotiated. This dual approach, an appeal to external power and a simultaneous distancing of the tutor from the FTA, is in sharp contrast to feedback on linguistic deficiencies, where tutors do not feel under the same degree of obligation to defend their views, say by reference to the appropriate pages of a grammar, and where linguistic politeness, if present, is predominantly at the selectional level. . Presupposition as face protection: The case of advice Advice, like reminders, is considered by Brown and Levinson (1987) to constitute a threat to the negative face of the Hearer; yet they argue that this threat can be neutralised in certain circumstances (1987) through the calculation of P, D, and Wx.3 Let us consider advice within the context of our corpus. We have already identified the role of the tutor as being one of identifying strengths and weaknesses in the student’s performance and giving feedback designed to enable the student to improve. It follows that much of this feedback will be in the form of advice of some kind. We also argued that the tutor had the status to give this feedback; however, this was more apparent in the case of language skills than in conceptual skills. Consequently, the giving of advice is a required duty of the tutor and is, indeed, very much part of what the student is paying for when enrolling on the course. By giving advice, the tutor is complying with his or her agreed role and furthering the best interests of the student. So while the identification of inadequacies in the student’s performance may be face-threatening, the giving of advice, in this context, is arguably considerably less so. It supports the positive face of the Speaker (positive politeness strategy 1, Brown & Levinson 1987: 103ff.) and affords some protection for the negative face of the Hearer as criticism of performance is presupposed (off-record strategy 3, Brown & Levinson 1987: 217) by the advice given but not stated on record. We have also seen, in the case of feedback on language, how this advice is often provided bald-on-record with little attention paid to face. In this section I shall examine advice within the arguably more face-threatening context of giving feedback on conceptual skills. (24) Este es un excelente ensayo donde has identificado y abordado todos los puntos que se te pedían en el título. En tus evaluaciones has sabido sacar a relucir los efectos negativos al mismo tiempo que imaginas cómo sería la vida cotidiana sin los inventos con relevantes ejemplos. No olvides, sin embargo, de citar las fuentes de información. Como sabes hay varias formas de hacerlo y puedes hacer una revisión mirando a la información en el libro 6 “Tipos

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.13 (111)

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness

de cambio” en la página 44. Esto va a ser importantísimo en los próximos trabajos. PS5/8 ‘This is an excellent essay where you have identified and tackled all the points which you were required to by the title. In your assessment you have managed to highlight the negative aspects at the same time as you imagine what daily life would be like without these inventions using relevant examples. Don’t forget, nonetheless, to cite your sources. As you know, there are several ways of doing this and you can revise this by looking at the information in book 6 “Tipos de cambio” on page 44. This is going to be extremely important in future pieces of work.’

This feedback is very different from the feedback given in Extract 21, where the tutor identifies the shortcoming and then proceeds to give advice for future improvement. Here the criticism that the student has failed to reference appropriately is clearly presupposed by the advice given but never stated on record. The advice (no olvides) is couched as a reminder which, as we argued above, is potentially less face-threatening than other forms of advice in the sense that the Speaker assumes that H has the requisite knowledge but has forgotten to apply it rather than is lacking in basic conceptual skills. In advising the student to revise this area, the tutor further implicates that the student already knows about how referencing is done (como sabes) and simply suggests non-directively that he or she can (puedes) rather than should revise this area. And finally, in support of her decision to give this particular piece of advice, she points, in the guise of a further reminder, to its future crucial importance in terms of the course. In this extract there is considerably more attention to face than tends to be the case in feedback on language; the decision to couch all implicit, facethreatening, criticism in the form of a reminder/advice allows the Speaker to protect her face by presenting herself as giving her interlocutor the benefit of the doubt and fulfilling the role of a tutor. In example (25) below, the criticism is presupposed but not stated by the text: that the student has uncritically deployed received thinking when talking about gender issues and that the aim of the exercise is to use critical thinking and to avoid preconceived ideas: (25) Otra sugerencia: trata de analizar críticamente algunas de las visiones preconcebidas que utilizas, p. ej. todo lo referente a los “roles domésticos” de las mujeres. PS5/1 ‘Another suggestion: try to analyse critically some of the preconceived ideas you use, e.g. everything relating to the “domestic roles” of women.’



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29



F: PB12306.tex / p.14 (112)

Miranda Stewart

Once again, the advice is offered in a non-directive fashion as a “suggestion” (despite the imperative trata de), the assessment that the student uses received thinking is presented as secondary to the advice about what he or she can do about it in future. Once again, this advice is justified with close reference to the student’s submitted work. In (26) below, advice is given in terms of what the tutor would have done (implicitly contrasted with what the student has not done, i.e. not given enough attention to the relationship between bilingualism, identity, and socioeconomic status nor to the scope of political action): (26) Muy buen esfuerzo para un TMA4 tan difícil como éste. El contenido de tu ejercicio me parece bueno, haces referencia a puntos importantes acerca de las diferentes situaciones en España y Latinoamérica y sus políticas lingüísticas – yo hubiera dado más énfasis a la conexión entre bilingüismo identidad y prestigio socio-económico y cómo una política de actuación debe ser más amplia que sólo lingüística. PS3/12 ‘Very good effort on a TMA as difficult as this one. The content of your exercise seems good to me, you refer to important points relating to the different situations in Spain and Latin America and their language policies – I would have given more emphasis to the connection between bilingualism identity and socio-economic prestige and how a policy must have wider aims than merely linguistic ones.’

By presenting this advice non-directively in terms of what the tutor would have done rather than what the student did do, the tutor does, to a certain extent, expose her own positive face in case of challenge. However, in this way she is able to make two crucially face-threatening implicatures, that is, that there is a link between these factors and that the scope of political action should be wider (both of which have not been understood by the student). Consequently, the advice appears to be to pay more attention to these elements, the implicit criticism being that the student has failed to grasp this area of knowledge. In all these examples above, we would argue that the tutor, by giving advice and thereby merely presupposing criticism of performance, is not only protecting the face of the Hearer but is essentially protecting his or her face against challenge. . Defocusing as face protection Typically feedback on positive performance is couched in the second person singular, a direct and solidary address form, as can be seen in the text below.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.15 (113)

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness

Similarly, much of the feedback on linguistic performance also uses the direct second person singular tú form: (27) Has hecho un excelente trabajo donde identificas el origen en España de los gitanos, y los hechos claves durante la historia que afectaron sus vidas. Explicas y comentas muy bien los altibajos de su aceptación a través de los tiempos hasta hoy, utilizando relevantes ejemplos y evidencia. Por eso las notas (25 y 25) para las dos primeras secciones están bien merecidas. En cuanto al lenguaje y gama de expresiones (14,15), como observarás por las correcciones tienes bastantes errores que tienen que ver con la concordancia, el género, la ortografía y acentos. En el párrafo 4, los verbos que tienes en el tiempo perfecto (pretérito perfecto) necesitas ponerlos en el pretérito (indefinido): ha sido → fue, se ha adoptado → se adoptó, ha influído → influyó, pues son hechos completos en un pasado lejano. PS5/1 ‘You have done an excellent piece of work where you identify the origin in Spain of the gypsies, and the key events over history which affected their lives. You explain and comment very well on the ups and downs affecting their acceptance over time up to the present day, using relevant examples and evidence. Consequently the marks (25 and 25) for the first two sections are well deserved. As for the language and range of expression (14,15), as you will see from the corrections you have quite a lot of mistakes which are to do with agreement, gender, spelling and accents. In paragraph 4, the verbs you have in the perfect tense you need to put in the preterite: ha sido → fue, se ha adoptado → se adoptó, ha influído → influyó, as they are completed events in a distant past.’

In the section of the extract relating to linguistic skills, criticism of student performance is direct (tienes, tienes) as is advice on how to rectify error (necesitas). However, in giving feedback on conceptual skills there is frequent defocusing of the criticism away from the Hearer. (28) Has hecho un excelente trabajo donde muestras conciencia de hechos y factores claves que contribuyeron a la discriminación e integración de los gitanos. No sólo explicas los hechos sino que comentas sobre ellos, haciendo referencia a información de varias fuentes. En la conclusión sin embargo, falta claridad sobre quién no ha deseado integrarse a sociedad, pues escribes como si el flamenco fuera sinónimo de gitanos. PS1/4 ‘You have done an excellent piece of work where you show an awareness of the key facts and factors which contributed to the discrimination against and integration of the gypsies. Not only do you explain the facts but you



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29



F: PB12306.tex / p.16 (114)

Miranda Stewart

comment on them, referring to information from a variety of sources. In the conclusion, nonetheless, there is a lack of clarity about who did not want to integrate into society, for you write as if flamenco were a synonym for gypsies.’

As we can see, when commenting on the positive features of the student’s work there is the use of the second person singular, but as soon as there is criticism of the quality of the student’s argument this is deflected onto the impersonal falta claridad with the consequent elimination of the agent. The direct second person singular (escribes) is then used in substantiating this criticism. In (29) below, it is the (inanimate) organisation of the essay rather than the (animate) student which is responsible for the weak conclusion; the student is again referred to directly in the substantiation of this claim. (29) La organización también es buena, pero echa de menos una conclusión más fuerte y es que me falta tu punto de vista razonado: por ejemplo, dices “no cabe ninguna duda” de la represión de los gitanos. PS3/2 ‘The organisation also is good, but it lacks a stronger conclusion and the thing is that your reasoned point of view is lacking for me: for example, you say “there is no doubt” about the repression of the gypsies.’

And, in example (30) below, not only does the tutor present the acknowledgement of certain inventors as being lacking (rather than the student’s failure to provide this) (la organización . . . echa de menos), but she also resorts to the positive politeness of shared common interests in the use of the first person plural pronoun nos and the negatively polite hedge quizás to protect the face of both Speaker and Hearer from the implied criticism. (30) Nos faltan quizás unas palabras de reconocimiento a los inventores y científicos que al fin y al cabo son los responsables de todos estos avances. PS3/8 ‘We are lacking perhaps a few words of recognition to the inventors and scientists who at the end of the day are responsible for all these advances.’

While the defocusing of the agent could be argued to protect the face of the Hearer, the target of the face-threatening act of criticism, more than that of the Speaker, the perpetrator of the act, it nonetheless functions to the benefit of the Speaker. Depersonalising the FTA is a basic negative politeness strategy communicating S’s want not to impinge on H (Brown & Levinson 1987). By casting external authority, or presupposed agreed course objectives as the arbiter of student performance rather than the tutor him or herself, the tutor effectively protects his or her own face with this selectional strategy.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.17 (115)

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness

In this section we have argued that presentational politeness appears to be a key factor within the textual conventions of this text type, i.e. that at the level of the text and also within the text positive attention is paid to the face of the hearer before any criticism is made. We have argued that while the use of bald-on-record strategies can, amongst other things, implicate power on the part of the Speaker, when this power (and consequently the face of the speaker) is under threat it can be reinforced by self-justification, normally with reference to external sources of power, in this instance to the institution of which the Speaker is representative. The giving of advice also functions, in the context described above, to protect the face of the Speaker; the giving of it not only implicates the power of the Speaker to do so but also puts on record his or her desire to work in the best interests of the Hearer, thus enhancing the Speaker’s positive face. Finally, the defocusing of criticism from the Hearer, while acting principally to protect the face of the Hearer can combine the benefits of the strategies outlined above; it can enable the Speaker to appeal to external authority thus enhancing the Speaker’s power and it can show the Speaker as sensitive to the hearer’s face wants, enhancing the Speaker’s positive face.

. Conclusion In this paper we have examined how extra-linguistic variables, in this instance those of role and status (Power), determine the weight accorded to the FTA, the nature of the strategies used to mitigate it and the relative attention paid to the face of the Speaker or Hearer. In the data used here, when Speakers feel less authority (status) to give feedback on conceptual skills than on linguistic skills they may consequently rank criticism in this area as a greater threat both to their own face and to that of the Hearer. They therefore expend greater energy both at presentational and selectional level in mitigating this threat. At presentational level, in addition to paying attention to the Hearer’s positive face before engaging in any face-threatening activity, they also expend considerable energy in justifying their criticisms often with reference to external (agreed) authority. At selectional level, they exploit the typical devices of hedging, presupposition, and indirectness through defocusing of agent to protect the faces of both interlocutors. Interestingly here, the speech acts of advice and reminders are transformed by means of the role of the Speaker (one of giving advice) from devices which essentially threaten the negative face of the Hearer to ones which



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29



F: PB12306.tex / p.18 (116)

Miranda Stewart

can be actively exploited to protect the positive face of the Speaker while at the same time reducing relative threat to the face of the Hearer.

Notes * This research was made possible thanks to a Small Research Grant from the British Academy. . While the relationship between text producer (Peninsular Spanish) and text receiver (normally British) is clearly intercultural, the study here is intracultural in that it aims to analyse a group of Peninsular Spanish text producers. For future studies, their output could be compared against that for other varieties of Spanish or that for other languages, e.g. French. . All translations are my own and are relatively literal with the aim of providing some insight into the linguistic choices made by the text producers. . Hernández Flores (1999) goes further than this and argues that the use of advice in Spanish colloquial conversation can enhance the face of both speaker and hearer in respect of a dimension of face identified as “self-affirmation” (Bravo 1996: 63 in Hernández Flores 1999: 40). . TMA = Tutor Marked Assignment.

References Bell, Allan (1984). “Language style as audience design”. Language in Society, 13, 145–204. Bell, Allan (2001). “Back in style: Reworking audience design”. In P. Eckert & J. Rickford (Eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (pp. 139–169). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1978). “Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena”. In E. Goody (Ed.), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in social interaction (pp. 56–289). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chen, Rong (2001). “Self-politeness: A proposal”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 87–106. Grice, Paul (1975). “Logic and conversation”. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3 Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press. Hatim, Basil (1998). “Text politeness: A semiotic regime for more interactive pragmatics”. In L. Hickey (Ed.), The Pragmatics of Translation (pp. 72–102). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hernández Flores, Nieves (1999). “Politeness ideology in Spanish colloquial conversation: the case of advice”. Pragmatics, 9(1), 37–49. Leech, Geoffrey (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. McLaren, Yvonne (2001). “To claim or not to claim? An analysis of the politeness of selfevaluation in a corpus of French corporate brochures”. Multilingua, 20(2), 171–190.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:29

F: PB12306.tex / p.19 (117)

Written pedagogic feedback and linguistic politeness

Myers, Greg (1989). “The pragmatics of politeness in scientific articles”. Applied Linguistics, 10(1), 1–35. Sell, Roger (1991). “The Politeness of literary texts”. In Roger Sell (Ed.), Literary Pragmatics (pp. 208–224). London: Routledge. Sifianou, Maria (1992). Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Weizman, Elda (1993). “Interlanguage requestive hints”. In G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlanguage Pragmatics (pp. 123–137). Oxford: Oxford University Press.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:9/02/2004; 14:12

Pragmatics and cross- and inter-cultural communication

F: PB123P23.tex / p.1 (119)

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.1 (121)

Chapter 7

Displaying closeness and respectful distance in Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters* Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

.

Introduction and aims

This article reports the results of a preliminary pragmatic contrastive study on the language of service encounters (SE hereafter) in Montevideo (Uruguay) and Quito (Ecuador). Based on data gathered in clothing and accessories shops in lower-middle class areas in both capitals, this study attempts to characterise the interactional style of participants in SEs (salespersons in particular) in the two cities. SEs, understood as everyday social interactions between a service provider and a customer who are in some service area (Merritt 1976), were chosen as the focus of examination since they represent everyday social activities characterised by socially shared, regular patternings (Ventola 1987; Kuiper & Flindall 2000). Through the study of the linguistic elements that constitute these encounters, cultural patterns can emerge and preferred communicative styles can be established. The motivation for this study comes from the findings of previous pragmatic studies carried out on these varieties in other contexts (cf. Placencia 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001a; Márquez Reiter 1997, 2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2003). Even though Spanish is spoken in both Montevideo and Quito, sociocultural differences underlying language use are to be expected given that Uruguay and Ecuador have experienced different historical, political, and social developments, which permeate institutional and other types of interactions. In this respect, this study forms part of a recent trend of contrastive studies into Spanish pragmatic variation (cf. Fant 1996; Puga Larraín 1997; Curcó 1998; García 2004), that is to say, how different varieties of a language, in this case

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.2 (122)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Spanish, vary in their use of language in context. These studies have highlighted possible communication problems and misunderstandings between speakers of different varieties of Spanish due to differences in the cultural norms underlying their communicative style.

. Background SEs have been examined from different perspectives in different languages. There have been single language/culture studies, contrastive, and intercultural studies. Among the most important studies is Ventola’s (1987) within the British systemics tradition. Ventola’s work is a proposal for a generic structure for public SEs. George’s (1990) is an ethnomethodological ethnography of requests and complaints in Naples with the aim of uncovering the underlying interactional norms necessary for successful intercultural communication with Neapolitans. Scholars on the PIXI (Pragmatics of Italian/English cross-cultural interaction) project, on the other hand, have carried out contrastive studies of bookshop SEs in English and Italian mostly within the conversation analytic tradition, thus focusing on different aspects of the local organisation of these interactions (cf. Aston 1995, 1988; Gavioli 1997). These studies highlight, for example, differences in interactional style in English and Italian through an analysis of the way in which elements of the SE are sequenced. More recently, small talk in different types of SEs (and other kinds of interactions) has been the object of analysis, as in McCarthy’s (2000) and Kuiper and Flindall’s (2000) studies. These scholars, as others in Coupland’s (2000) collection of studies, emphasise the significance of small talk not only for the marginal sections of SEs, but for the entire interaction. In the same vein, in the present study we stress the function of phatic (Malinowski 1972 [1923]; Laver 1975) and other relational talk (e.g. the use of address forms) in the opening section of SEs as setting the tone for the entire interaction. However, we also show how some Montevidean participants in the study, in contrast with the Quiteño participants, make attempts to renegotiate the degree of closeness they established at the beginning, or we show how Montevidean participants attempt to reinforce the ‘closeness’ created at the beginning, in other stages of the interaction. In addition to the works so far mentioned, two studies of particular relevance to the present study are Bailey (1997) and Traverso (2001). The former focuses on contrasting interactional practices in interethnic SEs between Koreans and African Americans, as a reflection of a different conception of the customer-salesperson relationship held by members of these two ethnic

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.3 (123)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

groups. Like Bailey’s, the present study is also contrastive though cross-cultural and its main aim is to discover similarities and/or differences in the customersalesperson relationship in Montevideo and Quito, as reflected in the interactional style of Montevidean and Quiteño speakers. Traverso’s work on the other hand, is of interest to us given that she examines service encounters of a similar nature to ours and like Bailey she also focuses on the construction of the interpersonal relationship in the (re)negotiation of the exchange. Concerning Spanish, there are a few studies on SEs. Ciapuscio and Kesselheim (1997) examine how immigrants and representatives of a public institution in Buenos Aires construct their respective identities and the institutional context through talk. Placencia (1998) investigates similarities and differences in the realisation of requests for information and services at hospital information desks in Madrid and Quito. Placencia (2001a), on the other hand, examines aspects of politeness in service encounters in a public institution in Quito; Placencia (2001b), focuses on address behaviour in service encounters in public institutions in La Paz, and Placencia (forthcoming) looks at a range of interactional activities carried out in corner shop encounters in Quito. Finally, Chodorowska-Pilch (2002) examines offers in travel agencies in Spain with data from the Comunidad de Madrid and Galicia. In the present study, drawing from pragmatics and conversation analysis, we examine similarities and differences in the overall organisation of SEs, that is, how these interactions are organised section by section (Schegloff 1972; Schegloff & Sacks 1973). We look at how SEs in both cultures are opened and closed and the type of selling strategies shop assistants employ to carry out the business exchange.1 Due to the type of data collected (see 3. below), the emphasis will be on the language of service providers only. Through the analysis of features of the overall organisation and linguistic realisations we examine similarities and differences regarding the type of interaction/relationship buyers and salespersons seek to construct in Montevideo and Quito. In Montevideo the encounters examined display participants’ preference for a ‘friendly’ interaction, with a blurring between the public and the private, whereas in Quito participants appear to value distance-maintenance, with little or no blurring between the public and the private.

. Methodology The data for this study consist of 56 audio-recorded SE interactions in clothing and accessories shops collected in situ; namely, 28 in Montevideo and 28



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.4 (124)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

in Quito. As indicated earlier, the data were gathered from lower-middle class areas in both cities. Lower-middle class shopping areas were chosen in order to ensure sameness of situational context in both cultures and as a consequence of the steady increase of Western-like malls where the ethos of multinational chains can pervade in selling-purchasing encounters. In this sense, the shops selected for this study represent a more traditional Montevidean and Quiteño style of shopping experience where employees tend to receive very little training, if any. Also to ensure sameness of situational context, shops corresponding to the closed only rather than the open setting type (Traverso 2001) were selected. As some studies have shown, spatial (and other) features of the encounter may constrain the type of talk that takes place (McCarthy 2000). An additional feature shared by the shops examined is that they can be characterised as non-selfservice (Traverso 2001) in that customers need to interact with a salesperson in order to examine or try on the goods, find out about their characteristics (material or origin), and price. As such, both Montevidean and Quiteño encounters in this study constitute a kind of personalised shopping experience for customers which stands in contrast with the impersonal shopping experience that international chains in modern malls offer, where customers have free access to the goods and whose only interaction is often with the cashier when the payment for the goods needs to be effected. In this respect, the interactions examined correspond to what Traverso (2001: 424) refers to as speech intensive encounters. The encounters in the present study thus provide rich data for examination. The selection criterion for the choice of clothing and accessories shops over other types of shops was mainly based on the greater availability of these in comparison to others in the areas where the data were collected. Also, the rationale for collecting data in clothing and accessories shops only, as opposed to in a variety of shops is three-fold: firstly, to ensure cross-cultural comparability, as remarked earlier; secondly, because some of the selling strategies employed will depend on the type of product being sold. Thus, the selling/purchasing of a sports car is likely to involve a higher incidence of certain strategies than the selling/purchasing of a pair of jeans and; thirdly, because in these type of SEs private and/or personal information is unlikely to emerge. Both researchers with the aid of friends who agreed to go into the above-mentioned shops and simulate a shopping experience collected the data. Although the research collaborators were not prompted at all as to what was expected from them and were asked to be as natural as possible, in other words, to shop as they would usually do, the fact that in some cases they did not need the item(s) they were

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.5 (125)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

inquiring about might have had an effect on their interactional behaviour. This is a point we shall return to during the analysis of the results. Whilst the research collaborators knew beforehand that the interactions were being audio-recorded by the researchers, the service providers were not informed about this until after the interaction had taken place. It was then that permission to use the recordings was sought from them. Permission to record was not sought in advance since this might have affected the language of the service providers and since this kind of interaction is neither intimate nor private and thus permission to record is fairly easily obtainable (Ventola 1987).2 In Montevideo a random sample of 35 SEs was employed whereas in Quito, due to a smaller number of clothing and accessories shops in the selected area, SEs were audio-recorded in every clothing and accessories shop in that particular area, amounting to 32 SEs altogether. Due to background noise which made some recordings inaudible, and due to the fact that permission to keep the recordings made was not granted in all cases, seven interactions in Montevideo and four in Quito had to be discarded. In order to counterbalance the limitation of customer-simulated scenarios, the analysis will focus on the language of the salespersons and will only use the language of the customers as reference when and if necessary. Another reason for this is that the customers in this study correspond to four participants only (two in Montevideo and two in Quito) so, unlike Traverso (2001) whose data also comes from the interaction of two participants – friend and friend’s mother – with 17 service providers, we do not think it is appropriate to focus on their style as any patterns found could represent their idiolect.

. The results The analysis of the data reveals that the most prominent differences between Montevideans and Quiteños relate to the way in which the speakers position themselves within the interaction; with the former employing strategies that seek involvement or closeness between the interlocutors and the latter employing respectful distance-keeping strategies. This difference in the interactional orientation of the SEs is reflected firstly, by the overall organisation of the interaction in Montevideo and Quito, that is to say, in the number and type of turns and turn sequences that occur; secondly, by the type and frequency of the selling strategies employed and their actual linguistic realisation showing differences at the level of (in)directness and tentativeness; and thirdly, by the



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.6 (126)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

stylistic (in)formality of the language employed mirrored by the choice of address forms, discourse markers, and other related linguistic features. Due to the scope of this paper we will only discuss in detail the similarities and differences in terms of the overall organisation of the interactions and in their stylistic (in)formality as reflected throughout the interaction. . The overall organisation of the interaction One of the main differences in the overall organisation of the SEs in Montevideo and Quito can be found in the actual length of the interactions. Montevidean interactions have more and longer turns than Quiteño ones; more specifically, the former have a mean of 47.43 turns per interaction and a median of 41 against a mean 43.71 and a median of 36 for the latter.3 This would, at first glance give the impression that all in all Montevideans are more verbose than Ecuadorians, however, a closer examination of the turn sequences found in the data indicate that while the above characterisation would accurately describe the business exchange and closing sections of the interactions including the use and frequency of the selling strategies employed as well as the closings sequences, Ecuadorian openings are longer; they are realised over three to four turns unlike Montevidean ones which are generally realised over two turns and sometimes over three. .. Openings In both Montevidean and Quiteño SEs, openings are realised by (paired) greetings, summons-response and summons, and offers to help. Quiteño openings, unlike Montevidean ones, also display invitations to come in. Greetings are defined by Goffman (1971) as access rituals and as such they mark the transition to a period of interpersonal access. Along the same lines, Firth (1972) suggests that a central function of greetings is to reduce uncertainty in social contact, particularly between persons not previously known. So using Firth’s words, greetings in SEs can be said to provide “a framework within which individuals can identify each other as preliminary to further action” (1972: 30). In the context of service encounters, greetings can also function as summons to direct the salesperson’s attention to the customer. In both cases, the linguistic realisation of the greetings helps to construct the interpersonal relationship between the interactants (also see Goffman 1971; Firth 1972). Table 1 below illustrates first and second pair parts of greetings, as employed in the interactions.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.7 (127)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters 

Table 1. Type and frequency of greetings First pair

Type of greeting Second pair

Hola ‘Hi’ Hola qué tal ‘Hi how are you’ Hola ‘Hi’ Hola buenas tardes ‘Hi good afternoon’ Buen día ‘Good day’ Buenos días / Buenas tardes ‘Good morning’ / ‘Good afternoon’ Buenos días ‘Good morning’ Muy buenos días ‘A very good morning’ Buenos días ‘Good morning’ Buenos días ‘Good morning’ Buenos días/ Buenas tardes ‘Good morning’ / ‘Good afternoon’ 0 greeting (Summons) Sí / 45 ‘Yes’ / ‘45’* (Summons and offer to help) Sí en qué te puedo ayudar ‘Yes how can I help youT ’ (Response to nonverbal summons) Sí buenos días ‘Yes good morning’ Buenos días ‘Good morning’

Frequency Mdeo Qto N: 28 N: 28

Hola ‘Hi’ Hola ‘Hi’ Buenas tardes ‘Good afternoon’ Buenas tardes ‘Good afternoon’

8 4 7 3

Buen día / Buenas tardes ‘Good day’/ ‘Good afternoon’ Buenos días / Buenas tardes ‘Good morning’ / ‘Good afternoon’

2

1

1

Buenas ‘Morning’ Buenos días ‘Good morning’

2 2

Cómo está buenos días ‘How are youV good morning’ Siga no más buenos días ‘Do come in good morning’ 0 greeting

1

0 greeting (Summons response) Acá ‘Here’ Hola buenas tardes ‘Hello good afternoon’

1 3

6 2 2

Buenos días ‘Good morning’

1

Sí a la orden ‘Yes at your service’

1

* 45 is the customer’s ticket number.

Within the types of greetings available, most of the Montevidean ones (19 out of 28) correspond to Hola – Hola ‘Hi-Hi’ and Hola – Buenas tardes ‘Hi – Good afternoon’ while most of the Quiteño ones (20 out of 28) are realised by Buenos días – Buenos días ‘Good morning – Good morning’. Thus showing differences in the degree of (in)formality, with Montevideo speakers

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.8 (128)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

exhibiting a preference for informality and Quiteño speakers, for formality. Such choices of greeting initially signals the closeness or distance that the interlocutors are likely to adopt in the course of the interaction; a point we shall refer to throughout the article. Summons per se had a very low incidence with only 2 out of 28 in each language. The physical presence of the customer constitutes a summons in itself and is responded by the salesperson with an offer to help such as sí, en qué te/le puedo ayudar ‘yes, how can I help youT /youV ’. These responses also help to establish the degree of closeness between the conversational participants in the service encounter, through the choice of address forms. Montevidean speakers employ T forms, in contrast to the Quiteño interactants who employ V thus showing a preference for closeness and respectful distance, respectively.4 Although offers to help were present in both samples with 2 out of 20 in Montevideo and 16 out of 28 in Quito, Quiteño speakers employed a wider range of formulae such as en qué le puedo ayudar ‘how can I help youV ’ or a la orden ‘at your service’. As in the previous cases, Quiteño speakers show a preference for formality as expressed in the choice of V and formulaic expressions. While both types of formulae explicitly state the sales provider’s willingness-obligation to help, the second formula also suggests an asymmetrical relationship between the interlocutors. In the same vein, it is interesting to note that invitations to come in, such as siga no más ‘come on in’ which only occur in the Quiteño data (5 out 28) also function as expressions of willingness to help while seemingly granting the customer permission to enter the realm of the salesperson. None of the Montevidean interactions had any incidences of such an opening thus Montevideans seem to be less affected by space boundaries in relation to their Quiteño counterparts. However, more data would be necessary in order to substantiate this point. With respect to the number of turns that comprise the opening sequence, while Montevidean openings are normally realised in two turns with the second turn generally constituting the main request for service by the customer, Quiteño openings are carried out in two to three turns with the main request for service occurring in the third or fourth turn as shown in examples (1) and (2) below. (1) [Mdeo.]5 S: hola ‘hi’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.9 (129)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters 

C: hola mirá estoy buscando camisa para mi marido ‘hi lookT I’m looking for a shirt for my husband’ (2) [Qto.] S: buenos días ‘good morning’ C: buenos días ‘good morning’ S: en qué le puedo ayudar ‘how can I help youV ’ C: verá ando buscando una chaqueta de cuero ‘lookV I am looking for a leather jacket’

The length of the openings together with the use of formulae in Quito in contrast with the shortness and the more limited number of formulas exhibited in the Montevidean data constitute another feature of the formality of Quiteño interactions against the informality of Montevidean ones, thus ensuring respectful distance or closeness between the interactants. Moreover, the fact that Montevidean customers produce the main request for service immediately after the exchange of greetings and do not wait to be invited in or offered help, unlike most Quiteño interactions, would seem to indicate differences in space boundaries between Montevidean and Quiteño speakers. Montevideans appear to take for granted that service providers are there to help them whereas Quiteño participants seem to be less certain and thus wait until they are offered help. This waiting could be interpreted as seeking permission to engage in the business exchange. According to Laver’s work on access routines “maximum risk leads to maximum routine, and, conversely, maximum routine reflects higher risk” (1981: 290). In other words, the length and formulaic nature of Quiteño openings in relation to Montevidean ones, could be taken as an indication that the Quiteño interlocutors of this study are more bothered about considerations of negative face (Brown & Levinson 1987) than the Montevidean ones. .. Closings This section examines the procedures that participants in SEs in Montevideo and Quito employ to bring the SE to an end by means of pre-closing (warrants and offers) and other closing devices (e.g. promises to come back to the shop or to think about the purchase, expressions of gratitude and their corresponding replies, apology and leave-taking utterances).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.10 (130)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

As in telephone conversations (Schegloff & Sacks 1973), the majority of closings in SEs in both data sets start with the production of a pre-closing device in the form of a warrant by one of the participants, the customer in this case. Warrants are utterances such as ‘okay’ and ‘well’ which signal the speaker’s desire to end the interaction. These utterances allow for the other participant to agree to proceed with the closing or to introduce a new topic. Common realisations of warrants in Montevidean closings are bueno entonces/ta ‘okay then’, and in Quiteño closings, ya/bueno ‘okay’. It is interesting to note that the range of warrants available for Montevidean speakers appears to include forms such as bueno as well as intensified expressions such as ta bárbaro ‘okay excellent’ or muy bien ‘very well’, whereas Quiteño speakers limit themselves to the ‘unemotional’ forms bueno ‘okay’ and ya ‘okay’. Intensified forms can be regarded as positive statements of the encounter (Albert & Kessler 1978) signalling that the customer found the experience enjoyable. As such, the use of these forms could be interpreted as Montevidean speakers displaying a higher degree of involvement and investment in the interaction than Quiteño speakers. Another utterance that appears to function as a pre-closing device, and which was found in the Montevidean data only is an offer by the salesperson for an additional purchase, as in the following example. (3) [Mdeo.] S: algo más? ‘anything else?’ C: no nada más ‘no nothing else’ S: bueno pasar por aquí ‘okay come this way’

Utterances of this type could be said to correspond in some way to Schegloff and Sacks’s (1973) offerings (e.g. are you busy?), which, nevertheless, occur at the beginning of conversations. In both cases, however, the reply by the other participant determines whether the conversation/interaction develops further or draws to a close. The occurrence of this particular pre-closing device, however, is tied to whether a customer has made any purchases or not. Going back to warrants, in Montevidean SEs only, salespersons are given the opportunity to display agreement or not after the initial warrant, as in example (4) below. The closing is thus prolonged as the salesperson’s agreement can also include the first part of a new adjacency pair (a display of willingness to help) to which the customer needs to respond, generating in turn another sequence (a thank you – rejection of thanks sequence).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.11 (131)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

(4) [Mdeo.] C: bueno entonces ‘okay then’ S: bueno cualquier cosita a las órdenes ‘okay if there is anythingD I am at your service’ C: bueno muchas gracias ‘okay many thanks’ S: de nada por favor ‘don’t mention it please’ C: chau ‘bye’ S: chau ‘bye’

However, in the majority of cases in both data sets, warrants do not normally occur on their own but are accompanied by another closing device, which is the use of formulae involving a promise to come back or to think about the purchase as in (5) and (6) below. These formulae would roughly correspond to Schegloff and Sacks’ (1973) arrangements. (5) [Mdeo.] C: bueno ta voy a ver entonces ‘okay then I’ll see then’ (6) [Qto.] C: bueno voy a darme una vueltita después de clases ‘okay I’ll have a lookD around and come back after school’ S: ya ‘okay’

Participants in SEs, salespersons in this case, can agree with the arrangement proposed and proceed with the closing or use the opportunity to reintroduce a sales topic. In the Quiteño interactions, salespersons tend to agree to proceed with the closing as in example (6) above. In contrast, in the Montevidean interactions, although salespersons may initially display agreement, they will more often attempt to reintroduce a sales topic, as in (7) and even offer an apology in the absence of the garment requested, as in (8) below.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.12 (132)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

(7) [Mdeo.] C: bueno ta (.) voy a ver entonces muchísimas gracias ‘okay okay (.) I’ll see then manyA thanks’ C: no por nada (.) no hay de qué ‘not at all (.) don’t mention it’ C: bueno entonces ‘okay then’ C: bueno a las órdenes (.) mi nombre es Diego ‘okay I’m at your service (.) my name is Diego’ C: bueno muy bien ‘okay very well’ S: cualquier cosa lo reservás porque es el único que me queda ‘just in case youT will have to reserve it because it is the only one left’ (8) [Mdeo.] C: y no van a recibir de niños ‘and will youP not get children’s’ S: no en bermudas por ahora nada (.) tenemos mercadería vieja ‘no in shorts nothing for the moment (.) we only have the old stock’ C: y sí (.) ya se termina la temporada (.) bueno (.) entonces ‘that’s right (.) the season is about the finish (.) okay (.) then’ S: bueno (.) perdoná que no te pueda ayudar ‘okay (.) sorry that I cannot help youT ’ C: ( ) S: remeras no querés (.) de niño ‘don’t youT want t-shirts (.) for children’

In (7) above, the use of a self-identification can be noted. This personalizes the interaction and as such it can be seen as attempt by the salesperson to reduce the distance between the service provider and the consumer. (Dis)agreement to end the encounter can also happen after expressions of gratitude by customers, which in both data sets accompany warrants and promises to come back or to think about the purchase, as in (9) and (10). (9) [Mdeo.] C: ta bárbaro bueno muchas gracias ‘excellent okay many thanks’ (10) [Qto.] C: bueno gracias ‘okay thank you’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.13 (133)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

In Quito, the expression of gratitude and its corresponding reply in most cases constitutes what Schegloff and Sacks (1973) refer to as the terminal exchange, that is, the adjacency pair that brings the interaction to a close, as in (11): (11) [Qto.] C: bueno voy a ver si le traigo le agradezco ‘okay I’ll see whether I can bring him thank youV ’ S: ya mi señora ‘yes Ma’am’

Le agradezco in this example appears to function both as an expression of gratitude and as the first part of the terminal exchange; the reply the salesperson gives can be interpreted as both an acceptance of thanks and an agreement to end the interaction. In the Montevidean interactions, on the other hand, one can observe that expressions of gratitude do not necessarily function as the terminal exchange; leave-taking utterances, as in (4) above can be employed instead. Clark and French (1981), in relation to telephone closings, propose that the occurrence of leave-taking utterances is related to the degree of involvement between the participants as these utterances are geared towards reaffirmation of acquaintance rather than contact termination. Thus, the use of leave-taking utterances in the Montevidean SEs could be interpreted as a reflection of the closeness achieved during the interaction (cf. Aston 1988). This would also be in line with Goffman’s (1971: 65) suggestion that supportive interchanges, of which leave-taking utterances are an instance, are apparently “more important for relations between persons who know each other . . . than for anonymous ones”. Participants in SEs in Montevideo appear to interact as if they knew each other thus they need to part as if they knew each other. This stands in sharp contrast with the Quiteño data where there is only one occurrence of leave-taking utterances; therefore showing the distance maintained throughout the encounter. As can be seen from the examples provided so far, a larger variety of turns appear to occur in Montevidean SE closings, this results in longer closings. In fact, the number of turns that constitute the closing in Montevideo varies from 3 to 9, with closings of 5 and 7 turns being the most common: there are 10 instances of 5-turn closings and 6 instances of 7 turns. In contrast, in Quito, the number of turns ranges from 2 to 6, with closings of 2 and 4 being the most common: there are 15 and 6 instances of each, respectively. It was noted in the previous section that openings in Quito, as compared to Montevideo, stretch over a larger number of turns, so it is surprising at first



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.14 (134)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

glance that closings do not mirror openings in this respect. Closings, nevertheless, appear to reflect other aspects of the interaction such as the ‘verbosity’ encountered in the business exchange section of Montevidean interactions as opposed to the ‘restraint’ found in Quiteño interactions, with more salespersons in Montevidean SEs seeking opportunities to restart the business exchange in the closing. Longer Montevidean closings also possibly reflect the closer relationship Montevidean participants seem to aim to pursue from the beginning of the interaction, as opposed to the respectful distance Quiteño participants appear to want to keep throughout. In other words, closings are orientated to what preceded them and as such they not only reflect but also ratify the nature of the interaction. While Quiteño openings reflect certain apprehensiveness on the part of the customer who, through the opening sequences, seeks (re) assurance from the service provider to proceed with the business exchange, the briefness of the closings appears to be directly related to the lack of closeness evidenced throughout the interaction. In other words, due to the fact that Quiteño participants maintain distance in the interaction, closings can be briefly effected. On the other hand, the briefness of Montevidean openings reflect the ‘confidence’ customers have that their request for service will be attended to. Such ‘confidence’ could derive from the belief that salespersons are there to provide a service for customers. . Type and frequency of selling strategies Interestingly, the negotiation of the business exchange was done in pragmatically similar, albeit non-identical, ways. Both Montevidean and Quiteño salespersons made use of a largely similar range of strategies to attend to their customers. There were a total of nine selling (sub)strategies identified in the Montevidean data, seven of which were also found in the Quiteño data (see below). Strategies relating to the provision of product related-information are the most common type within both data sets. However, within these strategies, a number of similarities and differences were identified in the amount and type of information given. 1. Disclosure of personal information: the salesperson volunteers information of a personal nature: yo nunca he tenido problemas con esta marca [Mdeo.] ‘I’ve never had any problems with this brand’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.15 (135)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

mi nombre es Diego, cualquier cosita a las órdenes [Mdeo.] ‘my name is Diego I’m at your service for whatever you might need’

2. Anticipating customer’s experience of the product: the salesperson comments on the (un)suitability of the product according to the customer’s needs before the latter tries the product on or makes any comments to that effect: viste que no te lastima el pie [Mdeo.] ‘youT see that it does not hurt yourT foot’ vas a ver que esas van a andar bien [Mdeo.] ‘you’llT see that those will go well’ usted le siente suavecito el zapato [Qto.] ‘the shoe will feel soft for youV ’

3. Product explanation: the salesperson volunteers information of an allegedly non-evaluative/factual nature about the product: C: S:

C: S:

¿a cuánto están estas botas? [Mdeo.] ‘how much are these boots?’ a 2500 y ésta es más cara pero sino la bota de dama, la de dama es ésta, lo que pasa es que traen diferentes numeraciones para, o sea para marear al cliente ‘2500 and this one is more expensive otherwise there are the lady’s boots, this one is the lady’s, what happens is that they have a different numbering so as to, to confuse the customer’ es de cuero [Qto.] ‘is it leather’ es cuero cuero es cuero pulat que es lo ( ) mejor que tenemos aquí en cueros sí y ese cuero es trabajado en aceite quemado? entonces el color es natural ‘it is leather leather it is pulat leather which is ( ) the best we have here in leather yes and we treat that leather with burnt oil? so the colour is natural’

4. Product Attribute enumeration: the salesperson positively comments on some aspects of the product: éstas son lindas [Mdeo.] ‘these are nice’



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.16 (136)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

éstos están en plena moda ‘these are very fashionable’

5. Intensified product attribute enumeration: the salesperson makes intensified positive comments on some aspects of the products. The intensification is realised through the mere repetition of qualifying adjectives, the use of superlatives, and adverbs: la tela es buena buena [Mdeo.] ‘the fabric is good good’ éstas son las más cómodas [Mdeo.] ‘these are the most comfortable’ ésas lo que tienen es que son comodísimas [Mdeo.] ‘what those have is that they are extremely comfortable’ . . . es bien suavecito ese zapato [Qto.] ‘. . . that shoe is very softD ’

6. Disclosure of restricted salesperson’s information: the salesperson volunteers information about business transactions in his/her shop and/or other shops: no sé si queda porque, o nos olvidamos de pedirlo o porque no le queda a ella [Mdeo.] ‘I don’t know if we have any left, either because we forgot to order it or because she has none left’ vas a ver que en todos lados te pasa lo mismo, los números grandes no hay nada porque este año se vendió mucho el número más grande y otra que las fábricas a su vez hicieron menos, muy pocas fábricas hicieron hasta 40 [Mdeo.] ‘you’llT see that wherever you go the same happens, there isn’t anything in large numbers because this year we sold a lot of large numbers and the other thing is that the factories made fewer, very few factories made up to (size 40)’

7. Suggestions aimed at cornering the customer: the salesperson volunteers information aimed at making the customer buy the product: te hago una atención igual (referring to the product price) [Mdeo.] ‘I give youT a complimentary gift anyway’ cualquier cosa la reservás porque es el único par que me queda [Mdeo.] ‘just in case reserveT it since it’s the only pair that I’ve got left’ lléveselo después se lo llevan [Qto.] ‘takeV it otherwise someone will take it’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.17 (137)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

8. Solicited product explanation: the salesperson complies with the customer’s request for product explanation: C: S: C: S:

de qué material es? [Mdeo.] ‘what’s the fabric’ de seda ‘silk’ éstos qué son de qué son? [Qto.] ‘these what are these what are they made of ’ ( ) gamuza ‘( ) suede’

9. Offers: the salesperson offers other related products, which might interest the customer or discounts: S:

después tenés el modelo que salió ahora para dama [Mdeo.] ‘then youT have the lady’s model which has just come out’

S:

pero sí le damos un buen descuentito para que se anime a llevarse [Qto.] ‘but we will give youV a discountD to encourage youV to take it’

Despite the fact that both data sets exhibit a similar variety of strategies across all the interactions, more differences than similarities were found in the frequency with which some of the strategies are employed, as can be seen in Table 2.6 Table 2. Frequency of use of selling (sub)strategies Selling (sub)strategy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Disclosure of personal information Anticipating customer’s experience of the product Product explanation Product attribute enumeration Intensified product attribute enumeration Disclosure of restricted salesperson’s information Suggestions aimed at cornering the customer Solicited product explanation Offers

Number of occurrences Montevideo Quito 12 14 41 64 12 16 12 67 36

– 5 11 59 18 – 4 19 34



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.18 (138)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

As can be seen in this table, the sub-strategy that figures most prominently in both data sets is attribute enumeration (including intensified product attribute enumeration), showing a similar incidence across the 28 SEs interactions, 64 and 12 times respectively for the Montevideans, and 59 and 18 times respectively for the Quiteño salespersons. The second most salient sub-strategy in the Montevidean data is solicited product explanation with 67 instances, followed by product explanation with 41 instances, closely followed by offers with 36 occurrences. The Quiteño data, on the other hand, shows a preference for offers with 34 instances followed by solicited product explanation with 19 occurrences and then product explanation with 11 instances. The remaining strategies found in both data sets, namely anticipating the customer’s experience of the product and making suggestions aimed at cornering the customer, exhibit a lower incidence in both languages with the Montevidean data showing an incidence of 14 for the former and 12 for the latter and the Quiteño data exhibiting an incidence of 5 and 4, respectively. Finally, the disclosure of personal information and the disclosure of restricted salesperson’s information, as indicated earlier, were only found in the Montevidean data. These strategies show a similar incidence to anticipating the customer’s experience and to making suggestions aimed at cornering the customer in the Montevidean data, 12 and 16 times respectively. In order to discover whether the observed differences between both data sets were significant or not, a statistical comparison of both samples was carried out. .. Statistical results As will be recalled, in both cities the data were collected in clothing and accessories shops in lower middle-class areas. Whereas the Montevidean data is randomised, the researcher went into every clothing and accessories shop in Quito. Hence, the data roughly forms 28 matched pairs. The variables in question are the nominal selling strategies (see 4.2 above) employed by the salespersons in both Montevideo and Quito. Since the expected distribution of frequencies across the nine selling strategies is small we were unable to use a Chi Square. Instead, the Mann-Whitney U-test was employed considering that the two samples are independent. Table 3 below shows the results of the test.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.19 (139)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters 

Table 3. Values of u, z, and p-values in Mann-Whitney test

U z p-value

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

308.0 –1.38 –0.08

183.5 –3.42 0.0003

192.0 –3.28 0.0005

340.5 –0.84 0.2

375.5 –0.27 0.4

266.0 –2.06 0.02

286.0 –1.73 0.04

120.5 –4.45 0.000004

243.5 –2.43 0.007

1. Disclosure of personal information 2. Anticipating customer’s experience of the product 3. Product explanation 4. Product attribute enumeration 5. Intensified product attribute enumeration

6. Disclosure of restricted salesperson’s information 7. Suggestions aimed at cornering the customer 8. Solicited product explanation 9. Offers

From the results we see that there are significant differences at the 5% level in the frequency of use of: anticipating the customer’s experience of the product, product information, disclosure of restricted salesperson’s information, suggestions aimed at cornering the customer, solicited product explanation, and offers. On the other hand, if we regard the two samples as paired due to the fact that they were both gathered in lower middle-class areas, they sell similar items and have similar sizes, then we can use a Wilcoxon matched pairs signed-rank test. The results of the test are contained in Table 4 below. Table 4. The ranks of the differences and the corresponding Wilcoxon test Pair

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

0 –5.5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 –1.5 0 0 –1.5 0

0 –15 9.5 0 0 –4 –4 –4 0 0 0 –4 –17 0 –4 0

–9.5 –17 –9.5 9.5 –14 0 –3.5 –3.5 0 0 0 –3.5 –19 0 –3.5 0

0 –21 22 –3 –15 0 0 –20 18 –9.5 15 3 18 9.5 –9.5 –3

0 –10 12 7 0 0 0 0 10 0 0 0 –3 0 –3 10

0 –7 0 –9 0 0 0 0 –3.5 0 0 –8 –3.5 0 –3.5 0

0 –12 0 0 0 0 0 –4 9.5 0 0 –4 –4 0 0 –4

–18 –23 –6.5 –9.5 –9.5 –16 –3 0 3 0 3 0 –20.5 –18 –9.5 –6.5

–5 –15.5 5 0 0 –20.5 –5 0 12 5 –12 –12 –12 –13.5 –5 0

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.20 (140)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Table 4. (continued) Pair

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

0 –5.5 0 0 0 –3.5 0 0 0 –3.5 0 0 6 0 1 0.05

–16 –9.5 –13.5 –4 0 –9.5 –13.5 4 0 –9.5 –12 –18 18 13.5 40 0.01

–18 –9.5 –16 –3.5 0 0 –14 3.5 9.5 –9.5 –14 –20 20 13 52 0.01

–9.5 0 –9.5 –18 9.5 3 –9.5 9.5 –3 –15 0 0 22 104.5 66 0.1

0 0 3 0 0 –3 0 –7 3 –7 0 0 12 33 14 0.1

0 –3.5 0 –3.5 0 0 –3.5 0 0 0 0 0 9 0 6 0.01

0 –4 0 0 0 0 –9.5 –4 0 –9.5 9.5 –4 12 19 14 0.1

–25 –18 –13.5 –13.5 –3 –20.5 –23 –13.5 –9.5 –13.5 3 –23 25 9 90 0.01

–18 –18 –18 –12 0 0 –22 5 –5 –20.5 5 –5 22 32 66 0.01

p-

1. Disclosure of personal information 2. Anticipating customer’s experience of the product 3. Product explanation 4. Product attribute enumeration 5. Intensified product attribute enumeration

6. Disclosure of restricted salesperson’s information 7. Suggestions aimed at cornering the customer 8. Solicited product explanation 9. Offers

Unlike the results of the Mann-Whitney U-test, the results of the Wilcoxon test also reveal significant differences for the disclosure of information at the 5% level and no significant differences for suggestions aimed at cornering the customer. In order to corroborate the results of the Wilcoxon test a t-test was also employed. The results are shown in Table 5 below. Table 5. The results of the t-test

t df p-values

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

–2.46 957 0.007

–3.34 89 0.0006

–3.40 103 0.0005

–0.05 93 0.5

0.71 522 0.2

–2.84 811 0.002

–1.96 1141 0.03

–5.79 80 6e-8

–2.65 92 0.005

1. Disclosure of personal information 2. Anticipating customer’s experience of the product 3. Product explanation 4. Product attribute enumeration 5. Intensified product attribute enumeration

6. Disclosure of restricted salesperson’s information 7. Suggestions aimed at cornering the customer 8. Solicited product explanation 9. Offers

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.21 (141)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

Interestingly, the t-test gives the same results as those from the Wilcoxon test at the 5% level. To sum up, the observed differences found in the frequency with which attribute enumeration, intensified attribute enumeration, and suggestions aimed at cornering the customer are employed in both data sets are not significant. However, highly significant differences were found for the rest of the strategies. Thus, the Montevidean shopkeepers of this study provide their customers with more product explanations irrespective of whether the explanation is requested by the customer or not, when compared with their Quiteño counterparts. Both of these strategies were highly significant at p < 0.01 (see Table 3). Likewise, Southern Cone shopkeepers seem to make a more active attempt to guess what the customer needs might be by making more offers and by anticipating the customer’s reaction to a product. Differences in the frequency of these strategies were found to be highly significant at p < 0.01 (see Table 3). Besides giving their customers a more informed picture of the product in question by pursuing product-information related selling strategies more actively and in doing so enhancing the consumer’s learning process (Foxall 1999), the Montevidean salespersons of this study also personalise the interaction. They bring in personal and/or restricted information, which might be of interest to the customer. It will be recalled that these two strategies do not occur in the Quiteño data. The disclosure of personal information had a significance level of p < 0.05 and the disclosure of restricted salesperson’s information was highly significant at p < 0.01. The differences found so far in the type and frequency of selling strategies in the contexts examined show that Montevidean interactions appear to constitute on the whole a more informative experience than shopping interactions in Quito. Montevidean salespersons provide more explanations about the product irrespective of whether the explanations were requested by the customer or not. They also make more product related offers and in doing so, may give the impression to Uruguayans of being more knowledgeable, more ‘helpful’ and more orientated towards the customer needs than their Andean counterparts in the context examined. Quiteño customers, nevertheless, may not necessarily perceive Montevidean salespersons’ ‘over-informativeness’ in a positive light, but rather may regard it as aggressive selling. The provision of more information than required by salespersons in Montevideo is reinforced by the employment of personal and/or restricted information, hence not only ascertaining further knowledge about the product but also engaging at a personal level with the customer and thus shortening the existing distance between service provider and customer. In order to illustrate the dif-



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.22 (142)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

ferences found it is necessary to turn our attention to the linguistic similarities and differences exhibited in the use of the above strategies. .. Selling sub-strategies (Intensified) Attribute enumeration is the most salient sub-strategy in both data sets. The differences found in the realisation of this sub-strategy are of a lexicogrammatical nature. Both shopkeepers prefer to intensify this substrategy through the use of adverbs. Due to dialectical differences Montevideans tend to employ muy while Quiteños prefer bien. When it comes to solicited product explanation, Montevidean salespersons not only make more use of the sub-strategy but their explanations tend to be more complete in relation to those given by the Quiteños as shown in examples (12) and (13) below. (12) [Mdeo.] C: son los únicos que tenés o tenés algún otro [Mdeo.] ‘are they the only ones youT have or do youT have any others’ S: no (.) tenés acá (.) del otro lado también tenés (.) ésto es un doble G (.) es el más grande (.) un G ‘no (.) there areT some here (.) on the other side there are some too (.) this is a double L (.) it’s the largest (.) an L’ C: y es de algodón? ‘is it made of cotton?’ S: sí (.) es de algodón (.) tiene un poco también de poliéster (.) tiene 55 de poliéster (.) 25 de viscosa ‘yes (.) it’s made of cotton (.) it also has a bit of polyester (.) it has 55% of polyester (.) 25% of viscose’ (13) [Qto.] C: señorita disculpe de qué material son éstas? ‘excuse me madam what material are these’ S: algodón ‘cotton’ C: sí son? será algodón ciento por ciento? ‘they are? would they be a 100% cotton?’ S: no ciento por ciento sí tiene poliéster ‘not a 100% they do contain polyester’ C: ya (.) qué porcentaje será más o menos? ‘all right (.) what percentage would it be more or less’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.23 (143)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters 

S: a ver veamos en la caja (.) no no dice aquí ‘let’s see let’s look at the box (.) no no it doesn’t say here’

As can be seen from (12) and (13) above, Montevidean salespersons do not just limit their explanations to the precise question asked by the customer by giving no more and no less information than required but tend to flout Grice’s maxim of quantity by offering fuller explanations. Thus, in (12) the saleswoman complies with the customer’s (pre)request to be shown other models by not only showing the models in question but by providing a description of the different sizes available and in doing so she probably pre-empts the customer’s next question/request. Likewise, when asked about the material of the garment in question, the sales assistant provides the customer with a detailed description of the materials. In an equivalent interaction in Quito, see example (13) above, the customer needs to ask three questions in an attempt to establish the material of the garment in question. Lengthy product explanations were found in one or two of the Quiteño interactions only. Thus, it could be claimed that both the Montevidean and Quiteño vendors of this study tend to flout Grice’s maxim of quantity. While the former do so by being ‘over-informative’, the latter do so by being ‘under-informative’. A similar pattern is observed in the way in which Montevidean salespersons volunteer product information as in example (14) below, where the saleswoman not only confirms the origin of product in the last turn but also provides further information on the product. (14) [Mdeo.] C: de qué procedencia son? ‘where are they made’ S: son chilenas ‘they are Chilean’ C: son chilenas ‘they are Chilean’ S: sí (.) ésta es la principal competencia en Chile de Hush Puppies ‘yes (.) they’re the main competitors of Hush Puppies in Chile’

Similar instances can be found in Quiteño SEs but are limited to one or two salespersons, whereas their use appears to be more generalised in Montevidean SEs. The informativeness that seems to characterise the giving of product information in the Montevidean data makes Montevidean salespersons appear knowledgeable and willing to assist the customer, as remarked earlier. The com-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.24 (144)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

pleteness of their explanations when compared to the briefness of the Quiteño ones would seem to indicate that a ‘learning shopping experience’ is probably expected by the consumer in Montevideo. However, data on customer expectations would need to be collected in order to substantiate this point. When it comes to the next sub-strategy, namely offers, Montevideans once again make more use of the sub-strategy than Quiteños. Thus, once again giving the impression of a more customer-orientated service than the Quiteños and more of a willingness to help. Example (15) below illustrates the use of the sub-strategy in Montevidean SEs and (16) in Quiteño SEs. (15) [Mdeo.] S: acá está el 8 para que tú te lo pruebes ‘here’s an 8 for youT to try on’ C: mm ‘mm’ S: te voy a mostrar si querés algún otro tono ‘and I’m going to show you T if youT want another colour’ (16) [Qto.] C: . . . sólo blazer? ‘blazers only?’ S: no: para hacerle a la medida ‘no: to be tailor-made’

Example (16) illustrates the use of an elliptical, impersonal offer. The use of such forms is not uncommon in Quiteño SEs and may contribute, in an intercultural encounter, to give the impression that the salesperson is not very willing to help. The use of these forms, however, stands in contrast with explicit offers to help that appear in a large number of interactions in the opening section of SEs. Whereas differences in the completeness of the information given to the consumer were found in the realisation of the above strategies, both Montevidean and Quiteño shopkeepers anticipated the customer’s experience of the product in linguistically similar ways despite significant differences in its frequency. Thus, both Montevidean and Quiteño salespersons expressed their evaluation of the product in relation to their customer’s needs by giving advice and making suggestions. Examples (17)–(18) below illustrate the realisation of the strategy.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.25 (145)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters 

(17) [Mdeo.] S: las sandalias se usan justitas (.) así que te sobra (.) te sobra de adelante (.) el pie no va todo para adelante ‘sandals are worn tight (.) so youT have plenty of room (.) youT have room on the front (.) the foot doesn’t go all to the front’ S: te digo (.) precisás un número más me parece ‘I’m telling you (.) youT need a larger number I think’ (18) [Qto.] S: la chompa (.) propiamente viene (.) viene no la manga es así (.) viene la manga recta entonces ahí se va a sentir más cómoda . . . ‘the jacket (.) comes (.) comes you know the sleeve is like this (.) it comes with a straight sleeve so youV are going to feel more comfortable . . . ’

The disclosure of personal information and restricted salesperson’s information only occur in the Montevidean data. Examples (19) and (20) below illustrate the use of the former and (21) and (22) the latter. (19) [Mdeo.] S: señora yo soy Katiana ‘Madam I’m Katiana’ C: qué lindo nombre ‘what a nice name’ S: es ruso ‘it’s Russian’ (20) [Mdeo.] S: hace años que vendo esto y nunca he tenido problemas ‘I’ve been selling this for years and I’ve never had any problems’ (21) [Mdeo.] S: no (.) son las únicas eh: el único fabricante que nos hizo éstas bermuditas (.) Afa ‘no (.) they only ones ah: the only manufacturer that made these shorts (.) Afa’ (22) [Mdeo.] S: generalmente a una persona que no usa plantales le estoy dando dos talles más ‘in general I’m given two extra sizes to a person who wears inner soles’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.26 (146)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

With the exception of (19) above and the example provided under the identification of this sub-strategy (see 4.2) where the salesperson personalises the interaction by providing the customer with her name thus shortening the distance with the customer despite the mitigating force of the formal title señora in (19); the rest of the examples focus on the giving of product related information as experienced by the salesperson. By volunteering personal and restricted information Montevidean service providers not only display further knowledge about the product but also provide the ground to involve the customer at a more personal level. The disclosure of personal and restricted information, a higher incidence of product information selling strategies as well as the informativeness displayed in the realisation of these strategies, accompanied by a higher incidence of offers and anticipating the customer’s reaction to the product seem to reflect a tendency for interactional proactiveness and interactional reactiveness, to use Bailey’s (1997) terms, by Montevidean and Quiteño salespersons respectively.7 In other words, Montevidean storekeepers tend to flout the quantity maxim so as to provide their consumers with a fuller explanation of the product and to disclose personal and restricted information. Most Quiteño salespersons in the study, on the other hand, provide no more and no less information than is required by the consumer. The way in which the selling strategies are employed in the Montevidean data, appear to depict the Montevidean salespersons as more active and dynamic than their Quiteño counterparts, who in comparison appear rather taciturn. The interactional pro-activeness exhibited by the Montevidean salespersons in relation to the reactiveness displayed by the Quiteños would seem to indicate different conceptions of the “the spatial dimension and the symbolic value given to personal territories” (Traverso 2001: 440). In an intercultural encounter, the style of Montevidean salespersons may be regarded as pushy and intrusive by Quiteño customers. . The stylistic (in)formality of the interactions Whilst Quiteño interactions show a preference for formality in their interactions, Montevidean ones reflect a preference for informality. This (in)formality is not only evidenced by contrast to the formulaic nature of the Quiteño opening sequences, but also by the choice of forms of address, the use of titles, discourse markers, and even humour by the interlocutors.8

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.27 (147)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters 

.. Forms of address and titles Before we start discussing the findings under this sub-section it should be borne in mind that our aim is to provide an analysis of the results in line with the overall linguistic behaviour of the participants discussed so far. In other words, our objective here is not to present an exhaustive analysis of the choice and use of address forms between the two data samples since firstly, this is not the main purpose of the paper and secondly, the type of the data collected for this study would not render itself for such purposes due to the unequal numbers of female and male interactants amongst other reasons. Montevidean and Quiteño interactions can be sharply contrasted with each other in terms of the choice of address forms. Unlike Quiteño interlocutors who show an absolute preference for the formal pronoun of address, usted, in all their SEs, Montevidean interactional participants exhibit a preference for informality in their exchanges.9 This informality is realised through the choice of tú and vos in preference to usted. More than a third (20/28) of the Montevidean SEs whether initiated by the customer or the salesperson employed tú/vos in preference to usted.10 Four out of the 28 SEs were initiated with usted by the salesperson and then negotiated to tú/vos. In only two out of the 28 interactions usted was employed by both salespersons and consumers and in 2 out of 28 SEs the interlocutors code-switched between tú/vos and usted throughout the interactions. It should be noted that in these four interactions either the salesperson or the customer were in his/her fifties and this could have influenced the choice of pronoun of address. However, due to the small number of interactions where usted was employed such comments should only be taken speculatively. Whereas usted appears to be the only appropriate socio-pragmatic choice available to Quiteños in these type of interactions; Montevidean interactional participants appear to be able to fluctuate along the (in)formality continuum despite showing a clear preference for informality. Thus, in six out of 28 interactions, Montevidean conversational participants were able to negotiate the preferred form of address unlike their Quiteño counterparts who appear to follow a socially pre-patterned or fixed choice. From this linguistic behaviour it could be argued that the Montevidean interlocutors of this study seem to have room for negotiation in contrast to the Quiteños whose role-relationships in this type of social context appear to be pre-established. In other words, while Quiteños appear to be recreating the existing status quo by conforming to the socially expected form of address hence maintaining distance between the salesperson and the consumer, Montevideans seems to (re)define it in their

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.28 (148)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

interactions, in favour of shortening the distance between the conversational participants. With respect to the use of titles, these were not very prominent in either data set. Montevideans employed three titles in 28 interactions. The title employed is señora and it was used in those interactions where usted was the preferred from of address. In the Quiteño data there were a few more occurrences (eight altogether) with a larger range of formal forms: señora ‘Mrs/Madam’, señorita ‘Miss/Madam’ and the deferential form mi señora. The occurrence of these forms would display once again the higher degree of formality in Quiteño SEs in relation to Montevidean SEs. One exception, however was the occurrence of the familiar form mija ‘my daughter’. The use of this form would constitute one of the few instances of involvement strategies in the Quiteño SEs examined. The Montevidean overall orientation towards closeness in their interactions is also evidenced by the use of viste in more than half of the SEs. .. Viste, Verá The Montevidean data contain a number of interpersonal discourse markers such as mirá ‘lookT ’, sabés ‘you knowT ’ and viste ‘you seeT /you knowT ’.11 Whereas the first two markers have a very low incidence, the latter is employed by the salespersons in more than half of the SEs. The use of viste as an interpersonal discourse marker follows the conjugation of the informal second person singular with vio as its formal counterpart. Both markers are only employed in the preterite and could be translated as ‘you see’ or ‘you know’ in British English. Viste occurs in initial, middle, and final utterance position as illustrated below: (23) [Mdeo.] C: . . . para que veas la calidad (.) viste que el otro era más finito ‘for youT to see the quality (.) you seeT the other one was thinner’ (24) [Mdeo.] C: si fuese cuerina viste que te lastima ‘if it were PVC you see it would hurt’ (25) [Mdeo.] C: son perlas españolas viste ‘they’re Spanish pearls you see’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.29 (149)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters 

In all three positions viste is employed as a way of involving the hearer, that is to say, assuming the hearer agrees or is aware of what the speaker is saying. In other words, when employing viste the speaker does not provide the hearer with new information but makes reference to something already known and/or shared by both interlocutors. Thus, in using viste the speaker seeks to engage the hearer further by making him/her share the responsibility of what is being or has been said (Carranza 1998). As such, the employment of the marker by the Montevidean salespersons could be interpreted as an involvement substrategy. In the Quiteño data, the interpersonal discourse markers that were found are verá ‘look’ (literally, ‘you will see’), vea/vea usted ‘do you realise it?’, no/no es cierto ‘isn’t that so?’, and sí ‘are you with me/is that clear?’. The form with the highest incidence is verá, with 17 instances whereas there are only a few occurrences of the other forms. Verá, as opposed to the Montevidean viste occurs in initial position only, as in the following examples: (26) [Qto.] S: verá éste le cuesta 550 ‘look this is 550’ (27) [Qto.] S: ya le voy a indicar (.) verá (.) ésta es la 6 de Diciembre sí ‘I’ll show it to you straight away (.) look (.) this is 6 de Diciembre yes’

This marker seems to be used to preface explanations, as a way of ensuring and focusing the hearer’s attention. Its use seems to constitute an attempt to draw the hearer towards the speaker’s space/position; however, it does not seem to imply the same degree of involvement that viste appears to create. A key difference in function is possibly related to the use of a past or a future form. The use of the past form viste, in contrast with the future of verá, seems to convey that the speaker assumes the other person shares his/her point of view, whereas verá, as remarked earlier, appears to constitute a request to the hearer to share his/her view. In any case, it has to be stressed that the majority of occurrences of verá and other interpersonal discourse markers in the Quiteño data were found in two interactions only. These were interactions with a larger number of turns that did not follow the pattern of briefness that characterised most of the Quiteño interactions.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.30 (150)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

. Conclusions The analysis of the interactions shows that, overall, the Montevidean participants of the study are more ‘verbose’ than Quiteños. With the exception of the opening sequences, this verbosity is manifested through a larger number of turns, a higher frequency of selling strategies, which in the vast majority are characterised by their informativeness in contrast to the briefness and less frequent use of the same strategies by the Quiteño speakers in this study. Furthermore, Montevidean salespersons, unlike Quiteños, also employ personalisation strategies. The features described for Montevidean SEs can be associated with interactional proactiveness and those of Quiteño speakers, with interactional reactiveness. However, it should be noted that these are tendencies observed in one specific context and cannot be generalised to all Montevidean and Quiteño salespersons.12 The findings also reflect that Quiteño speakers prefer formality in their interactions. This is shown in the formulaic nature of some of the sequences, in particular in their openings and in their absolute preference for a V form of address in contrast to the Montevidean preference for informality as reflected by a lesser use of formulae and the preference for T forms of address. These features seem to be geared towards maintaining or shortening the distance between the interlocutors, respectively. All in all, the differences found in terms of the different sequences and the selling strategies employed, together with the (in)formality exhibited throughout the encounters would seem to indicate that the Montevidean and Quiteño participants of this study have different conceptions of their space and that of the other. While Montevidean speakers use strategies, which are orientated towards closeness thus ‘erasing’ the social distance boundary between the consumer and the service provider, Quiteño participants tend not to make any attempts to trespass this boundary (but see Placencia [forthcoming] in relation to a different context). With respect to the generalisability of the research findings, it should be noted that due to unequal numbers of female and male service providers, as well as age differences between them, the results cannot be generalised to all Montevidean and Quiteño salespersons’ linguistic behaviour in clothes selling/purchasing interactions in lower-middle class areas. The collection of this kind of data would involve considerably more time and resources, and this is not necessary for the purposes of a preliminary study into pragmatic variation. Also, while focusing on clothes selling/purchasing interactions in both capitals helps comparability it may also restrict the generalisability of some of the ob-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.31 (151)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

served regularities in that they could respond to the specific setting in question and/or to the idiosyncrasies of the interlocutors involved (Aston 1988). Another limitation of the study is that it does not include the perspective of the customers or salespersons. For a future study, semi-structured interviews would need to be employed for triangulation purposes. It would be useful to examine, for example, how customers rate the interactions in which they take part in terms of the treatment they received in a shop encounter, the amount of information they were given and their degree of satisfaction with the service overall. Such interviews would provide access into customers’ expectations, which can be cross-culturally variable. It would also be useful to find out about the type of training salespersons receive (if any) in terms of ‘appropriate’ selling strategies, use of address forms, and other linguistic behaviour, as well as how shop owners assess the interactional performance of their salespersons. Such information would be needed to determine perhaps how much of salespersons’ behaviour is a reflection of the ethos of the company or of the social group (i.e. salespersons in a lower middle class shopping area).

Notes * We are grateful to Helen Spencer-Oatey for her useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. . In the analysis of the overall organisation of conversation, conversation analysts refer to conversations as having beginnings, middles, and ends (see Benson & Hughes 1983). In SE studies, different terms have been proposed to refer to the middle section, i.e. the section where the SE transaction is carried out. Bailey (1997), for example, refers to it as the negotiation of the business exchange/transaction, from which the term employed here derives, and Kuiper and Flindall (2000) as the matrix interchange. . For a different approach to recording without informants’ prior permission see Lamoureux (1988/89). . A turn in this paper is understood as the holding of the floor with the intention of making a contribution. Backchannel items were not counted as turns. . It should be noted that in Montevideo there are two familiar forms in the singular: tú and vos and that their use is not uniform in that speakers tend to employ tú with the conjugation corresponding to vos (cf. Pederetti de Bolón 1983). . See the Appendix for the transcription conventions employed. . The frequency of use of each sub-strategy was treated nominally, that is to say, every time an occurrence of a sub-strategy was found in a SE interaction a value of 1 was assigned; likewise, when no occurrences of a sub-strategy were found, a value of 0 was assigned. Hence, if different explanations were given about a particular product, each explanation (i.e. the



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31



F: PB12307.tex / p.32 (152)

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

origin of the product, the product make, its uses, etc.) was assigned one point; similarly, if four product attributes were mentioned by the shopkeeper in an interaction then, a value of 4 was assigned. . Bailey (1997) finds a similar difference in interactions between Afro-americans and Koreans with the former being characterised as interactionally proactive and the latter, as interactionally reactive. . Humour was mostly employed by the customers. . This finding is in line with the results of a previous study of public SEs in Quito in the context of hospital information desks where such usage was also found (cf. Placencia 1998). . It should be noted that in Uruguay, as in many other Latin American countries there is an alternative pronoun which expresses solidarity: vos which has almost replaced tú in Montevidean Spanish. . Chodorowska-Pilch (1999) distinguishes in her study interpersonal discourse markers such as vamos from other discourse markers that have been examined where the focus is on the propositional content and the role of the speaker in the coherent expression of an utterance, rather than on the speaker’s motivation to exert influence upon the hearer. . For example, in the context of corner shop interactions in Quito, where participants are familiar with each, most of the behaviour Placencia (forthcoming) describes for shopkeepers would fall under the category of interactional proactiveness.

References Albert, Stuart & Kessler, Suzanne (1978). “Ending social encounters”. Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, 14, 541–53. Aston, Guy (1995). “Say ‘Thank you’: Some pragmatic constraints in conversational closings”. Applied Linguistics, 16(1), 57–86. Aston, Guy (Ed.). (1998). Negotiating Service. Studies in the Discourse of Bookshop Encounters. Bologna: CLUEB. Bailey, Benjamin (1997). “Communication of respect in interethnic service encounters”. Language in Society, 26, 327–356. Benson, Douglas & Hughes, John A. (1983). The Perspective of Ethnomethodology. London: Longman. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carranza, Isolda (1998). Conversación y deixis de discurso. Córdoba: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna (1999). “On the polite use of vamos in Peninsular Spanish”. Pragmatics, 9(3), 343–355. Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna (2002). “Las ofertas y la cortesía en español peninsular”. In M. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 21–36). Munich: Lincom Europa.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.33 (153)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

Ciapuscio, Guiomar & Kesselheim, Wolfgang (1997). ““Usted, ¿qué es?”: Categorizaciones y contexto institucional”. In K. Zimmerman & C. Bierbach (Eds.), Lenguaje y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispánico (pp. 105–130). Frankfurt: Vervuert. Clark, Herbert H. & French, J. Wade (1981). “Telephone goodbyes”. Language in Society, 10, 1–19. Coupland, Justine (Ed.). (2000). Small Talk. London: Longman. Curcó, Carmen (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. Fant, Lars (1996). “Regulación conversacional en la negociación: Una comparación entre pautas mexicanas y peninsulares”. In T. Kotschi, W. Oesterreicher, & K. Zimmerman (Eds.), El Español hablado y la cultura oral en España e Hispanoamérica (pp. 147–185). Frankfurt: Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana. Firth, Raymond (1972). “Verbal and bodily rituals of greeting and parting”. In J. S. La Fontaine (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ritual: Essays in Honour of A. I. Richards (pp. 1–38). London: Tavistock. Foxall, Gordon R. (1999). “Consumer decision making: process, involvement and style”. In M. Baker (Ed.), The Marketing Book (pp. 109–130). Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. García, Carmen (2004). “Reprendiendo y respondiendo a una reprimenda: Similitudes y diferencias entre peruanos y venezolanos”. Spanish in Context, 1, 113–147. Gavioli, Laura (1997). “Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian: Notes on the achievement of information and advice”. In F. Bargiela-Chiappini & S. Harris (Eds.), The Languages of Business. An International Perspective (pp. 136–156). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. George, Susan (1990). Getting Things Done in Naples. Action, Language and Context in Discourse Description. Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice. Goffman, Erving (1971). Relations in Public. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Iacobucci, Christine (1990). “Accounts, formulations and goal attainment strategies in service encounters”. In K. Tracy & N. Coupland (Eds.), Multiple Goals in Discourse (pp. 85–99). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Kuiper, Koenraad & Flindall, Marie (2000). “Social rituals, formulaic speech and small talk at the supermarket checkout”. In J. Coupland (Ed.), Small Talk (pp. 183–207). London: Longman. Lamoureux, Edward Lee (1988/89). “Rhetoric and conversation in service encounters”. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 22, 93–114. Laver, John (1975). “Communicative functions of phatic communion”. In A. Kendon, R. M. Harris, & M. Ritchiekey (Eds.), Organization and Behaviour in Face-to-Face Interaction (pp. 215–238). The Hague: Mouton. Laver, John (1981). “Linguistic routines and politeness in greeting and parting”. In F. Coulmas (Ed.), Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standard Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech (pp. 289–304). The Hague: Mouton. Malinowski, B. (1972 [1923]). “Phatic communion”. In J. Laver & S. Hutcheson (Eds.), Communication in Face-to-Face Interaction (pp. 146–152). Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.34 (154)

 Rosina Márquez Reiter and María E. Placencia

Márquez Reiter, Rosina (1997). “Politeness phenomena in British English and Uruguayan Spanish: The Case of Requests”. Miscelánea, 18, 159–167. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2000). Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2002a). “Estrategias de cortesía en el español hablado de Montevideo”. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 89–106). Munich: Lincom Europa. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2002b). “A contrastive study of conventional indirectness in Spanish: Evidence from Uruguayan and Peninsular Spanish”. Pragmatics, 12(2), 135– 151. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2003). “Pragmatic variation in Spanish: External request modification in Uruguayan and Peninsular Spanish”. In R. Núñez-Cedeño, L. López, & R. Cameron (Eds.), A Romance Perspective on Language Knowledge and Use (pp. 167–180). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. McCarthy, Michael (2000). “Mutually captive audiences: Small talk and the genre of closecontact service encounters”. In J. Coupland (Ed.), Small Talk (pp. 84–109). London: Longman. Merritt, Marilyn (1976). “On questions following questions in service encounters”. Language in Society, 5, 315–357. Pederetti de Bolón, Alma (1983). El idioma de los uruguayos. Unidad y diversidad. Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental (Temas del Siglo XX). Placencia, María Elena (1994). “Pragmatics across varieties of Spanish”. Donaire, 2, 65–77. Placencia, María Elena (1996). “Politeness in Ecuadorian Spanish”. Multilingua, 15(1), 13– 34. Placencia, María Elena (1997). “Address forms in Ecuadorian Spanish”. Hispanic Linguistics, 9, 165–202. Placencia, María Elena (1998). “Pragmatic variation: Ecuadorian Spanish vs. Peninsular Spanish”. Spanish Applied Linguistics, 2(1), 71–106. Placencia, María Elena (2001a). “Inequality in address behavior in public institutions at la Paz, Bolivia”. Anthropological Linguistics, 43(2), 198–217. Placencia, María Elena (2001b). “Percepciones y manifestaciones de la (des)cortesía en la atención al público: El caso de una institución pública ecuatoriana”. Oralia, 4, 177–212. Placencia, María Elena (2004). “Rapport-building activities in corner shop interactions”. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8(2), 215–245. Puga Larraín, Juana (1997). La atenuación en el castellano de Chile: Un enfoque pragmalingüístico. Universitat de Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch Libros. Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1972). “Sequencing in conversational openings”. In J. J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Schegloff, Emanuel A. & Sacks, Harvey (1973). “Opening up closings”. Semiotica, 7, 289– 327. Traverso, Veronique (2001). “Syrian service encounters: A case of shifting strategies within verbal exchange”. Pragmatics, 11(4), 421–444. Ventola, Eija (1987). The Structure of Social Interaction. London: Pinter.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:31

F: PB12307.tex / p.35 (155)

Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters

Appendix Transcription conventions : signals vowel lengthening ? marks rising intonation (.) marks a short pause measured impressionistically T indicates the use of a T-form of address in the singular (i.e., familiar address) V indicates the use of a V-form of address in the singular (i.e., formal address) P indicates the use of the only second person plural form of address available in the two varieties, which is an unmarked form in terms of familiarity/formality D indicates the use of a diminutive A indicates the use of an augmentative



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.1 (157)

Chapter 8

Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning Requests and promises in intercultural communication in Oaxaca, Mexico Martina Schrader-Kniffki

.

Introduction

This paper examines a conflicting interaction between members of the Zapotec indigenous group of Mexico with a Spanish speaker, hereafter referred to as Hispanophone,1 in an attempt to show that culture specific action patterns2 may determine not only the characteristic linguistic acting of members of an in-group but also their interpretation of the utterances of out-group members and that this in turn can lead to intercultural communication problems.3 Mainly drawing from the ethnography of speaking (cf. Baumann & Sherzer 1974; Saville-Troike 1982) ethnomethodological conversation analysis (cf. Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974; Blumer 1981; Henne & Rehbock 1995; Hutchby & Woofitt 1998) and cross-cultural pragmatics (cf. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989; Wierzbicka 1991), it will be shown that both, the immediate context and the socio-cultural background of the interaction and its participants are relevant to the structure of meaning, independent of the language used. The conflicting exchange analysed here is part of a complex interaction constituted by various partial (non)verbal actions, some of which can be identified as speech acts (cf. Searle 1969) like requests, promises, and thanks, representing distinguishable parts within the interaction.4 Closely interwoven with the various partial actions which constitute the interaction is politeness which contributes an important part to the interactive construction of meaning in the form of so-called subsidiary actions, subordinated to the respective superordinated action, the head act (Edmondson 1981; Held 1995).5

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.2 (158)

 Martina Schrader-Kniffki

Thus, in expressions of politeness, for instance, an introduction to and a justification of a request, its fulfilment, or a justified rejection can be seen as complementary partial actions. Different culture-specific forms of linguistic action are often found to be in contrast with each other in cross-cultural pragmatics research.6 This article will show that in intercultural communication, in addition to contrasting linguistic behaviour, 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). These mixed forms are characterized by different types of transference from one of the languages in contact to the other. The transference can be phonetic, grammatical, lexical, and/or pragmatic.7 This, in turn, provides a further challenge for the analyst (cf. Knapp 1996). In this regard, in SchraderKniffki (2003) it was shown that the realisation of linguistic actions such as making requests and giving thanks in a language contact situation may take the form of a complex interaction comprising a sequence of conversational steps, actions, and phases,8 as well as aspects of the non-linguistic context.9 As far as culture-specific manifestations are concerned, these can be seen in the interactive development of the sequential flow as well as in the entire conversational flow as manifested by the use of turn-taking mechanisms, the length of the speech contributions, and interruptions. As a result, different complex action patterns, which are reproduced by the speakers in certain communication situations, can be identified.

. The study This study is based on five years of intensive and extensive field-work, namely participatory observation in a Zapotec village located in the mountains of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Participatory observation here involved full immersion into the local Zapotec culture. It included Zapotec language acquisition as a precondition of active participation in all possible daily-life situations and collaboration in women’s housework and agricultural activities; activities in the traditional religious context (e.g. the fiestas) of the community and in the general meetings of the village, amongst others. During this time, a deep understanding of the community was acquired through the observation, recording, and analysis of a wide range of communicative situations and social interactions.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.3 (159)

Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning 

The sequences selected for this analysis are part of a conflict-laden meeting, in which a small group of Zapotecs and a Hispanophone speaker participated. The latter had convened the meeting. The conflict that developed was preceded by a donation of money by an international organisation to a local self-help cooperative for the construction of a house. The Hispanophone acted as a mediator between the international organisation and the local group of Zapotecs. As such, the Hispanophone speaker had to present regular reports on the progress of the project (construction of the house) and the use of funds. His role helps to explain his strong interest in the progress of the project. The Zapotecs’ obligation, in turn, was that of building the house. For the Zapotec, however, their commitment to this project occurred during the coffee harvest time. Coffee is one of the few sources of income and its harvest is of survival significance for them. Through these two parallel commitments, a precarious situation emerged for the Zapotec group in that they felt under pressure to fulfil both. In order to deal with situations of this type, the Zapotecs resort to group specific collective measures and strategies such as forms of work division and organisation. This will be touched upon in the analysis. The Zapotecs with over 400,000 speakers are settled on the Isthmus of Tehuántepec and in the valley of Oaxaca as well as in the southern and northern mountain regions of this state.10 The local group examined is mainly based in the Northern part of the Sierra Madre Occidental, in a very isolated as well as geographically and socially marginalised region. The interactants examined are mostly bilingual and speak Zapotec as their mother tongue. Zapotec is used in daily communication between members of the group and at village meetings and on the street. Spanish, however, is used by members of the group when interacting with the few out-group members living in the village or in the cities of Oaxaca and Mexico City.11 Considerable influences from Zapotec can be observed in their Spanish and can often be attributed to a low level of competence in Spanish. However, the adoption of Zapotec pragmatic functions and meanings in Spanish can be observed, giving their use of Spanish a Zapotec colouring. This surfaces in their use of address forms (Schrader-Kniffki 1995) and the use of specific in-group deictic forms as well as in certain action patterns, as will be shown in the analysis section below. It has to be emphasised that although only a small part of the corpus is examined here, the interpretation of the results presented here is based on the observation and knowledge gained from intensive and extensive field-work.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.4 (160)

 Martina Schrader-Kniffki

. The analysis In this section a conflictive misunderstanding based on different culturespecific notions of politeness as reflected in the meaning of the verbal acting will be discussed by focusing on: 1. the reaction to an ‘untruthful’ promise by the Hispanophone and his suggestions for a ‘more polite’ form of acting; 2. the reaction of the Zapotecs explaining the reproach of the Hispanophone speaker that results from a different interpretation of the promise given by the Zapotecs themselves; and 3. the Zapotecs’ explanation of the misunderstanding based on their awareness of the use of the two languages, Zapotec and Spanish. The first sequence analysed consists of two parts of the monologue with which the Hispanophone speaker opens the meeting he had convened.12

Extract 1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

yo pensaba que yo vine con tanto gusto para ver todos los ‘I thought that I would be happy to see everyone who que trabajando allá pero sólo pude ver cuatro personas is working there but I could only see four people trabajando (. . . ) sí ya yo bien encabronado ayer no y una working (. . . ) yes I was already angry yesterday right and one cosa me dice y ya sí así vamos a hacer y despues dice ya thing is said and OK yes that is what we are going to do and then is said and nadie aparece (. . . ) nobody appears (. . . )’

Extract 2 1.66 1.67 1.68 1.69 1.70

sí me dijeron todos no sí no(?) domingo sí (NN)13 vamos a ‘yes everyone told me yes right (?) Sunday YES we are going trabajar no pero nadie me dijo (NN) yo no tengo tiempo no to work right but nobody told me I have no time and I will not voy a poder trabajar nadie me dijo (NN) no tengo yo tengo be able to work nobody told me no I have I have alguna cosa urgente(..)todos dijeron sí (NN) vamos a venir something else urgent (. . . ) everyone told me yes we are coming pero yo llegué a las nueve nueve y media para ver si estaban

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.5 (161)

Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning

1.71 1.72

but I arrived at nine half past nine to see if you were trabajando bien animados para terminar pero cuatro very cheerfully working to finish it off but four personas allí (. . . ) people were there (. . . )’

As can be seen in both extracts, the Hispanophone shows his disapproval of the behaviour of the addressed. His annoyance can be explained by the discrepancy between his expectations regarding the behaviour of the addressed and their actual behaviour. He thus feels let down. To start with, in Extract 1, the Hispanophone gives his diagnosis of the situation: yo pensaba que yo vine con tanto gusto para ver todos los que trabajando allá pero sólo pude ver cuatro personas trabajando (Extract 1, lines 1.2–1.3)

In the linguistic realisation of his diagnosis, the expression of a positive feeling con tanto gusto (Extract 1, line 1.2) and the contrasting description of the reality, linguistically introduced by the adversative conjunction pero (Extract 1, line 1.3) already indicate the disappointment. For the Zapotec this is to be understood as an open and clear reproach expressing annoyance and fury (Extract 1, line 1.4): yo bien encabronado.14 In contrast to his expectations stemming from a supposedly consensual agreement, the Hispanophone only finds a small part of the group at work, four people (see Extract 1, line 1.3 and Extract 2, line 1.71). He states repeatedly by means of direct speech, the alleged agreement which is decisive for the development of his argument (Extract 1, line 1.5): sí, así vamos a hacer, also (Extract 2, line 1.66): sí me dijeron todos no?, sí vamos a trabajar, and finally (Extract 2, line 1.69): sí (NN) vamos a venir. With the affirmative particle sí in the preceding utterances, which stands out through repetition and marked emphasis, the speaker signals that the acceptance of the addressed has to be interpreted as an answer to his previous request and/or demand to carry out the agreed work.15 Their affirmative answer to his request implies an acceptance and a binding promise of action, which he repeats here word for word. According to him, the group of co-operative members had promised to do the work, (see Extract 1, line 1.5; Extract 2, lines 1.66 and 1.69). The promises repeatedly given were, however, not fulfilled. The speaker therefore interprets the promises as untruthful. His interpretation of the event becomes clear once more when he proposes what appears to be an appropriate response, at least in his eyes, to his original request and/or demand, namely the Zapotecs’ inability to carry out the work as ‘agreed’. It consists of



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.6 (162)

 Martina Schrader-Kniffki

a polite refusal in the form of an explanation: nadie me dijo (NN) yo no tengo tiempo no voy a poder trabajar nadie me dijo (NN) yo tengo alguna cosa urgente (Extract 2, lines 1.67 and 1.68) reflecting the Hispanophone’s own notions of politeness, while at the same time establishing himself as an out-group member with different politeness norms. From the preceding analysis and observations, it can be argued that preferred reactions16 to requests in the Hispanophone’s politeness system proceed as follows: 1. To react with an acceptance or a concrete promise of action and to mean this promise honestly i.e. with the intention of fulfilling it. On the other hand, the dispreferred response proceeds as follows: 2. To refuse a request with a justifiable explanation or 3. To give an insincere promise of action, that is, a promise without the actual intention to act on it. According to the Zapotecs’ norms of in-group politeness, to reject a request also counts as a dispreferred response. If the request cannot be fulfilled, verbal rejection is done directly and mostly without justification.17 On the other hand, according to the Zapotecs’ out-group politeness norms, the preferred response to requests realised by members of the out-group would be to indicate compliance whether or not they can carry out the expected action and organise its fulfilment within in-group commitments. Whereas avoiding refusals as part of the in-group politeness is based on close interpersonal relationship and social exchange, avoiding rejection as part of the out-group politeness norms counts as a form of evading conflicts. It reflects distance with the out-group as well as in-group unity and, therefore can be defined as a mixed form of politeness. However, for the Hispanophone, instead of compliance, a politely modified and justified refusal should have been given along the lines he uttered in Extract 2, lines 1.67 and 1.68. Such a refusal would constitute a dispreferred response according to 2 above. According to the Hispanophone’s notions of politeness, however, this would constitute a preferred reaction, that is to say, the Hispanophone would have preferred a justified refusal to an empty promise. The Hispanophone has the named sequences of preferred responses to a request stored as a mental programme reflecting the action pattern of his own actions and his interpretation of the actions of his conversational partners.18 This, however, is culture-specific and not necessarily shared by the addressed given that their own socio-cultural patterns differ from the Hispanophone’s.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.7 (163)

Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning 

The Zapotecs possess their own characteristic rules and conventions for the expression of polite behaviour that correspond to their cultural specifications and are valid within their group. At the same time, the Zapotecs in question have developed mixed forms of politeness on the basis of their long-standing and intensive cultural and linguistic contact with Hispanophone culture; these forms are employed for intercultural communication, that is to say, to communicate with persons who do not belong to their in-group. These emerging forms of politeness are also to be understood as culture-specific as they represent the responses that have arisen from the group’s specific interpretations of contact with ‘outsiders’. For this social configuration, i.e. the interaction between members of the group and outsiders, the members of the group regard a reply with a negative answer to a request made by outsiders as a response which is dispreferred and, therefore, has to be avoided even if it can be well justified.19 Therefore the Zapotecs’ understanding of politeness stands in contrast to that of the Hispanophone who interpreted their politely intended linguistic acting as impolite. From the perspective of the Zapotec speakers, their way of interacting with members of the out-group has the function of avoiding conflict and showing respect and, is therefore used as a politeness strategy.20 As pointed out earlier, Zapotecs prefer to accept the request and to give a promise to carry it out even though they know that it cannot be kept for the reasons described above.21 This reflects a Zapotec form of respect exclusively shown to Hispanophone speakers. The two aspects of verbal acting, head act (the promise) and subsidiary act (expression of politeness by avoiding refusal) are subsumed here into one mixed form. The avoidance of a negative reaction and its justification is two-fold: on the one hand, it gives them the interpersonal distance which the group prefers to maintain with outsiders in situations of intercultural communication and on the other hand, their acting reproduces, updates and confirms the validity of the internal group’s values; this is a strategy which reflects the expression of in-group politeness and thus supports the group’s identity. Such action procedures, based on internal group values, are also conveyed by the remarks of the Zapotec speakers themselves as shown in Extract 3 below. They are also part of the same interaction from which two extracts (Extracts 1 and 2) were presented and discussed, and show the discussion of the group in Zapotec.22 The discussion arose from the reproaches of the preceding sequence:

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.8 (164)

 Martina Schrader-Kniffki

Extract 3 1.1 para le’ zhon cun raqui’ne’ para le’ zhon con raqui’ -ne’ para el pues con parecer -3s23 CONs PRON PART CONs V -SUF para él pues, conque le parece que todos ‘for him then, it seems to him that we all 1.2 benru’ cumprumisu b -en -ru’ cumprumisu PRET -hacer -1ps compromiso PREF -V -SUF Ns hicimos el compromiso, que todos made a commitment, that we all

derá derá todo ADJ

zuraru’ zura-ru’ todo-1pi ADJ-SUF

be’ru’ b -e’ -ru’ PRET -dar -1pi PREF -V -SUF

len len con CONJ

2.1 didza’ shidza’ la’ ti’ ca’ puresu rnia’ didza’ shidza’ la’ ti’ ca’ pureso rina -a’ palabra nuestra este no así por eso decir -1s N N PART PART PART CONs V -SUF prometimos este no así por eso digo promised this is not so this is why I have been saying 2.2 bachi tra gúi’li’ didza’ shtila’ bachi tra g -úi’ -li’ didza’ shtila’ hace rato ya no FUT -dar -2p palabra castilla (español) ADV PART PREF -V -SUF N N hace rato ya no den (hablen/prometan) en español a while ago do not give (talk/promise) in Spanish anymore.’

In Extract 3, the Zapotec speaker refers first of all (lines 1.1 and 1.2) to what was said beforehand by the Hispanophone speaker. His diagnosis confirms the acceptance of the group that a promise was meant and this was understood and interpreted as such by the Hispanophone speaker. In Extract 3, line 1.2 and 1.2, he literally refers twice to the speech act of promising. First he does so by borrowing from Spanish (Extract 3, lines 1.1 and 1.2) benru’ cumprumiso, Spanish hicimos compromiso, ‘we made a commitment’.24 Here it becomes clear already, that the problem does not lie in the verbalisation of the speech act, which was understood perfectly on both sides. The critical point is indicated by the adjective todos (Extract 3, lines 1.1 and 1.2): the misinterpretation derives from the fact that the addressee expected that all of them would fulfil the promise together. His reproach thus results from finding only four instead of all of them

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.9 (165)

Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning 

working together. It is therefore a part of the subject matter of the promise of action, its propositional part which is based on different notions about the action to be followed by the promise.25 This represents a mixed form of promise which, although realised in Spanish, has a culture specific in-group meaning.26 When the speaker refers for the second time to the promise given, he uses the Zapotec term to name the speech act (see Extract 3, line 2.2) be’ru’ len didza’ shidza’, Spanish dimos con nuestra palabra, which means prometimos, ‘we promised’. The Zapotec expression didza’ shidza’ however is ambiguous. The same expression is used to refer to their language, Zapotec. Correspondingly, rui’ didza’ shidza, Spanish dar con nuestra palabra, means ‘speaking Zapotec’ as opposed to ‘speaking Spanish’. For the Zapotec speakers, it seems therefore that to ‘make a promise’ implicitly means to speak Zapotec, i.e. to give the promise in Zapotec language. This speech act then is explicitly situated in the cultural context of the Zapotec. The promise, however, was made in Spanish and not in Zapotec, and it counts as a promise made to an out-group member, as indicated earlier. The second speaker of this sequence explicitly refers to this problem in his answer to the first remark (Extract 3, lines 2.1 and 2.2) puresu rnia’ bachi tra gúi’li’ didza’ shtila’,27 Spanish por eso digo hace rato ya no hablen/ prometen en zapoteco pues. As shown in the Spanish translation, his comment is also ambiguous. On one hand, it can be understood as a suggestion not to speak Spanish. On the other hand, it can be interpreted as an appeal to make no more promises in Spanish. In both cases it becomes clear that the speakers are to a certain degree conscious of the fact that the problem arose from the understanding and interpretation of the contents of their promise. This can be evidenced in the following sequence:

Extract 4 42.1 ti’ benru’ cumprumisu dza dumingu zhon ti’ b -en -ru’ cumprumiso dza dumingu zhon no PRET -hacer -1pi compromiso día domingo pues NEG PREF -V -SUF Ns N Ns PART ‘no hicimos compromiso (que todos fueran) el día domingo pues ‘we did not promise (that we would all go) on Sunday 42.2 cun cun con CON

basta basta basta Vs

chinaca re’u hora chi -naca re’u hora ya -es nosotros hora PART -V PRON Ns

reajru’ (. . . ) reaj -ru’ ir -1pi V -SUF

hora hora hora Ns

runa runa hacer V

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.10 (166)

 Martina Schrader-Kniffki

con que ya quedó de nosotros qué día vamos cuando since we then agreed that we would go on day 43

re’u lataj zhon peru re’u lataj zhon peru nosotros lugar pues pero PRON N PART CON nos da tiempo pues pero él pues we had time to so but he

44

zöne’ cuenda z -ön -e’ cuenda PRES -agarrar -3sm cuenta PREF -V -SUF Ns nos toma en cuenta pues. takes into account then.’

le’ le’ él PRON

zhon zhon pues PART

re’u re’u nosotros PRON

la’ la’ si PART

zhon zhon pues PART

Explicitly, what is said here is that the Zapotec speakers gave their promise but that the content of the promise, the action to be carried out is, in their opinion, subject to their own estimation cun basta chinaca re’u hora reajru’ hora runa re’u lataj’, Spanish pues ya quedó de nosotros qué día vamos cuando nos da tiempo pues. It also becomes clear that the speakers are now aware of the possibility of having behaved differently. In the following sequence of conversation, this is once again explicitly expressed by one of their speakers:

Extract 5 45.1 gu’ni horana’ gu -u’ni hora -na’ PRET -requerir hora -este PREF -V Ns -PRON ‘se requirió que cuando preguntó, ‘it was requested when he asked,

rinabe’na’ rinab -e’ -na’ preguntar -1sm -este V -SUF -PRON

45.2 gu’ni uzuaru’ razon queru’ gu -re’ni u -zua -ru’ razón queru’ PRET -requerir FUT -poner -1pi. razón nuestro PREF -V PREF -V -SUF Ns PRON se requirió poner nuestras razones porque it was requested from us to explain our reasons because 45.3 le’na’ le’

-na’

rizöne’ rizöna

-e’

re’u re’u

cuenda na’a cuenda na’a

comu comu como CONs

zhon zhon

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.11 (167)

Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning 

él -este agarrar -1sm nosotros cuenta PRON -PRON V -SUF PRON Ns él es que nos toma en cuenta ahora pues. he is taking us into account now so.’

ahora pues ADV PART

From the remarks of the speakers and their interpretation, it can now be concluded that the communication problem that emerged between the Zapotec speakers and the Hispanophone is not due to their language competence in Spanish or to a possible misinterpretation of the realisation of the speech act in question, at least by the Zapotecs. The two parties, the Zapotec speakers and the Hispanophone, even though they come from different communities, can converse in Spanish without major problems. Likewise, they obviously agree on the illocutionary part of the intended speech act but not necessarily on its propositional content. In order to understand the possible causes of the conflict, it is helpful to view a further excerpt from the discussion in Zapotec language in which the speakers directly refer to their plan of how to deal with the given promise:

Extract 6 17 2 ön mm gunru’ modu ön gu -runa -ru’ modu sí FUT -hacer -1pi modo PART PREF -V -SUF Ns ‘sí entonces vamos a hacer de manera ‘yes so we are going to do it in this way 18 3 tsani guiba’a gúi lataj luza’aru’ tsani g -riba’a g -rúi’ lataj luza’a -ru’ mientras FUT -arreglar FUT -dar espacio compañero -1pi PREP PREF -V PREF -V N N -SUF mientras se va a arreglar damos espacio entre nosotros compañeros while this is fixed we alternate with other compañeros 20 3 tsjaca lu zaca luza’abi’ naca lati’ tsjaca lu zaca luza’a -bi’ naca lati’ vayan en lugar compañero -3sj es poco Vfin ADV N N -SUF Vfin ADJ que vayan en lugar de cada uno es poco nomás so that they would go instead of each us it’s not much

zi -zi -nomás -PART

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.12 (168)

 Martina Schrader-Kniffki

21 2 ön ön sí PART sí yes 22 3 cle’ tseajru’ lati’ cle’ ts -eaj -ru’ lati’ verdad FUT -ir -1pi poco PART PREF -V -SUF ADJ verdad, vamos hacer un poco right, we are going to do a bit 23

hueaj hueaj pieza N

shdzhinru’ sh -dzhin -ru’ POS -trabajo -1pi PREF -N -SUF

lati’ lati’ poco ADJ

hueaj gunru’ na’ hueaj g -runa -ru’ -na’ pieza FUT -hacer -1pi. -este N PREF -V -SUF -PRONdem. cada quien de nuestro trabajo, cada quien va a hacer un poco allí each of our work, everyone is going to do a bit there

24 5 ca’na’ ca’ -na’ así -este PART -PRON así es. that is it.’

In this sequence the discussion is repeated verbatim and in direct speech; here the members of the group plan the realisation of the action, implicit in their promise concerning the building of the house. It is interesting to note that the speaker iterates to the group the internal characteristic form of shared working.28 This form of work represents a behaviour pattern, which is virtually automatically applied by the members of the group in a situation such as the one described here. The plan, as it is expressed in this sequence, is to give each other time for their own work, the harvesting of the coffee (Extract 6, line 18) gúi’ lataj luza’aru’, Spanish dar tiempo entre compañeros, by alternating the work on the house and in the fields, (line 22) tseajru’ lati’ hueaj shdzhinru’ lati’ hueaj gunru’na’, Spanish vamos a hacer un poco cada quien de nuestro trabajo, cada quien va a hacer un poco allí. In addition, the members of the group should go and work together the fields of the other members who are occupied with

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.13 (169)

Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning 

building the house: (Extract 6, line 20) tsjaca luzaca luza’abi’ naca lati’zi, Spanish que vayan en lugar de cada es poco nomás. These remarks serve to update and confirm the internal group’s form of work division and reflect mutual support and respect for their own work and that of the others. Through the use of the expression luza’aru’, Spanish nuestros compañeros, group identity is further asserted. The implicit content of the promise that they gave to the Hispanophone speaker is found in their culture-specific plan of action and differs considerably from the expectations of the addressee.

. Conclusion The aim of this analysis has been to show how Zapotec speakers can transfer Zapotec (pragmatic) meaning when using Spanish for intercultural communication purposes. A prerequisite for this was to analyse linguistic acting, going beyond the individual speech act alone and to define certain culturally determined complex action patterns as a starting point. It has been shown that such action patterns are constituted by both the interactive execution and structure of specific linguistic acts as well as culture-specific politeness strategies. These are automated in so far as they are stored by the speakers in the form of mental programs and are thus applied irrespective of the language in contact employed. In this way the use of a language, such as Spanish, can reflect Zapotec (pragmatic) meaning. A pragmatically orientated analysis of misunderstandings and conflicts emerging in intercultural communication situations reflects differences of meaning, which do not always appear on the surface for the speakers themselves since they are stored as cognitive schemes (cf. Knapp 1996) or mental programs. These, in turn underlie their linguistic acting independent of the use of a certain language.

Notes . This speaker does not have Spanish as his mother tongue. However, at the time of the interaction analized here, he had already lived for several years in Mexico, so he was well acquainted with the use of the Spanish language and more importantly, with the cultural patterns associated with it. Although he is not strictly speaking a representative of the Mexican Hispanophone culture, the Zapotec speakers in this interaction perceive him as such. . Cf. Rehbein (1977) and Schrader-Kniffki (2003). The organised succession of interactively constructed sequences of all the verbal (and non-verbal) actions within the entire

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.14 (170)

 Martina Schrader-Kniffki

complex interaction represent its action pattern. Action patterns differ according to the type of action realized (e.g. requests, promises) and the cultural background of the interactants. The action pattern of a request, for example, might consist of a sequence of introductive apologies-requests-justification-fulfilment-thanks in a specific culture, whereas in a different culture it might comprise the following sequence requests-justification-fulfilmentjustification-thanks (Schrader-Kniffki 2003). . Cf. House (2000). . Cf. Edmondson (1981) for an approach which attempts to integrate the expression of conventionalized speech acts as constitutive parts of the interaction. See also Held (1995) for an approach which examines speech acts in their immediate interactive context. . Following Zimmermann (1992: 307ff.) the superordinate action is the main verbal action (head act) realized by the interactants in order to reach a specific goal (e.g. fulfilment of a request). At the same time, the interactants perform so called subsidiary actions, subordinated to the superordinate action, in order to establish an interpersonal relationship which favours the main aim of the verbal action. These subsidiary acts can be defined as acts of politeness. . Cf. Matsumoto (1988); Gu (1990); Wierzbicka (1985, 1991); Schrader-Kniffki (2001, 2003). . Cf. Zegarac and Pennington (2000) for a short overview of the most important aspects of the research on pragmatic transfer. . Every single verbal contribution of a speaker in an interaction is a conversational step. Conversational actions consist of at least two conversational steps complementing each other to form an adjacency pair. Conversational phases are the speech acts performed interactively by a sequence of conversational actions (cf. Schrader-Kniffki 2003). . Examples for the non-linguistic context are: the role of requests in the specific social context of Zapotec culture, the spatial setting including the constellation and arrangement of the speakers in the room where the interaction takes place. . For an extensive bibliography of studies on Zapotec culture in Oaxaca, Mexico see for example Schrader-Kniffki (2004). . Usually these out-group members are: a Catholic priest, a doctor, a nurse, and the teachers of the local primary school. . The grammatical peculiarities, which can be observed in the language use of this ‘Hispanophone’ speaker, are partly due to Spanish being his second language, but it also has to be considered that during his speech he was angry and agitated. . NN represents the name or term of address of the person. . With regard to this expression, it has to be noted that the Zapotec hardly ever use such colloquial phrases, hence they are likely to regard it as a serious affront. . Please note the capitals in (1.5.) SI show stressed emphasis. . Following Levinson ([1983] 1990) preferred second parts of adjacency pairs such as requests and reactions to requests, are defined in contrast to dispreferred reactions which can be described as marked, sometimes even complex and thus to be avoided.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.15 (171)

Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning . Zapotec in-group requests are usually realized directly only when its fulfilment seems to be guaranteed. This is possible in a small local group where interpersonal relations are close and based on social exchange. In the few cases of a necessary rejection this is realized just stating the impossibilty of fulfilment. The routine formula for this is: Zapotec ti’ huaca, Spanish no se puede. . The term ‘mental programme’ refers to mentally stored behaviour and action patterns, which speakers can apply, and often do so, on the basis of their socio-cultural background. Cf. Hofstede (2001: 2ff.) and Knapp (1996). It should be noted, however, that we are not proposing that there are no possibilities to deviate from this action patterns: “Das bedeutet natürlich nicht, dass Menschen wie Computer programmiert sind. Das Verhalten eines Menschen ist nur zum Teil durch seine mentalen Programme vorbestimmt: er hat grundsätzlich die Möglichkeit, von ihnen abzuweichen und auf eine neue, kreative, destruktive oder unerwartete Weise zu reagieren” (Hofstede 2001: 3). (This of course does not mean, that men are programmed like computers. The behaviour of a human is only partly determined by his mental programs: in general he has the possibility of deviating from them and of reacting in a new, creative, destructive or unexpected way.) It has to be emphasised here, that the Zapotec speakers are much more creative in their interactions with members of the out-group (cf. Schrader-Kniffki 2003). . Negative answers to the request of members of the out-group are generally avoided. This pattern was found beyond the episode presented in this paper and across the data examined within the whole investigation of the verbal expression of politeness of this group of speakers. Exceptions to this pattern were rarely found. . One of the various functions of politeness is to ritualise difficult conflict situations, thereby weakening or avoiding a confrontation (cf. Werlen 1984). It has to be emphasised here, that showing deference by avoiding conflict is a well-known politeness strategy in Mexican Hispanophone society (Schrader-Kniffki 2003). Zapotec speakers use this strategy exclusively in interactions with members of the out-group whilst conflicts within the in-group are dealt with much more directly. . Knapp (1996) makes similar reflections on an experiment described in Collett and O’Shea (1976): “[. . . ] dass man, anders als in westlichen Kulturen, im Iran damit rechnen muss, bei Wegauskünften vom Auskunftgeber bewusst in die Irre geführt zu werden: Wenn der Befragte den Weg selbst nicht kennt, gibt er eher eine falsche Wegbeschreibung als gar keine. Offensichtlich kollidieren hier das Sachverhalts- und das Beziehungsschema; es wird als wichtiger angesehen, dem Fremden gegenüber hilfsbereit zu erscheinen, als durch Erkennenlassen der eigenen Unkenntnis konventionelle Erwartungen an Hilfsbereitschaft und damit Anforderungen des Beziehungsschemas nicht zu erfüllen” (Knapp 1996: 64f.). ([. . . ] in contrast to western cultures, in Iran you have to reckon with being deliberately led the wrong way if you ask for directions: If the person asked does not know the way himself, he will rather give a wrong description than none at all. Obviously the fact and the relationship schema clash here. It is regarded as more important to seem helpful towards a stranger, than to fulfil conventional expectations of helpfulness in showing your own ignorance, thereby not meeting the requirements of the relationship schema.) . The use of Spanish to start longer interactions with Hispanophones is a characteristic intercultural form of communication of this group. The Hispanophone’s suggestions or



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.16 (172)

 Martina Schrader-Kniffki

general speech content are then discussed in Zapotec language within the group in interim sequences. At the end of this discussion, a summary of the results, or of the part that is to be communicated, is rendered in Spanish by a bilingual speaker. Such conversational sequences are repeated several times in the course of a longer interaction. . The abreviations used in the Zapotec transcriptions are: ADJ: adjective; CONJ: conjunction; N: noun; NEG: negation particle; PART: particle; POS: possessive form; PREF: prefix; PRES: present tense; PRET: past tense; PRON: pronoun; SUF: suffix; V: verb; Vfin: conjugated form of verb; 1ps: first person singular; 1pi: first person plural (inclusive); 2: second person; 3s: third person singular. For more information about the Zapotec language see Schrader-Kniffki (2004). . Hacer compromiso in this context means hacer una promesa. The expression hacer promesa (Zapotec benru’ promesa), however, has a religious connotation. Zapotec benru’ cumprumiso represents an example of Zapotec/Spanish mixed word construction with a Zapotec verb (benru’= we made) and a Spanish noun (cumprumisu). . Speech acts are composed of an illocutionary act that indicates the type of the speech act (request, promise, thank etc.) and a propositional part which defines its subject matter. Here the speakers agree on the interpretation of the illocutionary part that indicates a promise. They do not agree, however, on the propositional part that specifies the action to be carried out in order to fulfil the promise. . Todos for the Hispanophone speaker means all the members of the group working together in the building of the house. For the Zapotecs, however, it means all of them involved in working, but split up into two groups, one group constructing the house and the other group doing each other’s coffee harvest work. . Didza’shtila derives from didza’ castilla, meaning ‘Spanish’ in Zapotec. The adjectivally used noun, shtila, is phonetically assimilated to Zapotec and serves to designate objects of non-Zapotec origin as in yöta’ shtila, ‘tortilla española’, meaning ‘bread’, in contrast to the corn tortilla (yöta’) which is typical of Zapotec food. . Shared working is a traditional form of Zapotec work and it is based on the reciprocal alternation of working each other’s land. Through their collective work a larger part of the work gets done. At the same time, there is communal labour service (cf. Chance 1987: 143), which in Zapotec is called dzhin lahui’ Mexican Spanish: tequio. This form of unpaid work is regarded as one of the characteristic features of the indigenous cultures of Oaxaca. The men of the entire village take part in this type of seasonal work, which is carried out in order to take care of public ways and buildings.

References Baumann, Richard & Sherzer, Joel (Eds.). (1974). Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, House, Juliane, & Kasper, Gabriele (Eds.). (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood: Ablex.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.17 (173)

Speaking Spanish with Zapotec meaning 

Blumer, Herbert (1981). “Der methodologische Standort des symbolischen Interaktionismus”. In Arbeitsgruppe Bielefelder Soziologen (Eds.), Alltagswissen, Interaktion und Gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit (pp. 80–146). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Brown, Gillian & Yule, George (1983). Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chance, John (1987). Conquest of the Sierra. Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Oaxaca. London: University of Oklahoma Press. Collett, Peter & O’Shea, Michael (1976). “Pointing the way to a fictional place: A study of direction giving in Iran and England”. European Journal of Social Psychology, 6, 447–458. Edmondson, Willis (1981). Spoken Discourse. A Model for Analysis. London and New York: Longman. Gu, Yueguo (1990). “Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese”. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 237–257. Gumperz, John (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Held, Grudrun (1995). Verbale Höflichkeit. Studien zur Linguistischen Theoriebildung und Empirische Untersuchung zum Sprachverhalten Französischer und Italienischer Jugendlicher in Bitt- und Dankessituationen. Tübingen: Narr. Henne, Helmut & Rehbock, Helmut (1995). Einführung in die Gesprächsanalyse. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Hofstede, Geert (2001). Lokales Denken, globales Handeln. Interkulturelle Zusammenarbeit und globales Management. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. House, Juliane (2000). “Understanding misunderstanding: A pragmatic-discourse approach to analysing mismanaged rapport in talk across cultures”. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport Through Talk Across Cultures (pp. 145–164). London: Continuum. Hutchby, Ian & Woofitt, Robin (1998). Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Knapp, Karlfried (1996). “Interpersonale und interkulturelle Kommunikation”. In N. Bergemann & A. Sourisseaux (Eds.), Interkulturelles Management (pp. 63–78). Heidelberg: Physica. Levinson, Stephen (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (German edition (1990). Pragmatik. Tübingen: Niemeyer.) Matsumoto, Yoshiko (1988). “Reexamination of the universality of face: Politeness phenomena in Japanese”. Journal of Pragmatics, 12, 403–426. Rehbein, Jochen (1977). Komplexes Handeln. Elemente zur Handlungstheorie der Sprache. Stuttgart: Metzler. Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel, & Jefferson, Gail (1974). “A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation”. Language, 50, 696–735. Saville-Troike, Muriel (1982). The Ethnography of Communication. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Schrader-Kniffki, Martina (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. 73–99 ). Frankfurt, Main: Vervuert.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:39

F: PB12308.tex / p.18 (174)

 Martina Schrader-Kniffki

Schrader-Kniffki, Martina (2001). “Cortesía en transición: La dinámica de la imagen social de los zapotecas bilingües en Oaxaca/México”. Oralia, 4, 213–241. Schrader-Kniffki, Martina (2003). Spanisch-Zapotekische Bitt- und Dankeshandlungen. Sprachkontakt und Höflichkeit in Einer Amerindischen Kultur Mexikos. Frankfurt, Main and Madrid: Vervuert, Iberoamericana. Schrader-Kniffki, Martina (2004). Introducción a la lengua y cultura zapotecas. Valencia: Instituto Valenciano de Lengua y Cultura Amerindias. Searle, John (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University press. Sinclair, John & Coulthard, Malcolm (1975). Towards an Analysis of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Werlen, Iwar (1984). Ritual und Sprache. Zum Verhältnis von Sprechen und Handeln in Ritualen. Tübingen: Narr. Wierzbicka, Anna (1985). “Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts. Polish vs. English”. Journal of Pragmatics, 9, 145–178. Wierzbicka, Anna (1991). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Zegarac, Vladimir & Pennington, Martha (2000). “Pragmatic transfer in intercultural communication”. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport Through Talk Across Cultures (pp. 145–164). London: Continuum. Zimmermann, Klaus (1992). Sprachkontakt, Ethnische Identität und Identitätsbeschädigung. Aspekte der Assimilation der Otomí-Indianer an die Hispanophone Mexikanische Kultur. Frankfurt, Main: Vervuert.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:9/02/2004; 14:38

F: PB123P3.tex / p.1 (175)

P III

Common topics in pragmatics

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:9/02/2004; 14:39

Discourse markers

F: PB123P31.tex / p.1 (177)

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.1 (179)

Chapter 9

Procedural constraints on context selection Siempre as a discourse marker Carmen Curcó

.

Introduction

This paper provides evidence in support of the recent view that the notion of procedural meaning as a constraint on contextual effects is too narrow and must be extended. Early work on the notion of procedural meaning suggested that its role was restricted to guiding the hearer towards recovering implicit content (Blakemore 1987). Later on, it was shown that procedural meaning can guide inferences about explicit content too (Wilson & Sperber 1993; Infatidou 1993; Blakemore 1996). More recently, Blakemore (2000) has argued that the concept of procedural meaning must be broadened to include all semantic information about the inferential processes underlying utterance interpretation, including constraints on contexts. Here I consider the use of the temporal adverb siempre as a discourse marker in Mexican Spanish. My aim is to show that in its use as a discourse marker siempre encodes a procedural constraint on context selection, indicating to the hearer that the utterance must be processed in a changing context, specifying the nature of the change, and the fact that the change is relevant on its own.

. Discourse markers, coherence, and relevance . The nature of discourse markers The study of discourse markers is one of the areas of linguistic and pragmatic research that has received most attention in the past twenty-five years. On the

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.2 (180)

 Carmen Curcó

one hand, this interest has generated a rapidly expanding body of detailed analysis of specific expressions in a growing number of languages: words and constructions thought to belong to a functionally related set of expressions that do not affect the propositional content of the utterances in which they appear, and which seem to play a crucial role in the relation of separate utterances and the creation and understanding of extended discourse. On the other hand, the study of discourse markers has given rise to important theoretical questions about the nature of linguistic meaning, the boundary between pragmatics and semantics, the relationship between coding and inference, and the nature of discourse structure and utterance interpretation. Not only have discourse markers been examined within a large number of frameworks, but they have also been approached in inquiries beyond pragmatic theory and discourse analysis. Discourse markers are receiving increased attention in research on sociolinguistics, language acquisition (Montes 1999), language attrition (De Fina 2003), language pedagogy (Tyler 1992), and other areas. Whatever perspective is taken to approach discourse markers, two immediate related questions arise: (a) what are the – defining or prototypical – properties of discourse markers? and (b) do discourse markers constitute a well defined class? With regard to the first question, authors vary in the features they consider to be characteristic of a discourse marker. Those figuring most prominently in definitions are their connectivity, that is, their use to relate utterances or other discourse units (Schiffrin 1987; Fraser 1996; Hansen 1997; Rouchota 1998a), and the fact that they are syntactically and semantically optional (Blakemore 1987; Fraser 1988; Brinton 1996; De Fina 1997). Discourse markers are syntactically optional in that removal of a discourse marker does not affect the grammaticality of the sentence where it appears. They are semantically optional because they seem to contribute nothing to the truth-conditions of the proposition expressed by the utterance in which they occur. It has also been claimed that discourse markers are pragmatically optional in that they merely give cues about the structural organisation of discourse (Brown & Yule 1983), and make explicit the connections between propositions, but do not create the connections themselves (Schiffrin 1987). Other less central features of discourse markers are often mentioned in the literature. These include a tendency to introduce the segments they mark (Schiffrin 1987; Hansen 1997), their frequent occurrence in speech, and their syntactic heterogeneity (Schourup 1999).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.3 (181)

Procedural constraints on context selection

In exploring the status of the set of discourse markers as a well-defined class, some rather unfruitful efforts have been made to find evidence for a grammatical category of discourse markers (Zwicky 1985; Schourup 1999). In fact, discourse markers do not seem to comprise a distinct syntactic class. On the other hand, if one takes the criterion of connectivity as central in the definition of what constitutes a discourse marker, what emerges is an apparently functionally related group of non-truth conditional linguistic expressions that either link clauses to other clauses or to preceding stretches of text, or an utterance to a speech act or a non-verbal context (Rouchota 1998a, 1998b). But even under functional or pragmatic criteria, discourse markers resist treatment as a single well-defined class, mainly because the evidence indicates that they do not encode a single type of meaning, and as a consequence, do not perform pragmatic roles of a single kind.1 To sum up, discourse markers are generally treated as a group of syntactically optional, non-truth conditional connective expressions, which are drawn from various syntactic categories, and which do not seem to constitute a single well-defined class. There is, however, considerable disagreement about the connectivity property. The problem not only concerns the nature of the connection discourse markers express, including the type and extent of the elements connected, and whether the relationships marked are psychologically real or not. There is also an ongoing dispute, which goes beyond the field of discourse markers, concerning the relationship between the notions of coherence – tightly linked to the connectivity property – and relevance.2 . Coherence-based approaches to the study of discourse markers There is a research tradition that views discourse markers as linking devices indicating coherence relations in a text. The idea behind this perspective is that coherence is a property of texts that accounts for their being perceived as a unified whole, and that it can be described in terms of a set of relations that hold between consecutive text fragments.3 There is no agreement though as to the number of relations that are needed to account for coherence, nor as to the status of the relations themselves. For some, only two structural relations (dominance and satisfaction-precedence) are required in a theory of coherence (Grosz & Sidner 1986), while others have argued for 70 discourse structure relations (Hovy & Maier 1994). Also, coherence and coherence relations are considered from at least two different perspectives. Some authors regard coherence as a property of discourse and are mainly concerned with determining a set of relations that can be used in successful machine text generation (cf. Hovy



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.4 (182)

 Carmen Curcó

& Maier 1994). Others (Hobbs 1978; Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman 1993; Knott & Dale 1994) believe that coherence is not a property of discourse itself, but of the mental representation people have of it. Hence, coherence relations are seen as cognitive entities that affect the way people produce and understand discourse. In this view, discourse markers are linguistic devices that make existing implicit coherence relations explicit (see Unger 1996 and Rouchota 1998a for critical discussion of this position). One of the most influential contributions to the study of discourse markers within a coherence framework is Schiffrin (1987). For her, discourse markers contribute to coherence because they establish multiple contextual coordinates simultaneously, thus facilitating the integration of several components of verbal interaction. The contextual coordinates that she suggests are indicated by discourse markers and are of two main kinds. First, discourse markers index utterances to preceding or following text and to the speaker or hearer. Second, they locate utterances in five planes of talk which she calls ideational structure, action structure, exchange structure, participation framework and information state. Other more recent approaches to discourse markers within this tradition are Redeker (1991), Fraser (1994, 1996), and De Fina (2003). Undoubtedly, coherence-based approaches to discourse connectives have resulted in an important number of analyses of particular expressions and constructions in many languages. At this stage, however, many central issues remain unresolved. Some of the unanswered questions concern the nature of the notion of coherence itself, and the possible characterisation of a principled set of coherence relations. Others are more specific to the proper analysis of words and expressions generally treated as discourse markers. Coherence approaches to discourse markers designed to support the automatic generation and interpretation of discourse need not be concerned with the psychological reality of coherence relations. However, if discourse markers are explored within a cognitive theory of verbal communication, the question of the psychological reality of coherence relations and their role in interpreting and producing discourse can hardly be avoided. It has been argued that non-truth conditional expressions can play a variety of roles in the utterances that contain them, and that a coherence-based treatment of discourse markers leads to an inadequate classification of essentially different words into a single category, overlooking a crucial distinction of linguistically encoded meaning: the difference between conceptual and procedural meaning drawn within the framework of relevance theory (see Blakemore 1996 and below).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.5 (183)

Procedural constraints on context selection 

. Relevance-based approaches to the study of discourse markers An empirically grounded cognitive theory of verbal communication based on the notion of coherence is forced to assume that the identification of coherence relations is essential both for the production and the interpretation of discourse. Indeed, discourse markers are seen by some (Sanders et al. 1993; Knott & Dale 1994) as evidence for the psychological reality of coherence relations. However, given the little agreement among coherence researchers about the number of possible coherence relations, and the risk of circularity of arguments that take the existence of certain discourse connectives as support for the psychological reality of the coherence relation they are seen as encoding, a coherence-based approach to discourse markers does not seem the most adequate alternative.4 Besides, as was mentioned above, there are strong arguments for viewing coherence as a secondary derivative notion (Wilson 1998). Within the theoretical approach to utterance understanding developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995), the most fundamental cognitive notion that drives ostensive communication is taken to be not coherence, but relevance. Besides, the linguistic semantics suggested by this approach is based on a distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning, which is shown to cross-cut the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional linguistic meaning, and to be fundamental to a theory of linguistic meaning in an overall account of discourse understanding (Wilson & Sperber 1993; Blakemore 1996). .. The relevance-theoretic framework According to relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995), the human cognitive system is biologically driven by the search for relevance. Relevance is a technical notion defined in terms of cognitive gains and processing effort. The more cognitive effects derived in processing a given stimulus, the more relevant the stimulus will be; the higher the cost invested in deriving such effects, the lower its relevance. The relevance of any stimulus is thus defined as a balance between the cognitive gains obtained in processing an utterance and the effort invested in deriving those effects. The workings of ostensive communication are seen as a consequence of the general make-up of our relevance-oriented cognitive system. By demanding the hearer’s attention in using an utterance, the speaker creates the expectation that it is worth it, because attention resources are selectively allocated by the cognitive relevance-seeking system. In other words, an addressee is entitled to

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.6 (184)

 Carmen Curcó

assume that an utterance will yield cognitive effects in exchange for the effort invested in processing it. The guarantee of relevance carried by every utterance is limited. Sperber and Wilson argue that each utterance comes backed by a guarantee of its own optimal – as opposed to maximal – relevance, which entitles the hearer to assume that it will yield adequate cognitive effects and that it will put the hearer to no gratuitous effort in deriving those effects. But human beings are not always competent communicators, and they are not always benevolent. Hence, an utterance is defined as optimally relevant if and only if (a) it achieves sufficient cognitive effects to be worth the hearer’s processing effort and (b) it is the most relevant one the speaker could have produced given her abilities and preferences. One of the central points of relevance theory is the idea that the linguistic meaning of an utterance drastically underdetermines what it communicates even at the explicit level (Carston 2002). The output of linguistic decoding is almost never propositional, whereas what gets communicated is a set of propositions conveyed in different ways and with varying strength. Verbal communication is thus a phenomenon involving two kinds of processes: decoding and inference. Such cognitive processes require two basic tools: representation and computation. If natural language has evolved alongside a relevance-oriented cognitive system, it should come as no surprise that linguistic expressions can encode two types of meaning, paralleling the distinction between representation and computation. So, linguistic meaning can encode constituents of propositional representations, or in other words, concepts. It can also encode a procedure for manipulating representations in inferential computations. The semantic distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning proposed within relevance theory is designed to capture this fundamental cognitive contrast. To sum up, relevance theory starts from the assumption that every utterance has a number of different interpretations, each compatible with its linguistic form. Rather than searching for some mentally represented coherence relation, hearers interpreting discourse are seen as trying to identify among the set of all possible interpretations of an utterance the one that best satisfies a certain expectation of relevance, following a path of least effort until an interpretation compatible with the communicative principle of relevance is found. Utterance interpretation involves two processes: decoding and inference. The decoding process gives as output an incomplete conceptual representation, which the hearer must inferentially enrich. The inferential process is one of hypothesis formation and confirmation. Relevance is the criterion for testing

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.7 (185)

Procedural constraints on context selection

the hypothesis and choosing an interpretation. Let me now return to the two components of relevance: cognitive effects and processing effort. Cognitive effects are the result of processing the information provided by an utterance against a background of contextual assumptions, which are selected by the audience as part of the interpretation process. Cognitive effects are thus the result of an interaction between the new information and the context of interpretation, understood as a subset of the assumptions the hearer can represent mentally as true or probably true. Sperber and Wilson argue that there are three basic ways in which information conveyed by an utterance can combine with the context to produce cognitive gains: (a) the new information can combine with existing assumptions to produce a new contextual implication, (b) the new information can combine with the context to strengthen an existing assumption, and (c) the new information can combine with the context to contradict and eliminate one or more of the hearer’s assumptions. Factors known to affect processing effort are, among others, the logic and syntactic complexity of the expression, its recency and frequency of use, and the size and accessibility of the intended context of interpretation. A hearer interpreting discourse has several simultaneous tasks to perform. He must identify what was communicated explicitly, what was implicitly conveyed, and identify the intended context of interpretation and the speaker’s attitude towards what was said and implicated. All these subparts of deriving an interpretation for an utterance are guided by the Communicative Principle of Relevance, which states that every utterance communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance.

. Procedural meaning Seen from the cognitive stance outlined above, it is to be expected that linguistic meaning contributes to inferential pragmatic processes in two ways: on the one hand, linguistic expressions may encode constituents of conceptual representations; on the other, they may encode procedural information about how conceptual representations should be manipulated in pragmatic inference. The change to a cognitive perspective like the one outlined in the framework of relevance theory raises the question of whether the semantic distinction between truth conditional and non-truth conditional meaning is sufficient to capture linguistic meaning. Within the relevance theoretic framework it has been argued that truth conditionality is not a property of linguistic expressions as such, but rather of utterances and thoughts. Linguistic semantics should,



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.8 (186)

 Carmen Curcó

consequently, be concerned not with truth conditionality but with the relation between pieces of linguistic form and the cognitive information they encode (Carston 1988, 2002). The conceptual/procedural distinction was originally proposed and developed by Blakemore (1987). In her seminal work, she argued that words like but, after all, and so belong to a class of expressions which are non-truth conditional and encode constraints on the derivation of the implicatures of the utterance in which they occur. Blakemore originally conceived the conceptual/ procedural distinction as coextensive with the distinction between truth conditional meaning and non-truth conditional meaning. She also limited the role of procedural information to inferences related to implicature derivation. More recent work has demonstrated both of these assumptions to be wrong. Wilson and Sperber (1993) have shown that the dichotomies truthconditional/non-truth conditional and conceptual/procedural cross-cut each other, arguing that there are truth-conditional expressions that encode procedures and affect the explicit content of an utterance (e.g. pronouns). IfantidouTrouki (1993) has also demonstrated that procedural meaning not only sets constraints on the recovery of the implicit import of an utterance. She puts forward an analysis of sentential adverbs, arguing that they are non-truth conditional and encode procedural information that constrains the derivation of higher-level explicatures.5 Later on, Blakemore herself argued for a more complex notion of procedural meaning so that “it can capture all the ways in which linguistic meaning can constrain the inferential procedures involved in utterance interpretation” (2000: 485). The development of the concept of procedural meaning has revealed that conceiving of procedural information as a constraint only on contextual effects overlooks other ways in which information about the inferential processes underlying utterance interpretation can be encoded. Blakemore herself (2000) mentions that procedural meaning can, in principle, include constraints on contexts. As mentioned above, cognitively, the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning is rooted in the very idea that much of our thinking in general, and interpreting utterances in particular, involves performing computations over conceptual representations. Languages – as a vehicle for thought and for verbal communication – can be expected to encode information about such computations, besides information about the representations that are the object of the computations. But the distinction is also communicatively motivated, at least if the relevance theoretic framework is on the right track. Recall that according to the communicative principle of relevance, an addressee is entitled to assume that the speaker is being optimally relevant. The quantity of

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.9 (187)

Procedural constraints on context selection 

effects achieved by an utterance increases the degree of relevance, but the effort invested in deriving cognitive gains is a factor that detracts from relevance. In this picture, then, encoded information able to guide the hearer either in the identification of the explicit content of an utterance or the intended contextual assumptions and effects would reduce processing costs. In the following section I offer an initial analysis of a particular use of the Spanish word siempre and suggest that in its non-truth conditional uses – that is, in cases where it is not a temporal adverb – it encodes procedural information that increases the salience of specific contextual assumptions against which the speaker expects the hearer to process the utterance where siempre occurs.

. Constraints on context selection: The case of siempre As a temporal adverb, Spanish siempre corresponds roughly to always in English. It is a tonic element, which has positional mobility within a sentence, and contributes to the truth conditions of the proposition expressed, as exemplified in (1). (1) a.

Siempre te estás quejando always you are complaining ‘You are always complaining’ b. Estos dos siempre llegan tarde these two always arrive late ‘These two are always late’ c. Nos necesitan siempre us need-3p always ‘They need us always’

Besides its role as a temporal adverb, in Mexican Spanish siempre can occur non-truth conditionally in examples like the following:6 (2) a.

Siempre no me voy siempre neg me leave-1s ‘Siempre I’m not leaving’ b. Siempre acepté el trabajo siempre accepted-1s the job ‘I siempre accepted the job’ c. Siempre se murió la señora de abajo siempre ref died-3s the lady from downstairs ‘The lady downstairs siempre died’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.10 (188)

 Carmen Curcó

In the examples in (2) siempre is not a temporal adverb, and it does not contribute to the truth conditions of the utterance. The utterances in (2) can be paraphrased roughly as in (3), but they are not totally equivalent to their Spanish closest counterparts:7 (3) a.

I’m not leaving after all ‘No me voy después de todo’ b. I accepted the job in the end ‘Al final acepté el trabajo’ c. The lady downstairs died after all ‘La señora de abajo se murió después de todo’

My claim is that if p is the proposition expressed by an utterance, the use of siempre signals to the hearer the kind of context where the utterance should be processed. It indicates that the utterance should be interpreted in a context where both p and p were at some stage prior to the time of utterance held as possible outcomes, and that this fact is relevant in itself. So, besides stating the fact that the speaker will not go away, (2a) may either convey that the fact that the speaker will not go away stands in contradiction with a previously held contextual assumption (i.e. that the speaker was going away), or corroborate and strengthen a previously held contextual assumption that he was not going away, although the second possibility is a less favoured interpretation. (2b) and (2c) are similar. The role of siempre is to make salient that in the intended context of interpretation two opposite assumptions p and p were held with equal or similar certainty prior to the time of utterance. In most cases, it indicates that there were contextual shifts such as p was true or most likely to be true at some point t1 in the past, while p was true or most likely to be true at some other point t2 also in the past, and most importantly, it points out that this fact is relevant itself. So, (2b) conveys that the speaker accepted a particular job, but also that there has been uncertainty as to whether this would be the case, and that the probability that the speaker would not accept it was high at some stage in the past. (2c) communicates the death of a specific lady, but also that the possibility that she could survive was taken seriously for a while. This extra layer of meaning is not part of the truth conditions of the utterance, as shown by the contrast between the acceptability of the exchanges in (4a), (5a) and (6a) and the oddity of those in (4b), (5b) and (6b): (4) a.

A: Siempre no me voy siempre neg me leave-1s ‘siempre I’m not leaving’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.11 (189)

Procedural constraints on context selection 

B: No es cierto. Tu boleto de avión está en la mesa neg is true your ticket of plane is on the table ‘That’s not true. Your plane ticket is on the table’ b. A: Siempre no me voy siempre neg me leave-1s ‘siempre I’m not leaving’ B: ?No es cierto. Nunca titubeaste en quedarte. neg is true never hesitate-2s past in staying-2s ?‘That’s not true. You never hesitated about staying’ (5) a.

A: Siempre acepté el trabajo siempre accepted-1s past the job ‘I siempre accepted the job’ B: No estás diciendo a verdad. neg are telling the truth ‘You are not telling the truth’ No tienes ninguna intención de empezar a trabajar neg have-2s none intention of start to work ‘You have no intention to start working’ b. A: Siempre acepté el trabajo siempre accepted-2s the job ‘I siempre accepted the job’ B: ?No estás diciendo la verdad. neg are telling the truth ‘You are not telling the truth’ ?Nunca dudaste en aceptarlo never doubted-2s in accepting acc ?‘You never had doubts about taking it’

(6) a.

A: Siempre se murió la señora de abajo siempre ref died-3s the lady from downstairs ‘The lady downstairs siempre died’ B: Mentira. Acabo.de verla subiendo la escalera lie perf-1s see acc climb-imp the stairs ‘That’s a lie. I’ve just seen her coming up the stairs’ b. A: Siempre se murió la señora de abajo siempre ref died-3s the lady from downstairs ‘The lady downstairs siempre died’ ? B: Mentira. lie ?‘That´s a lie’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.12 (190)

 Carmen Curcó

Nunca hubo esperanza de que se salvara never there.was hope of comp ref save-3s sub ?‘There was no hope that she could survive’

So, a speaker who uses siempre in examples like those above cannot lay himself open to charges of untruthfulness in his use of it. While the exchanges in (4a), (5a) and (6a) are perfectly acceptable – B denies A’s claim that he is not leaving, that he accepted the job, and that the lady died –, B cannot be charged with untruthfulness in his use of the marker siempre: the indication that there were doubts about two possible outcomes preceding the situation reported cannot be questioned in itself. Another standard criterion to test the truth conditionality of the meaning of a word is to embed the item to be tested in the antecedent of a conditional sentence and check whether it falls within the scope of the if. If it does, the item is truth conditional, otherwise, it isn’t (Wilson 1998–1999; Infantidou 2001). If we apply it to the example in (6a) we obtain (7a): (7) a.

siempre acepto el trabajo, tendré que mudarme If siempre accept-1s the job have-1s fut comp move ‘If I siempre accept the job, I will have to move’

The question now is whether the suggestion conveyed by siempre that the speaker is doubtful about accepting the job is truth conditional or not. Another way of framing this question is asking whether the truth conditions in the antecedent of (7a) are correctly given in the A or the B set, or in other words, under what circumstances is the speaker of (7a) claiming that he will have to move. A. (i) I accept the job B. (i) I accept the job (ii) I am doubtful about accepting the job

Clearly, the speaker of (7a) is claiming that his need to move is a consequence of his acceptance of the job, not of his doubts about it. Hence, siempre does not fall under the if then connective and does not contribute to the truth conditions of the utterance. The test works similarly for (6b) and (6c). We can embed them in the antecedent of a conditional and check whether the suggestion about the contextual shifts in the certainty with which the proposition expressed by the utterance is held is part of the truth conditions of the original sentence. (7) b. Si siempre no me voy, puedo ayudarte a pintar la casa ‘If siempre I’m not leaving, I can help you paint the house’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.13 (191)

Procedural constraints on context selection

c.

Si la señora de abajo siempre se murió, su hijo heredará un montón de dinero. ‘If the lady downstairs siempre died, her son will inherit a lot of money’

The speaker of (7b) is claiming that his help in painting the house depends only on his not leaving and not on the current uncertainty of this fact; and the speaker of (7c) is asserting that the son’s inheritance of a lot of money only depends on whether his mother died and not on whether there were prior hopes that she would survive. So, there are non truth-conditional uses of siempre, which make it distinguishable from siempre as a temporal adverb. But the fact that an expression is non-truth conditional does not in its own imply that it encodes a procedural meaning. We have seen that there are truth-conditional linguistic expressions that encode a procedure (e.g. pronouns). Indeed, although there is a principled cognitive difference between concepts and procedures which is rather unproblematic, in practice, establishing whether the meaning encoded by a particular bit of linguistic information is procedural or conceptual may not be a totally straightforward matter.8 There is, however, a further criterion that points in the direction of procedural meaning: lack of compositionality. While conceptual representations combine in a predictable fashion to yield larger conceptual representations, procedures do not combine in any predictable way to form larger or more complex procedures, but rather interact in varied ways. A conceptual representation can be true or false. A procedure can be adequate or successful, compatible or incompatible with other procedures, but not true or false. The fact that compositionality cannot apply to procedures in the same way as for conceptual representations explains why temporal adverbs that specialise as discourse markers exhibit the following properties, pointed out by Portolés (1998: 57): a. morphological invariability b. impossibility to be modified by specifiers and complements c. inability to function as the basis for elliptical constructions To illustrate the first property, that is, that temporal adverbs that become markers are uninflecting, consider (8a–b) below, where ahora is used as a temporal adverb (Eng. now), and (8c–d) where it is a discourse marker:9 (8) a.

Ahora te lo digo now you dat it acc tell-1s ‘I’ll tell you now’



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.14 (192)

 Carmen Curcó

b. Ahorita/ahoritita te lo digo now-dim/now-dim dim you-dat it-acc tell-1s ‘I’ll tell you just now’ c. Ahora, te lo digo para que me now, you-dat it-acc tell-1s for comp me entiendas, no para que te enfurezcas. understand-2s sub neg for comp you enrage-sub ‘Now, I’m telling you about it so that you can understand me, not to get you enraged’ d. *Ahorita, te lo digo para que me now dim, you dat it acc tell-1s for comp me entiendas, no para que te enfurezcas. understand-2s subj neg for comp you enrage-subj *‘Now [dim], I’m telling you about it so that you can understand me, not to get you enraged’

Ahora can be inflected only when it is a temporal adverb, but not when it functions as a discourse marker. In the case of siempre, we find no morphological variability whether it is used as a temporal adverb or as a marker.10 With regard to the second property, notice that siempre as a temporal adverb can be modified by determiners and complements as in (9a–b), but that this possibility is lost in its use as a marker (9c), where modification by determiners or complements eliminates the possibility of interpreting siempre as a marker (9d–e), and makes the temporal adverbial interpretation the only one available. This factor is indicative of the lack of compositionality of siempre in its use as a discourse marker, and of its procedural meaning. (9) a.

Casi siempre llega temprano. almost always arrive-3s early ‘She’s almost always early’ b. Me avergüenzas siempre que se te olvida su nombre me embarras-2s always comp dat you forget his name ‘You embarrass me every time you forget his name’ c. Siempre voy a aceptar el trabajo siempre going-1s to accept the job ‘Siempre I’m going to accept the job’ d. Casi siempre voy a aceptar el trabajo Almost always going-1s to accept the job ‘I’ll almost always accept the job’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.15 (193)

Procedural constraints on context selection 

e.

Siempre que pueda voy a aceptar el trabajo always comp can-1s sub going-1s to accept the job ‘I’ll accept the job every time I can/I’ll accept the job as long as it is possible’

The third property – impossibility of functioning as the base for elliptical constructions – is illustrated in (10) below. As a temporal adverb, siempre can be the basis for an elliptical construction (10a–b), but this is not possible when siempre is used as a discourse marker (10c–d). In (10d), siempre does not affect what is predicated of Juan. The indication that there was uncertainty as to whether the speaker would leave does not extend to Juan. What is conveyed is merely that Juan did not leave. (10) a.

Helena viene siempre y Juan también Helena come-3s always and Juan too ‘Helena always comes and Juan too’ b. Pedro está siempre dispuesto a escuchar y a opinar Pedro is always inclined to listen and to give.opinion Pedro is always willing to listen, and to express his opinion c. ¿Siempre te fuiste? siempre you left-2s ‘Siempre you left?’ d. ( ?) ¿Siempre te fuiste y Juan también? siempre you left-2s and Juan too (?)‘Siempre you left and Juan too?’

Therefore, in certain contexts siempre loses its truth conditional meaning and its inflection and combination possibilities, which constitutes strong evidence that in such contexts, rather than its standard conceptual meaning, siempre encodes procedural meaning. The procedural meaning of siempre seems to be linked to its conceptual meaning as a temporal adverb, which can roughly be paraphrased as ‘on every possible occasion’ or ‘in every possible case’. My suggestion is that in its use as a discourse marker, siempre encodes a procedure that can be defined as a precise instruction about the nature of the intended context of interpretation as follows: –

Include in the context of interpretation of the utterance U, whose prepositional form is p, the assumption that at a time t prior to the time of utterance there was an unresolved tension between p and p, and process

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.16 (194)

 Carmen Curcó

the propositional content of this utterance as the resolution of this tension. Take this previously unresolved tension between p and p in the context of interpretation as a potential source of cognitive effects. So, the use of siempre indicates that p and p must be selected as part of the context of interpretation as possibly true – with varying degrees of probability – at a time prior to the utterance, and that at the time of utterance, p is the case. Besides, it points to this fact as a potential source of cognitive effects, that is, as relevant on its own. This can be captured as follows: siempre → [ (pp1 ∧ pp2 ) t ∧ (p)t+1 ],

where p1 and p2 are the relative strengths with which p and p were held as true or possibly true prior to the time of utterance (t) and t +1 is the time of utterance. In contrast, it could be argued that the meaning of siempre may also be seen as directing the hearer towards the derivation of two specific types of cognitive effects, as follows: – –

Process the propositional content of this utterance as a strengthening of a previous contextual assumption with the same content Process the propositional content of this utterance as a contradiction of a previous contextual assumption and eliminate it

I wish to argue in favor of the first possibility, that is, the idea that siempre gives a precise instruction to the hearer about the context where the utterance is expected to be processed, and that the above indications about the type of contextual effects to be achieved are only derivationally encoded. Consider the exchange in (11): (11) Context: Pedro, Juan and María are chatting over coffee. Pedro and Juan are good friends. María is a friend of Juan’s and has just met Pedro. She has no previous information about Pedro’s work life, nor about the fact that Pedro was offered a new job. She shares the common knowledge that jobs in Banxico are extremely well paid with lots of fringe benefits. Changing the topic from the film they’ve just seen, Juan asks Pedro: Juan: ¿Siempre aceptaste el trabajo en Banxico? siempre accepted-2s the job in Banxico ‘Did you siempre accept the job in Banxico?’ Pedro: Claro Clear ‘Of course’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.17 (195)

Procedural constraints on context selection 

María: ¡Cómo! ¿Habías pensado en rechazar un trabajo allí? how had-2s thought in turn.down a job there ‘What! Did you consider turning down a job there?’

In the conversation above, the only reason that makes possible María’s contribution as a surprise about the fact that Pedro could have considered turning down a job which she considers desirable is that the presence of siempre makes accessible an otherwise totally absent assumption concerning Pedro’s doubts about accepting the job. Her reaction also points to the fact that the tension between accepting and not accepting the job is relevant on its own and is a potential source of cognitive effects. María engages in the conversation with no background knowledge and reacts to assumptions in a context that she can access through the meaning of siempre. Therefore, there can be no strengthening of a previous assumption by her that Pedro will accept a job in Banxico because she knew nothing about Pedro’s work affairs; for the same reason, there is no contradiction and elimination of the contrary assumption that Pedro would not accept a job in Banxico. The two are cognitive effects that Juan can work out derivatively, and María can recognise them as she interprets the whole exchange as consistent with the communicative principle of relevance, but the instruction to derive these precise cognitive effects (a strengthening of a contextual assumption, and/or a contradiction and elimination of a contextual assumption) cannot be what the procedural meaning encoded by siempre consists of. If it were, the exchange in (11), containing María’s surprise as such would be impossible. In spite of the fact that siempre seems to encode primarily procedural constraints on context selection, the kind of contextual assumptions to which it gives access is of course linked to the cognitive effects of strengthening and contradiction and elimination. In cases where the speaker’s intention is to give easy access to the contextual effects themselves, siempre is followed either by an affirmative or a negative emphatic adverb, as the following examples, taken from different sources illustrate:11 (12) a.

Siempre sí era cáncer siempre yes-emph was cancer ‘Siempre, it was indeed cancer’ b. Siempre sí quiero estudiar siempre yes-emph want-1s study ‘Siempre sí I do want to study’ (Diccionario del español usual de México)

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.18 (196)

 Carmen Curcó

(13) a.

(14) a.

Context: A client is waiting at her lawyer’s office. The lawyer’s secretary calls her in. Secretary: Pase, por favor, señora. come please madam ‘Please, do come in Madam’ The client stands up. Realising she is missing some documents, the secretary hesitates Secretary: Ay, no, permítame. exc neg allow.me imp ‘Oops, no, just a second’ The client sits down again Client: ¿Siempre no? siempre neg ‘siempre not yet?’ Secretary: Sí, sí. Permítanos sólo un momentito, por favor. yes yes allow.us just one moment dim please. Me falta un documento aquí. I miss one document here ‘Yes, yes. Just one second, please. I’m missing a document here’

El presidente de la Comisión CONASUPO, Manuel Hinojosa, determinó que siempre sí le pagará sus emolumentos al despacho privado Bladinieres Compañía. La fracción del PRD había solicitado que no se le pagarán los 1200 millones de pesos que costaron las investigaciones, pues juzgó que la firma no dejó satisfechas a las fracciones de oposición (Diario de Yucatán, 12.9.1996, CREA) [The president of the CONASUPO Committee, Manuel Hinojosa, decided that he siempre sí will pay emoluments to Bladinieres Compañía private firm, which audited CONASUPO. PRD members of parliament had requested that the 1200 million pesos charged for the investigation should not be paid, because they considered that the firm’s actions did not satisfy opposition MPs] b. ¿Cómo podían saber que se lanzó para suicidarse? ¿Por qué suponer su arrepentimiento apenas cayó al mar? ¿Lo gritó – ¡que siempre sí quiero vivir!-, se los dijo con los ojos, con los gestos, lo intuyeron? (Ignacio Solares, Nen, la inútil, 1994, CREA) [How could they know that he had thrown himself in order to commit suicide? Why assume his regret as soon as he fell into the sea? Did he cry out – I siempre sí do want to live-? Did he say it with his eyes, with his gestures, did they intuit it?]

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.19 (197)

Procedural constraints on context selection 

c.

¡Jesús, ya se me andaba olvidando, padrecito: Que siempre sí parece que se desposa la niña Sole con don Luis Valdés. Nos vamos a ir a vivir al rancho, bueno, a la hacienda. Eso le oí decir a la patrona. No me vaya usté a echar de cabeza. Vayan a decir que nomás ando de chismosa. La niña Sole no quiere poner la fecha..., ya lo tendré yo a usté al corriente (Eladia Gonzáles, Quién como Dios, 1999, CREA) [Jesus! I was almost forgetting, father[dim] : it seems that la niña Sole is siempre sí marrying don Luis Valdés. We are moving to the ranch, I mean, the hacienda. That’s what I heard my mistress say. Don’t you let them know I told you. They’ll say I’m here only gossiping. La niña Sole doesn’t want to fix the date. . . , I’ll let you know what happens]

In fact, when used as a discourse marker siempre is often followed by an affirmative or a negative emphatic adverb, especially if the temporal adverbial interpretation is also available. The co-occurrence of siempre and the emphatic adverb serves to disambiguate the utterance. The above cases show that the use of siempre as a discourse maker is not limited to informal oral interaction. It is common also in literature and the press. What all these examples have in common is the interplay in the context of interpretation of contradictory assumptions – underlined in the examples –, and the fact that such a shift in context is relevant on its own. The procedural meaning encoded by siempre reduces processing effort by guiding the hearer to select very specific contextual assumptions against which he intends his utterance to be processed, thereby pointing to the type of cognitive effects that he expects to be derived. With this analysis I hope to have provided evidence in support of the idea that the notion of procedural meaning should indeed be extended to include constraints on all types of non-conceptual pragmatic inference, and in particular, indications about context selection. Natural languages are likely to encode instructions about how to manipulate conceptual representations that get ostensively communicated at all levels involved in the recovery of the intended interpretation: the explicit, the implicit, the intended context of interpretation, and the speaker’s attitude towards what was said and what was implicated. Some authors treat the development of a word which encodes only conceptual meaning into another one encoding a procedural meaning as the result of a process of grammaticalisation. For instance, in discussing adverbial discourse markers, Portolés suggests that the degree to which the properties discussed above are reflected in adverbs functioning as discourse markers will vary according to the extent to which the process has evolved for a particular word:

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.20 (198)

 Carmen Curcó

Los adverbios marcadores proceden de la evolución de una serie de sintagmas que, de una parte, van perdiendo sus posibilidades de flexión y combinación y, de otra, van abandonando su significado conceptual y se especializan en otro de procesamiento. (1998: 59) [Adverbial discourse markers are the result of a series of syntagmatic constructions that, on the one hand, gradually lose their inflection and combination possibilities, and on the other, progressively drop their conceptual meaning and get specialised in a different procedural one].

Grammaticalisation is a historical process, defined by Hopper and Traugott as “the process whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalised, continue to develop new grammatical functions” (1993: XV). There is an ongoing dispute as to whether grammaticalisation is a distinct and independent process whose mechanisms need to be explained by a distinct predictive theory, or is rather an epiphenomenal result that can be explained as falling out of some more general theory about language and communication. This debate is beyond the scope of this paper.12 However, it seems that if the human cognitive system is indeed designed to process stimuli in the search for relevance, the development of natural languages will naturally tend to produce mechanisms that enable speakers and hearers to achieve optimal relevance: words encoding constraints on context selection reduce processing costs. Not all shifts to procedural encoding will give rise to a gramaticalising expression, if grammaticalisation is understood as a process affecting only subpropositional conceptual representations (Nicolle 1998). However, grammaticalisation always involves a change from conceptual encoding to procedural encoding. The emergence of procedural meaning from words encoding concepts is the expected result of the workings of our general cognitive and basic communicative dispositions.

Notes . For further discussion, see for instance Blakemore (1996) and below. . See Giora (1997) and Wilson (1998) for a general discussion on whether the notion of relevance is derivative from the basic concept of coherence or vice versa, and Rouchota (1998a) and Blakemore (2002) for how this dispute affects the study of discourse markers more concretely. . The notion of coherence is generally contrasted with that of cohesion. Cohesion refers to the surface grammatical and lexical continuity of a text, and is usually taken to occur

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.21 (199)

Procedural constraints on context selection 

where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another in the sense that it cannot be decoded except by recourse to it. Cohesive ties include reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. In contrast to cohesion which is a textual property, coherence refers to the semantic-pragmatic continuity among discourse segments. Coherence relations hold between the propositional content of text segments. . The circularity arises from an argument with the following structure: The relation is linguistically encoded, therefore it must be mentally represented; and we know that it is mentally represented, because it gets linguistically encoded. . A higher level explicature is a particular type of explicature (an ostensively and explicitly communicated assumption) which results from embedding the prepositional form under a speech act description, a prepositional attitude description, or some other comment on the embedded proposition. . I am not aware of the possibility of this use of siempre in other dialects of Spanish. . The paraphrases here are only intended to give the reader a rough approximation to the meaning of siempre, but it should be stressed that they are not equivalent to the utterances with siempre. I discuss the contrast between siempre, después de todo, al final, finalmente y por fin elsewhere. . For instance, the fact that the content of conceptual representations is normally susceptible of being brought to consciousness with relative ease, while the content of procedures is not, is crucial for the cognitive motivation of the conceptual/procedural distinction. Besides, procedural meaning is more resistant to being learnt in processes of second language acquisition, and shows patterns of loss which differ from those involved in alterations to conceptual meaning in cases of language attrition. For a review of language attrition processes see Seliger and Vago (1991). . For an approach to ahora as a discourse marker see Silva-Corvalán (1999, 2001). . The use of diminutive forms of the adverb ahora is typical of American dialects of Spanish, and very common in Mexican Spanish. . Notice that in all these real-life examples, there is indication either in the physical or textual context of the two possibilities p and p mentioned in the description of the procedure encoded by siempre. The underlining in the examples is meant to illustrate this. . But see Newmeyer (2001) for an excellent presentation and discussion. See also Nicolle (1998) for a relevance theoretic view on grammaticalisation.

References Blakemore, Diane (1987). Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, Diane (1996). “Are apposition markers discourse markers?” Journal of Linguistics, 32, 325–347. Blakemore, Diane (2000). “Indicators and procedures: ‘nevertheless’ and ‘but”’. Journal of Linguistics, 36, 463–486.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.22 (200)

 Carmen Curcó

Blakemore, Diane (2002). Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Brinton, Laurel (1996). Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Brown, Gillian & Yule, George (1983). Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carston, Robyn (1988). “Implicature, explicature and truth-theoretic semantics”. In R. Kempson (Ed.), Mental Representations: The Interface Between Language and Reality (pp. 155–181). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carston, Robyn (2002). Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. De Fina, Anna (1997). “An analysis of Spanish bien as a marker of classroom management in student-teacher interaction”. Journal of Pragmatics, 28, 337–354. De Fina, Anna (2003). “I marcatori ma e però nel discorso di parlanti italiani bilingui: verso una varietà mista Italiano-Spagnolo”. In A. De Fina & F. Bizzoni (Eds.), Italiano e italiani fuori d’Italia (pp. 15–43). Perugia: Guerra Editore. Fraser, Bruce (1988). “Types of English discourse markers”. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 38, 19–33. Fraser, Bruce (1994). “An approach to discourse markers”. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 383– 395. Fraser, Bruce (1996). “Pragmatic markers”. Pragmatics, 6, 167–190. Giora, Rachel (1997). “Discourse coherence and theory of relevance: Stumbling blocks in search of a unified theory”. Journal of Pragmatics, 27, 17–34. Grosz, Barbara & Sidner, Candace (1986). “Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse”. Computational Linguistics, 12, 175–204. Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard (1997). “Alors and donc in spoken French: A reanalysis”. Journal of Pragmatics, 28, 153–187. Hobbs, Jerry (1978). Why is discourse coherent. Technical note 176. SRI Projects 5844, 7500, 7910. Hopper, Paul & Trauggot, Elizabeth (1993). Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hovy, Eduard & Maier, Elizabeth (1994). “Parsimonious or profligate: how many and which discourse structure relations”. Unpublished manuscript. Infantidou, Elly (2001). Evidentials and Relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Infantidou-Trouki, Elly (1993). “Sentential adverbs and relevance”. Lingua, 90(1/2), 65–90. Knott, Alistair & Dale, Robert (1994). “Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations”. Discourse Processes, 18, 35–62. Montes, Rosa (1999). “The development of discourse markers in Spanish: Interjections”. Journal of Pragmatics, 31–10, 1289–1319. Newmeyer, Frederick (2001). “Deconstructing grammaticalization”. Language Sciences, 23, 187–229. Nicolle, Steve (1998). “A relevance theory perspective on grammaticalization”. Cognitive Linguistics, 9–1, 1–35. Portolés, José (1998). Marcadores del discurso. Barcelona: Ariel.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:42

F: PB12309.tex / p.23 (201)

Procedural constraints on context selection 

Redeker, Gisela (1991). “Linguistic markers of discourse structure”. Linguistics, 29, 1139– 1172. Rouchota, Villy (1998a). “Connectives, coherence and relevance”. In V. Rouchota & A. Jucker (Eds.), Current Issues in Relevance Theory (pp. 11–57). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rouchota, Villy (1998b). “Procedural meaning and parenthetical discourse markers”. In A. Jucker & Y. Ziv (Eds.), Discourse Markers: Description and Theory (pp. 97–126). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sanders, Ted, Spooren, Wilbert, & Noordman, Leo (1993). “Coherence relations in a cognitive theory of discourse representation”. Cognitive Linguistics, 4–2, 93–133. Schiffrin, Deborah (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schourup, Lawrence (1999). “Discourse markers”. Tutorial overview. Lingua, 107, 227–265. Seliger, Herbert & Vago, Robert (Eds.). (1991). First Language Attrition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (1999). “Ahora: from temporal to discourse deixis”. In R. Blake, D. Ranson, & R. Wright (Eds.), Essays in Hispanic linguistics dedicated to Paul M. Lloyd (pp. 67–81). Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (2001). Sociolingüística y pragmática del español. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Tyler, Andrea (1992). “Discourse structure and the perception of incoherence in international teaching assistant’s spoken discourse”. TESOL Quarterly, 26(4), 713–729. Unger, Christopher (1996). “The scope of connectives: implications for discourse organization”. Journal of Linguistics, 32, 403–438. Wilson, Deirdre (1998–1999). Semantic theory lectures. Unpublished manuscript. University College London. Wilson, Deirdre (1998). “Discourse, coherence and relevance: A reply to Rachel Giora”. Journal of Pragmatics, 29, 57–74. Wilson, Deidre & Sperber, Dan (1993). “Linguistic form and relevance”. Lingua, 90, 5–25. Zwicky, Arnold (1985). “Clitics and particles”. Language, 61, 283–305.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.1 (203)

Chapter 10

Discourse markers in the construction of the text, the activity, and the social relations Evidence from courtroom discourse Isolda E. Carranza

.

Introduction

The central argument to be developed in this paper is that phenomena which are essentially and basically pragmatic in nature, as it is the case with discourse markers, are intrinsically related to “the particular language games in which they play a role” to put it in Levinson’s words (1992 [1979]: 96) and can only be satisfactorily accounted for by approaches whose scope allows analysts to deal with that fact. A subsidiary goal of the paper is to offer evidence from genres other than conversation that illuminate some aspects of the function of discourse markers and confirm the need to make use of pragmatic and social theoretical constructs in order to deal with those aspects. Courtroom discourse is an unlikely environment for conversational discourse markers. It will be shown here that the presence of those forms is fully accounted for when viewed in conjunction with other forms which, though employed in doing institutional business, evoke everyday, ordinary, non-institutional life. The data were observed and collected by the researcher from eighteen trials in the Criminal Courts of a major city of Argentina as part of a broader research agenda which includes the ethnography of the institution. The most common trial format in the Argentinean judicial system is the trial by bench, where the Tribunal is made up of three judges. The presiding judge is the member who is most involved in the interactional dynamics of the trial. The next section contains a synthesis of what is currently known about the nature and functioning of discourse markers, and sets the theoretical and methodological framework of this study. Section 3 engages in a dialogue with a different research tradition that has focused on the category discourse mark-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.2 (204)

 Isolda E. Carranza

ers. The analysis component of this paper is developed in Sections 4 and 5. The former deals with exchanges that take place during a trial between institutional representatives and members of the public while the latter focuses on a non-interactional genre typical of the speech event in question, the closing argument. Section 5 makes a proposal to deal with the heterogeneity of oral institutional discourse in which discourse markers are involved. That heterogeneity at times includes the strategic exploitation of register shifts. This section also presents the entire range of features of various types that are found to express the predominant voice of the legal system in courtroom discourse and those that express the voice of the lifeworld, among which we find discourse markers. Section 6 sums up the conclusions.

. Characterisation of discourse markers The most often described aspect of discourse markers is their contribution to cohesion since they indicate relations between discourse units at multiple planes of discourse organisation – the ideational, the sequential, and that of speech acts (Redeker 1991) – and they can act at more than one plane simultaneously (Schiffrin 1987). They have been characterised as deictic due to the fact that these forms take on unique, situated meanings in the particular context in which they are produced, and focus the interlocutor’s attention on the basis of a common orientation (Carranza 1988, 1993a, 1993b, 1998a; Montes 1999; see Cook 1992 on Japanese for an application of the concept of non-referential indexing). Their role in the interactive creation of the text goes beyond this metatextual function. It also involves modal and social deixis, which justifies a conception of these markers as discourse deixis of a type that includes those dimensions of their function in situated discourse (Carranza 2000). Application of a key concept in interactional sociolinguistics, contextualisation cues (Gumperz 1982), led to an early identification of Spanish discourse markers as such cues (Carranza 1993a, 1993b). It is this character of markers (for English see Dorr-Bremme 1994) and its connection with system and ritual constraints of interaction (Goffman 1981 [1976]) that only discourse analytical studies can bring to light. Signalling contextual assumptions contributes to indexing, and at the same time, creating the context. Because of this defining, general relation to context as indices and signals, they have been called pragmatic expressions (Erman 1987). One aspect of their central pragmatic character is the orientation of these cues to general principles of language

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.3 (205)

Text, activity and social relations 

use such as those expressed by Grice’s (1975) Conversational Maxims (Schiffrin 1987; for Argentinean Spanish see Carranza 1988, 1998a). System constraints of interaction become manifest in mechanisms in which markers have specific functions, such as turn-assignment, turn-taking, turn-construction, floor holding, calling for attention, self-repairs, otherrepairs, background repairs, preference organisation, the opening, embedding, and closing of sequences (on Italian, Bazzanella 1990) and what Goffman called “framing capabilities” (Goffman 1981 [1976]: 15), which will be a focus of the present paper. The interpretation of activity in general, not just speech, is linked to the frame of the experience. In this regard, foundational work on face-to-face interaction provides insights which are directly relevant to the study of discourse markers. For example, it has been found that “connectives are part of the organizational requirements of experience and ordinarily do their work unnoticed, part of the directional track” (Goffman 1974: 415), “the [bracket] cues themselves being placed to function prospectively or retrospectively” (Goffman 1974: 545). Goffman’s concept of ritual constraints inspired influential later work on politeness that has guided discourse analysts in their characterisation of the politeness applications of discourse markers. Also, numerous studies have found that these forms are abundant in interactions between participants with close, symmetrical relationships (Redeker 1990; Bazzanella 1990). Some of these forms are associated with additional language user categories. For example, in New Zealand English eh was found to be an index of male, working-class identity (Stubbe & Holmes 1995) and the stigmatised abundant use of o sea has been exploited in fiction to represent the uneducated (Carranza 1993a, 1998a). Argentine Spanish provides more examples: the use of de pronto, during the last fifteen years, and the recently extended use of ¿sí? with the distribution of ¿no es cierto? have a clear association with differently defined social groups. The former, with fashion-conscious adults in large urban centres; the latter, with the young and when the task at hand is that of explaining. One point needs to be emphasised. It is clear that the level of the speech act does not exhaust the functions of discourse markers in relation to what the participants are involved in doing. Firstly, at a local level that transcends the individual utterance, we have discourse tasks such as explaining, arguing, narrating, describing, etc. Secondly, there are strategies deployed by participants. At a more encompassing level, the concept of activity type proposed by Levinson (1992 [1979]), equivalent to Hymes’s (1972) speech event and applied in interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982), captures the event that is taking

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.4 (206)

 Isolda E. Carranza

place at a social encounter, for example, a courtroom trial, a job interview, or a dinner party. From the point of view of discourse comprehension, Gumperz has pointed out that “the activity type does not determine meaning but simply constrains interpretations by channelling inferences” (1982: 131). In turn, speech events belong to a certain domain or institution that imposes specific constraints on its members and interactants. Finally, the most general principles conditioning rational interaction (informativity, relevance, etc.) have been pointed out above. Social action and activity have occupied a central place in discourse studies informed by interactional sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, and linguistic anthropology. Such is the approach adopted in this paper.

. The question of meaning and function Spanish discourse markers have often been described individually and in some cases, by listing their contexts of use instead of dealing with the underlying theoretical issues. When the studies have considered several of these forms, the efforts have been centred on producing detailed taxonomies. The work by Portolés (1998, 2002), on the other hand, is a sound grammatical study within the structuralist theory of Argumentation dans la Langue. Portolés adheres to Ducrot’s (1984) distinction between meaning and sense, and proposes that discourse markers have a meaning in the linguistic system and a sense in each concrete text. A meaning, according to this view, consists of a set of instructions for the interpretation of the form, and a particular sense is the result of the interaction between the habitual meaning of the form and the type of utterance in which it appears. Nevertheless, Portolés’ view of discourse markers, like that produced by other grammarians in Spain, is not entirely compatible with that offered by the Anglo-American tradition of interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, mainly with regard to the specificity of discourse markers. Within the extremely broad category markers Portolés deals with various kinds of adjuncts and connectors which strike any discourse analyst as very distinct from what would qualify as a discourse marker (see also Martín Zorraquino & Portolés Lázaro 1999). Some of them are por ejemplo (for example), en suma (in sum), mejor dicho (rather), sin embargo (however), en consecuencia (in consequence), incluso (even), en efecto (indeed), and en primer lugar . . . en segundo lugar (firstly . . . secondly). Consider the English expression y’know or Argentinean ¿viste? in conversational stories, for example, and it will be hard to accept that they belong to the same general type as the preceding linguistic forms. Acknowledging the distinctiveness of discourse markers, however, does not de-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.5 (207)

Text, activity and social relations 

tract from thinking of them as a fuzzy set and as forms whose instructions are at times elusive. This is what Gumperz (1982) detected about contextualisation cues and expressed thus: “Although such cues carry information, meanings are conveyed as part of the interactive process” (1982: 131). The distinction between meaning and sense is akin to that found in functional approaches to meaning. For example, Silva-Corvalán (1995, 1997) offers a more elaborated view by distinguishing three types of meaning in language: (1) systemic invariant meaning, (2) contextualised meaning, and (3) prototypical discourse meaning. She defines invariant meaning as the meaning which underlies, or is present in all uses of a linguistic form; contextualised meaning as the message which the form conveys, or which the analyst infers that the form conveys in a specific context. Contextualised meanings derive from the interaction of the form with morphosyntactic, semantic, prosodic, and pragmatic factors which constitute its context of use. Silva-Corvalán seems to admit that extra-linguistic elements regularly intervene in the production of contextualised meaning. She is concerned with classes or types of contexts and it is to context types that she attributes variability or fuzziness. Finally, she uses the term prototypical discourse meaning to denote the most frequent contextualised meaning that the form conveys in a corpus of language data. Distinctions like instructional meaning versus sense, or invariant meaning versus contextualised meaning manage to define some feature or features of a discourse marker as a core meaning and other features as peripheral. However, this periphery will fall short of encompassing many of the functions of these forms, unless the theoretical apparatus is such that discourse units larger than the utterance are considered as context of occurrence, and for many discourse markers, units larger than the exchange and even larger than a sequence, as well as units at other planes of discourse, such as a topic, a subtopic, and an entire text such as a narrative within a conversation. In addition, factors of a social, non-semantic nature must be included and fully integrated into the theory. In examining the theoretical underpinnings of a different phenomenon, Levinson argues that There is a way in which question-answer format is invariant and insensitive to all this [the consequences of questions for turn-taking and the assignment of a discourse role to the utterer]. But there is another way in which the role and the function of each question is relative to the goals and strategies of the participants. (1992 [1979]: 86)

He then formulates the problem in this way: “Can we factor out from all these different usages a common core which we can continue to think of as part of

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.6 (208)

 Isolda E. Carranza

the semantics of questions?” (Levinson 1992 [1979]: 93). For us the query is: Do discourse markers have a core meaning? The grammatical approaches that encircle various kinds of forms in the set they call discourse markers and define them extremely broadly do not see any reason to treat them differently from any other structural or modal item. The answer I endorse is that the semantics of discourse markers makes a minimal contribution to an understanding of such complex multi-level pragmatic resources. Somewhat along the lines of what Levinson concludes about questions, I support the view that there is a role for semantics to play in the characterisation of discourse markers, but the local as well as global pragmatic constraints that govern their use are so crucial and prevailing that the role of semantics is considerably limited.

. Discourse markers in a non-typical social setting: ahora, bueno, mire, and y in courtroom interactions Given that we know that discourse markers are typical of non-institutional discourse of a conversational kind and produced by participants with a close and symmetrical social relationship, we may expect them to be absent from speech events that are not conversations. Nevertheless, some of these forms have been found in other speech events, for example, lessons (Dorr-Bremmer 1994; De Fina 1997), sociolinguistic interviews (Schiffrin 1987), and medical interviews (Heritage & Sojornen 1994). Courtroom discourse is a type of oral institutional discourse characterized by a high degree of formality. This register and the pre-established turn-taking characteristic of courtroom discourse are factors that discourage the appearance of discourse markers since they are forms that have, by definition, a function in the negotiated, emergent production and interpretation of discourse. In the trial as a speech event there are, on the one hand, interactional genres such as the examination and cross-examination of witnesses and of the defendant, and on the other, the apparently monologic genre of the closing argument. In what follows, I will consider the first type of texts. For the purposes of the topic of this paper, there is no need to discriminate between the subclasses of interactional texts since all have in common that one of the interactants is a member of the institution and the other is a member of the public, that is, the social relationship, as defined by the situational context, is asymmetrical.1

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.7 (209)

Text, activity and social relations 

Extract 1 Defence: Witness: Defence: Witness: Defence: Witness: Defence: Witness: Defence: Witness: Defence: Witness:

Eso es efectivamente lo que usted dijo ‘That is what you actually said’ Sí [sí. ‘Yes [yes’. [que era parecido al “Cheto” González [‘that he looked like Cheto González’ Sí= ‘Yes’= =o sea no lo podía decir categóricamente =‘that is you could not say it categorically’ Cla:ro.= ‘Righ:t.’= =eso fue [lo que dijo. =‘that was [what you said.’ [Sí eso dije. ‘[Yes I said that.’ Ahora, el barrio donde usted vive,= ‘Ahora, the neighbourhood where you live,’= =Sí. =‘Yeah.’ es un barrio tranquilo, violento, tranquilo, ¿cómo es? ‘is it a quiet neighbourhood, violent, quiet, what’s it like?’ No es muy .. tranquilo que digamos ‘It’s not that .. quiet really’

The speaker’s stance signalled by Ahora is one of assertiveness and commitment as the author of the utterance. Due to its cataphoric orientation, ahora has a focusing effect that can be applied to initiate a new move or a new ideational unit. In the exchange above, the sequence that achieves the confirmation of information is left behind and the beginning of a new subtopic is marked with ahora, but the activity of examining a witness is kept constant. The participant whose utterance is initiated with this marker exerts control over the direction and the development of the discourse. It has been noticed that some markers are more often organisational markers (e.g. ¿Viste . . . ?, porque) while others are essentially markers of modality (e.g. te juro, escuchame) and still others are both (e.g. ¿no?, Bueno. . . ) (Carranza 2000a) In the example above, the metatextual function predominates, but at the end of this section we will examine a very different case.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.8 (210)

 Isolda E. Carranza

The second set of exchanges to be examined were produced during the initial stage of a witness’s appearance in court. When a witness appears before the court, the judge who presides over the tribunal puts the witness on oath and asks a fixed set of questions basically aimed at checking the respondent’s identity, as happens in the following extract:

Extract 2 ((omitted exchange in which the judge swears the witness in)) Judge: E: .. perdón, está todo cerrado aquí. Bueno. ¿su nombre completo es Eugenia Dolores Travalón? ‘uh: .. excuse me, all doors are closed here. Bueno. Is your full name Eugenia Dolores Travalón?’ Witness: Sí. ‘Yes.’ Judge: ¿Usted conoce a las dos personas que están sentadas ahí? ‘Do you know the two persons who are sitting over there?’ Witness: Sí. ‘Yes.’ Judge: ¿Usted es amiga, enemiga, deudora, acreedora? ‘Are you their friend, enemy, debtor, or creditor?’ Witness: No. ‘No.’ Judge: Y ¿de dónde los conoce? ‘Y where do you know them from?’ Witness: Del Barrio San Jorge. ‘From Barrio San Jorge.’

In the judge’s first turn, bueno occurs after an utterance addressed to the police officer apparently suggesting that the door should be kept open (as prescribed by the regulations). The occurrence of bueno initiates the participant’s engagement in the task of questioning the witness who is sitting in front of him and to whom he addresses his next utterance. In this case, the shift marked with bueno is an instance of what Goffman called “a change of footing” (1981 [1976]: 128) and signals the establishment of the frame initial stage of a witness testimony. The observed shift in what the judge is involved clearly fits the following description: “an alteration in the social capacities in which the persons present claim to be active. [. . . ] when such a change of gears occurs among more than two persons, then a change commonly occurs regarding who is addressed” (Goffman 1981 [1976]: 126). This is what happens in the segment under ex-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.9 (211)

Text, activity and social relations

amination and it is what Goffman conceived of as a change in the participant’s alignment to herself or himself and to the coparticipants. Goffman explains that “A change in our footing is another way of talking about a change in our frame for events” (1981: 128) and later he states “And I believe linguistics provides us with the cues and markers through which such footings become manifest” (1981: 157). An analysis of discourse markers which is limited to their contribution to cohesion or modality cannot fully account for the use of bueno illustrated above and for what the sociology of face-toface interaction – concerned as it is with the organisation of experience – conceptualises as a bracket between different footings. The other discourse marker in the example text is y in question-initial position. Unlike the rest of the discourse markers illustrated in this paper, y is typical of institutional dialogues. The most insightful and complete account of the occurrence of the English equivalent of this form in this sequential context comes from ethnomethodology. Heritage and Sorjonen have noticed that questions preceded by and are common in the discourse of the institutional representative when that participant is acting as incumbent of her or his particular social role. These authors noticed that the and-prefaced question may be linked either to a previous question or to its answer, and that “its fundamental task is to invoke the sense that the questions it prefaces are either routine, or agenda-based parts of some larger course of action” (1994: 24 my emphasis). It must be noticed that the findings reveal the importance of both the institutional speech event level of analysis and local discourse task level as well as the marker’s function as a cue in the co-ordinated interaction in such context. The following observations by Heritage and Sojornen about and are applicable to y: And-prefacing is primarily used by professionals to establish and maintain an orientation to the course-of-action character of their talk across sequences of question/answer adjacency pairs. Associated with this activity linkage, we argue, is the maintenance of an orientation by both parties to the questions as agenda-based. (1994: 5, my emphasis)

Ethnomethodological analyses such as this one enrich and complete any grammatical account of discourse markers. Participants’ orientation is a typical concern of ethnomethodology and consideration of how it is achieved in the exchanges of Extract 2 helps to confirm the indexical behaviour of discourse markers such as y. We can also notice that some discourse markers (like y or ahora above) do not mark a change of footing, but signal a type of footing because they are cues of the speaker’s capacity as addresser and principal.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.10 (212)

 Isolda E. Carranza

Others signal other footings, such as addressee (ah, ah mirá vos), co-author (digamos), etc. A purely grammatical perspective finds even more difficulties than those posed by Extract 2 in providing a full account of discourse markers when a significant aspect of the use of a marker consists of the social meanings it regularly indicates. Consider the following segment of a cross-examination.

Extract 3 Witness: Defence:

Y: sería ‘We:ll it would be.’ No .. mire yo soy tan cuidadoso con las palabras .. ES, (y) .. sería son dos cosas diferentes .. ‘No .. mire I am so careful with words .. IS, (and) .. would be are two different things ..’

The function of the marker on the discourse planes of the ideational content, the sequential structure, and the speech acts does not exhaust this marker’s contribution to the creation of the context. The analysis of mire in Extract 3 above must acknowledge the social meaning of distancing and disaffiliation signalled with mire that goes beyond a frequent association of the marker in utterance-initial position with the speech act of disagreement (Carranza 1998a: 52) or warning (Carranza 1998a: 81). The occurrence of mire in this extract is conditioned by the power-differential between the witness and the trial lawyer, and at the same time, it contributes to the construction of a superordinate participant position. A truly integral treatment of discourse markers cannot be provided by approaches restricted to the referential function of language, nor by those restricted to the semantic system of a language. By contrast, interactional approaches offer a more complete understanding of discourse markers because, in addition to the metatextual and expressive aspects of this phenomenon (that is, the cohesive and modal functions), they account for its relation to the dimension of activity. Interactional approaches comprise the social meanings this phenomenon conveys both situational, for example, the position of a participant in the interaction, and macrosocial, for example, the user’s membership of a certain social class group, gender group, institution, or even language group, as in the use of discourse markers in code-switching. It is important to notice also that natural data of situated discourse enables the analyst to make claims about the text type where the forms under study occur.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.11 (213)

Text, activity and social relations 

. Discourse markers in a non-interactional genre: The closing argument Some discourse markers have also been observed in a very different genre from the interrogations examined so far. Genre is generally understood as the relatively stable combination of a particular style, form, and content that is associated with a certain communicative situation and it is bound to the historical conditions in which it is produced (Bakhtin 1986). Style is the part of the generic configuration that organises the individual resources that will be dealt with in what follows. The closing argument is a text type that the trial lawyer produces to realise relevant and expected moves corresponding to a specific structural section in the development of the trial as an event. Those moves are part of the counsel’s performance of her or his situational role. In addition to the tasks of narrating a version of the past events in question and, at the end of the text, requesting a certain verdict and sentence, the counsel presents an argumentative case meant to convince the judge and make the request acceptable. The discourse marker ahora plays a role in the organisation of argumentation, as we can see in the extract below.

Extract 4 Prosecutor Olmos: Es decir, el acusado Ludueña era consciente del procedimiento que efectuó desde el momento que quiebra la escopeta hasta el momento que es efectuado el disparo. El acusado Ludueña debió prever a partir de que poseía en sus manos un elemento leTAL. podía ocasionar un daño morTAL. Es decir que Ludueña se representó la probabilidad o posibilidad de un resultado y asintió en ese resultado, en forma indiferente. Pero además debe tenerse en cuenta conforme a la pericia psicológica del acusado Ludueña .. la que expresa que un arma en su posesión estaría asociada a un recurso sobrecompensatorio de búsqueda

Prosecutor Olmos: ‘That is to say that Ludueña the accused was aware of the procedure he performed from the moment when he got the shotgun ready up to the moment the shot was fired. Ludueña should have expected that, since he had a lethal object in his hands, he could cause mortal damage. That is to say that Ludueña [the accused] conceived the probability or possibility of a result and agreed to that result with indifference. But we must also take into account that according to the psychological tests done on Ludueña the accused .. a gun in his hands would be associated with an overcompensatory resource in his

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.12 (214)

 Isolda E. Carranza

imaginaria de reforzamiento de la vivencia de su débil autoimagen. Ahora. .. ¿quería el acusado Ludueña directamente la muerte de Juan Manzano?

imaginary attempt to bolster his poor self-image. Ahora. .. Did Ludueña the accused straightforwardly want Juan Manzano’s death?’

Ahora can be not just continuative in that it precedes a new ideational unit, but also adversative, hence its use in a piece of argumentation. It introduces a restriction to what has just been said, that is to say, it is a cue that signals that the upcoming ideational content will contrast somewhat with what preceded (Carranza 1992; Silva-Corvalán 1997; Garrachana 1998). In this usage, ahora announces an opposition and not just the progression from one subtopic to the next (as do the markers entonces and después), so the rhetorical question is expected to have an answer that is not in accordance with what has been argued so far. Thus, in Extract 4 above the resulting structuring of the ideational content is conscience at the moment of the crime versus intention to kill, that is, there was the former, but not the latter. We now move on to consider other forces at play in the appearance of discourse markers in this genre. . Systems versus the lifeworld We can turn to the opposition, proposed by Habermas, between systems and lifeworld, to conceive public systems such as the political, the academic, the legal, on the one hand, and on the other, the private, the personal, the informal. The closing argument is a genre that unfolds within a speech event which belongs to the legal system and, therefore, to the public sphere of social life. As such, we expect the closing argument to fall into a systemic type of communication and, in fact, a set of features to be listed in Section 7 below are characteristic of legal oratory. However, it also contains a much smaller set of elements that come from lifeworld communicative interaction and the private sphere of social life. Therefore, it is relevant to apply Mishler’s (1984) concepts of the voice of the system and the voice of the lifeworld to account for the fact that in closing arguments there are elements from the institutional legal domain and from the private domain of ordinary interactions of everyday life. . Heterogeneity In prosecuting and defending lawyers’ closing arguments tensions become manifest between the language of the system and the language of ordinary life

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.13 (215)

Text, activity and social relations

when they emerge in the ongoing production of text. This is not the restructuring of the borders between discourses as described by Fairclough (1993), for example, the invasion of the publicity system by the conversational, or the colonisation of the field of education by the discourse of marketing. In the courtroom, we find the co-existence of the discourse of the legal system and the discourse of the lifeworld, which often results in heterogeneity. For example, in the closing argument genre we would expect to find only canonical forms of argumentation; however, there are argumentative schemas which can be characterised as colloquial and in fact, constitute “a lifeworld way of making an argumentative point” (Fairclough 1995: 204). The following extract illustrates this.

Extract 5 Defence lawyer Mazza: Traverso también asume ese riesgo y debe afrontar su resultado. Y vaya si lo afrontó. Con su propia vida lo tuvo que afrontar.

Defence lawyer Mazza: ‘Traverso also takes that risk and must face its result. And Gosh face it he did. With his own life he had to face it.’

In the same way, characteristically colloquial discourse markers sometimes appear in closing arguments thus constituting a brief shift from the basic, and by and large predominant, formal register of the genre. In order to account for their appearance, we must turn to their function in the ongoing production of situated discourse, their participation in rather automatic interactional routines, and to the concept of footing provided by interactional sociology. The two cases reproduced in Extracts 6 and 7 below show that indeed “Within one alignment, another can be fully enclosed” (Goffman 1981 [1976]: 155).

Extract 6 Defence lawyer Gutiérrez: Si se observa los subsecuentes testimonios de Miguel Gareca se va advertir que en los subsiguientes testimonios ha ido completando su versión, aportando más detalles, ha ido enriqueciendo su versión lo que va a contrapelo con lo que el Sr. Fiscal de Cámara muy bien correctamente señaló, Sra. Presidente, mientras más cerca se está del hecho

Defence lawyer Gutiérrez: ‘If we look at the subsequent depositions by Miguel Gareca, we can notice that in subsequent depositions he has been completing his version, by providing more details, he has been enriching his version, which goes against what the Prosecutor of this Court correctly pointed out, Your Honour, the closer you are to the event, the BEtter. Uh::



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.14 (216)

 Isolda E. Carranza

meJOR. este:: meJOR. pero resulta ser que a medida que fue transcurriendo el tiempo Miguel Gareca fue recordando cada vez más. Es decir al revés. ¿No es cierto? Y esta versión que él ha dado no solo se contradice con las otras versiones de las víctimas, que son Gareca, sino que también va a contrapelo con versiones que han aportado los otros testigos independientes.

the BEtter. but it turns out that as time went by Miguel Gareca was remembering more and more. That is to say the other way round. ¿No es cierto? And this version he has offered not only contradicts other versions by the victims, who belong to the Gareca family, but also goes against versions that other independent witnesses have offered.’

This defending lawyer is engaged in the discourse task of arguing, but during the fleeting footing achieved with ¿no es cierto? he is metadiscursively oriented to his own discourse. With this discourse marker, the speaker monitors her or his own discourse by checking whether it is understandable and acceptable. As when it occurs in the course of explanations, here too ¿no es cierto? responds to the prescriptions of the Maxim of Manner and the Maxim of Quality. It is a token of informal register. Next, we consider a further example of a change of footing and a shift towards informality.

Extract 7 Defence lawyer Milano: Refiere *de que tenía: estaba vestido con un con un equipo de jogging. pantalón y campera:, azul, con una rayas blancas al costado. En lo actuado por la policía, entiendo de que lo llevaban detenido con un pantalón negro. ¡Negro! Bueno, la campera de gimnasia este obviamente eso sí coincidía pero tanto la estatura como la campera de gimnasia, como dijo ((inaudible)), hay mucha gente de esa estatura y hay mucha gente también que usa campera de gimnasia Adidas! e:ste:

Defence lawyer Milano: ‘[The victim] says that he [the accused] was wearing a a jogging outfit. blue pants and sweatshir:t, with white strips on the side. According to police reports, I understand that when he was arrested he had black pants on. Black! Bueno, the sweatshirt uh obviously that did coincide pero as to the height and the sweatshirt, as ((inaudible)) said, there are many people of that height and there are also many people who wear Adidas sweatshirts! Uh:’

What the conversational analysis literature has traditionally called self-repairs has also been of interest for frame analysis as the following quote indicates: “the speaker often finds cause for minor reflexive frame breaks, turning to his own just finished verbal behaviour as something to which he now directs exegetical or apologetic asides” (Goffman 1974: 502). Extract 7 above contains

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.15 (217)

Text, activity and social relations 

a repair of a type which, in the course of argumentation, allows for the incorporation of counter-evidence or even a potential objection to the position that is being defended. Thus, the speaker anticipates a possible refutation or counter-argument. The sequential combination bueno. . . pero has been discussed in studies concerned with conversational data (Carranza 1998a, 2000a) where it is recognised as bracketing specific interactional moves, self-repairs; however, this combination of discourse markers and the lexical choices in the aside (obviamente eso sí, ‘obviously that did coincide’) strike us as colloquial in the context of a closing argument. Occurrences of the type discussed in this section result from the pressures of on-line production of oral discourse. The shift in register is the manifestation in the surface of the text of the tensions between those pressures and the discourse conventions that are in force in the legal system and its genres. . Heteroglossia At times, heterogeneity takes the form of heteroglossia. Direct reported discourse constitutes sites amenable to the shift of register towards the informal end of the continuum. That happens not only in stories where the choice of register allegedly belongs to the story character, but also in all the other uses of direct reported discourse such as hypothetical narratives and dramatised thought. For example, in my research on courtroom discourse, a trial lawyer whose closing argument in a homicide case is characterised by hyperformality, the presence of archaisms, and syntax that is elaborate and contains oversubordination, quotes the reaction of the person who found the victim and the perpetrator: ¿Qué hiciste, boludo? ‘What have you done, you prat?’ This direct quote preserves the ‘original’ informal register and the vulgar vocative, thus a dramatic effect is achieved. In this case, the switch seems to be strategic and effective in drawing the audience’s attention. A further example can be found in the following narrative of virtual events where the direct discourse dramatises a permanent present with the informal second person treatment:

Extract 8 Defence lawyer Mazza: No hace falta que diga “te hacés cargo, me tengo que ir,” No. Es tácito. En el ámbito policial

Defence lawyer Mazza: ‘It is not necessary for him to say “you’re [reflexive pronoun and verb

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.16 (218)

 Isolda E. Carranza

está claro que si se va un oficial con mayor rango, queda a cargo el de menor jerarquía.

morphology corresponding to informal treatment] in charge, I have to go”. No. It is understood. In the police it is clear that if a higher-ranking officer leaves, the lower-ranking officer is in charge.’

A typically colloquial register is also manifest in closing arguments when, in a reported speech event within a story, at some point in the sequence of reported utterances by two different speakers, the introductory formulas are omitted, just as happens in spontaneous conversations (Carranza 1998b). The audience must attribute the utterances to the characters of the story by relying on the alternation of speakers in the reported interaction. In closing arguments we can find direct discourse to represent imaginary speech events. Such representation is part of an argumentative move, as in the extract reproduced below, where the hypothesised utterances are prefaced by the combination of two discourse markers.

Extract 9 Prosecutor Vera: Yo podría limitarme, Excelentísima Cámara, como actor civil .. a decir “Y bueno llegaron al lugar del móvil. Al parecer el Sargento Arce este: se introdujo en el móvil policial a cargo de Traverso y en circunstancias desconocidas, procedió a extraer el arma que portaba y efectuó un disparo que penetró por tal lugar, salió por tal otro, y le produjo la muerte.” Pero esto sería una actitud digamos un tanto mezquina y *ocultista.

Prosecutor Vera: ‘I could, Your Honor, as civil actor .. just say “Y bueno they got to where the patrol car was. It seems that this Sargent Arce uh: got into the police car assigned to Traverso, and for reasons we don’t know, he proceeded to take out the gun he had and fired a shot. the bullet went in at this place, went out this other place, and caused [Traverso’s] death.” But that would be let’s say selfish and misleading on my part.’

If observed from the perspective of Grice’s Conversational Maxims, the first element of the combination, y, a very frequent initiator of answers, is a contextualisation cue which displays an orientation to both the Maxim of Quantity and the Maxim of Quality since it evokes the expectations that the answer be complete but not obvious, and the utterances to follow may not satisfy those standards fully. In the example above, the direct discourse is not an answer; however, it represents an imaginary address to the Tribunal as direct speech which is framed as an answer by the discourse marker y in initial position.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.17 (219)

Text, activity and social relations 

While y is oriented to the existing expectations, bueno announces a move forward or a transition to a new unit in various discourse planes; for this reason, the two markers combine in the order they exhibit here (Carranza 2000a). Both components of the combination are turn-entry mechanisms. Each one by itself or in combination performs its functions in interactional discourse which is conversational in nature. Their presence in a ‘monologic’ text like a closing argument can be understood as the type of shifts that direct discourse makes possible by allowing for dramatisation of experience and the embedding of another voice within the discourse in progress. From the interactional perspective presented at the beginning of this paper, the re-enactment of a speech event within the current speech event constitutes a change of footing for which the combination y bueno is a recognisable bracket. Cases like this remind us that “brackets tend to become specialized – ritualized in the ethological sense – for the organizational work they do” (Goffman 1974: 435). The next case of direct discourse (Extract 10) is, similarly, a resource to re-enact an imaginary speech event within the current speech event, but it also recreates the social relationship of the alleged interlocutors, and in that representation, the discourse marker makes a key contribution that any theoretical approach to markers must not ignore.

Extract 10 Defence lawyer Gutiérrez: ¿Qué es lo que indica la experiencia? Dos grupos que han ingerido bebidas alcohólicas. Pasa un grupo y el otro lo provoca. El grupo que pasó se vuelve ¿Qué es lo que puede pasar? ¿A qué se vuelve? ¿A saludarlo, nada más? No. Se vuelve a preguntarle “Che. qué te pasa a vos.” y ahí se armó. Ha habido provocación por parte de los dos. Eso es lo que la experiencia indica.

Defence lawyer Gutiérrez: ‘What does experience indicate? Two groups who have drunk alcohol. One group walks by and the other one provokes it. The group who walked by comes back. What can happen? What do they come back for? Just to greet them? No. They come back to ask “Che. what’s the matter with you” and then all hell broke loose. There has been provocation on the part of both groups. That is what experience indicates.’

In the interactional systematics, che in turn-initial position and falling intonation functions as an attention-getter (Carranza 1992). The utterance that contains it is addressed to individualized participants and typically constitutes

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.18 (220)

 Isolda E. Carranza

the beginning of a new sequence. The marker che is clearly oriented to the shared expectation of relevance. What is more important for the argument in this paper is the fact that che conveys significant social meaning. It is associated to closeness or intimacy, and solidarity. However, since social meaning is a function of the set of co-occurring semantic, morphosyntactic, and prosodic features and of the situational or interpersonal context, the expression che can be exploited as in Extract 10 to reinforce one-upmanship and contribute to the authoritarian tone of the utterance (Carranza 1998a, 2000a). The opportunities for register fluctuations are not restricted to the limits of the utterances in direct reported discourse. The voice of the narrator (e.g. y ahí se armó ‘and then all hell broke loose’) can appear ‘contaminated’ by the voice of the characters of the story. In addition to dealing with the dimensions of social distance and power, a satisfactory account of the use of che in Extract 10 above must include the fact that it serves the purposes of performance. Performance is the display of verbal skill typical of face-to-face communication. It is a variable quality of oral discourse used to intensify its interest for the addressees and involve them as an audience. Strictly speaking, stretches of discourse can be more or less performed even if they are not produced face-to-face, but the oral interaction must be on line as it is the case in telephone conversations. . Two sets of features The findings of the examination of a large set of courtroom discourse data collected during a prolonged ethnographic fieldwork can provide the general framework in which the use of discourse markers in that context can be considered. This section presents the forms that have been found to express the voice of the legal system (Carranza 2001b) and the voice of the lifeworld (Carranza 2003) within the closing argument genre. The morphological, lexical, syntactical, textual, and suprasegmental features presented below are organised into those two classes. The expressions of the voice of the legal system are grouped into three sets. The presence of the first two sets of features both reflects and establishes the formality of the speech event (A and B below) while the third set does not serve to index the degree of the formality, but to lead the audience to accept and appreciate the trial lawyer’s performed speech (C below). In this set, the last two (2 and 3 in group C) are performance features characteristic of forensic oratory.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.19 (221)

Text, activity and social relations 

. Expressions of the voice of the legal system

A. Vocabulary and terms of address 1. Specialised or technical lexicon. 2. Third person singular, e.g. esta defensa ‘this Defence’ and este Ministerio Fiscal ‘this Prosecution’. 3. Honorifics, e.g. Vuestra Excelencia ‘Your Excellency’, which is doubly alien to ordinary language since the possessive adjective vuestra is not used in Argentinean Spanish.

B. Written discourse features 1. Duplication of nouns in paratactic noun phrases (or a tacit noun plus a noun), e.g. se sentía responsable de algún modo por haber permitido, de haber tolerado, de haber facilitado, que Pando estuviese en la casa de los Romero .. responsabilidad que lo hizo preocuparse [instead of esa responsabilidad lo hizo preocuparse] ‘he felt responsible somehow for having permitted, having tolerated, having made it easy for Pando to be at the Romero’s .. a responsibility that made him worry’ [instead of ‘that responsibility made him worry’]. 2. Omission of that before finite verbs, que este Ministerio estima corresponde para la situación procesal de Murúa [instead of estima que corresponde] ‘that this Prosecutor considers it applies to Murúa’s position in these legal proceedings’ [instead of ‘considers that it applies’]. 3. Oversubordination, e.g. Han declarado en este sentido, los taxistas Velásquez, González y Loza cuyos relatos en el caso del primero de los nombrados se ha visto reforzado incluso por el testimonio del testigo nuevo también taxista, el Sr. Farías, quien no había depuesto con anterioridad y corroboró los dichos de Velásquez en cuanto a las razones por las que resultó Velásquez el chofer del taxi que trasladó a Murúa y luego resultó despojado salvando providencialmente Farías- sorteando providencialmente Farías la circunstancia de haberle tocado a él ser el taxista despojado ‘The taxi-drivers Velásquez, González and Loza have made statements in this respect, whose [plural] stories in the case of the first taxi-driver mentioned [singular] has been reinforced even by the testimony by the new witness, Mr. Farías, also a taxi-driver, who had not made a statement before and confirmed Velasquez’s sayings as to the reasons why Velásquez turned out to be the driver of the taxi that transported Murúa and then became robbed providentially saving his-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.20 (222)

 Isolda E. Carranza

4.

5.

6.

7.

Farías- providentially escaping the circumstance of happening to be him the robbed taxi-driver’. Past participle clauses or ‘absolute clauses’, e.g. Practicados los disparos de rigor, [the ballistic test] ha determinado o confirma no sólo la operatividad de las armas sino también la munición precedentemente mencionada [instead of después que el perito realizó los disparos] ‘The corresponding shots having been fired, [the ballistic test] has ascertained or confirms that not only the gun but the aforementioned ammunition were operative’ [instead of ‘after the expert fired the shots’]. Nominalisations, e.g. frente al oficiamiento de lo que había ocurrido, por parte de González y de Hugo, es que ((González sale al exterior de la casa)). Gloss: Upon the knowledge [literally ‘official notice’] of what had happened, by González and Hugo, ((González goes outside the house)). A mental process, cuando González y Hugo se enteraron ‘when González and Hugo learned’, is represented as an event. Past subjunctive form in -ra (instead of the preterite), e.g. se procede en dicha oportunidad a la aprehensión de los que después resultaran los imputados Maida y Balbo [instead of después resultaron] ‘they proceeded on such occasion to the arrest of those who then turned out [subjunctive verb morphology] to be the accused Maida and Balbo.’ Gerunds, e.g. cuyo tambor tenía carga completa conteniendo 6 cartuchos [instead of y contenía] ‘whose magazine had a full load containing 6 bullets’. Note that this type of adjective gerunds are considered incorrect by grammarians of Spanish.

C. Audience-involvement resources 1. First person plural forms in predications about the members of the profession or the co-present judges and lawyers. 2. Triplets, e.g. me permito una mera observación, que creo que es útil, creo que es pertinente, y creo que es válida ‘Let me make a comment which I think is useful, I think is relevant, and I think is valid.’ 3. Rhetorical questions (with or without a subsequent answer) (Carranza 2001a).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.21 (223)

Text, activity and social relations 

. Expressions of the voice of the lifeworld 1. Conversational discourse markers, Y yo digo ‘I say.’ 2. Colloquial idioms, e.g. Fíjese ‘Listen’ (lit. ‘Notice’) and the example we saw in Section 6.1 above. 3. Conversational prosodic features. 4. Some lexical items borrowed from slang or criminal world jargon. 5. Omission of the introductory formula in quotes. 6. Narrator’s voice continuing the voice of the characters in the story and the tone of their verbal exchanges. 7. Direct discourse (in narrative and in dramatised thought for argumentation). 8. Historical present (in narrative). These forms are not only evocative of ordinary, everyday communication among lay participants; they are also typical of conversational discourse. This is the set that comprises discourse markers. The last two (7 and 8 above) are performance features that pervade conversational discourse in non-hierarchical social relationships, but they are equally pervasive in closing arguments. The co-occurrence of these heterogeneous features cannot be reduced to a formal-informal combination. Rather, it must be understood as expressing the voice of the system and the voice of the lifeworld. The described heterogeneity has a genre-constitutive character (Carranza 2003).

. Conclusion The analyses presented in this paper support the view that for an account of discourse markers to be satisfactory it is indispensable to take into account the local and global levels of analysis that reflect the organisation of activity into discourse tasks and entire events, as well as the social meanings they express, including interpersonal and institutional ones. The fact that the marker ahora acts mainly at the ideational plane of discourse is the basis of its observed function in the introduction of a new subtopic (Extract 1) and in the development of arguments (Extract 4). In the discussion of y we noticed the marker’s role as a cohesive tie was indexing something broader than neighbouring utterances and of a non-textual nature: an institutional agenda (Extract 2). Bueno, the most frequent marker in Argentinean Spanish, has many diverse applications as a bracket, so it is not surprising that, in the data used for this paper, it occurs more often than any other marker. It

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.22 (224)

 Isolda E. Carranza

can signal major shifts in the task at hand which may inherently constitute a change in the alignment of the speaker as discourse producer. That is the case when the participant marks with bueno a self-repair (Extract 7), a direct quote (Extract 9), and her or his getting down to business (Extract 2). This finding is compatible with observations of bueno initiating and ending a whole speech event. Finally, the analysis has highlighted the participation of utterance-initial mire in indexing and constructing the social relationship between the speaker and the addressed participant. Control of the interaction achieved with the imperative verb form mire helps to constitute the position of the speaker as a powerful one. The concept of genre allows the analyst to connect the text type to the speech event, in other words, to the situation and the social institution that is reproduced in such practice. The predominant linguistic features in the genres of an oral trial are those that can be classified as systemic. Within this set, many contribute to establish the formality of the communicative situation. Examination of the scarce but regular occurrence of discourse markers within the monological institutional genre studied here suggests that typically conversational forms must be considered within the constellation of features to which they belong within the specific genre. The study reveals, for closing arguments, that discourse markers are used due to their function in the ongoing, on-line production of oral discourse (¿no es cierto?, Bueno. . . pero, Ahora), and that some of them, like ¿no es cierto? (Extract 6), Bueno. . . pero (Extract 7), Y bueno . . . (Extract 9), and Che . . . (Extract 10), are manifestations of the voice of the lifeworld. The encompassing type of analysis advocated in this paper has been informed by a theoretical framework firmly grounded in pragmatics while acknowledging the contribution of grammar to the functions linguistic forms can perform on multiple planes of discourse organisation and in face-to-face interaction.

Note . The names of people found in the transcription are pseudonyms. The Spanish discourse markers are maintained in the translated version of the texts so that the reader’s interpretation is not influenced by the proposed English near-equivalent. Transcription conventions are included in the Appendix. Given the needs of the argument to be developed in this paper, the transcribed interactional and phonological features of the texts have been kept to a minimum.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.23 (225)

Text, activity and social relations 

References Bakhtin, Mihail M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Essays. C. Emerson (Ed.) and M. Holquist (Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bazzanella, Carla (1990). “Phatic connectives as interactional cues in contemporary spoken Italian”. Journal of Pragmatics, 14(4), 629–647. Carranza, Isolda E. (1988). “Bueno y la autorreparación”. ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics, ED 390271 FL023465. Carranza, Isolda E. (1992). “Las expresiones pragmáticas en la conversación espontánea”. ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics ED 362014 FL021446. Carranza, Isolda E. (1993a). “Variation in conversational discourse: Spanish pragmatic expressions”. ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics, ED 391355 FL023384. Carranza, Isolda E. (1993b). “Contextualización y expresiones pragmáticas: Che como señal de marco”. Proceedings of the XI International Conference of the Latin American Linguistic and Philological Association (ALFAL). Veracruz (México) and in ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics, ED 404849 FL023309. Carranza, Isolda E. (1998a). Conversación y deixis de discurso. Córdoba (Argentina). Dirección General de Publicaciones de la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Carranza, Isolda E. (1998b). “Low-narrativity Narratives and Argumentation”. Narrative Inquiry, 8(2), 287–317. Carranza, Isolda E. (2000a). “Contribuciones y desafíos para la comparación y la enseñanza de las lenguas”. Oralia, 3, 53–72. Carranza, Isolda E. (2000b). “Actuación y heterogeneidad en el discurso público”. Plenary lecture. Proceedings of the VIII Conference of the Argentine Linguistic Society. Mar del Plata (Argentina). Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. CD Rom. Carranza, Isolda E. (2001a). “Argumentar, explicar y justificar con preguntas retóricas”. Revista Iberoamericana de Discurso y Sociedad, 3(2), 61–83. Carranza, Isolda E. (2001b). “La voz del sistema en el alegato del fiscal”. In C. Lista, M. I. Bergoglio, & M. Díaz de Landa (Eds.), Cambio social y derecho: Debates y propuestas sociológicas en los inicios del siglo XXI (pp. 569–577). Córdoba: Editorial Triunfar. Carranza, Isolda E. (2003). “Genre and institution: Narrative temporality in closing arguments”. Narrative Inquiry, 13(1), 41–69. Cook, Haruko Minegishi (1992). “Meanings of non-referential indexes: A case study of the Japanese sentence-closing particle ne”. Text, 12(4), 507–539. De Fina, Anna (1997). “An analysis of Spanish bien as a marker of classroom management in teacher-student interaction”. Journal of Pragmatics, 28(3), 337–354. Dorr-Bremmer, Donald (1994). “Contextualization cues in the classroom: Discourse regulation and social control functions”. Language in Society, 19, 379–402. Ducrot, Oswald (1984). Le Dire et le Dit. Paris: Minuit. Erman, Britt (1987). Pragmatic Expressions in English. A study of “you know”, “you see” and “I mean” in Face-to-face Conversation. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Fairclough, Norman (1993). “Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse: the universities”. Discourse & Society, 4, 133–168. Fairclough, Norman (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.24 (226)

 Isolda E. Carranza

Garrachana, Mar (1998). “La noción de preferencia en la gramaticalización de ahora (que), ahora bien, antes, antes bien y más bien”. In J. L. Cifuentes (Ed.), Estudios de lingüística cognitiva II (pp. 593–614). Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame Analysis. An Essay in the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Goffman, Erving (1981). Replies and Responses. In E. Goffman (Ed.), Forms of Talk (pp. 5–77). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Reprinted from (1976), Language in Society, 5, 257–313. Grice, Herbert P. (1975). “Logic and conversation”. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 2, Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Harper and Row. Gumperz, John (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heritage, John & Sorjonen, Marja-Leena (1994). “Constituting and maintaining activities across sequences: And-prefacing as a feature of question design”. Language in Society, 23, 1–29. Hymes, Dell (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, Reinhart and Winston. Levinson, Stephen (1992). “Activity types and language”. In P. Drew & J. Heritage (Eds.), Talk at Work. Interaction in Institutional Settings (pp. 66–100). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted from (1979), Linguistics, 17(5–6), 365–399. Martín Zorraquino, María Antonia, & Portolés Lázaro, José (1999). “Los marcadores del discurso”. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, Vol. 3 (pp. 4051–4213). Madrid: RAE/Espasa. Mishler, Eliot (1984). The Discourse of Medicine: Dialectics of Medical Interviews. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Montes, Rosa Graciela (1999). “The development of discourse markers in Spanish: Interjections”. Journal of Pragmatics, 31(10), 1289–1341. Portolés, José (1998). Marcadores del discurso. Barcelona: Ariel. Portolés, José (2002). “Consideraciones metodológicas para el estudio del significado de los marcadores del discurso”. Proceedings of the International Conference on Argumentation. Buenos Aires (Argentina). Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires. CD Rom. Redeker, Gisela (1990). “Ideational and pragmatic markers of discourse structure”. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 367–381. Redeker, Gisela (1991). “Linguistic markers of discourse structure”. Linguistics, 29, 1139– 1172. Schiffrin, Deborah (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (1995). “Contextual conditions for the interpretation of ‘poder’ and ‘deber’ in Spanish”. In J. Bybee & S. Fleischman (Eds.), Modality in Grammar and Discourse (pp. 67–105). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (1997). “Gramática y pragmática discursiva”. Plenary lecture. Proceedings of the International Colloquium of the Latin American Discourse Studies Association (ALED). La Plata/Buenos Aires (Argentina). Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. CD Rom.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 10:45

F: PB12310.tex / p.25 (227)

Text, activity and social relations 

Stubbe, Maria & Holmes, Janet (1995). “Y’know, eh and other exasperating expressions: An analysis of social and stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic devices in a sample of New Zealand English”. Language and Communication, 15(1), 63–88.

Appendix Transcription conventions : lengthened syllable = latched utterances . falling tone , rising tone .. intraturn pause [ overlap CAPS increased loudness () unclear (( )) transcriber’s comments * ungrammatical, non-standard or inappropriate expression

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:9/02/2004; 15:26

Politeness

F: PB123P32.tex / p.1 (229)

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.1 (231)

Chapter 11

Coercion and cooperation A case study of Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands Carmen García

.

Introduction

The growing interest in the study of how members of different Spanishspeaking cultural groups communicate has given rise to a number of investigations regarding their preferred rules of interaction, patterns of communication, and politeness strategies. Specifically, there have been studies looking at the following groups: Californian Spanish (Arellano 2000); Mexican Spanish (Valdés & Pino 1981; Koike 1994, 1998; Bravo 1998; Curcó 1998; FélixBrasdefer 2002); Cuban Spanish (Ruzickova 1998); Chilean Spanish (Cordella 1990; Puga Larraín 1997); Ecuadorian Spanish (Placencia 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2001); Colombian and Castilian Spanish (Delgado 1995); Peruvian and Venezuelan Spanish (García 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1996, 1999, 2002, 2004; De los Heros 1998, 2001); Uruguayan Spanish (Márquez-Reiter 1997, 2000, 2002); Argentinean Spanish (Boretti 2001; Bravo 2002; Ferrer & Lanza 2002); and Peninsular Spanish (Bravo 1998; Briz 1998; Hernández-Flores 1999; Lorenzo-Dus 2001; Chodorowska-Pilch 2002). The present article adds to this body of research by exploring the preferred communication patterns of Argentinean Spanish speakers in the performance of reprimands. More specifically, it analyses the strategies used by male and female participants when reprimanding and responding to a reprimand, identifies their preferred politeness strategies, and attempts to uncover the underlying perspectives that make-up their culture within the context examined. For the purposes of this study, following Vanderveken, a reprimand is categorised as a communicative illocutionary act of the assertive type and defined as “[an accusation] with the special mode of achievement of adding personal displea-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.2 (232)

 Carmen García

sure as a punishment for the wrongdoing. Generally this reprimand comes out of a position of authority (a feature of the mode of achievement), although this may be a presumed sense of moral authority” (1990: 179). Taking into account Spencer-Oatey’s definition of culture as “a fuzzy set of attitudes, beliefs, behavioural conventions, and basic assumptions and values that are shared by a group of people, and that influence each member’s behaviour and each member’s interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour” (2000: 4), we can understand how some cultural groups preferring to give emphasis to distance and respect for privacy might favour a deferential demeanour and tone; while others, preferring closeness and interdependence between members of society, might support the expression of solidarity and, even what others might perceive as, imposition (García 1988, 1989, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1999, 2002; Placencia 1994; Delgado 1995; Curcó 1998; Hernández-Flores 1999). These values become evident, both in symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships, as well as confrontational and nonconfrontational scenarios (García 1996, 1999, 2001, 2004; Cordella & Forbes 1998; Placencia 1994). In order to analyse Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands, this work will first present the theoretical framework used and then discuss how the data was collected and analysed. The following null hypotheses serve as the basis for this investigation. When reprimanding and responding to a reprimand Argentinean males and females do not differ in their preference for: – – – –

bald on record, positive or negative politeness strategies in their head acts; mitigators or aggravators in their supportive moves; strategies threatening their own or the interlocutor’s face; frames of participation.

. Theoretical framework Before examining the data itself, it is essential to pursue an understanding of key terminology and theoretical perspectives used for the analysis and classification. Thus, each of the following will be considered: Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) categorisation of head acts and supportive moves, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model of politeness, Scollon and Scollon’s (1986) classification scheme, Bateson’s (1972) notion of frame, Fairclough’s (1989) definition

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.3 (233)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

of power, and Tannen’s (1993a, 1993b, 1994) and Tannen and Wallat’s (1993) studies of discourse and gender. Blum-Kulka et al. distinguish head acts and supportive moves by defining head acts as the “the minimal unit[s] which can realize a [speech act; they are] the core of the [speech act]”. On the other hand, supportive moves are the “unit[s] external to the [head act], which modif[y] its impact by either aggravating. . . or mitigating . . . its force” (1989: 275–276). The number of head acts and supportive moves varies from speaker to speaker and from situation to situation. Using Blum-Kulka et al.’s classification will allow for the identification of the strategies used by Argentinean Spanish speakers to reprimand and respond to a reprimand, and to see them in the context of other strategies with which they occur. It is worth pointing out that Blum-Kulka et al.’s categories derived from data obtained by means of a Discourse Completion Test in the analysis of requests and apologies, and it has been shown that such data is not as rich as role-play or real life data (cf. García 1996, 2003, 2004). As such, their categories cannot fully account for the rich variety of strategies used in real-life interaction or role-plays. Consequently, some of the strategies presented in this study go beyond Blum-Kulka et al.’s categorisation and reflect those strategies used in similar role-play scenarios with Peruvian and Venezuelan participants (García 2004). Head acts and supportive moves are further categorised as politeness strategies following Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theoretical framework. They posit that, in the course of interaction, speakers have the need to be liked, i.e. to maintain positive face; and, to be respected, i.e. to maintain negative face. They categorise politeness strategies as bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record, and do-nothing. Bald on record strategies are those that are used “whenever S wants to do the FTA with maximum efficiency more than he wants to satisfy H’s face. . . ” (1987: 95). Positive politeness strategies imply camaraderie and in-group membership between speakers. They are “in many respects simply representative of the normal linguistic behavior between intimates, where interest and approval of each other’s personality, presuppositions indicating shared wants and shared knowledge, implicit claims to reciprocity of obligations or to reflexivity of wants, etc. are routinely exchanged” (1987: 101). In contrast, negative politeness strategies are used to express respect; they “[perform] the function of minimizing. . . imposition. . . ” (1987: 129). Off-record strategies are those that are ambiguous, and therefore may convey more than one interpretation. Do nothing, as its name indicates, is when the speaker says nothing because the risk of losing face is too great.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.4 (234)

 Carmen García

Table 1. Correspondence between Brown and Levinson’s categorisation and strategies used by Argentineans Brown and Levinson’s strategies

Argentineans’ strategies

Bald on record →

Accusing/Admonishing/Warning/Threatening; Claiming authority; Rejecting accusation/ explanation/request; Presenting facts; Expressing disagreement; Rejecting accusation

Positive politeness strategies Claim common ground →

Convey that S and H are cooperators → Negative politeness strategies Communicate S’s want to not impinge on H → Redress other wants of H’s →

Accepting excuse/explanation; Accepting suggestion/reprimand/threat; Claiming common ground; Moralising; Self-defence Requesting cooperation; Requesting information; Offering cooperation Promising forbearance Indicate reluctance to offend/fire; Admitting responsibility; Grounder; Apologising Expressing gratitude

Table 1 shows the correspondence between Brown and Levinson’s (1987) categorisation and the actual strategies used by Argentinean participants when reprimanding as well as responding to a reprimand. Examples of each type of strategy will be examined shortly. Scollon and Scollon (1986) group bald on record and positive politeness strategies into a solidarity politeness system, and negative politeness, offrecord and do-nothing into a deference politeness system. According to Scollon and Scollon [w]here there is a strongly asymmetrical power relationship (P +) a different set of strategies is used by each speaker. The more powerful speaker uses low numbered strategies. . . [bald on record and positive politeness strategies], in speaking ‘downward’. The less powerful speaker uses strategies of deference [negative politeness, off record, do nothing] in speaking ‘upward’. (1986: 169)

The use of different politeness strategies when reprimanding and responding to a reprimand can also reflect how different cultural groups exert power and respond to individuals with power. Fairclough asserts that “[t]here are . . . in gross terms two ways in which those who have power can exercise it and keep it: through coercing others to go along with them,. . . ; or through winning others’ consent to, or at least acquiescence in, their consent” (1989: 33). Our purpose here is to present and illustrate how Argentinean subjects participating in this study exercised power and responded to a person holding power.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.5 (235)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

Bateson’s (1972) notion of frames of interaction was used to label speakers’ strategies in terms of how communication was intended. Bateson states that in a conversational interchange, the hearer must understand the activity the speaker is engaged in, and how he/she means what he/she says. This understanding is based on “one’s experience of the world in a given culture. . . [which helps us] predict interpretations and relationships regarding new information, events, and experiences” (Tannen 1993a: 16). Along these lines, a presentation of a reprimand within a ‘coercive boss’ frame, for example, signals how the speaker means what he/she says. Tannen states that “research on gender and language has consistently found male speakers to be competitive and more likely to engage in conflict. . . and females to be cooperative and more likely to avoid conflict” (1993b: 179). This analysis of Argentinean Spanish data will help to confirm or deny if this assumption holds true for this cultural group with respect to the context examined.

. Method All data was collected in 2000 in Buenos Aires, Argentina using subjects who agreed to participate in two role-play scenarios. The role-plays were tape recorded and then transcribed for analysis. It is important to note that the roleplay format was selected because it offers speakers the opportunity to control their participation (Scarcella 1979: 277), and also to provide what Blum-Kulka et al. call “stereotyped responses” (1989: 13). That is, “the prototype of the variants occurring in the individual’s actual speech”. . Subjects Participants in the first role-play, reprimanding, included twenty adult Argentinians, 10 males and 10 females; all were native Spanish speakers and ranged from 18 to 45 years of age. Argentinean participants in the second role-play, responding to a reprimand, included a different group of subjects, 10 male and 10 female adults from Buenos Aires. Again, all were native speakers of Spanish and ranged from 18 to 40 years of age. Although social class was not controlled for in either one of the role-play situations, the groups were diverse in terms of both education and occupation, and included members of the middle and upper middle class (e.g. university professors, undergraduate and graduate students, and administrative staff).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.6 (236)

 Carmen García

In each of the role-plays subjects interacted with a 60 year-old Argentinean female – a retired arts teacher, not known to any of the subjects. . Tasks The subjects were first told they would be presented with a given situation and that they were to engage in a regular, natural conversation. They were also told that this conversation would be videotaped. They were then given the instructions which described the following situation for both the subjects and the interlocutor:1 Su empleado(a) ha estado llegando tarde al trabajo, saliendo temprano y no ha estado cumpliendo con su labor. Esta mañana usted lo(a) llama a su oficina y le habla. El/ella no está de acuerdo con Ud. ... Your employee has been coming late to work, leaving early and not doing his/her work. This morning you call him/her and talk to him/her. He/she does not agree with you.

After receiving the instructions, each subject and his/her interlocutor, in this case the one playing the role of employee, improvised their conversation. The purpose of this type of interaction was to allow the two individuals to have maximum control over their conversational interchange, making it as complete as possible (Scarcella 1979). Except for the reversal of roles, the role-play setup for the second task was the same. In this case, the subjects responded and the interlocutor (the boss) reprimanded them. . Data analysis After all role-palys were completed and taped, the role-played interactions were transcribed using conventions designed by Jefferson (1986: ix–xvi). (See Appendix A.) Interactions were then characterised in terms of the recurrent types of strategies used as head acts and supportive moves by the subjects, the politeness strategies they illustrated, the types of face they threatened, and the types of frames of participation they expressed. This categorisation was done on the basis of the aforementioned theoretical framework for each of the areas. Paralinguistic features are indicated in the transcription, but a detailed analysis of how they affected the interaction is not included. Participants were identified using the following abbreviations: AM or AF where A stands for Argentinean;

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.7 (237)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

M and F for male and female respectively. Appendix B presents a list of the abbreviations used in this paper and their corresponding term.

. Description and analysis . Reprimanding When reprimanding, Argentinean participants playing the role of boss did not go through clearly defined stages where they first presented their reprimand, then responded to the employee’s reaction, and finally finished the encounter. In fact, it could be said that their whole participation was a constant reprimand and reaction to the employee’s response, with a very short wind-down, or end, to the interaction. The following descriptions and examples highlight the types of strategies used in the reprimands in conjunction with the surrounding text (in order to add some context to the use of the strategy). .. Head acts Both male and female participants used a variety of head act strategy types to reprimand. although there were some similarities in their choices, there was a difference in the weight they had in their overall participation in the role-play. It is important, however to point out the following: (a) although some acts (requests, for example) are considered face-threatening acts within the Brown and Levinson’s model, and as such require the use of negative politeness strategies, they are classified here as positive politeness strategies due to the fact that Argentinean requests were realised bald on record; (b) although samples are not presented here within the interactional context in which they occurred, their categorisation was determined by their illocutionary force. Thus, accusing/admonishing/warning/threatening, for example, is classified as a bald on record strategy because of the context within which it occurs (overlap and previous threats) and the interlocutor’s response (promise to repair). ... Bald on Record Strategies (BORS). Participants used a number of BORS to reprimand namely, accusing/admonishing/warning/threatening, claiming authority, presenting facts, rejecting explanation/accusation/request. By looking at definitions and examples of each of these, the nature of BORS themselves and the role of the participants (male and female) can be better understood.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.8 (238)

 Carmen García

1. Accusing/admonishing/warning/threatening Both male and female participants accused/warned/threatened the employee for his/her bad performance in the workplace. The following illustrates a participant issuing a number of warnings and threats. Employee problemas pero yo [pienso que ‘problems but I [think that’ AM [bueno, si quiere permanecer procure llegar a horario ‘[well, if you WANT to stay try to arrive on time’ Employee sí, sí lo voy a hacer. ‘yes, yes, I’ll do it.’ AM y si no se va más tarde ( ) ‘and if not, leave later ( )’ Employee aunque no estoy de acuerdo en que haya llegado tan tarde ‘although I don’t agree that I have arrived so late’ AM Preocupesé porque eh personal sobra así que trate de llegar a horario, de lo contrario no ‘you should worry because uh we have personnel to spare so try to arrive on time, if not you won’t’

2. Claiming authority Some participants chose to claim their authority by stating the company’s policies, dismissing the employee, and/or stating their obligation/expected behaviour. The following is a sample of a boss stating the company’s policy and then stating the employee’s obligation. AM pero la empresa fija un horario de entrada y un horario de salida. Ud. tiene que cumplir esos horarios, no puede ser que ‘but the company states a time to arrive and a time to leave. You have to follow this schedule, it can’t be that’

3. Presenting facts As expressed in the following example, most participants presented factual information about the employee’s behaviour. AF

yo noto que Ud. está llegando ta:rde e::h ‘I am noticing that you are arriving la:te u::hm’ Employee no::: ‘no:::’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.9 (239)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

AF

los informes no los entrega, no sé. no no estamos contentos ‘you are not handing in the reports, I don’t know. we are not we are not happy’

4. Rejecting explanation/request/accusation Males, more than females, rejected the employee’s explanation/request/ accusation. Employee a::h serán comentarios, pero yo he procurado llegar siempre en hora ‘a::h but that must be gossip, but I have tried to arrive always on time’ AF pero ha procurado, pero no quiere decir que lo haga ‘but you have tried, but that doesn’t mean you do it’

... Positive Politeness Strategies (PPS). In addition to the aforementioned BORS, Argentinean participants also used PPS to reprimand the employee. The strategies used were accepting excuse/explanation, claiming common ground, requesting cooperation, requesting information, offering cooperation, and moralising. An example of each follows. 1. Accepting excuse/explanation/token agreement Males and females overwhelmingly accepted the employee’s excuses/explanations despite a long reprimand and dispute. AM

bueno, bueno nos entendemos ‘well, well we understand each other’ Employee =que me disculpe ‘=that you excuse me’ AM sí, sí, cómo no, cómo no, simplemente que tome = ‘yes, yes, of course, of course, it is only that you take’ =

2. Claiming common ground Male and female participants showed empathy with the employee and acknowledged they also had experienced the problems the employee talked about. AF

=claro, la entiendo, la entiendo, a todos nos pasa ‘=yes, I understand you, I understand you, it happens to all of us’ Employee sí ( ) ‘yes’ ( )

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.10 (240)

 Carmen García

AF

un día que llegamos al subte ‘one day we get to the metro’ Employee claro ‘yes’ AF que llegamos tarde ‘we get there late’ AF o resulta que hay paro que siempre pasa ‘or there is a strike which happens all the time’

3. Requesting cooperation Participants requested their interlocutors to change their behaviour towards the workplace. AF

así que la única cosa que le vamos a pedir es que de ahora en adelante trate o de salir un poquito antes o de organizarse de alguna manera ‘so the only thing we are going to ask from you is that from now on try either to leave a little earlier or organize yourself in some way’ Employee =Bueno ‘=Ok.’

4. Requesting information Interestingly, females, but not males, requested from the employee information about his/her schedule and/or problems. Employee no:: siempre. habrá sido alguna ve::z pero no:: siempre no:: ‘no::t always. It must have been one ti::me but no::t always no::t’ AF siempre no? ‘not always?’ Employee no como para que eh se ‘not for you to uh’ AF cuál es? ‘what is?’ Employee =que se preocupe no:: no se preocupe. ‘=worry no:: don’t worry.’ AF hubo algún inconveniente que -? ‘was there any problem that -?’

5. Offering cooperation Both males and females offered to cooperate with the employee to avoid further problems.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.11 (241)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

AM

este vamos a hacer una cosa, vamos a ver qué pasa en el próximo mes a ver si Ud. puede:, digamos cumplir con el horario ‘uh we are going to do something, we are going to see what happens next month see if you ca:n, say follow the schedule’ Employee =claro ‘=of course’ AM =y cualquier [cosa lo volvemos a charlar] ‘=and in any [case we will talk about it again]’

6.

Moralising Male and female participants invoked “general moral maxims” (BlumKulka et al. 1989: 288) to reprimand.

AM

nosotros no podemos darnos el lujo de apoyarnos del metrovía de darnos una excusa de por qué no se cumple el horario. ‘we cannot have the luxury to trust the metro to excuse ourselves for not following the schedule.’ Employee [no no bueno ‘[no no well –’ AM =[tenemos que cumplir con nuestro trabajo. es algo estrictamente específico que tenemos que hacer. ‘=[we have to do our job. it is something strictly specific that we have to do.’

... Negative Politeness Strategies (NPS). Argentinean participants also used NPS to reprimand, namely expressing gratitude and indicating reluctance to offend/fire. Definitions and illustrations follow. 1. Expressing gratitude Females, but not males, expressed their gratitude to the employee for his/her cooperation and/or acceptance of what was required of them. AF bueh, muchas gracias por por escucharme y ‘we:h, thank you for for listening to me and’

2. Indicating reluctance to offend/fire Again, females, but not males, reassured the employee that they did not want to offend him/her and/or that they had no intention of firing him/her.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.12 (242)

 Carmen García

Employee Y que yo voy a procurar eh cumplir con el trabajo ‘And I will try uh to do my job’ AF muy bien. sí yo ( ) no pretendo despedirla, ‘very well. yes I ( ) don’t intend to fire you,’

.. Supportive moves The head acts discussed above were accompanied by supportive moves, which both mitigated and aggravated the strength of the head act itself. These supportive moves were mitigators – preparator, grounder, requesting confirmation, mitigating accusation, disclaiming responsibility, and aggravators – requesting justification, expressing dissatisfaction/lack of interest, expressing distrust, expressing concern, and claiming evidence. Definitions and illustrations of each of these types of supportive moves follow. Again, they are highlighted within the excerpt to express the proper context. ... Mitigators 1. Preparator Both male and female participants used preparators (the strategies used to preface the reprimand), thus preparing the interlocutor for the ensuing reprimand. AM sí, solicité llamarla a Ud. porque mire tengo que hablarle personalmente porque Ud. no me está cumpliendo bien con los horarios de llegada ‘yes, I asked to talked to you because I have to talk to you in person because you are not following the schedules to arrive’

2. Grounder Grounders are the reasons/explanations/justifications used by male and female participants to mitigate the reprimand. AF pero llegar al trabajo viste?, que tiene que estar a una hora determinada hasta tal otra hora y yo necesito que Ud. me cumpla con ese horario para que las cosas salgan bien porque si no no va a funcionar ‘but to arrive to the office you see?, you have to be here at a fixed time until another time and I need you to follow this schedule so that things come out ok because if not it is not going to work out’

3. Requesting confirmation Females, but not males, minimized the effects of the reprimand by requesting confirmation of the facts they were presenting.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.13 (243)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

AF nosotros estamos notando de que Ud. está llegando un poquito más tarde de la hora convenida, es así? ‘we are observing that you are arriving a little later than the scheduled time, is that right?’

4. Mitigating accusation After presenting their reprimand, participants mitigated it by denying complete or personal knowledge of the facts. AF también recibí informes de ciertas personas de – no han recibido ciertas cosas que le piden o que las hace que o las entrega más tarde de lo de lo necesario e::h, o sea, yo tengo ta también, yo no lo comprobé con mis propios ojos, pero yo tengo informes de ciertas personas de jefes suyos, y del jefe del jefe de personal me está diciendo que tiene ese problema. No sé. ‘I also received reports from certain people from – that have not received certain things that they ask from you or that you do them or that you do them or hand them in later than than expected u::h, that is I al also have, I didn’t see it with my own eyes, but I have reports from certain people from your bosses, and the head the head of personnel is telling me you have that problem. I don’t know.’

5. Disclaiming responsibility Only male bosses reacted to the employee’s accusations and denials by denying their own responsibility in the reprimand and attributing it to a higher boss or to the company at large. AM

a mí me dieron la or ‘I was given the or

[ [ Employee =[de que Ud. me ponga que yo fiche tarjeta ‘=[that you make that I check in’ AM pero a mí me han dado la orden de superiores, de hacer cumplir el horario y yo tengo que hacerlo respetar ‘but I have been given the order by the higher ups, of making sure the schedule is followed and I have to have it respected’

... Aggravators 1. Requesting justification The most frequent aggravator to the reprimand utilised by both male and female participants, was the request that the employee justify his/her behaviour.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.14 (244)

 Carmen García

AF cuál es el problema con el cual Ud. a veces llega tarde o se se supone que Ud. se retira temprano? ‘what is the problem that causes you to arrive late or it is it is said you leave early?’

2. Expressing dissatisfaction Some male and female participants chose to express their dissatisfaction towards the employee’s performance in the workplace and/or their lack of interest in his/her problems. AM yo vuelvo a reiterar, llega tarde, se va temprano cuándo trabaja? qué nos – en qué nos sirve a nosotros? no no [no tiene sentido, Marta ‘I insist, you arrive late, leave early when do you work? what do you – how do you help us? no no [it doesn’t make any sense, Marta.’

3. Expressing distrust After presenting their reprimand and listening to the employee’s response, participants expressed their lack of trust in the employee’s commitment. AF ’tá bien. eso lo puedo considerar pero tampoco o sea yo no puedo darle una mano y después Ud. me toma eh eh todo el brazo, o sea ‘it’s ok. I can take that into account but I can’t that is I can’t give you an inch and you take uh uh a mile, that is’

4. Expressing concern Only females expressed their concern about the employee’s performance, and created a sense of urgency. AF bueno eh yo estoy muy preocupada por sus llegadas tarde, quiero saber, quiero que me dé una explicación ‘well uh I am very worried because of your coming in late, I want to know, I want you to give me an explanation’

5. Claiming evidence Male and female participants alike aggravated their reprimand by stating to have evidence of the employee’s bad performance. AM

bueno Marta vea yo tengo o sea mi gente que se (encarga de supervisar) los empleados que están [en el puesto que Ud. está

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.15 (245)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

AM

‘well Marta see I have that is my people that are (in charge of supervising) the employees who are [in the place you are’ Employee [sí, pero habrá sido un día ‘[yes, but it must have been ONE day’

Table 2 shows the distribution of the strategies used by male and female participants in reprimanding. It divides them into head acts and supportive moves and, in addition, types them either as bald on record (BORS), positive politeness (PPS), or negative politeness strategies (NPS). As Table 2 demonstrates Argentinean participants used a variety of head acts and supportive moves in reprimanding. Furthermore, males were slightly more verbose than females in that they used 178 strategies, whereas females only used 153 strategies. It is important to note that, although interesting, this difference is not significant. Another noteworthy consideration is the occurrence of head acts vs. supportive moves. In this case, head acts had a higher incidence than supportive moves, 255 or 77%, of the strategies used in reprimanding. This means that reprimands were multi-headed and as such, stronger. In addition, and more importantly, 147 or 58% of the head acts were BORS, emphasizing the power differential, while only 5 or 2% were NPS. A simple proportions test rejects the null hypothesis of no difference between the occurrence of BORS and NPS at the 99% level (Z = 2.66 > 2.54). This is highly significant. The asymmetrical power relationship is highlighted even further if BORS and PPS are combined following Scollon and Scollon’s classification scheme (cf), yielding 250 solidarity politeness strategies, or 98%, vs. 5 deference politeness strategies, or 2%. In addition to looking at the total number of each strategy type, it is also important to examine the differences between males and females. In the current study, Argentinean female and male participants had an almost identical balance between their head acts and supportive moves (respectively, 112 or 73% vs. 41 or 27% of their strategies for females, and, 143 or 80% vs. 35 or 20% for males). These similarities, however, do not reflect how differently these two groups exercised power. Furthermore, only females used NPS, albeit at a very low rate (5 or 4%), whereas males used BORS and PPS exclusively (102 or 71% and 41 or 28%, respectively). Not only did males not use NPS, but 71% of their head acts were BORS showing their preference for coercing the interlocutor and engaging in conflict. These strategies accounted only for 40% of the females’ head acts. Therefore, a difference of proportions test rejects the null hypothesis of no difference between the use of BORS by males and fe-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.16 (246)

 Carmen García

Table 2. Head acts and supportive moves used by Argentineans in ‘Reprimanding’ classified in terms of gender F HEAD ACTS

n

A. Bald on Record Strategies (BORS) 1. Accusing/admonishing/warning/threatening 7 2. Claiming authority 14 3. Presenting facts 17 4. Rejecting explanation/accusation/request 7 Total # of Bald on Record Strategies 45 B. Positive Politeness Strategies (PPS) 1. Accepting excuse/explanation 25 2. Claiming common ground 2 3. Requesting cooperation 15 4. Requesting information 3 5. Offering cooperation 15 6. Moralising 2 Total # of Positive Politeness Strategies 62 C. Negative Politeness Strategies (NPS) 1. Expressing gratitude 2 2. Indicating reluctance to offend/fire 3 Total # of Negative Politeness Strategies 5 Total # of Head Acts 112

M %

N

6 27 13 38 15 24 6 13 40% 102 22 2 13 3 13 2 55%

Total % 19 27 17 9 71%

n

% 34 52 41 20 147

13 20 16 8 58%

20 14 3 2 5 3 0 0 6 4 7 5 41 28%

45 18 5 2 20 8 3 1 21 8 9 4 103 40%

2 0 0 3 0 0 4% 0 0% 73% 143 80%

2 1 3 1 5 2% 255 77%

SUPPORTIVE MOVES A. Mitigators 1. Preparator 2. Grounder 3. Requesting confirmation 4. Mitigating accusation 5. Disclaiming responsibility Total # of Mitigators B. Aggravators 1. Requesting justification 2. Expressing dissatisfaction/lack of interest 3. Expressing distrust 4. Expressing concern 5. Claiming evidence Total # of Aggravators Total # of Supportive Moves Total # of Strategies

6 10 6 2 0 24

15 24 15 5 0 59%

4 1 2 2 8 17 41 153

10 2 5 5 20 41% 27%

2 6 5 14 0 0 4 11 3 9 14 40% 7 7 2 0 5 21 35 178

20 20 6 0 14 60% 20%

8 11 15 20 6 8 6 8 3 4 38 51% 11 8 4 2 13 38 75 331

14 11 5 3 17 51% 23%

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.17 (247)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

males at the 99% level (Z = 3.05 > 2.54). This is highly significant. In contrast, females showed more solidarity with the interlocutor by using more PPS than their male counterparts (62 or 55% vs. 41 or 28% respectively). Thus, they preferred to win her consent, “to be cooperative and more likely to avoid conflict” (Tannen 1994: 40). Again, the difference is significant and the null hypothesis of no difference between the two is rejected at the 99% level (Z= 4.66 > 2.54). Implications of these differences will be discussed shortly. The supportive moves used by the participants present an even more interesting picture. Argentineans as a whole used mitigators and aggravators equally (51% each). Thus, the null hypothesis of no preference cannot be rejected. Females, however, used a slightly larger percentage of mitigators than aggravators (24 or 59% vs. 17 or 41%) while the opposite was true for their male counterparts (14 or 40% vs. 21 or 60%). Despite the fact that this difference is not statistically significant (Z = 1.68 < 1.96) and the fact that the null hypothesis of no difference between the two cannot be rejected, some conclusions are possible. In short, Argentinean females used BORS, PPS and NPS as head acts, and utilised more mitigators than aggravators as supportive moves. Males, on the other hand, used BORS and PPS exclusively and opted for aggravators over mitigators in their supportive moves. This indicates the following: (a) males were more interested in engaging in conflict and exercising power through coercion, in consequence participating within a ‘coercive boss’ frame; (b) females, conversely, preferred being cooperative and exercising power through cooperation, thus participating within a ‘cooperative boss’ frame. Nevertheless, these results need to be corroborated by further research. At this point, it is necessary to look at the interaction in terms of how Argentineans saved face. From this perspective one can see the effects the strategies had on the interlocutor’s and/or the speaker’s positive or negative face (IPF, INF, SPF, SNF). Using Brown and Levinson’s criteria (1987), it is possible to classify strategies as threatening the speaker’s and/or interlocutor’s positive/negative face wants in reprimanding. In the role-play where the interlocutor played the role of the employee, the interlocutor’s positive face was threatened by accusing/admonishing/warning/threatening, mitigating accusation, presenting facts, expressing dissatisfaction, claiming evidence, expressing distrust. Through these strategies the speaker shows that he/she “doesn’t like/want one or more of H’s wants, acts, personal characteristics, goods, beliefs, or values” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 66) The interlocutor’s positive face was also threatened by rejecting explanation/request/accusation, disclaiming responsibility, and preparator. The first two indicate that the speaker “thinks H is wrong or misguided or unreasonable

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.18 (248)

 Carmen García

about some issue, such wrongness being associated with disapproval” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 66). Finally, preparator indicates that the speaker “is willing to cause distress to H, and/or doesn’t care about H’s feelings” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 67). On the opposite side of the spectrum, the interlocutor’s negative face was threatened by claiming authority, requesting information, requesting confirmation, requesting justification, requesting cooperation, and offering cooperation. These strategies indicate that the speaker “wants H to do, or refrain from doing, some act A” (1987: 66). Offering cooperation also threatened the interlocutor’s negative face because doing so indicated that the speaker “wants H to commit himself to whether or not he wants S to do some act for H, with H thereby incurring a possible debt” (1987: 66). In addition, moralising also results in a threat to the interlocutor’s negative face because the speaker thinks H ought to (perhaps) do some act A” (1987). Brown and Levinson state that “[t]here is a natural association. . . between seeking ‘common ground’. . . and wanting to develop a relationship – which may be presumptuous or even threatening to H” (1987: 286–287). Thus, by claiming common ground, the interlocutor’s negative face was also threatened. The speaker’s positive face, in this case that of the boss, was threatened by expressing concern and accepting excuse/explanation. Through these strategies the “S indicates that he regrets doing a prior FTA, thereby damaging his own face to some degree” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 68). Finally, the speaker’s negative face is also threatened in this type of situation by expressing gratitude and by using grounders. By expressing gratitude the “S accepts a debt, humbles his own face” (1987: 67). Grounders, on the other hand, indicate that the speaker “thinks he had good reason to do, or fail to do, an act which H has just criticized” (1987: 67). Table 3 illustrates how the strategies used by Argentinean participants playing the role of boss emphasized the power differential; they protected their own image and attacked their interlocutor’s. Argentineans used four times more strategies to threaten their interlocutor’s face wants – both positive and negative – than to threaten their own, respectively 264 or 80% vs. 67 or 20%. A simple proportions test rejects the null hypothesis of no difference between the two at the 99% level (Z = 11 > 2.54). Thus, when reprimanding, both Argentinean males and females tended to assert themselves by curtailing the interlocutor’s freedom of action and expressing their dislike for them. Furthermore, when threatening their interlocutor’s face, Argentinean participants preferred to threaten both his/her positive and negative face with almost the same strength (respectively, 137 or 41% vs. 127 or 38%), a not

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.19 (249)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

Table 3. Strategies used by Argentineans classified in terms of the type of face threatened F n

%

M n

%

A. Strategies threatening the Interlocutor’s Positive Face (IPF) 1. Accusing/admonishing/warning/threatening 5 3 27 15 2. Presenting facts 17 11 24 13 3. Rejecting explanation/accusation/request 7 5 13 7 4. Mitigated accusation 4 3 4 2 5. Expressing dissatisfaction 1 1 7 4 6. Preparator 6 4 2 1 7. Expressing distrust 2 1 2 1 8. Claiming evidence 8 5 5 3 9. Disclaiming responsibility 0 0 3 2 Total # of strategies threatening the IPF 50 33% 87 49% B. Strategies threatening the Interlocutor’s Negative Face (INF) 1. Claiming authority 14 9 38 21 2. Moralising 2 1 7 4 3. Requesting cooperation 15 10 5 3 4. Requesting information 3 2 0 0 5. Requesting confirmation 6 4 0 0 6. Offering cooperation 15 10 6 3 7. Claiming common ground 2 1 3 2 8. Requesting justification 4 3 7 4 Total # of strategies threatening the INF 61 40% 66 37% Total # of strategies threatening the IF 111 73% 153 86% C. Strategies threatening the Speaker’s Positive Face 1. Accepting excuse/explanation 25 16 20 11 2. Expressing concern 2 1 0 0 Total # of strategies threatening the SPF 27 18 20 11 D. Strategies threatening the SNF 1. Expressing gratitude 2 1 0 0 2. Indicating reluctance to offend/fire 3 2 0 0 3. Grounder 10 7 5 3 Total # of strategies threatening the SNF 15 10% 5 3% Total # of strategies threatening the SF 42 27% 25 14% Total # of strategies 153 178

Total n %

32 10 41 12 20 6 8 2 8 2 8 2 4 1 13 4 3 1 137 41%

52 16 9 3 20 6 3 1 6 2 21 6 5 2 11 3 127 38% 264 80%

45 14 2 1 47 14 2 1 3 1 15 5 20 6% 67 20% 331

significant difference. As far as their own face is concerned, the participants seemed to disregard the importance of being liked and approved of, and in-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.20 (250)

 Carmen García

stead, protected their own freedom of action (45 or 14% of their strategies threatened their own positive face and 20 or 6% threatened their negative face). It is also important to examine the results in terms of the original hypothesis. There were differences between females and males in the percentage of strategies used to threaten the interlocutor’s positive and negative face (50 or 33% and 61 or 40% for females, and 87 or 49% and 66 or 37% for males), and these differences were significant. This, once again, rejects the null hypothesis. Performing a difference of proportions test between the proportion of strategies used by males and females to threaten their interlocutor’s positive face results in Z = 2.66 > 2.54 which is significant at the 99% level. Females seemed to concentrate on attacking both the interlocutor’s negative and positive face while protecting their own freedom of action. Similarly, males emphasized telling the interlocutor that he/she was not likable and that his/her freedom of action was being curtailed. They, however, protected their own image and freedom of action slightly more than their female counterparts (only 20 or 11% of their strategies vs. 127 or 18% of females’ threatened their own positive face and, 5 or 3% of their strategies threatened their negative face vs. 15 or 10% of females’). These results seem to corroborate what was stated above: the subjects of this study, as a group, participated within a ‘coercive boss’ frame, but when distinctions between male and female are made, females preferred a ‘cooperative boss’ frame. In short, the results provided here present a very interesting scenario. Argentineans, as a group, playing the role of boss, told the interlocutor with almost equal strength that he/she was not likable and that his/her freedom of action would be curtailed. At the same time, they preferred to be perceived as competent, intimidating, strong, not likable, and unwavering; thus, avoiding any possibility of fraternization or perception of weakness and closing the door to any possible negotiation that would curtail their authority. This might reflect this cultural group’s “set of attitudes, beliefs, behavioural conventions, and basic assumptions and values . . . ” (Spencer-Oatey 2000: 4) which can be stated as follows: in an asymmetrical relationship, the person holding power prefers to assert his/her own authority at the expense of his interlocutor’s selfimage and freedom of action. In addition, he/she might present him/herself as not likable, only to emphasize his/her power and unapproachability. However, he/she will not curtail or let anybody curtail his/her own freedom of action.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.21 (251)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands

. Responding to a reprimand As important as it is to see a cultural group’s preferred politeness patterns and frames of participation in a situation where participants hold power, it is also important to see the other side of the story; that is, how they interact when their interlocutor has power. When responding to a reprimand, male and female participants used a variety of head acts and supportive moves. Also there were a number of similarities in their choices. Illustrations and examples are discussed in the following section. .. Head acts Argentinean participants, talking upward did not always use NPS as expected (Scollon & Scollon 1986). Instead, both males and females preferred BORS and PPS in their responses to the reprimand. In order to gain a better understanding, it is important to look at each of these types of strategies individually. ... Bald on Record Strategies (BORS). Participants used three BORS to respond to the reprimand: expressing disagreement, accusing a 3rd party, and challenging the evidence. 1. Expressing disagreement Participants expressed their disagreement, rejected the boss’s complaint, or disclaimed their responsibility. Boss =[a la empresa no tiene nada que [( ) esos son problemas personales ‘=[the company has nothing to [( ) those are personal problems’ AM [viste, que por ahí no es justo llegué ‘[see, it is not fair I arrived’

2. Accusing a 3rd party One female participant accused her immediate boss of accusing her falsely. AM [uhm. Ud. sabe que yo con mi jefe no tengo una relación muy particular = ‘[uhm. You know that I don’t have a very special relationship with my boss =’

3. Challenging evidence Participants demanded the source of the accusation in no uncertain terms.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.22 (252)

 Carmen García

Boss qué le pasa a Ud.? para eso la he llamado, para preguntarle qué pasa que está llegando tarde Y además parece que se está yendo temprano? ‘what’s wrong with you? that’s why I called you, to ask you what is going on that you are arriving late AND besides it looks like you are leaving early?’ AF Y de dónde sacó eso? ‘AND where did you get that from?’

... Positive Politeness Strategies (PPS). In addition to BORS, Argentinean males and females used PPS. The strategies chosen were self-defence, accepting suggestion/reprimand/threat, and promising forbearance. 1. Self-defence Responding to the boss’s continuous complaint, participants defended their work and productivity. AM pero si la labor la estoy cumpliendo, mi labor la cumplo, o sea ‘but if I am doing my job, I am doing my job, that is’ 2. Accepting suggestion/reprimand/threat Argentinean participants overwhelmingly accepted the boss’s suggestion/ reprimand/threat. Boss [ah bueno. pero primero es eso es decir para que no se te vayan de las manos las cosas vos tenías que avisar por lo menos ‘oh well. but that comes first that is so that things don’t get out of hand you had to let us know at least’ AM ’tá bien, ’tá bien. ‘it’s fine, it’s fine.’

3. Promising forbearance Participants promised to take action to repair the damage done. AF prometo que no va a volver a pasar igualmente, o sea, mi padre ya se está recuperando, o sea ‘I promise it is not going to happen again, that is, my father is already getting better, that is’

... Negative Politeness Strategies (NPS). Although not an overwhelmingly strong choice, the NPS used by Argentinean participants in their response to the reprimand were grounder, admitting impingement, apologising, and expressing gratitude. Only those strategies that have not already been illustrated will be presented here.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.23 (253)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

1. Admitting fault/responsibility Participants admitted, albeit partially, their fault and responsibility. AM no me:: o sea no me parece que tenga que compartir con la empresa mis problemas personales o sea ’tá bien yo yo llego tarde ‘it doesn’t that is it doesn’t seem to me that I have to share my personal problems with the company I mean ok I I get in late’

2. Apologising Males, more than females, apologised for not having fulfilled their responsibilities as they should have. AM sí, no, eh disculpemé. lo que pasa es que tengo eh al chico enfermo ‘yes, no uh excuse me. what happens is that I have uh my child sick’

.. Supportive moves The aforementioned head acts were accompanied by supportive moves which exclusively mitigated their strength – mitigating fault, grounder, expressing sorrow/regret/embarrassment, expressing concern/discomfort, self-defence, and expressing good intentions. Again, definitions and examples of strategies used as supportive moves, not previously mentioned, are illustrated. ... Mitigators 1. Mitigating fault Participants downgraded the fault they were being accused of. AM no me parece que hayan sido tan tantas veces o un motivo tan ‘it doesn’t seem to me that it has been so many times or a reason so’

2. Expressing sorrow/regret/embarrassment Only males expressed their sorrow/regret/embarrassment for not having fulfilled their responsibilities fully. AM claro, es lamentable pero es así me sucedieron unos percances que yo no –no contaba con eso y bueno lastimosamente eh estoy en falta, lo sé ‘yes, it is unfortunate but it is that way that I had some problems that I didn’t – I wasn’t expecting that and well unfortunately I made a mistake, I know’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.24 (254)

 Carmen García

3. Expressing good intentions As part of their response, both males and females expressed their commitment to their jobs and the company, as well as their willingness to perform to the best of their abilities. AM

Y hasta le digo que creo que he avisado al supervisor inmediato y y que él sabía pero y ahora no sé cómo será esta situación de que ahora yo estoy llegando muy tarde, que me estoy yendo antes y todo lo demás, pero bueno eh= ‘AND I even tell you that I think I have informed the immediate supervisor and that he knew but now I don’t know how this situation is that I am now arriving very late, that I am leaving early and everything else, but well uh=’ Boss de cualquier manera ‘anyway’ AM =a mí me interesa la empresa ‘=I am interested in the company’

Table 4 shows the distribution of these strategies used by male and female participants in responding to a reprimand. It divides the strategies into head acts and supportive moves and categorises them as either bald on record, positive politeness or negative politeness strategies as well as mitigators and aggravators. As Table 4 shows, when responding to a reprimand, Argentinean participants – both male and female – used more head acts than supportive moves (235 or 74% vs. 82 or 26% of their strategies) and chose PPS over NPS and BORS (128 or 54%, 81 or 34%, and 26 or 11%, respectively). The difference between PPS and NPS was not statistically significant (Z = 1.29 < 2.54). However, grouping PPS and BORS together (solidarity politeness strategies) provides quite different, and interesting, results: in an asymmetrical power relationship, the less powerful speaker speaking upward used solidarity politeness strategies (154 or 66%) much more often than the expected (as the Scollon and Scollon framework suggests) deference politeness strategies (81 or 34%). The difference between solidarity politeness strategies (BORS and PPS) and deference politeness strategies (NPS) is significant at the 99% level (Z = 4.83 > 2.54). There was, however, no significant difference between females’ and males’ use of BORS, PPS and NPS (10 or 11%, 55 or 59%, and 28 or 30% vs. 16 or 11%, 73 or 51%, and 53 or 37%, respectively). In terms of their supportive moves, Argentineans – again both males and females-only used mitigators (82 or 100% of their supporting moves). This is highly significant. A simple proportions test rejects the null hypothesis of no difference between mitigators and aggravators at the 99% level (Z = 9.26

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.25 (255)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

Table 4. Head acts and supportive moves used by Argentineans in ‘Responding to a Reprimand’ classified in terms of gender F HEAD ACTS A. Bald on Record Strategies 1. Expressing disagreement 2. Accusing a 3rd party 3. Challenging evidence Total # of Bald on Record Strategies B. Positive Politeness Strategies 1. Self-defence 2. Accepting suggestion/reprimand/threat 3. Promising forbearance Total # of Positive Politeness Strategies C. Negative Politeness Strategies 1. Grounder 2. Admitting impingement 3. Apologising 4. Expressing gratitude Total # of Negative Politeness Strategies Total # of Head Acts

n

M %

n

Total %

n

%

8 1 1 10

9 1 1 11%

15 0 1 16

11 0 1 11%

23 1 2 26

10 0.4 1 11%

10 26 19 55

11 28 20 59%

8 49 16 73

6 35 11 51%

18 75 35 128

8 32 15 54%

10 16 1 1 28 93

11 27 17 11 1 9 1 6 30% 53 69% 142

19 8 6 4 37% 78%

37 27 10 7 81 235

16 11 4 3 34% 74%

SUPPORTIVE MOVES A. Mitigators 1. Mitigating fault 7 17 8 20 2. Grounder 25 61 23 56 3. Expressing sorrow/regret/embarrassment 0 0 3 7 4. Expressing concern/discomfort 2 5 1 2 5. Self-defence 5 12 1 2 6. Expressing good intentions 2 5 5 12 Total # of Mitigators 41 100% 41 100% B. Aggravators ------------0 0 0 0 Total # of Aggravators 0 0% 0 0% Total # of Supporting Moves 41 1% 41 22% Total # of Strategies 134 183

15 18 48 59 3 4 3 4 6 7 7 9 82 100% 0 0 82 317

0 0% 26%

> 2.54). Considering both head acts and supportive moves, one can infer that Argentinean participants, when in a subordinate and confrontational positionresponding to a boss’s reprimand, are cooperative and non-confrontational. They are interested in engaging in a cordial, but not necessarily strongly def-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.26 (256)

 Carmen García

erential, dialogue with the interlocutor, defending their good behaviour and performance, and accepting the boss’s suggestions and requests. Furthermore, looking at the interaction in terms of how Argentineans saved face, it is possible to see the effects the strategies had on the interlocutor’s and/or the speaker’s positive or negative face. As mentioned previously, Brown and Levinson’s criteria are used. In the case of the participants responding to the reprimand, the interlocutor’s positive face was threatened in two ways: by expressing disagreement and accusing a 3rd party. Through these strategies, the speaker shows that he/she “doesn’t like/want one or more of H’s wants, acts, personal characteristics, goods, beliefs, or values” (1987: 66). The interlocutor’s positive face was also threatened by self-defence, indicating that the speaker “thinks H is wrong or misguided or unreasonable about some issue, such wrongness being associated with disapproval” (1987: 66). Additionally, the interlocutor’s negative face was threatened by requesting verification because doing so indicates that the speaker “wants H to do, or refrain from doing, some act A” (1987: 66). At this point it is also important to discuss how the speaker’s (employee) face was threatened. The speaker’s positive face was threatened by admitting impingement, accepting reprimand, mitigating fault, expressing sorrow, expressing concern, and apologising. Through these strategies, the “S indicates that he regrets doing a prior FTA, thereby damaging his own face to some degree” (1987: 68). Finally, the speaker’s negative face is threatened by expressing gratitude because by doing so the “S accepts a debt, humbles his own face” (1987: 67). This also occurs with the use of grounders, by promising forbearance, and by expressing good intentions. In using grounders the speaker indicates that he/she “thinks he had good reason to do, or fail to do, an act which H has just criticized” (1987: 67). The strategies promising forbearance and expressing good intentions, on the other hand, indicate that the “S commits himself to some future action although he doesn’t want to” (1987: 68). Table 5 indicates the pattern of use of these strategies by both males and females. Table 5 shows that, when responding to a reprimand, Argentinean participants preferred threatening their own face – both positive and negative – to a much larger degree than their interlocutor’s (267 or 84% vs. 50 or 16%). This difference is significant at the 99% level (Z = 12.6 > 2.54), and as such, rejects the null hypothesis of no difference between the preference to threaten their own or their interlocutor’s face. In threatening their own face, partici-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.27 (257)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

Table 5. Strategies threatening the speaker’s and the interlocutor’s positive or negative in ‘Responding to a Reprimand’ classified in terms of gender F n A.

B.

C.

D.

Strategies threatening the IPF 1. Expressing disagreement 2. Accusing a 3rd party 3. Self-defence Total # of strategies threatening the IPF Strategies threatening the INF 1. Requesting verification Total # of strategies threatening the INF Total # of strategies threatening the I’s face Strategies threatening the SPF 1. Admitting impingement 2. Accepting suggestion/reprimand/threat 3. Mitigating fault 4. Expressing sorrow 5. Expressing concern 6. Apologising Total # of strategies threatening the SPF Strategies threatening the SNF 1. Promising forbearance 2. Expressing good intentions 3. Grounder 4. Expressing gratitude Total # of strategies threatening the SNF Total # of strategies threatening the S’s face Total # of strategies

%

M n

%

Total n

%

8 1 15 24

6 1 11 18%

15 0 9 24

8 0 5 13%

23 1 24 48

7 0.3 8 15%

1 1 25

1 1% 19%

1 1 25

1 1% 14%

2 2 50

1 1% 16%

16 26 7 0 2 1 52

12 19 5 0 1 1 38%

11 49 8 3 1 9 81

6 27 4 2 1 5 47%

27 75 15 3 3 10 133

9 24 5 1 1 3 42%

19 2 35 1 57 109 134

14 1 26 1 43% 81%

16 5 50 6 77 158 183

9 3 27 3 42% 86%

35 7 85 7 134 267 317

11 2 27 2 42% 84%

pants threatened both their positive and negative face. But, when threatening their interlocutor’s face, they tended to threaten her positive face with more strength than her negative face (respectively 48 or 15% and 2 or 1%). Although important, this difference was not statistically significant. There was no significant difference between male and female behaviour, thus the null hypothesis of no difference cannot be rejected. These results also indicate that when responding to a reprimand, Argentinean participants seemed to disregard both the importance of being liked and/or approved of and of protecting their own freedom of action. As far as the interlocutor’s face, though, they did not curtail her freedom of action, but did not refrain from expressing their dislike for her.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.28 (258)

 Carmen García

In short, Argentinean participants in this study approached this situation as if it were a symmetrical, rather than asymmetrical interaction by using more solidarity politeness strategies (BORS and PPS) than the expected deference politeness strategies (NPS). Along these lines, they participated within a ‘cooperative frame’. These results lead to the conclusion that within this cultural context, social power and social distance may not be “a motivating factor in the performance of speech acts” (Márquez-Reiter 2000: 169). Scollon and Scollon’s (1986) assertion that the more powerful speaker speaks downward while the least powerful one speaks upward was not supported here. In fact, the only manner in which Argentineans expressed deference was by threatening their own positive and negative face much more than their interlocutor’s.

. Conclusions This analysis examined two role-play interactions of Argentinean Spanish speakers: (1) where participants reprimanded an employee for coming in late and not fulfilling his/her obligations; and, (2) where participants responded to the reprimand. Based on the results of this data, a number of conclusions can be made regarding the patterns of Argentinean speakers in general as well as the differences between males and females.

Reprimanding Interactions in this situation showed Argentinean participants going through a continuous process of reprimanding and rebutting the employee’s response. In doing so, they used a majority of BORS followed by PPS as head acts (58% and 40%, respectively), and used as many mitigators as aggravators (51% each). Furthermore, males used a slightly higher number of strategies than females (178 vs. 153). The differences between male and female participation are also important: females, but not males, used NPS and a higher percentage of mitigators than aggravators. Thus, their participation was less aggressive and reflected the different way males and females exercised power. Males preferred to coerce the interlocutor, whereas, females preferred to win his/her consent. These results confirm Tannen’s assertion that males are “more likely to engage in conflict, . . . and females to be cooperative and more likely to avoid conflict” (1994: 40). In addition, Argentineans preferred threatening their interlocutor’s face wants rather than their own (80% vs. 20%) and, in doing so, they expressed with almost equal strength, their dislike for the interlocutor and desire to im-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.29 (259)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

pose (41% and 38% of their strategies). When threatening their own face, they threatened their own positive face more than their negative face (14% and 6% respectively). By doing this, the speaker acting as boss sent the message that he/she was not likable and that it was impossible to impede his/her own freedom of action, a very strong and coercive boss indeed.

Responding to a reprimand When responding to a reprimand, Argentinean participants chose more solidarity than deference politeness strategies as head acts (54% vs. 34%), a result that is contrary to what is expected when speaking upward in an asymmetrical relationship. As far as supportive moves are concerned, the participants used mitigators exclusively (100%). There were no significant differences between male and female distribution of strategies between these two categories. As previously mentioned, males were more verbose than females (183 vs. 134 strategies), but this difference was not significant. As a group, Argentinean participants preferred to threaten their own face, rather than their interlocutor’s, at a much higher rate (84% vs. 16%), and when doing so, they preferred to threaten both their own likeability and their freedom of action equally. Again, there were no significant differences between male and female behaviour. When threatening the boss’s face, they preferred to threaten her positive, rather than her negative, face (15% vs. 1% respectively). This presents a different picture than the one presented when reprimanding: Argentineans playing the role of boss preferred to express their dislike and imposition to the interlocutor and, at a much lower rate, they presented themselves as not likable. When responding to a reprimand, they concentrated on threatening their own face, both positive and negative. Although they were respectful of the boss’s freedom of action, they did not hesitate to express that she was not likable. Their overall frame of participation could be defined as ‘cooperative employee’. In sum, Argentineans participating in this study did not prioritise the need to be liked and/or approved of in either one of the situations. When in power, they assumed it all for themselves and withdrew it all from the interlocutor’s. When in a subordinate position, they cooperated but did not assume a complete subordinate role. As interesting as the results presented above may be, it is important to highlight that this paper looked only at a select group of Argentinean Spanish speakers, and that as such, the results cannot be generalised to all Argentinean speakers or to all Spanish speakers interacting in this type of speech act. Further studies would help extend what was found here and check on our results.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.30 (260)

 Carmen García

Note . This role-play situation is the same used when analysing Peruvian male and female participation when reprimanding and responding to a reprimand (García 1996).

References Arellano, Silvia (2000). “A hierarchy of requests in California Spanish: Are indirectness and mitigation polite?” In Ana Roca (Ed.), Research on Spanish in the United States. Linguistic Issues and Challenges (pp. 319–332). Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press. Bateson, Gregory (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, House, Juliane, & Kasper, Gabriele (Eds.), (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Boretti, Susana H. (2001). “Aspectos de la cortesía lingüística en el español coloquial de la Argentina”. Oralia, 4, 75–102. Bravo, Diana (1998). “¿Reírse juntos?: Un estudio de las imágenes sociales de hablantes españoles, mexicanos y suecos”. In H. Haverkate, G. Mulder, & C. Fraile Maldonado (Eds.), La pragmática lingüística del español. Recientes desarrollos, Diálogos Hispánicos 22 (pp. 315–364). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bravo, Diana (2002). “Actos asertivos y cortesía. Imagen del rol en el discurso de académicos argentinos”. In María E. Placencia & Diana Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 141–174). Munich: Lincom Europa. Briz Gómez, Antonio (1998). El español coloquial en la conversación. Esbozo de pragmagramática. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, S.A. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna (2002). “Las ofertas y la cortesía en el español peninsular”. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 21–36). Munich: Lincom Europa. Cordella, Marisa (1990). “Apologizing in Chilean Spanish and Australian English: A crosscultural perspective”. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 7, 66–92. Cordella, Marisa & Forbes, Katie (1998). “Discourse control and leadership in Spanish conflict talk”. Onomazein, 3, 45–61. Curcó, Carmen (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 22 (pp. 129–171). Amsterdam: Rodopi. De los Heros, Susana (1998). “El papel del género en la datación y recepción de cumplidos y la cortesía lingüística”. Cuadernos del Lazarillo: Revista Literaria y Cultural, 15, 62–68. De los Heros, Susana (2001). Discurso, identidad y género en el castellano peruano. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.31 (261)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

Delgado, Vilma Lucía Concha (1995). Politeness in Language. Directive Speech Acts in Colombian and Castillian Spanish, and US English. Dissertation Abstracts international 55 (8): 2365A–2366A. Fairclough, Norman (1989). Language and Power. London: Longman. Félix-Brasdefer, J. César (2002). Refusals in Spanish and English: A cross-cultural study of pragmatic strategies among L1 Mexican and American English speakers and L2 learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota. Ferrer, María Cristina & Sánchez Lanza, Carmen (2002). Interacción verbal. Los actos de habla. Rosario, Argentina: Rosario U. N. R. Editora. García, Carmen (1988). “Disagreeing and requesting by Americans and Venezuelans”. Linguistics and Education, 1(3), 299–322. García, Carmen (1989). “Apologizing in English: Politeness strategies used by native and non-native speakers”. Multilingua, 8(1), 3–20. García, Carmen (1992a). “Responses to a request by native and non-native English speakers: deference vs. camaraderie”. Multilingua, 11, 387–406. García, Carmen (1992b). “Refusing an invitation: a case study of Peruvian style”. Hispanic Linguistics, 5, 207–243. García, Carmen (1993). “Making a request for a service and responding to it: A case study of Peruvian style”. Journal of Pragmatics, 19, 127–152. García, Carmen (1996). “Reprimanding and responding to a reprimand: A case study of Peruvian Spanish speakers”. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 663–697. García, Carmen (1999). “The three stages of Venezuelan invitations and responses”. Multilingua, 18(4), 391–433. García, Carmen (2001). “Perspectives in practices: Teaching culture through speech acts”. In Vicki Galloway (Ed.), Teaching the Cultures of the Hispanic World: Products and Practices in Perspective (pp. 95–112). Boston, MA: Thomson Learning. García, Carmen (2002). “La expresión de camaradería y solidaridad: Cómo los venezolanos solicitan un servicio y responden a la solicitud de un servicio”. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 55–88). Munich: Lincom Europa. García, Carmen (2003). “Estudio comparativo del discurso oral de peruanos y venezolanos: reprendiendo y respondiendo a una reprimenda. Poder y solidaridad”. 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. 257–297). Stockholm: University of Stockholm. García, Carmen (2004). “Reprendiendo y respondiendo a una reprimenda. Similitudes y diferencias entre peruanos y venezolanos”. Spanish in Context, 1(1), 111–144. Hernández-Flores, Nieves (1999). “Politeness ideology in Spanish colloquial conversation: The case of advice”. Pragmatics, 9, 37–49. Jefferson, Gail (1986). “Transcript notation”. In M. J. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Interaction. Studies in Conversational Analysis (pp. ix–xvi). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koike, Dale (1994). “Negation in Spanish and English suggestions and requests. Mitigating effects?” Journal of Pragmatics, 21, 513–526.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.32 (262)

 Carmen García

Koike, Dale (1998). “La sugerencia en español: una perspectiva comparativa”. In H. Haverkate, G. Mulder, & C. Fraile Maldonado (Eds.), La pragmática lingüística del español. Recientes desarrollos, Diálogos Hispánicos 22 (pp. 211–235). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria (2001). “Compliment responses among British and Spanish university students: A contrastive study”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 107–127. Márquez-Reiter, Rosina (1997). “Politeness phenomena in British English and Uruguayan Spanish: The case of requests”. Miscelánea, 18, 159–167. Márquez-Reiter, Rosina (2000). Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. A Contrastive Study of Requests and Apologies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Márquez-Reiter, Rosina (2002). “Estrategias de cortesía en el español hablado en Montevideo”. In M. E. Placencia & D. Bravo (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 89–106). Munich: Lincom Europa. Placencia, María E. (1992). “Politeness in Ecuadorian Spanish and British English”. Language Learning Journal, 6, 80–82. Placencia, María E. (1994). “Pragmatics across varieties of Spanish”. Donaire, 2, 65–77. Placencia, María E. (1995). “Explicitness and ellipsis as features of conversational style in British English and Ecuadorian Spanish”. IRAL, 33(2), 129–141. Placencia, María E. (1996). “Politeness in Ecuadorian Spanish”. Multilingua, 15, 13–34. Placencia, María E. (1998). “Ecuadorian Spanish vs. Peninsular Spanish”. Spanish Applied Linguistics, 2, 71–106. Placencia, María E. (2001). “Percepciones y manifestaciones de la (des)cortesía en la atención al público, el caso de una institución pública ecuatoriana”. Oralia, 4, 177–212. Puga Larraín, Juana (1997). La atenuación en el castellano de Chile: Un enfoque pragmalingüístico. Valencia, Spain: Universitat de València. Ruzickova, Elena (1998). “Apologies in Cuban Spanish”. In J. Gutiérrez-Rexach & J. del Valle (Eds.), Proceedings of the First Hispanic Linguistics Colloquium (pp. 126–149). Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University. Scarcella, Robin (1979). “On speaking politely in a second language”. In C. A. Yorio, K. Perkins, & J. Schachter (Eds.), On Tesol ’79 (pp. 275–287). Washington, DC: TESOL. Scollon, Ron & Scollon, Suzanne B. K. (1986). “Face in interethnic communication”. In J. C. Richards & R. W. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and Communication (pp. 156–190). New York: Longman. Spencer-Oatey, Helen (2000). “Introduction: Language, culture and rapport management”. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturallly Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures (pp. 1–46). London: Continuum. Tannen, Deborah (1993a). “What’s in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations”. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in Discourse (pp. 14–56). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tannen, Deborah (1993b). “The relativity of linguistic strategies: Rethinking power and solidarity in gender and dominance”. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Gender and Conversational Interaction (pp. 165–188). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tannen, Deborah (1994). Gender and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.33 (263)

Argentinean reprimands and responses to reprimands 

Tannen, Deborah & Wallat, Cynthia (1993). “Interactive frames and knowledge schemas in interaction: examples from a medical examination/interview”. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in Discourse (pp. 57–76). New York: Oxford University Press. Valdés, Guadalupe & Pino, Cecilia (1981). “Muy a tus órdenes: compliment responses among Mexican-American bilinguals”. Language in Society, 10, 73–144. Vanderveken, Daniel (1990). Meaning and Speech Acts, Vol. 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Appendix A The following transcription conventions were used: A. Simultaneous utterances: [[are used to link together utterances that start simultaneously. B. Contiguous utterances: = is placed between utterances with no time gap uttered by different speakers or to link different parts of a speaker’s utterance that has been carried over to another line because of an interruption. C. Intervals: (0.0) is placed to measure pause lengths (measured in tenths of a second). - is placed at point of interruption. An utterance was considered to be interrupted when the speaker started making an utterance and changed its content and/or form. D. Characteristics of speech delivery: . marks fall in tone , marks continuing intonation ? marks rising intonation; ?, marks weaker rising intonation ! marks an animated tone ↑↓ marks rising and falling shifts in intonation. > < marks that the enclosed utterance is delivered at a faster pace ::: marks lengthened syllable; each : marking one “beat”. (LF) marks laughter (( )) encloses description of gestures or other non-verbal information. Underlining marks emphasis. Capital letters mark increased volume in the production of a given word or words of the utterance;

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:20

F: PB12311.tex / p.34 (264)

 Carmen García

E. Transcriber doubt: ( ) is used to mark unintelligible utterances.

Appendix B Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used throughout the text: BORS PPS NPS AM AF IPF INF SPF SNF

Bald on record strategies Positive politeness strategies Negative politeness strategies Argentinean male Argentinean female Interlocutor’s positive face Interlocutor’s negative face Speaker’s positive face Speaker’s negative face

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.1 (265)

Chapter 12

Politeness as face enhancement An analysis of Spanish conversations between friends and family Nieves Hernández-Flores

.

Introduction and aims

As is well known, Brown and Levinson’s theory (1987) has been the most important theoretical reference in politeness research for the past two decades and has triggered a long series of studies on the social effects of communication. Brown and Levinson’s theory is based on the idea that all the individuals have a need for face. Face is defined as “the public self-image that every member [of a society] wants to claim for himself ” and it is asserted that face can be lost, maintained, or enhanced in daily interaction (1987: 61). Thus face is constantly the focus during communicative and social exchanges. One of the ways of focusing on face is through politeness, a social phenomenon that Brown and Levinson describe theoretically and practically, although they do not explicitly define the concept in their study. Their characterization of politeness is based on the notion of threat to face, that is, the threat that some speech acts arising in communicative interaction are said to entail towards the face of the interactants. Politeness thus consists of the linguistic strategies that speakers choose in order to avoid or to soften the “face-threatening acts” (FTAs) that appear in interaction (1987: 68). Brown and Levinson construct their theory of politeness by considering which acts are FTAs, what kinds of strategies are used for redressing these FTAs, and what social factors condition the choice of anti-FTA strategies. In other words, the occurrence of politeness is conditioned by the presence of threats to face, which is a relatively frequent situation because the list of threatening acts provided by these authors is long, and because many of these acts are everyday acts of widespread use (e.g. requests, invitations, advice, and compliments).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.2 (266)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

Brown and Levinson’s perspective has been criticised for being too pessimistic with respect to human interaction (Kasper 1990; Held 1992; KerbratOrecchioni 1997); however, in spite of this, most theoretical and empirical studies of politeness have followed Brown and Levinson’s approach, that is, they assume that threat to face is the reason for using politeness. In consequence, the view they support is that the function of politeness is to avoid or mitigate socially risky situations. This approach, however, gives rise to a number of questions: is avoiding and mitigating threats to face the only function of politeness? Is the communicative behaviour that we interpret as friendly, agreeable or pleasant without perceiving the existence of a threat to face, then not a case of politeness? Can this kind of behaviour be included in the concept of politeness? If yes, how? The present article attempts to answer these questions. The main goal is to circumscribe the functions of politeness in order to highlight a function that is not considered within Brown and Levinson’s theory: face enhancement without the presence of a threat to face. Furthermore, the idea that a threat to face is not necessary for the deployment of politeness will be developed, and finally, in the light of the results from previous research and my own work in this area, it will be proposed that this function could be characteristic of some specific communities due to features of the cultural context. These points will be illustrated with examples from a corpus of data corresponding to conversations between family and friends in Salamanca, Spain.1

. Theoretical framework and presuppositions This article is based on notions about politeness developed in HernándezFlores (2002). I take as a starting point Brown and Levinson’s proposal that the reason for using politeness is the need for face. In fact, since individuals live in society, it is their wish that their face should be accepted and considered by the group to which they belong. One of the ways of focusing on face wants is what we call politeness. Since both the speaker and the addressee are interested in maintaining their face (Goffman 1967; Brown & Levinson 1987), in polite behaviour I believe that the focus is not only on the addressee’s face but also on the speaker’s face.2 In fact, I understand politeness as the communicative behaviour that aims at achieving an ‘ideal’ balance between the addressee’s face and the speaker’s face (Hernández-Flores 1999, 2002, 2004). An ‘ideal’ face balance means that, in order to attain a positive social interaction, the accomplishment of the wants of the speaker’s face and the addressee’s

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.3 (267)

Politeness as face enhancement 

face are attempted to be as balanced as possible; in other words, an ‘ideal’ face balance points to the benefit of both interactants’ face. However, the complexity of human communication means that a completely satisfactory balance is never attained in real interaction. On the other hand, since face is “delineated in terms of approved social attributes”, in the approach proposed here, this concept is regarded as closely related to the features displayed by the particular cultural community under examination (Goffman 1967: 5). This means that it is necessary to study the sociocultural context if a more accurate description of polite behaviour in real data is to be obtained. In politeness research, this requirement has usually been fulfilled by describing the data in Brown and Levinson’s terms with respect to face wants: the want of being unimpeded in one’s own actions (negative face) and the want of being accepted and appreciated by the others (positive face). The focus thus stays on how negative face and positive face are realised in the community under study. Although some universal characteristics are used in Brown and Levinson’s approach (the references to human individuality and human sociability) the description of these universals depicts some specific desires for individuality and sociability, which can certainly be recognised in some communities, such as the western English-speaking communities, but not in all communities. This restricted framework has led some researchers in specific communities to approach face by describing the features that the sociocultural context presents without including them in the universal concepts of negative face and positive face (cf. Matsumoto 1988; Mao 1994; Bravo 1999, 2003; Hernández-Flores 1999; Boretti 2001; Schrader-Kniffki 2001), given that the features they have observed do not fit into these concepts. In order to categorise the concrete features of face that a particular community presents, Bravo (1999) proposes the use of basic methodological categories that refer to the person and his/her relationship with the other persons of his/her group: the categories of autonomy and affiliation.3 Autonomy is defined in general terms as how one perceives oneself and is perceived by others as someone different from the group, whereas affiliation is defined as how one perceives oneself and is perceived by others as someone identified with the group. However, autonomy and affiliation can only be further specified within the framework of a particular community. In other words, autonomy and affiliation are devoid of more specific social content because the researcher must fill these categories with what are the approved social values of the community under scrutiny, that is, in relation to features of the particular sociocultural context (Bravo 1999).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.4 (268)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

To describe how autonomy and affiliation are perceived in the community I study (family and friends in a Spanish community), I have attempted to approach the sociocultural context in different ways. Firstly, by drawing on the proposals and results of previous pragmatics research in Peninsular Spanish (mainly Fant 1989, 1992; Bravo 1996, 1999, 2000) and the descriptions of anthropological and sociological work in Spanish communities as in the work of Thurén (1988), de Miguel (1990), and Pitt-Rivers (1991). My proposal is also based on the results of a questionnaire on native informants’ perceptions of politeness and of what is considered appropriate in certain social situations as well as on the analysis of metapragmatic comments (Blum Kulka 1997) that were made by the speakers in the conversations recorded.4 Following Bravo (1999), one of the features that I assign to autonomy is the self-affirmation of one’s own qualities whereas one of the features of affiliation would be the search for confianza. Confianza can be defined as a kind of relationship that aims at achieving close bindings and that alludes to familiarity and to the right to speak openly.5 An important factor for finding and describing face within the proposed approach is the observation of the roles that are assumed by the participants in the concrete interaction. Description of them is also made with reference to Bravo (1999). Within this theoretical framework, in the next section I examine the functions that I attribute to politeness.

. The functions of politeness As mentioned above, I consider politeness as the communicative behaviour geared towards achieving an ideal balance between the addressee’s face and the speaker’s face. This behaviour has different functions depending on the situation of the participants’ face in the concrete interaction. When it is suspected that the communicative situation is negative for face, mitigation of a risk to face would be the function of politeness behaviour. If possible damage to face is considered to have occurred, then politeness would have a function of reparation of the negative effects to face. But if no threats to face are perceived and politeness is observed to occur, then the function of politeness would be enhancement of face. Face enhancement is a function of politeness that consists of affirming and strengthening face. It expresses good wishes, concern, and a friendly attitude towards the addressee, that is, it focuses on a positive relationship between the interlocutors. The difference between this function and the two other functions is that, in face enhancement, face threat redress

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.5 (269)

Politeness as face enhancement 

is not the case, since no face threat is perceived in the interaction or in the context.6 Furthermore, it should be stressed that I understand enhancement as a function of politeness, not as a politeness strategy. These two categories refer to different aspects of politeness: the function focuses on the social effect that polite behaviour has on the face of the interactants, whereas strategy refers to the communicative tools that can be used for expressing politeness. Let us see an example.7 I ask a colleague to comment on a paper that I have written, saying something like: You are the expert on this subject. Would it be possible for you to read this paper. . . ? In this example it would seem that politeness fulfils two functions at the same time: a face enhancement function (that would be deduced from the polite use of the compliment: you are the expert on) and a mitigation function (that would be observed in the request). However, I would argue that mitigation is the only politeness function in this example since enhancement is not the goal of the polite utterance, but the means (i.e. a politeness strategy) for accomplishing mitigation. In fact, if I decide to make such a request to a colleague I know that this supposes a loss of his/her time and an absence of direct benefit (even if it is of some professional interest to him/her). So, in order to mitigate the possible risk that this request may present to his/her face and my face, I choose to make the request politely. In order to do this, some strategies of politeness can be used: a strategy of mitigation (by saying, for example, Would it be possible for you to read this paper. . . ? and the possibility of using justifications, apologies, etc. in addition to this) or a strategy of enhancement of the addressee’s qualities in addition to the strategy of mitigation (by saying, for example, You are an expert on this subject. Could it be possible for you to read this paper. . . ?). But, regardless of the strategy of politeness that is chosen, the function of politeness is still to mitigate a potential risk to face. In consequence, the approach to the functions of politeness I propose has the following characteristics: on the one hand, it distinguishes between politeness that anticipates a risk to face, and politeness that appears after the communicative behaviour has been carried out. This distinction is considered by Goffman (1967), who defines two kinds of facework: the avoidance process, consisting in some protective manoeuvres that prevent threats to face, and the corrective process, that tries to correct the negative effects of an event. In Brown and Levinson’s theory the focus is not so much on the corrective process because politeness arises whenever a threat appears (Bayraktaroglu 1991). Yet this distinction can be methodologically useful because the focus is on the interaction, that is, the distinction is directed towards how threat to face and politeness strategies are related in the interactional frame. On the other hand, the terms

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.6 (270)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

to set a risk to face and to do possible damage to face do not assume the existence of certain acts that can pose a risk to face (face-threatening acts, in Brown and Levinson’s terminology). Risk, damage or threat to face are not intrinsic to certain acts, but they arise from the situational and cultural context of the interaction (Held 1992; Watts, Ide, & Ehlich 1992; Meier 1995). In any event, I prefer the terms risk to face and possible damage to face to the term threat because the former do not assume a conflict to the extent than the term threat does. Finally, the present proposal regards face enhancement without redress as the third function of politeness. Face enhancement in polite behaviour has been observed in empirical work in different cultural communities: as a way of engagement with social interaction in familiar Spanish conversation (Hernández Flores 1999); underlying solidarity in the rejection after advice in Turkish (Bayraktaroglu 2001); as boosting face in Greek simultaneous speech (Tzanne 2001); for offering concern, understanding, and cooperation in Greek compliments (Sifianou 2001); and for expressing recognition of and adherence to socially sanctioned rules in Persian offers and expressions of thanks (Koutlaki 2002). At this point, a question arises. If face enhancement is a function of politeness, how can it be incorporated in politeness studies? Some studies have suggested that this function can be found in some speech acts that would be basically polite. Haverkate (1994), for example, proposes a category called polite speech acts that includes the expressive acts (expression of thanks, congratulation, apology) and the commissive acts (promise, invitation); Bayraktaroglu (1991) sets the presence of FTAs against the presence of FBAs (face-boosting acts); Sifianou (1995) points out that some acts (like offers, congratulations, and compliments) although they can be face threatening, are primarily facesaving and face-enhancing acts; and Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1997) proposes the category face-enhancing acts for acts that accomplish flattering behaviour, like wishes, thanks and compliments (see also Albelda 2004). For the purposes of this article, the studies mentioned above are useful because they regard politeness from a broader perspective, that is, by dealing with this concept beyond the presence of threats to face. These approaches present, however, the inconvenience of linking politeness to certain acts. As some studies have pointed out (Fraser & Nolen 1981; Held 1992; Meier 1995), politeness must not be associated with certain acts, that is, there are no polite or impolite acts per se. Politeness does not arise because some specific acts are used, but because of the social meaning achieved through the communicative behaviour as a whole, and this means that context in a broader sense (the situational context and the cultural context) must be taken into account. Although I agree with the idea

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.7 (271)

Politeness as face enhancement 

that acts like offers, congratulations, and compliments do usually have a polite function, these acts can have a polite, impolite, or neutral meaning just as acts like requests, advice, or statements (cf. Georgakopoulou 2001 for a non-face threatening approach to disagreements). Furthermore, those approaches that consider an enhancement or boosting function of certain acts do not explain whether enhancement or boosting is totally independent of threat (which is my proposal) or whether the function is an anti-FTA.8 In short, in the present approach, the focus is on face enhancement as a function of politeness instead of enhancement as a feature that certain acts can present. Moreover, face enhancement here is not understood as having a redress function because this is not the only function of politeness (Mao 1994; Bravo 1996; de Kadt 1998). An alternative proposal would be to include the face enhancement function within the concept of positive politeness. In fact, a similar function is described in the examples that Brown and Levinson give for positive politeness: “(. . . ) in some respects, S wants H’s wants (e.g. by treating him as a member of an in-group, a friend, a person whose wants and personality traits are known and liked” (1987: 70). In this way, behaviour as the expression of good will and camaraderie (a potential case of face enhancement, in my opinion) has been included under positive politeness (Holmes 1995). But for the present approach, the consideration of face enhancement under positive politeness is problematic because, on the one hand, the allocation of a redress purpose to positive politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987) would be in contradiction with the absence of a redress function that I have proposed for face enhancement. On this subject, Brown and Levinson affirm: “Positive-politeness techniques are usable not only for FTA redress, but in general as a kind of social accelerator, where S, in using them, indicates that he wants ‘to come closer’ to H” (1987: 103) (my emphasis). In my opinion, these authors admit that the verbal strategies included under positive politeness (positive-politeness techniques) can have more than an antiFTA purpose. However, because of the absence of an anti-FTA purpose, these strategies do not find a place in their concept of politeness since in their view, politeness appears when a FTA occurs (Brown & Levinson 1987: 70). In other words, when positive politeness techniques are used for mitigating or softening an FTA, they are considered as anti-FTA strategies, and hence they constitute politeness strategies; but when these techniques are simply used to be nice and pleasant, they are not considered to be politeness strategies because they do not have a redress function. Therefore, the understanding of enhancement as a function of politeness without the occurrence of an FTA does not receive any attention in the theory, and positive politeness cannot include the function of face enhancement without redress. At the same time, another obstacle arises for

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.8 (272)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

this possible inclusion. Positive politeness is directed to positive face and, as was explained above, the features that Brown and Levinson assume for positive face are not the most accurate for describing the features of affiliation in some communities, the Spanish being one of them (Bravo 1999, 2003; Hernández-Flores 2002, 2003a). In the following sections the three functions that I have used to define politeness will be explained on the basis of my research into conversation between family and friends in a particular context within a Spanish community.

. The analysis Two extracts from the conversations of my data will be analysed in the following section. The first extract has been chosen in order to show the three functions that I assign to politeness. The second extract has been chosen in order to show that politeness with a face enhancement function (without either a mitigation or reparation function) can appear with a request, an act that is commonly considered to be a FTA.

Extract 1 Participants: Pili and her husband Gabriel (both around 55 years old) their daughter María (26 years old) and their neighbours Celia (55 years old) and Rosalía (75 years old). Pili is a housewife, Gabriel and María are teachers, and Celia and Rosalía are farmers. Situation: A meal at Pili and Gabriel’s country house is taking place. Their neighbours Celia and Rosalía have been invited for the meal. The participants have eaten soup and a piece of chicken. Now, Pili also offers a steak to Celia. Celia praises the quality of the chicken from Pili and Gabriel’s poultry yard. Celia thinks that María’s German friends will be impressed by the chicken (they are expected for dinner). María says that the meat (the steak) is tough. Celia thinks that María is referring to the chicken, and she disagrees by saying that this kind of meat is normal in ecological chickens. María explains that she is referring to the steaks, not to the chicken.9 Celia, trae pa’ acá =10 ‘Celia, give me’11 = 2 Rosalía: (A Gabriel) (muchos) ‘(To Gabriel) (many)’ 3 Pili: = que te eche. . . 1 Pili:

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.9 (273)

Politeness as face enhancement 

4 Celia: 5 Pili: 6 Gabriel: 7 Pili: 8 Celia:

9 Gabriel: 10 Celia: 11 Gabriel: 12 Rosalía: 13 Celia: 14 María: 15 Celia: 16 María: 17 Gabriel: 18 María: 19 Pili: 20 María: 21 Celia:

= ‘to serve you. . . ’12 (A Gabriel) ¡ah! ¡de toda la vida! ‘(To Gabriel) oh! as usual!’ ¡Celia! = ‘Celia!’= (A Celia) ¡yo también tengo eso! ‘(To Celia) I have this too!’ = que te voy a echar un cacho, un cacho de. . . = ‘I’m serving you a piece, a piece of. . . ’ sí ¡pero sólo un filetín! ¿eh? pues está riquísimo, hija, el pollo. como vengan [los alemanes y se lo des. . . ] = ‘yes, but only a little steak, ok? well, the chicken is delicious, my dear. When [the Germans come and you serve it to them. . . ] =’ pues yo [prefiero pollo]. ‘well, [I prefer chicken].’ = verás cómo se ponen. . . = ‘you will see how much they eat. . . ’ yo prefiero pollo. ‘I prefer chicken.’ (Risas) ‘(Laughter)’ (A María) porque [allí también hay pollo,] = ‘(To María) because [there is chicken there13 too,]’ [está un poco. . . ] [‘it’s a bit. . . ’] = ¡pero así de corral, de campo! = ‘but not a farm chicken, a chicken from the countryside!’ no, de corral, no. ‘no, not from farms.’ (A María) ¿está? ‘(To María) it’s a bit, what?’ ¡está un poco duro, la carne! ¿eh? ‘the meat is a bit tough, you know!’ ¿está dura? ‘is this tough?’ [un poco.] ‘[a little.]’ [¡NO, HIJA!] ¡ES QUE ES ASÍ! ‘[NO, MY DEAR!] CHICKEN IS LIKE THIS!’

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.10 (274)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

22 María:

no, no del pollo, no del pollo = ‘no, not the chicken meat, not the chicken meat’ = 23 Pili: ¡no! ‘no!’ 24 María: = del filete = ‘the steak meat’ 25 Celia: ¡ah! ¡del filete! = ‘ah! the steak meat!=’ 26 Rosalía: (A María) ¡tú. . . ! = ‘(To María) you. . . ! =’ 27 Celia: = es que el pollo, es así. . . = ‘because chicken meat is like this. . . ’ 28 (Rosalía changes the topic)

In this interaction, the three functions that I have assigned to politeness are: a. Face enhancement function (turns 1–16). This function is perceived in two polite situations: Pili offers food to Celia and Celia makes a compliment. b. Mitigation of a possible risk to face (turns 14–20). A mitigation function is triggered when María gives her opinion about the meat she is eating. Because her comment is negative, this opinion is a criticism that puts the face of two of the participants at risk: Pili’s face, because she has cooked the meat and she is the hostess, and Celia’s face, because she understands that her positive opinion about the chicken meat has been challenged. c. Reparation of possible damage to face (turns 21–27): this function is achieved by the polite behaviour of two participants: Celia and María. Celia tries to protect Pili’s (the hostess) face, and María looks after Pili’s face (she softens the criticism to Pili) and Celia’s face (she avoids disagreeing with Celia about the compliments that she has paid Pili’s meal). Politeness is observed when Pili makes an offer to Celia, the third dish that Pili offers her during the meal. The strategy consists in making the offer in the form of a direct request (in turns 1 and 3) with an explanation of the offer (turn 7) after attracting the addressee’s attention (turn 5). The use of direct strategies and the absence of preparative strategies inquiring about the guest’s wishes is a common way of offering in my data (Hernández-Flores 2002). By way of making offers, Pili is fulfilling what I assume to be the role of hostess in the Spanish community, that is, paying attention to the guests and being generous to them.14 On the other hand, Celia’s response to the offer consists in accepting with objections (turn 8) and paying an elaborate compliment with a superlative (riquísimo ‘delicious’), and a term of endearment (hija ‘my dear’) in

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.11 (275)

Politeness as face enhancement 

turn 8. There is a generalisation of the compliment by saying that other people will appreciate what is being offered (turns 8 and 10), and the exceptionality of eating such a chicken is stressed (turns 13 and 15). It must be observed that the expected response to an offer, gracias ‘thanks’, does not appear. In my opinion, this is due to the fact that in Peninsular Spanish thanks are mostly given in formal situations, while a compliment is an appropriate polite response in informal situations.15 Celia’s acceptance is polite because it carries out two behaviours that are appreciated in her community: valuing offers and participating in common activities (that of eating, in this case). Politeness, thus, occurs both in the initiatory utterance (an offer) and in the response provided (an acceptance), but no face threat is perceived. As a matter of fact, the interaction occurs in a friendly atmosphere where the participants behave as is expected of them and in accordance with some of the cultural features that can be assigned to the role each one plays. In this interaction, their faces are positively emphasised. By making an offer, Pili focuses on her guest’s affiliative face, that is, on her wish to receive thoughtfulness and attention from her hostess. In addition to this and because confianza exists, Pili is allowed to insist on offering food without enquiring about her guest’s wishes; that is, confianza allows her to act openly, without the fear of being unpleasant, because she is expected to act in her neighbour’s best interests. At the same time, Pili’s autonomy face is benefited too because she confirms her good qualities as a hostess and as a housewife, that is, she performs one of the behaviours that have been described for the Spanish community: self-affirmation of one’s own qualities (Bravo 1999; Hernández-Flores 2002). In addition, her affiliative face is also emphasised because she confirms her engagement with the members of her group. On the other hand, Celia’s polite behaviour stresses her own affiliative face (she is engaged with the activity of participating in a common meal), Pili’s affiliative face (she values Pili’s work for the group), and Pili’s autonomy (she confirms Pili’s good qualities). In this particular interaction, I do not observe a threat to face that should explain the presence of politeness. Hence, I consider that the function of politeness is the face enhancement of the two participants. The second function of politeness, mitigation of a risk to face, arises when María criticises the food (in turns 14, 18, and 20). María’s critical opinion entails a possible risk to Pili’s autonomy, that is, for Pili’s wish to be seen as a good cook, and for María’s own affiliative face, since she does not value something that is done for the group. To achieve her communicative goal without causing Pili too much embarrassment, María uses a softener: un poco ‘a little’ in her three interventions.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.12 (276)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

The third function of politeness, reparation of possible damage to face, is achieved by both Celia (lines 21, 25, and 27) and María (lines 22 and 24). Celia notices that María’s critical opinion about Pili’s food has probably damaged Pili’s autonomy (her qualities as a cook, a part of her role as a housewife). Celia expresses her disagreement with María through emphatic intonation (turns 21 and 25). Celia’s behaviour towards Maria is neither polite nor impolite since expressing disagreement is socially accepted in Spanish conversation (cf. Grindsted 1995; Villemoes 1995; Bravo 1996). One can say that it is a rather neutral behaviour. On the other hand, Celia’s behaviour towards Pili is polite because she defends the qualities of Pili’s dish, that is, she repairs Pili’s affiliative face when she acknowledges her talent as a cook. For this purpose, she uses the authority her role gives her: she is a farmer and she knows how a farm chicken tastes. María’s opinion, in contrast, is not so valid because she does not know so much about country topics. María’s comments contradict the compliments that Celia has previously made to Pili in relation to the chicken and, for this reason, Celia also repairs the possible damage to her own autonomy, that is, to her wish to be seen as someone qualified to voice an opinion on the subject. She achieves this by stressing her authority when she conveys her opinion. In other words, Celia’s polite behaviour repairs her interlocutor’s and her own face. The function of face reparation (addressed both to Pili and Celia, and to herself) is followed by María too (turns 22 and 24) when she explains that her negative comment is not addressed to the dish (i.e. the chicken) that has received positive comments from all the participants. To sum up, the analysis of this interaction shows the occurrence of polite behaviour as the manifestation of three different functions. As has been shown above, a risk or possible damage to face is perceived in the last two parts of the extract whereas no such risk is observed in the first part of the extract. In this part, face enhancement only seems to be accomplished.

Extract 2 The same participants and situation as in the previous example: Gabriel asks his wife (Pili) for another piece of chicken. Pili jokes about her husband’s appetite. Celia praises the chicken once more. 1 Gabriel: (A Pili) échame, Pili, otro cachito de, pollo. ‘(To Pili) serve me, Pili, a little piece more of, chicken.’ 2 Pili: (A Celia y Rosalía) éste. . . (Gabriel) vosotros comeréis poco pero él. . . ¡“con fundamento”!16

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.13 (277)

Politeness as face enhancement 

‘(To Celia and Rosalía) he. . . you don’t eat much but he (Gabriel) eats. . . “really well”!’ 3 Celia: déjalo. = ‘let him. =’ 4 Gabriel: a ver que coma otro cacho. ‘let me have another piece.’ 5 Celia: = qué coma. el pollo está riquísimo así, ¿eh? = ‘let him eat. the chicken is delicious like this, you know?’ 6 Pili: (Sirviéndo a Gabriel) toma. ‘(Serves to Gabriel) here you are.’ 7 Gabriel: (A Pili) na’ más un cachito. ‘(To Pili) just a little piece.’ 8 (Pili changes subject)

In this interaction, a typical instance of a request in Spanish informal conversation can be found (turn 1). It is a useful example to illustrate how politeness can appear with an enhancement function. Politeness is observed by the use of polite strategies such as the use of the vocative (Pili), which focuses on the addressee through the utterance of her name; and the use of the diminutive not as a softener, but as a sign of affectivity, cachito ‘a little piece’, which the speaker repeats in turn 7. This means that I do not attribute the use of politeness to the wish to redress a threat to face, but to the wish to enhance face. The reasons are found in the Spanish cultural context. In fact, when Gabriel asks Pili for more food, he is behaving in a way that is socially appreciated: he has valued positively what he has been offered (Pili’s food). By doing this Gabriel is acting in accordance with his roles: as Pili’s husband he confirms her good qualities as a cook, (i.e. Pili’s autonomy); as a participant in the meal, he appreciates Pili’s tasks for the group (i.e. Pili’s affiliative face). At the same time, Gabriel is confirming his own affiliative face. On the one hand, he affirms that he has a relationship of confianza with Pili, that is, that there is a degree of familiarity, which allows him to act openly and ask for food. On the other hand, as a participant in the meal, Gabriel shows that he is able to value the qualities of another member of the group (Pili). These facts can explain why no threat to face is seen. Pili’s response to the request (in turns 2 and 3) confirms that she has received Gabriel’s request positively since she remarks that her husband likes eating her cooking. In the same way, her guest Celia continues with face enhancement work when she praises the chicken that her hostess (Pili) has prepared. In brief, this example displays that interactions containing acts like requests are not always face-threatening.17 Consequently, politeness does not always have

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.14 (278)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

a mitigating function, but can possess an enhancement function. Explanations for this need to be found in the sociocultural context, the Spanish context in this case. More specifically, it is necessary to examine how social relationships are constructed in the cultural community under scrutiny.

. Conclusions Politeness was analysed here in two extracts from conversations between friends and relatives in a Spanish community. The purpose was to illustrate the three functions that I attribute to this communicative and social phenomenon. Two of these functions are related to the presence of possible risks to face during the communicative exchange. When such risks exist, the purpose of politeness is to mitigate them or repair the possible damage to the face of the participants after the event. The third function appears when no threat to face is produced. This function, which I refer to as face enhancement, is employed to make face stand out positively. In the light of the previous discussion, it can be concluded that redress functions (mitigation and reparation) are used to protect the good working of social interaction, whereas the enhancement function is used to affirm the good working of social interaction. Goffman (1967) notes that redress is the aim of doing facework, and Brown and Levinson (1987) consider redress as the purpose of politeness. Here, however, I have attempted to show that face enhancement without a redress function can arise in communicative behaviour with positive consequences for the face of the interactants and for the good working of their communicative and social exchange. In other words, in the analysed extracts, face enhancement accomplishes politeness in the same way as redress. In relation to this, the notion of face threat has, in my opinion, been overemphasised in politeness studies, since face threat is one possible, but not the only reason for using politeness. The analysis presented has shown, on the one hand, that politeness should not be examined only in relation to the presence of face threats. On the other hand, it has shown that face enhancement is an important function in interaction that should be incorporated into politeness studies. Obviously, further empirical research would be necessary to confirm the generalisibility of the results in the present study and the usefulness of this proposal; however, previous research focusing on enhancement (Bayraktaroglu 1991; Haverkate 1994; Sifianou 1995; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1997) indicates that this is not a phenomenon exclusive to the data dealt with here.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.15 (279)

Politeness as face enhancement 

Within this approach an alternative considered was the incorporation of this function in the group of so-called face-enhancing acts or face-boosting acts. However, in my proposal, face enhancement is not limited to the presence of particular acts, but is a broader function that involves several communicative elements, such as context (both cultural and situational), the interactional structure, or the paralinguistic elements. Another alternative is to include the enhancement function under Brown and Levinson’s concept of positive politeness; however, this would be problematic since face enhancement does not have a redress purpose like positive politeness; in addition to this, the features of positive face cannot describe face in every possible community. Yet another alternative to include face enhancement within Brown and Levinson’s (1987) framework can be considered. It may be found in the link between face threat and the social factors that according to Brown and Levinson determine the choice of strategy. These factors are power (the power that the speaker has over the hearer), distance (the social distance between the speakers), and ranking of imposition (the degree of threat that a particular act presents in a given culture). In the interactions analysed above, these factors are very low given the close social relationship between the interactants, and given that acts such as offers, acceptances, compliments and requests have a low degree of threat in Spanish culture (cf. Hernández-Flores 2003b). The result is that face threat is very low, and this suggests that face concern would not be so important as it would be in face-threatening situations (cf. Holtgraves 1992). However, we can see that this alternative does not work either since, as shown in the analysis, concern for face is high in the use of politeness with face enhancement. To conclude, I would like to suggest a possible explanation for the different focus on politeness functions in current research. Face-threatening redress is the function that has traditionally been ascribed to politeness, first by Goffman (1967) in his studies of face, and subsequently by Brown and Levinson in their theory of politeness. These authors assume that risks to face arise continually in interaction and that the purpose of facework is redressing these risks. Studies on face in western English-speaking countries have corroborated Goffman’s and Brown and Levinson’s proposals. In fact, redress face work in the presence of threats is equated with the term politeness, whereas behaviour that focuses on friendliness or camaraderie is not labelled polite (Holmes 1995). On the other hand, face enhancement has mostly been observed in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures and it has been considered as politeness (as in the Greek, French, Spanish, Turkish and Persian studies referred to earlier). Therefore a possible explanation for the lack of attention to the face enhance-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.16 (280)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

ment function in politeness studies would be that in some communities – such as English-speaking communities – social interaction is firstly understood as a site with potential threats to face. However, in other communities, such as the Mediterranean, this assumption is not foregrounded. In short, this explanation provides further support for the proposal that the social values of the community under scrutiny need to be examined. My final conclusion is, therefore, that, in order to attain a better understanding of politeness, an approach not exclusively based on face threats redress should be considered. The use of face enhancement understood as a function of politeness, as has been explained here, is one possible contribution to the development of this proposal.

Notes . The data employed consist of transcripts of five audio-recorded conversations (210 minutes in total). The conversations, in which I participated (see María in the examples provided), took place during visits between relatives and friends in two homes in Salamanca, Spain and were surreptitiously recorded. The participants were informed of the recording at the end of the data collection and they gave their permission for the recordings to be used for research purposes (Hernández Flores 2002). The names of the participants were changed to protect their anonymity. At the time of the recordings, the aim of the data collection was its use in grammatical research. This means that, although I was one of the participants, I was not motivated to emphasise politeness in my contributions to the interactions recorded. . Within Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory, the speaker’s face is mentioned in relation to FTAs, more specifically, when threats to the addressee’s face are distinguished from threats to the speaker’s face. Nevertheless, when politeness strategies are discussed, the focus stays on the addressee’s face, while the speaker’s face does not receive attention. Some studies have challenged this approach by underlining the importance of the speaker’s face in politeness behaviour (Scollon & Scollon 1983; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1992; Watts 1992; Holmes 1995; Chen 2001; Koutlaki 2002). . These notions have been previously used in face studies (cf. Fant 1989; Lim 1994), however not with the same meaning Bravo attributes to them. . This questionnaire was administered to 70 informants (50% of them came from Salamanca and the other 50% came from different parts of Spain). Characteristics of this questionnaire, some results and a proposal for this kind of data to support the analysis of politeness can be seen in Hernández-Flores (2003b). . These features were observed by Fant (1989, 1992) and were considered as some of the distinguishing traits of Spanish face by Bravo (1996, 1999). Research into conversations of relatives and friends has verified the presence of these features (cf. Hernández-Flores 2002).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.17 (281)

Politeness as face enhancement  . These were the results of an empirical study on advice in conversations between family and friends in Peninsular Spanish (Hernández-Flores 1999). It was noted that politeness was used to stress (a) the engagement of the participants in the social and communicative interaction, (b) the attention to the interlocutor’s face, and (c) the wish to strengthen the participants’ relationships. Mitigation of threats to the addressee’s face (as Brown & Levinson’s theory states for the act of advice) was not found in the analysed interactions. . I owe this example to one of the anonymous reviewers of this article. . The idea of face-threatening acts as a kind of face-saving acts is suggested by Sifianou (1995: 99) and Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1997: 13). . In turns 2, 4, 6, 26, and 28 a parallel conversation occurs; the topic is not related to the main topic of this extract. . See Appendix for transcription conventions. . Pili is asking for Celia’s dish. . Pili wants to serve a steak to Celia. . In Germany. . These features were found after the analysis of my data (Hernández-Flores 2002) and they are mentioned in sociological studies (De Miguel 1990). . In my data (five real conversations, 210 recorded minutes altogether) no thanks in response to offers were found, in spite of the occurrence of a large number of offers. . This is a known expression from a famous TV Spanish cook, Karlos Arguiñano, when he refers to his dishes. . Instances of non-face-threatening requests in other Spanish-speaking communities can be seen in Márquez Reiter (2000), for example, in relation to the Uruguayan community.

References Albelda, Marta (2004). “Cortesía en diferentes situaciones comunicativas. La conversación coloquial y la entrevista sociológica semiformal”. In D. Bravo & A. Briz (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: Estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 109–134). Barcelona: Ariel. Bayraktaroglu, Arin (1991). “Politeness and interactional imbalance”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 92, 5–34. Bayraktaroglu, Arin (2001). “Advice-giving in Turkish. ‘Superiority’ or ‘solidarity’?” In A. Bayraktaroglu & M. Sifianou (Eds.), Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish (pp. 177–208). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (1997). Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Boretti, Susana (2001). “Aspectos de la cortesía lingüística en el español coloquial de Argentina”. Oralia. Análisis del discurso oral, 4, 75–102. Bravo, Diana (1996). La risa en el regateo: Estudio sobre el estilo comunicativo de negociadores españoles y suecos. Stockholm: Institutionen för spanska och portugisiska.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.18 (282)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

Bravo, Diana (1999). “¿Imagen “positiva” vs. imagen “negativa”? Pragmática socio-cultural y componentes de face”. Oralia. Análisis del discurso oral, 2, 155–184. Bravo, Diana (2000). “La atribución de significados en el discurso hablado: perspectivas extrapersonales e interpersonales”. In F. J. Bustos et al. (Eds.), Lengua, discurso y texto, Vol. II (pp. 1501–1514). Madrid: Visor-UCM. Bravo, Diana (2003). “Actividades de cortesía, imagen social y contextos socioculturales: una introducción”. In D. Bravo (Ed.), Actas del primer coloquio del programa EDICE (pp. 98–108). www.primercoloquio.edice.org Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chen, Rong (2001). “Self-politeness: A proposal”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 87–106. De Kadt, Elizabeth (1998). “The concept of face and its applicability to the Zulu language”. Journal of Pragmatics, 29, 173–191. De Miguel, Amando (1990). Los españoles. Sociología de la vida cotidiana. Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy. Fant, Lars (1989). “Cultural mismatch in conversation: Spanish and Scandinavian communicative behaviour in negotiation settings”. Hermes, 3, 247–265. Fant, Lars (1992). “Scandinavians and Spaniards in negotiation”. In A. Sjögren & L. Janson (Eds.), Culture and Management in the Field of Ethnology and Business Administration (pp. 125–153). Botkyrka: The Swedish Immigrant Institute and Museum. Fraser, Bruce & Nolen, William (1981). “The association of deference with linguistic form”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 27, 93–109. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2001). “Arguing about the future: On indirect disagreements in conversation”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 1881–1900. Goffman, Erving (1967). Interaction Ritual. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Grindsted, Annette (1995). “Dyadic and polyadic sequencing patterns in Spanish and Danish negotiations interaction”. In K. Ehlich & J. Wagner (Eds.), The Discourse of Business Negotiation (pp. 203–221). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Haverkate, Henk (1994). La cortesía verbal. Madrid: Gredos. Held, Gudrun (1992). “Politeness in linguistic research”. In R. Watts, S. Ide, & K. Ehlich (Eds.), Politeness in Language. Studies in its History, Theory and Practice (pp. 131–153). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hernández-Flores, Nieves (1999). “Politeness ideology in Spanish colloquial conversations: The case of advice”. Pragmatics, 9, 1, 37–49. Hernández-Flores, Nieves (2002). La cortesía en la conversación española de familiares y amigos, la búsqueda del equilbrio entre la imagen del hablante y la imagen del destinatario. Aalborg: Institut for Sprog og Internationale Kulturstudier, Vol. 37. Hernández-Flores, Nieves (2003a). “Cortesía y contextos socioculturales en la conversación de familiares y amigos”. 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. 121–127). Stockholm: University of Stockholm. Hernández-Flores, Nieves (2003b). “Los tests de hábitos sociales y su uso en el estudio de la cortesía: una introducción”. 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. 186–197). Stockholm: University of Stockholm.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.19 (283)

Politeness as face enhancement 

Hernández-Flores, Nieves (2004). “La cortesía como la búsqueda del equilibrio de la imagen social”. In D. Bravo & A. Briz (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: Estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 95–108). Barcelona: Ariel. Holmes, Janet (1995). Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman. Holtgraves, Thomas (1992). “The linguistic realization of face management: implications for language production and comprehension, person perception, and cross-cultural communication”. Social Psychology Quarterly, 55(2), 141–159. Kasper, Gabriele (1990). “Linguistic politeness: Current research issues”. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 193–219. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine (1992). Les interactions verbales 2. Paris: A. Colin. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine (1997). “A multilevel approach in the study of talk-in interaction”. Pragmatics, 7(1), 1–20. Koutlaki, Sofia A. (2002). “Offers and expressions of thanks as face enhancing acts: tæ’arof in Persian”. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1733–1756. Lim, Tae-Seop (1994). “Facework and interpersonal relationships”. In S. Ting-Toomey (Ed.), The Challenge of Facework: Cross-Cultural and Interpersonal Issues (pp. 209–229). New York: State University of New York Press. Mao, LuMing (1994). “Beyond politeness theory: Face’ revisited and renewed”. Journal of Pragmatics, 21, 451–486. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2000). Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Matsumoto, Yoshiko (1988). “Reexamination of the universality of face: Politeness phenomena in Japanese”. Journal of Pragmatics, 12(4), 403–426. Meier, Ardith (1995). “Passages of politeness”. Journal of Pragmatics, 24(4), 391–392. Pitt-Rivers, Julian (1991). “Los estereotipos y la realidad acerca de los españoles”. In M. Cátedra (Ed.), Los españoles vistos por los antropólogos (pp. 31–43). Madrid: Júcar Universidad. Schrader-Kniffki, Martina (2001). “Cortesía en transición. La dinámica de la imagen social de los zapotecas bilingües en Oaxaca/ México”. Oralia, 4, 213–241. Scollon, Ron & Scollon, Suzanne Wong (1983). “Face in interethnic communication”. In J. C. Richards & R. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and Communication (pp. 156–188). London: Longman. Sifianou, Maria (1995). “Do we need to be silent to be extremely polite? Silence and FTAs”. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5(1), 95–110. Sifianou, Maria (2001). “‘Oh! How appropriate!’ Compliments and politeness”. In A. Bayraktaroglu & M. Sifianou (Eds.), Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish (pp. 391–430). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Thurén, Britt Marie (1988). Left Hand Left Behind. The Changing Gender System of a Barrio in Valencia, Spain. Stockholm: Stockholms Studies in Social Anthropology. Tzanne, Angeliki (2001). “‘What you’re saying sounds very nice and I’m delighted to hear it’: Some considerations on the functions of presenter-initiated simultaneous speech in Greek panel discussions”. In A. Bayraktaroglu & M. Sifianou (Eds.), Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries: The case of Greek and Turkish (pp. 271–306). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 13:22

F: PB12312.tex / p.20 (284)

 Nieves Hernández-Flores

Villemoes, Anette (1995). “Culturally determined facework priorities in Danish and Spanish business negotiation”. In K. Ehlich & J. Wagner (Eds.), The Discourse of Business Negotiation (pp. 291–312). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Watts, Richard, Ide, Sachiko, & Ehlich, Konrad (Eds.). (1992). Politeness in Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Appendix Transcription conventions Numbers on the left correspond to turns in the conversations : turn , pause, 0–1second . pause, 1–3 seconds (Pause of . . . seconds) pause, over 3 seconds (time is indicated) ¿? questions ¡! exclamations ... lengthened syllable self-interruption muchos loud pronunciation MUCHOS emphatic pronunciation [] overlapping utterance = turn-holding () unintelligible utterance (muchos) uncertain transcription (laughter) contextual comments

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:9/02/2004; 16:37

Metaphor

F: PB123P33.tex / p.1 (285)

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.1 (287)

Chapter 13

Quarrelling about metaphors of love A pragmatic approach* Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

.

Introduction

This study systematically explores some of the cognitive and social factors involved in the construction of meaning through the examination of metaphors in an emotionally-charged face-to-face conversation between a young couple.1 As such, the intention of this article is to further our understanding of how the cognitive and discursive aspects of language interact in order to generate meaning in context, adopting a holistic conception of meaning. Similarly, the need for considering both cognitive and discursive aspects of a metaphor is emphasised here in contrast with the view held by some scholars that it is necessary to distinguish between conceptual-level and discourse-level phenomena (Glucksberg & McGlone 1999). This paper not only offers a pragmatic approach to the study of metaphorical utterances, but also seeks to provide a comprehensive qualitative analysis of a paradigmatic interaction which allows for the identification of the different factors involved in the expression of emotions.

. Meaning in context: A multidisciplinary approach The pragmatic approach I follow applies an interdisciplinary view to the study of metaphors, integrating cognition, and discourse. This is necessary to fully understand the functioning of metaphors. The reductive view proposed by Glucksberg and McGlone (1999) limits understanding of how metaphor plays a role in context. By contrast, the approach adopted here integrates what could be called socio-pragmatics and cognitive science. The socio-pragmatic field

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.2 (288)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

studies “the language users and their conditions of use, making crucial reference to the societal context in which language is used to create, maintain, or change power relations between interlocutors” (Marmaridou 2000: 2). Cognitive science limits the study of language to mental processing of information to fulfil some mental purposes either of a cognitive or a communicative kind. This interdisciplinarity has theoretical and methodological implications for pragmatics as a discipline as discussed in length by Kopytko (2001); some of these implications will be considered here with regard to the theory of metaphor. In consequence, the present study will consist of a microanalysis of the interaction, with three layers of study: the way analogical mappings constitute one of the processes by which the participants conceptualise their experience; the associations these conceptualisations have with socially and culturally evaluated patterns of behaviour and attitudes; and the factors of a social nature that restrict the use of those utterances. The argument between the young couple will be analysed with the purpose of showing how these three layers interact. Blanca and Andrés, two Spaniards from Valencia, in their early twenties, are arguing about themselves as a couple. At the beginning, after an exchange with two female speakers, C and Mercedes (D), Andrés has to admit to Blanca that they are “having problems,” and Blanca wants to know which problems and why. As the interaction develops, Andrés prefers to take an unresponsive and uncommunicative attitude, not yielding to Blanca’s requests to express his feelings or his commitment to the relationship. Since Andrés does not commit, Blanca becomes more demanding and impatient. She resorts to showing her frustration by using strong language while Andrés has to resort to all kinds of strategies in order to avoid expressing his commitment while not breaking up. As they quarrel, two conceptualisations of love and relationships are at play: Love is a unity and An intimate relationship is a close enclosure. But these conceptualisations, which I will analyse in terms of the cognitive semantic theory developed mainly by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), also collide with implicit stereotypical social images as they represent different ways of viewing an intimate relationship or romantic love between both young persons. In psychology, a distinction is made between love as a sentiment and other affective states or emotions, which are temporary and intense. A sentiment is characterised by the duration of affective traits (cf. Ben-Ze’ev 1997). As the reader will see in this interaction, the sentiment is related to the depth of Andrés and Blanca’s commitment, adding the social layer of a long-term relationship to the gamut of feelings that are associated with love. These concepts and views on love are going to be clearly implicit in the words Andrés and Blanca use, and both participants, as will be seen, show an

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.3 (289)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

awareness of those implicit meanings. In this sense, through the analysis of the interaction, we will be able to discover traces of metapragmatic awareness of language and its use and we will be able to observe how this component of meaning determines linguistic choices and the couple’s interpretation of utterances (see Section 2.2). The love Blanca and Andrés try to extricate and show to each other is influenced not only by the cognitive construct that determines the expression of their feelings and also their feelings themselves, but also by the dynamics of the interaction. In these dynamics, the analysis will show how concepts such as face, which I take as the positive self-image the speaker claims for himself (Goffman 1967) (Section 4.1), and footing, the positioning of the self socially constructed in the interaction (Goffman 1981), function while the participants adopt strategies to support or challenge the status of the other person (Labov & Fanshell 1977; see Section 4.2). All of these factors determine the way the linguistic interaction develops. By using these strategies the interactants try to achieve power or dominance over each other. In this context, dominance is a construct of two factors, face and status, “the individual’s position with respect to other individuals,” as Watts (1991: 55) suggests. The question to be posed is which of the speakers achieves dominance in a situation where there is no institutionally defined power structure. One way to achieve dominance could be finding the felicitous metaphor that describes the situation and the conceptualisation of love (Section 3 and further Section 5). These strategies of linguistic behaviour coincide with Holmes’s (1995) findings on differences in politeness between men and women in relation to English. According to her, women tend to use positive politeness strategies understood as the politeness that “‘anoints’ the face of the addressee by indicating that in some respects, S[peaker] wants H[earer]’s wants (e.g. by treating him as a member of an in-group, a friend, a person whose wants and personality traits are known and liked)” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 70). Otherwise, men tend to use negative politeness which, according to Brown and Levinson, is “redressive action addressed to the addressee’s negative face: his want to have his freedom of action unhindered and his attention unimpeded” (1987: 129) (see 4.2.1 and 4.2.2). . Context: A multilayered, dynamic view As a result of the interdisciplinary approach taken here, the concept of context adopted is that of Verschueren (1999). That is, context here includes the physical, the social, and the mental world, which are “somehow activated by

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.4 (290)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

the language users’ cognitive processes” (Verschueren 1999: 77).2 Bearing this in mind, in this conversation, the interactants are not only challenged by each other’s interventions, but also by the fact that they are both aware of the social consequences that their positioning (Goffman 1981) towards love and relationships can bring about. . Metapragmatics and metaphor The conversation examined here is a paradigmatic interaction in which the participants can express and perform changes of view and attitude as a result of being aware of the interplay between what is said and what is implied. Such awareness is partly due to the speaker’s ability to reflect on language and its use, a metapragmatic ability, defined as the pragmatics of pragmatics.3 Reflexivity is an important factor in how the conversation develops, as the participants can be more or less aware of the implied meaning that their words may have. This fact prompts them to negotiate their position towards the concept of love, firstly, by attempting to define how they understand it, and, secondly, by showing awareness of the social stereotypes and conventions generally associated with the linguistic choices they have (see Section 3.1). As will be suggested in Section 3, in order to fully comprehend the use of metaphors, it is necessary to study them in relation to the cognitive concepts they encapsulate. It is also essential to study how the participants position themselves with respect to the cultural models their words convey, and to understand how that positioning can result in a power imbalance in the relationship which, in turn, can affect the way the participants act.4 Although reflexivity is generally identified as a design function of language use, the analysis of metaphorical utterances in context shows that, when uttered, metaphors, in particular, can create this reflexivity, and such act can be especially powerful in influencing the development of a conversation.5 Therefore, metaphor is a phenomenon able to trigger participants’ metapragmatic awareness. This awareness is the result of the capacity that language users have to make linguistic choices on the basis of their mediating roles as utterers and interpreters.6 An example of how a metaphorical utterance can create such awareness in an interaction is the following dialogue taken from Verschueren (1999: 48): (1) 1 Dan: Como is a giant silk worm 2 Debby: Yukh! What a disgusting idea!

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.5 (291)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

This is an instance where the implicatures of metaphorical utterances can be open to agreement or disagreement on the part of the interpreter due to participants’ reflection on what has been said. A varied number of responses could have been given to that metaphorical utterance, and each would have represented one aspect of all those that the metaphor could express. The utterance in (1) also exemplifies a kind of metaphor that can be placed at one end of the continuum of originality since its interpretation must be grounded in the context of the utterance. In other words, the interpreter may decide to “activate the meaning potential that was not intended at all” (Verschueren 1999: 48). It is not so easy to find entirely creative metaphors in interaction since most metaphorical utterances show some degree of fixation and conventionality; however, the use of conventional metaphors is not different from original ones insofar as the former can also achieve subtle degrees of awareness of language and its use. This can be observed at the beginning of the interaction examined. This section starts when Mercedes (D) interrupts a conversation between Andrés and C. When Mercedes intrudes, she is not immediately informed about the topic of their conversation, which happens to be Andrés’s problems, and Mercedes expresses her need for information as follows: (2) 1 C: lo puede saber ¿no? we can tell her, right? 2 A: síi/ claro// total↑ yyyyeah/of course// no big deal 3 D: bueno↓ pues contarme [porque estoy pez] ok so tell me [because I’m totally in the dark] 4 A: [no es-] // no es ningún secreto de estado// [it’s not] // it’s not a state secret//

The utterance porque estoy pez ‘because I am in the dark’ in (2), line 3, implies total ignorance about something and the weak implicature of wanting to know more. In (2), line 4, Andrés (A) replies to Mercedes’s acknowledgement of ignorance with a fixed expression: no es ningún secreto de estado ‘it is not a state secret’. The register of this expression corresponds to the one employed by Mercedes, that is, Andrés chooses another colloquial expression to explain that what they are talking about is something that can be shared with other people, and, by doing so, he implies that she can be part of the conversation. Immediately after this exchange, C says: me parece que [estás sacando=] [. . . ] el problema de [quicio] ‘you are blowing things out of proportion’. This utterance is a prelude to a problem-solving turn or a strategic way of disagreeing with what Andrés is saying in the hope that he will give more details. This

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.6 (292)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

interaction is suddenly aborted by Blanca’s appearance, probably as C is uttering the words in (3) below, lines 6–7. Most obviously in (2), line 3, the choice of metaphor accommodates to the co-text and the informal register of the interaction, but also to the participants’ background knowledge and social world. Knowledge of language and language use is fundamental for achieving communicative goals, and, as the reader can see, even in these common metaphors, a holistic view of meaning is necessary to understand their use as strategies for in-group membership and solidarity. In this regard, metaphors are the result of a cognitive process based on the analogical mapping between discrepant domains that can trigger language users to reflect on what they are saying or what they mean to say.7 The reflection on what has been said, on its references and on its implicatures, has a major role in determining how the talk proceeds and how the participants project their attitudes and views of the world.8 Metaphors are open to being reinterpreted and re-analysed insofar as they can raise such metapragmatic awareness throughout the interaction. Consequently, it is necessary to have an increased consciousness that language is part of the act of communicating itself and, in order to achieve communication and mutual understanding, the participants must solve, first of all, the problems associated with the interpretation of the metaphorical utterance.

. Conceptual metaphors As stated earlier, the view of context supported here is that three strata – the mental, the physical, and the social world – are at play in communication and that both the utterer and the interpreter of the utterances are the focal points. Regarding the mental world, the main question to be addressed is how participants conceptualise reality and emotions, feelings, and needs of love. This conceptualisation is understood through the notions of conceptual analogies or conceptual metaphors. According to Lakoff (1993) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999), conceptual analogies are a cross-domain mapping between a source domain and a target domain. Both domains have “a set of fixed ontological correspondences” and, as those correspondences are activated, the inference patterns from the source domain can be projected on to the target domain (Lakoff 1993: 207). Conceptual metaphor is a cognitive mechanism by which we conceptualise a domain of a subjective experience in terms of a sensorimotor domain (Lakoff & Johnson 1999). In the first metaphor, Love is a unity, love is the target, and

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.7 (293)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

unity is the source domain of the conceptual metaphor.9 Both belong to discrepant or distant domains: love belongs to the domain of feelings, emotions, and psychological or personal experiences while unity is a physical or social concept that is “more physical, and/or more delineated and/or more familiar” (Kövecses 1991: 80). Similarly, in An intimate relationship is a close enclosure, relationships are understood in terms of a close physical space. Conceptual analogies or metaphors have two properties: the power of creating concepts and of conveying a series of implications. Such implications can be inferred in conventionalised linguistic expressions that can also be constructed by those metaphors (Kövecses 1991). The present analysis will next highlight the implications of the metaphorical conceptualisations for our experiencing of emotions. . Presupposed conceptualisations of love From metaphors examined in the literature in connection with the concept of love, Love is a unity (Gibbs 1994), and An intimate relationship is a close enclosure (Lakoff & Johnson 1999 and Section 3.1.2) are metaphors particularly relevant to the present analysis. These metaphors are considered in this section. However, some reference will also be made to Self as container and to Life as a journey. In the context of the interaction examined, both Love is a unity and An intimate relationship is a close enclosure show correspondences within a single metaphorical family where love and relations are conceptualised together, since love generally involves a personal relationship with one person or between two persons. This overlap becomes crucial in the way both Andrés and Blanca express their attitudes towards love and relationships. Conceptual metaphors share a network of coherent metaphorical correspondences in which “various metaphorical structurings of a concept serve different purposes by highlighting different aspects of the concept” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 96). For the purpose of the present analysis, these conceptual metaphors will be the presupposed cognitive framework of the interaction.10 .. Love is a unity This metaphor is expressed by Andrés early in the interaction as can be seen in (3) where he speaks of compartirlo todo ‘to share everything’: (3) 1 C: [. . . ] ELLA NO TIENE LA CULPA§ [. . . ] IT’S NOT HER FAULT

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.8 (294)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

2 A:

§SÍ/ YA LO SÉ/ ELLA ES MI YEAH/ I ALREADY KNOW/ SHE IS MY 3 PAREJA/ Y TIENE QUE COMPATIRLO TODO GIRLFRIEND AND /SHE HAS TO SHARE EVERYTHING 4 CONMIGO/ si yo tengo problemas/ tengo que WITH ME/ if I have problems/ I have to 5 compartirlos con ella↑ / etcétera etcétera etcétera§11 share them with her/ etc., etc., etc. 6 C: §tío sabes qué me parece↑? que estás c’mon do you know what I think? That you’re 7 actuando como un absoluto egoísta§ acting in a completely selfish way

Later on Blanca makes explicit reference to it in the following lines: (4) 1 B: ES QUE ¡JODER!/// (3”) es que eres un egoísta tú y I MEAN–FUCK!///(3”) look you’re so selfish you 2 tú y tú encierras y tú eres todo ¡coño! pues si no – and you and you and you – and you close yourself off and everything’s about you/ fucking hell! Look if 3 compartes conmigo las cosas no sé qué [cojones you don’t share things with me I don’t know what the fuck 4 quieres que te diga]. you want me to tell you

In Blanca’s case, this concept is connected explicitly with finding out why they are dating, as expressed in (5): (5) 1 B: 2 3 4 5 6 7

§PERO ME BUT YOU NEED NECESITAS ¿PARA QUÉ? NANO/ ¿PARA QUÉ ME. FOR WHAT? WHY DO YOU NEED ME NECESITAS? PARA LOS MOMENTOS EN ME? FOR THOSE MOMENTS WHEN QUE TÚ ESTÁS BIEN?/ ¿PARA QUÉ// PARA YOU’RE WELL?/ FOR WHAT? FOR A GOOD METERNOS EL ROLLO Y YA ESTÁ? ¿PARA FUCK? IS THAT WHAT ESO ME NECESITAS? YO NECESITO YOU NEED ME FOR? I NEED COMPARTIR MÁS COSAS§ TO SHARE MORE THAN THAT

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.9 (295)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

8 A: 9

§NO↓ TÚ SABES QUE YO NO YOU KNOW THAT I ONLYSÓLO- NO NO SÓLO TE PIDO ESO (3”) I DON’T JUST ASK THAT FROM YOU

In this extract, when Blanca attempts to summarise the basis of their relationship, she raises a question which is ambiguous: ¿para qué, para meternos el rollo? Meterse el rollo may be a common expression in her idiolect or it may be related to enrollarse which, in this context, can mean ‘to talk at length’ or ‘to get involved with somebody,’ probably with sexual implications. If to talk at length is what she means, Blanca is implying that perhaps talk on its own may be in vain and purposeless, while taking action is fulfilling and purposeful. There appears to be some kind of challenge on Blanca’s part as evidenced by Andrés’s reply in (5), lines 8–9. Andrés seems to admit that he expects something more than just empty talk or physical contact from their relationship. Therefore, one could argue that by using this metaphor, Blanca is trying to challenge Andrés to express his view on where the relationship is leading. The extracts just cited have shown positive views of the metaphor Love is a unity. This concept, as suggested earlier, is implicit in the idea of sharing and the attitudes expected from a relationship, such as openness and commitment. However, there are also negative attitudes attached to the possible behaviours connected with this metaphor; these are contrary to both openness and commitment. These attitudes are expressed by the accusation of ser egoísta ‘to be selfish’, made against Andrés, first, by a female friend (C), in (3) above, and also by Blanca in lines (6) below where the metaphor encerrarse ‘to close oneself off ’ is connected to ‘sharing’: (6) 1 2 3 4 5 6

[si] / si- es que no me cuentas nada/ no me [if] if/- you don’t explain anything/ anything cuentas- / te veo todo el rato↓ igual estás superbién /I see you all the time in general you seem great conmigo↑ahí superbién↑ ¿no? y no con todo el with me really great, right? and with everybody mundo↓y de repente te encierras↑ tío↑ yo no sé qué te and all of a sudden you close yourself off// I don’t know what’s pasa↑ si es que tienes algún problema en casa o algo↑ wrong with you if you have a problem at home or something tío↑ / y de repente te encierras y ya no quieres hablar and suddenly you shut yourself off and you don’t want to talk

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.10 (296)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

7

con nada/ ya no me diriges la palabra↑ te vas solo with anyone/ now you don’t communicate with me you’re off alone 8 tío↑ / y tengo que ir por ahí como una idiota pululando and I have to go wandering around like an idiot 9 a ver dónde estás/// yo qué sé me parece un poco mal looking for you/// I don’t know it seems a little off 10 A: es [que→] I mean 11 B: [porque] TÍO SI TIENES ALGÚN PROBLEMA [because] MAN IF YOU HAVE SOME PROBLEM 12 CUÉNTAMELO E INTENTARÉ= TELL ME AND I WILL TRY 13 A: [VALE/ SÍ] [OK/ YES] 14 =AYUDARTE TO HELP YOU

As an answer, Andrés’s typical argument, son problemas míos ‘these are my problems’, implies that Blanca has nothing to do with the problems arising in the conversation, and also that the conversation has to end because he does not feel he needs to share or explain the reasons behind his actions toward her. As the reader will see in the next section, in (7) Andrés is trying to focus on those negative aspects of another conceptual metaphor: close enclosure. (7) 1 A: §ES- ES- SON PROBLEMAS MÍOS↓ IT’S- IT’S THAT LOOK THEY’RE SIMPLY MY PROBLEMS/ 2 SIMPLEMENTE TENGO QUE ARREGLARME I HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF THEM MYSELF/ AND – 3 YO/ Y- Y UNA VEZ ESTÉ ARREGLADO/ SÉ QUE AND ONCE EVERYTHING IS WORKED OUT I KNOW 4 PODRÉ ESTAR [BIEN CONTIGO] THAT I CAN BE GOOD WITH YOU

The linguistic realisations that represent the metaphor Love is a unity embrace the whole gamut of the experience of love and to some extent create the emotion of love. As in the case of Self as a container, the experience of love is one of reaching out to somebody else and joining in a compromise to ‘advance together’. Extract (8) shows how the conceptualisation of Love is a unity can be associated with social roles and identities as it implicates the concept of commitment and compromise towards the other part in the unity.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.11 (297)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

(pues mira yo no sé lo que quieres)o /// (4”) ¿para qué (well look, I don’t know what it is you want)/// 2 me necesitas? a ver what do you need me for? Let’s see 3 A: mmm -es- es que no lo sé/ o sea tú sabes que- que simmm- it’s – it’s that I don’t know/ I mean you 4 sin ti de ya- se me hunde↑ lo poco que tengo de lo know that- that with – without you the little I have 5 demás§ falls apart 6 B: §o sea tú quieres que esté aquí aguantando so you want me to stay here and put up 7 ¿no? ¿es eso lo que me estás pidiendo? with this, right? Is that what you’re asking from me? 8 A: NOOO§ NOOO 9 B: §DÍMELO/ NO↓ DÍMELO/ ¿TÚ QUIERES TELL ME/ NO TELL ME/ YOU WANT 11 QUE ESTÉ YO AQUÍ AGUANTANDO QUE TÚ ME TO BE HERE PUTTING UP WITH YOUR 12 ESTÉS MAL?§ NOT FEELING WELL? 13 A: §NO QUIERO QUE I DON’T WANT 14 ESTÉS AGUANTANDO YOU TO HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS 15 B: ENTONCES ¿QUÉ QUIERES QUE HAGA?/ SO WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO? 16 ¡HOSTIA! ES QUE/ HOLY SHIT! I MEAN/

(8) 1 B:

o

In this extract, the discussion is subtly centred on the fact that Blanca has to be patient with Andrés not being well. She has to aguantar ‘put up with it’ while he gets better. Immediately, other implicit meanings seem to be tackled at this point, which force Andrés to say that Blanca does not have to put up with it. I would argue that aguantar could also imply here the traditional role of a woman waiting for the man. Andrés does not say that Blanca has to put up with his problems, something that she seems willing to do in her role as friend or confidant (see 4.2.3). He seems to be denying the implicature that she has to wait for him until he solves his own problems.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.12 (298)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

As remarked earlier, there are correspondences between different conceptualisations of love since a feature of conceptual metaphors is the coherence across different metaphors, which specialise in one aspect of the concept. Hence, Love is a unity stresses the final stage or purpose of a love relationship, but the same metaphor can entail a process of both union and of separation. In the case we are discussing, the notions of compromise and commitment seem to be an important component of love.12 Compromise is implicit in the metaphor of Love is a unity; in the words of Kövecses, “the notion of a single matching partner leads to the belief that the other is irreplaceable, it is understandable why we wish that our true love should last forever” (1988: 82). But in psychological matters and, as pointed out in Section 2, this is also related to the intensity and duration of the feelings, and, from a social point of view, can also be identified with certain roles and expectations. Let us now focus on the other conceptual metaphor. .. An intimate relationship is a close enclosure The participants conceptualise their relationship in the cross-mapping of entities from a close enclosure and the intimate relationship. The conceptual metaphor is full of negative implications, as for instance, in the verb atar ‘to tie someone/something’ in (9), line 8. (9) 1 A: §mira/ yo/ siempre he pensado que nunca había- que look/ I’ve/ always thought that it’d never be- that 2 noo estoy todavía preparado/ me da la impresión de I’m not ready yet/ I have the impression that I have 3 que tengo que hacer muchas cosas↑ / antes de poder to do many things/ before being able 4 dedicarme a salir con alguien/// y que/ y que/ no tengo to dedicate myself to go out with someone/// and that/ and that/ 5 tiempo para hacer todas esas cosas / y- y dedicarle I don’t have time to do all these things/ and- and devote 6 tiempo A ELLA/ yo creo quee sí que la quiero pero time TO HER/ I think that I love her but 7 noo// no sé I I I I I / don’t know 8 C: ya/ que no te apetece estar ahora estar atado a nadie ok/ right now you’d rather not be tied to anyone

Blanca uses other expressions such as agobiar ‘to hassle or stress someone’ when she asks Andrés tío// yo no te quiero agobiar perooo/ me gustaría que me dijeras lo

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.13 (299)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

que te pasa ‘I don’t want to harass you too much buuuut/ I’d like you to tell me what’s going on’,13 and acaparar ‘to hog, to monopolize or dominate someone’, as in (10), in order to argue that she does not want to be possessive. (10) 1 B: 2 3 A: 4 B: 5 A: 6 7 B: 8

§pero ¿QUÉ’S que yo but WHAT IS IT? Do I te acaparo demasiado? dominate you too much? no§ no §¿es que te quito mucho tiempo?§ is it that I take too much of your time? §no yo SÉ que no I know debería darte más tiempo↓ del que te doy I should be giving you more time than I do pero si yo no te pido más tiempo↓ yo lo que te pido es but if I don’t ask for more of your time what I ask que estés SEGURO/ is that you should be SURE/

The same idea is conveyed by Blanca’s use of the verb pedir ‘to request’ as can be seen in (10), line 7, above. By using pedir instead of exigir ‘to demand’, for example, she is careful to avoid placing strong demands on Andrés and being overbearing.14 In (11), Andrés puts forward his final argument with a trace of feeling overwhelmed and lacking space to think or express something without being anticipated by Blanca:15 (11) 1 A: MIRA/ ¿QUÉ PASA? YO TE CUENTO LO QUE LOOK/ WHAT’S UP? I TELL YOU WHAT 2 PIENSO/ Y COMO TÚ CREES CONOCER I THINK/ AND SINCE YOU THINK YOU 3 PERFECTAMENTE TODO LO QUE YO PIENSO/ KNOW PERFECTLY EVERYTHING THAT I 4 YA DICES/ PUES MIRA ESTO NO ESTO NO ESTO THINK/ YOU’RE ALREADY SAYING/ WELL 5 NO ESTO SÍ ESTO/ ESTO NO/ LOOK THIS NO & THIS NO & THIS NO & THIS YES

Andrés is alluding to Blanca’s attitude as being overbearing and demanding.16

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.14 (300)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

The implicit meanings related to the concept of love are associated with its metaphorical conceptualisation and, as I have attempted to show, this metaphorical conceptualisation partly restricts and motivates the inferential processes. It would seem that Blanca and Andrés do not wish to be seen as a couple with hastily established and too strong links, that is, with no space for freedom or personal development. They seem to imply that the above expressions in the conceptual framework of a close enclosure can be associated with other negative experiences such as lack of space or even claustrophobia. Both conceptual metaphors, Love is a unity and An intimate relationship is a close enclosure, represent two sides of the same coin and they seem to be a standard conception of love and relationship in our days. Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) general theory of conceptual metaphor is partial in their restriction of the phenomenon of metaphor to a cognitive process whereas, Geeraerts and Grondelaers (1995) have stressed how important cultural traditions are in the conceptualisation of emotions such as anger. As I have shown, crossdomain mappings function at an abstract level. Although conceptual meaning is grounded in everyday experience and knowledge, awareness of the implicit meaning can be conventionally inferred when language is used with inferential processes to determine the interpretation of utterances. Now, I will expand on questions related to the interaction and how the concepts of self and love as an emotion or sentiment are negotiated through the interaction and the major concepts which surface in the use of language.

. Emotion and self-presentation In Section 2, I mentioned that psychological aspects of love as a sentiment differ from other temporary and intense affective states, which would be called emotion. From a socio-psychological point of view, affective states are complex and they consist of “. . . subjective feelings, physiological reactions, behavioural responses, and cognitive processes” (Fussell & Moss 1998: 116). The social aspect of these manifestations of an emotion is what will be discussed in this section. The metaphorical concept Love is a unity (Section 3.1.1) already has shown some implications of the ideas of commitment and compromise in the conceptualisation of love, but in the case of Blanca, in particular, this compromise is related to the depth of the commitment and it is identified with the reciprocation of love. According to Cloven and Roloff ’s study of young couples and dating, this reciprocation of love has been discovered to be a strategy and

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.15 (301)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

they have found it to be particularly common among women in order to keep power relations (Cloven & Roloff 1993). The expression of love can be subjected in interaction to stereotypes commonly associated with the presentation of the self and the perspectives that participants may take while they are talking or, as in our case, arguing about it. In order to understand how power relations are established in this interaction, I think that the presentation of self must be explained according to the concepts of face and footing. These two concepts give an insight into how the cognitive and the social levels are anchored, developed and manifested in the process of the interaction. I will analyse both concepts in relation to the socially stamped conceptualisations of love previously studied. . Blanca and Andrés, face to face Face, as described in Section 2, is a positive image of the self adopted or assigned to the speaker. It is characterised by being consistent and institutionalised, and developed by “a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he [the speaker] expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself ” (Goffman 1967: 5). In Andrés’s and Blanca’s conflictive interchanges clear face implications can be found. While Blanca claims positive politeness / interdependence / solidarity / involvement in ‘why don’t you talk to me, etc.’, Andrés claims negative politeness / independence / autonomy in ‘don’t intrude’. It is clear that Andrés does not want Blanca to impose upon him. In some way, every time Andrés proposes an explanation of why he feels the way he feels, as seen in extracts (4), (5), and (6), Blanca takes a stronger position so as to challenge Andrés’s commitment to the relationship. In (12) Blanca suggests ending the relationship, (12) 1B: QUIERO QUE HAGAS/ QUE ME DIGAS SI I WANT YOU TO DO/ THAT YOU TELL ME IF 2 QUIERES SEGUIR O SI QUIERES YOU WANT TO STAY TOGETHER OR IF YOU WANT 3 CORTAR/ PERO YO ASÍ NO PUEDO ESTAR/ TO BREAK UP/ BUT I CAN’T BE LIKE THIS/ I CAN’T

In order not to make her challenge into a face-threatening act, she must adopt different strategies. These strategies can be seen in terms of shift of footing (Goffman 1981), as the reader will see next.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.16 (302)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

. Footing and strategies A close look at the interaction shows different roles in Blanca’s portrayal of face, and in the way Andrés avoids expressing his feelings. Studying how the participants position themselves in relation to the cultural models their words convey will help explain how any shift in perspective as expressed by their choice of words means an attempt to unbalance power relations affecting their social image. Goffman defines footing in terms of alignments and shift according to a concept of self that is socially constructed in an interactive context. Footing is a social construct that emerges through the way the participants in the interaction handle the production and reception of utterances (Goffman 1981). This concept helps to understand the relationship between “participation frameworks and social interaction” (Schiffrin 1994: 104).17 Departing from Goffman and his dyadic distinction between producers and recipients with two types of participant status, participant and nonparticipant,18 Levinson (1988) distinguishes essentially three participant roles: author, who will identify with the usual concept of speaker, the relayer, transmitter of the message but not the source, and the indirect source, not transmitter but the source of the message.19 Among those roles, the figure of the “authorised speaker” in terms of Levinson’s categorization (1988: 187) is relevant to describe Andrés’s attitude and his need to justify his inability to say what he thinks or feels. The main problem for the analyst remains to determine whether the participants selected their roles themselves or whether these were determined by particular contextual factors. Should the latter be the case, the analyst’s additional task would be to identify what those roles were and how they were expressed. .. Blanca and Andrés’s strategies The interaction between Blanca and Andrés wavers between the alternatives “to love” or “I don’t know,” between the lack of definition in the relationship on Andrés’s part, and Blanca’s demand for a definitive answer one way or another. As seen in Section 3.1.2, the conceptual metaphor An intimate relationship is a close enclosure has clearly negative implications regarding the level of commitment and freedom of action. The stereotypical argument Andrés adopts is that the situation has nothing to do with Blanca, but that son problemas míos ‘they are my problems’ as in (8) (Section 3.1.1). However, if Andres’s attitude shows that he chooses to define himself as a closed entity in relation to Blanca, he defines his own self in terms of others and what others think or say.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.17 (303)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

Andrés’s need for social support can already be seen in the first section of the transcribed interaction. At the beginning, Andrés is talking to Mercedes (D) and speaker C, as we have seen in (3) Section 3.1.1 above, and his need to share his problem is obvious. He confides in both friends before telling Blanca that there is a problem. In (3) line 5, Andrés identifies certain duties as conventional knowledge from his use of etcétera implying some common sense kind of knowledge. Andrés is attributing what he is supposed to do to a compulsive need. The position of dominance Andrés takes by using this strategy is one that causes C to react quite emotionally accusing him of being an absolutely selfish person. In (13) it is possible to see that Andres’s defensive and uncommitted attitude clashes with Blanca’s resolve to extract a clear response or a commitment from him and we can observe some verbal aggression that will be obvious at a later stage. (13) 1 A: mira↓ no lo sé/ cre- es que no no no- es que ya no look I don’t know/ do you–think that I’m not- it’s 2 estoy seguro de nada that now I’m not sure of anything 3 B: pero ¿de qué? ¿de lo de salir conmigo? but, of what? Of going out with me? 4 A: no lo sé I don’t know 5 B: pero ¿lo quieres dejar? but, do you want to break up? 6 A: NO QUIERO DEJARLO// PERO/ RECONÓCELO/ I DON’T WANT TO BREAK UP// BUT/ ADMIT IT/ 7 NO VAMOS BIEN THINGS AREN’T GOING WELL 8 B: yo creo que no vamos bien porque tú no quieres. I think we aren’t going well because you don’t want

Andrés refuses to express his feelings to Blanca, and says that his problems are in his social life. He acknowledges this explicitly in (14). (14) 1 A: no si/ TÚ NO TE HAS PORTADO MAL// pero → no no of course/ YOU HAVEN’T ACTED BADLY// but 2 lo sé/ hay veces que- que me da la impresión de que/ I don’t know/ sometimes I get the impression that/ 3 cuando estoy con mis amigos me-/ me miras como si when I’m with my friends you- you look at me as if

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.18 (304)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

4

me dijeras ¿por qué estás ahí? / ¿sabes? you would say, why are you with them?/ you know? 5 B: o (¿¡pero qué dices!?) o (what are you talking about?!) 6 A: o igual son imaginaciones MÍAS or maybe it’s MY imagination

In this extract, Andrés proposes a reading of how he views himself again in a social context, but he states what he feels Blanca is thinking about him. Andrés repeatedly uses the strategy of direct speech, the reproduction of real, possible, or imaginary utterances (Reyes 1993), in order to share his doubts and feelings of uncertainty. By means of direct speech Andrés is attributing certain attitudes to Blanca, and also implicating her in the way he is feeling. Perhaps Andrés is unsuccessfully trying to acquire the authorised speaker’s (Levinson 1988: 187) voice (see Section 4.2 above); that is to say, by attributing his thoughts to Blanca in direct speech, Andrés wants to authorise his perception and implicate that they are not only imaginaciones mías ‘my imagination’.20 In (15), Andrés speaks of how he acts in relation to feelings that are for the most part inexpressible. (15) 1 A: SE ME JUNTAN LAS COSAS// llega un momento TOO MANY THINGS ARE GOING ON IN MY LIFE// there comes a moment 2 que vas aguantando y que las cosas se juntan y dices/ when you’re putting up with everything and everything becomes so overwhelming and you say to yourself/ 3 PUES NO/ TENGO QUE PARARME/ Y- Y DECIDIR WELL NO/ I HAVE TO STOP MYSELF/ AND- AND DECIDE 4 B: pero ¿te refieres a nosotros? but, do you mean us? 5 A: A NOSOTROS Y A TODO LO DEMÁS/// I MEAN US AND TO EVERYONE ELSE///

Again here Andrés associates his own behaviour to common activities as the tú form vas aguantando and dices imply. Andrés’s use of first person is a footing of author who knows ‘what is normally done’.21 The first person reflects Andrés’s own situation and that of those people who, like him, go through the same experience. This is an implicit way of giving force to his utterance and his whole argument, as shown in the extract above. The change from first to second person serves as a signal for evaluation of the small narrative provided in

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.19 (305)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

this extract by alluding to a general and common situation and thus reinforcing his non-committal attitude towards Blanca. At the same time, another subtle variation of perspective can create a sense of authority and dominance, a similar strategy as Blanca in her expression of love towards Andrés in (16): (16) 1 B: [PORQUE LA VERDAD ES QUE EN TU VIDA YA [BECAUSE THE TRUTH IS THAT IN YOUR LIFE 2 SABES QUIÉN TE QUIERE DE VERDAD] YOU ALREADY KNOW WHO REALLY LOVES YOU] 3 A: [¡NO ME DIGAS ESO! TÚ SABES] QUE YO TE DON’T TELL ME THAT! YOU KNOW] THAT 4 NECESITO// I NEED YOU

The impersonality of the subject makes the statement more poignant and difficult to contradict and, for the first time in this interaction, Blanca manages to get Andrés to express some kind of feeling or emotion towards her. The use of these strategies explains Andrés’s attempts to blame Blanca or external causes for his situation. Blanca is prone to accept and understand Andrés’s problems. But this attitude of acceptance and understanding is also problematic since Blanca is divided between the roles she wishes to take on and the demands she exerts upon Andrés. .. Blanca’s social harmony and self-assuredness Andrés’s inability to express himself divides Blanca between two poles. In this section, I will show how, on the one hand, it is her conceptualisation of love as a unity which takes the social dimensions of correspondence and reciprocity, and, on the other, the relation of her anger and frustration to her need for harmony, which she seems to need to maintain. The first pole is centred on the conceptions of love and relationships considered in the previous sections. It is connected to socially stamped notions of a lasting, stable relationship and to expectations of openness and friendship from someone who is an intimate, somebody with whom the relationship is close. For this reason, “negative information is tolerated more, and close personal information is not only tolerated but even expected” as Planalp (1999: 118 and ff.) describes from a psychological perspective. The opposite pole includes Blanca’s conflict between challenging Andrés and openly articulating her emotions and demands, for which she may be deemed as violent and aggressive, and her need to keep the harmony of her social and, particularly, emotional rela-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.20 (306)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

tionship with Andrés. In contrast with Andrés’s uncooperative attitude, Blanca is, at the beginning, extremely cooperative and understanding. .. Blanca’s roles As I have already pointed out, both conceptual metaphors have a social reflection in the attitudes and roles the participants choose to display. Blanca’s positive politeness strategies serve the function of “minimizing the particular imposition” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 129) of Andrés’s non-committal attitude towards her. In a situation as the present one, both attitudes correspond to the occurrence of mixed emotions of frustration and affection that clash at different moments; nevertheless, Blanca’s general tendency at the beginning is to be co-operative, understanding, and supportive of Andrés’s negative face. In this regard, Blanca presents herself in a series of roles. The role of ‘help/confidant’ is found in a passage where the reader can see how Blanca’s challenging attitude and this role are conflicting. She is a ‘friend’: pero- por lo menos si tienes un problema me gustaría que confiaras en mí↓ ya como amiga/ o (además que)o ‘but- at least if you have a problem I would like you to confide in me like a friend/ (and what’s more)’. In (17) implicitly Blanca is more like a girlfriend or partner: (17) 1 B: [PERO ES QUE] ESO NO ES PROBLEMA TUYO↓ [BUT] THIS IS NOT JUST YOUR OWN PROBLEM 2 ESO TAMBIÉN ES PROBLEMA→ QUE A MÍ ME THIS IS ALSO A PROBLEM WHICH AFFECTS 3 AFECTA/ ANDRÉS. ME/ ANDRÉS

Blanca tries both to challenge and support Andrés. In this case, support is a “form of behaviour which would reinforce or raise the status of the other person” (Labov & Fanshell 1977: 64) while a request such as si tienes algún problema cuéntamelo ‘if you have some kind of problem tell me’ is the basis of her challenge. In Labov and Fanshell’s words, a challenge is “any reference by direct assertion or more indirect reference to a situation, which if true, would lower the status of the other person,” thus constituting a face threatening act (1977: 64). A challenge can come as a result of the repetition of a request and this noticeably happens in the interaction examined. Besides the one just considered, other instances of requests made by Blanca to Andrés to express or explain his problems have already been quoted in (6), lines 5–8 or in Section 3.1.1.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.21 (307)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

Blanca is aware of the problems challenging Andrés can bring so she uses mitigating utterances in order to preserve social harmony. This awareness seems to be implicit in (6) (see 3.1.1) where Blanca delivers a short narrative. This narrative describes a real scene as typical of what is going on, and at the same time she tries to interpret and evaluate Andrés’s attitude negatively, and she positions herself as the victim of Andrés’s behaviour: y tengo que ir por ahí como una idiota pululando a ver dónde estás/// yo qué sé me parece un poco mal ‘and I have to go wandering around like an idiot trying to find you/// I don’t know, to me it seems a little off ’. However, her accusation is made in a mitigated manner, using all kinds of expressions indicating that it is her point of view: yo qué sé me parece. . . ‘I don’t know to me it seems. . . ’. Similarly, in a moment of anger, Blanca tells Andrés that he is selfish while also addressing him as cariño ‘darling’. Both sides show once more the clash between Blanca’s demands for commitment and her need to maintain the social harmony of the relationship (see also Section 3.1.2). . Verbal directness and physiological reactions As Blanca gets angry, she shows a greater degree of directness in her use of expletive terms and expressions with explicit physical and sexual reference. This is the case especially in two moments of anger. First, in extract (4) quoted in 3.1.1, and then in the following extract: (18) 1 B: pero tío/ tú estás de psicólogo↓ nano/ ¡yo flipo! but man/ you need to go to a psychologist/ It’s making me crazy! 2 A: sí [yo estoy muy filósofo últimamente] yes [I’ve been very philosophical lately] 3 B: [SÍ PERO ES QUE]/ PERO YO ¡PERO YO ¡QUÉ [YEAH BUT IT’S THAT I]/ BUT I. . . WHAT THE 4 COÑO! A VER ANDRÉS/ mira↓ paso↓ es que no me FUCK!/ LOOK ANDRES/ Look I’m I don’t want 5 quiero enfadar/ YO- YO ¿¡COMO VOY A SABER to get mad/ I- I HOW AM I GOING TO KNOW 6 LO QUE TÚ PIENSAS Y LO QUE TÚ QUIERES!? WHAT YOU’RE THINKING AND WHAT YOU 7 SI HE VENIDO AQUÍ PARA HABLAR CONTIGO WANT!?/ IF I CAME HERE TO SPEAK WITH 8 Y DECIRTE QUÉ COJONES TE PASA/ A VER YOU AND TO TELL YOU WHAT THE FUCK IS

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.22 (308)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

9

¿¡QUÉ QUIERES QUE TE DIGA YA!? ¡HOSTIA! GOING ON WITH YOU/ LOOK WHAT DO YOU 10 ES QUE / YO ESTOY HASTA LA POLLA WANT ME TO SAY NOW!? IT’S THAT/ I’M SO FUCKING TIRED OF YOUR BULLSHIT 11 A: venga va/ no seas ridícula come on/ don’t be ridiculous

In general, the utterance estar hasta. . . is used to imply being extremely fed up by somebody or something. It is found in many expressions, most often referring to body parts: estar hasta la coronilla, hasta la nariz, which literally refer to the crown of the head and the nose, respectively, and are perhaps the most common. In less formal language other body parts such as estoy hasta los cojones ‘I’m up to my balls’, estar hasta los huevos ‘to be up to one’s eggs,’ eggs a euphemism for balls, or hasta el culo ‘up to one’s arse,’ also used by Blanca, can be employed to express extreme annoyance. Estar hasta la polla ‘to be up to one’s prick’ used by Blanca in line 10 in the extract above, can be interpreted as an intensification of her anger, a change in Blanca’s footing. Although the three former expressions can be easily said by men and women alike in a very informal setting, Andrés’s reaction no seas ridícula ‘come on/ don’t be ridiculous’ seems to be a metapragmatic comment to the effect that it is not appropriate for Blanca to use estoy hasta la polla, probably due to the transparency of polla. It seems that the perspective implied by Blanca’s use of estar hasta la polla conveys a change of footing to a more male aggressive role that coincides with the whole section where Blanca lets her frustration become anger.22 Blanca’s change in perspective involves a change in the self she has adopted in this interaction from that of a receptor of Andrés’s difficulties in expressing his feelings, to an aggressive role normally associated with male attributes through the metonymic transfer of power to sexual prominence.23 Andrés avoids the more colloquial register except in the following excerpt where he answers back using the same register. (19) 1 A: MIRA/VAMOS A DEJARLO/ VAMOS A PASAR A: LOOK/ LET’S JUST DROP IT/ LET’S JUST GET THROUGH 2 LO QUE QUEDA DE ACAMPADA BIEN WHAT’S LEFT OF THE CAMPING TRIP 3 PORQUE/ NO ES PLAN DE JODER EL BECAUSE/ LET’S NOT FUCK UP

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.23 (309)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach 

4

AMBIENTE QUE HAY AHÍ BAJO / THE MOOD HERE / 5 B: §pero si es que yo no he jodido nada ¿eh?§ B: but I have not fucked up anything

Andrés’s utterance, no es plan de joder el ambiente ‘let’s not fuck up the mood’ leads Blanca to react angrily. In fact, Blanca’s reaction coincides with the importance she has awarded to keeping social harmony; the implicit accusation that she could have been one of the persons that has disrupted the mood of the outing leads her to more anger. This utterance shows how Blanca’s metapragmatic reflection of what Andrés is implying by his use of the impersonal form no es plan, literally ‘it is not a plan’, angers her. The relationship between the expression of frustration and anger, use of expletive terms and her attempts at dominance is also related to physiological responses to complex affective states such as these. Blanca’s choice of wording, then, is due to an emotional reaction to Andrés’s non-committal attitude. Her emotional distress may justify her shift in perspective since her footing has changed from a co-operative and solidarity role, to a role which can command threatening and antagonistic attitudes.24 As the analysis of Blanca’s and Andrés’s interaction shows, politeness plays a major role since the participants display similar attitudes to those found by Holmes (1995) in English.25 Females seem to emphasise solidarity, understanding, and cooperation, while males tend to challenge and interrupt more and appear to be more antagonistic and in our case, this attitude causes Blanca to contradict herself. Perhaps another important issue at hand is that neither Blanca nor Andrés seem to be able to find the right metaphor to conceptualise their romantic relationship. The struggle to define it and not to damage their face is one of the questions at stake here. In the following section, I will conclude the analysis by referring to aspects concerning how the roles described above reflect patterns of power and dominance in interaction.

. Commitment and non-commitment If we believe that Blanca’s interactional goal is to get a clear commitment from Andrés to what Blanca understands as being in a relationship, she has partly achieved that goal, but, as I have shown, only after using a series of strategies deployed to make Blanca’s view on the relationship and love adequate or felicitous. In general, power relations are usually asymmetrical and characterised

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.24 (310)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

by two elements: face and status, that is to say, the “individual’s position in the structure of social relationships with respect to other individuals” (Watts 1991: 55). Both of these can lead to “dominance” or “power” as the capacity of “imposing one’s will” (Watts 1991: 56–57), since a dominant person is someone who “is perceived by the other participants to assume, rightly or wrongly, a position of higher status and to act on this assumption in preventing others from achieving their interactional goals” (Watts 1991: 55). In our case the concept is difficult to define because the balance of power between Andrés and Blanca is not obvious. In an interpersonal relationship such as this one, participants cannot achieve dominance because factors such as emotions and socially stamped conceptualisations of love can threaten their face. As Mey says, metaphor use depends on “how felicitous is a particular metaphor in a particular context (e.g. solving a problem, obtaining consensus, elucidating a difficult subject matter, and so on)” (Mey 1993: 62). Nonetheless, a clear-cut distinction cannot always be made. It is participants’ awareness of the implicit meanings of the utterances which plays an important role in how those metaphors are used, and determines also the way the interaction develops.26 Table 1 presents an attempt to integrate the main perspectives taken in the interaction examined. It reflects the main metaphorical conceptualisations discussed in this paper, which have a surface linguistic representation. Through these conceptualisations, the participants try to control the way their relationship is going by restricting the interpretation of the implicit senses of the words uttered. Both Andrés and Blanca struggle for words: Andrés to find the right metaphor to convey what they mean to each other and to maintain his face, and Blanca, to avoid the stigma of being overbearing or too demanding, eliciting at the same time, some kind of commitment on Andrés’s part. Blanca, nevertheless, gives in to her emotional distress. The attempt for dominance is, then, more obvious because Blanca has used up all her resources to obtain a clear answer from Andrés in order to define the state of their relationship. The role of the metapragmatic factor is obvious in both cases since both Andrés and Blanca are aware of and identify the implicit meanings associated with the use of language.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.25 (311)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach

Table 1. Summary of concepts, linguistic forms and participants’ attitudes in the extract examined       

   “compartirlo todo”

“ser egoísta”

3.1.1: (3), (4), (5) and (6)

3.1.1: (4)

“aguantar”

“son problemas míos”

(6) and (8)

(7)

“estar atado”, “atar a alguien” (9) (Section 3.1.2) “agobiar”, “acaparar” (10) “pedir” (see Section 3.1.2):

Implicit sense: 3.1.1 (7) “having to wait for him

Implicit negative sense:

to make a decision.”

“being tied and restricted by

Passive position of the woman as expected in their traditional roles.

the relationship” (11)

Social reactions and attitudes: Contrary to the expectations about relationships in young independent persons

Blanca’s attitude: Reciprocation of love (4.2.3) Roles: (Section 4.2.1) (16) Help, Confidant, Friend, Girlfriend

Blanca’s reaction: “estoy hasta la polla” (Section 4.3 (18)).

Andrés’ attitude “I don’t know” non-committal Section 4.2.1 (13) Author: Section 4.2.1 (14–16)

Andrés’ strategies: Apologies and accusation that she pre-empts anything he does or says (4.2.1)

. Final remarks Through the examination of the interaction between Andres and Blanca, this paper has provided an overview of the role of a number of cognitive and discursive factors in the production and understanding of meaning in context. The conversation analysed contains many nuances and layers of meaning that have been brought together in this analysis by incorporating a consideration of social and contextual factors in addition to considerations stemming from semantic theory.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.26 (312)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

The interdisciplinary approach taken here is aimed at furthering our understanding of the variety of factors involved in language production and interpretation. By sifting through the utterances in one single interaction, it has been possible to interpret and understand the complexity of what users do with language. The reader saw how Blanca and Andrés struggled to maintain their face, the self which is associated with the concept of love and dating that they imagine is expected in a young couple. Andrés and Blanca attempted to define their recent experience in order to achieve some dominance over the situation. Both participants used utterances that strongly implicate the conceptualisations of love which require them to carefully position themselves to define and maintain a particular face, according to their own view and experience of the world. The conceptualisation of feelings affects communication; in turn, the image the participants want to display restricts the kind of emotions they can display, given that in the conversation examined, the participants were engaged in an emotional argument which could mean possible threats to each other’s face in different ways. For his part, Andrés tried to save his face by changing his footing, which he accomplished by stressing the authority of stereotypical behaviours and attitudes. Andrés was intent on avoiding the challenge Blanca posed when she wanted to force him to make a decision regarding his commitment. As he admitted, Andrés wants something else from the relationship. At the same time, by not making it clear, Andrés managed to avoid an explicit commitment to either the relationship or a possible break-up. Blanca, for her part, was taken aback by Andrés’s attitude, and tried to elicit a response from him. As Blanca witnessed Andrés’s continuous lack of commitment, she resorted to shifting her perspective from a positive and understanding role, ready to offer help and support, to a challenging stand where she tried, at the same time, not to over-state her demands. As has been shown in the analysis, participants can be aware of the cultural models their words convey and of those stereotypes that affect their behaviour, their utterances and their actions while they attempt to keep them coherent. Since these concepts reflect their view of the world, they have an effect on the face and the footing they have maintained or that has been assigned to them. This is an instance of the role metapragmatic awareness plays in interaction, that is, participants’ ability to reflect on the language as a code and its use. The interplay between the implicit and the explicit become important factors for the interaction to progress. In brief, beyond the limitations imposed by the cognitive view of language that restricts it to a series of cognitive processes, the analysis provided here has attempted to show the essential embeddedness of

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.27 (313)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach

mind in society, and the interrelation between cognitive processes, emotions, and social factors in context.

Notes * This study was supported by project CGICYT PB98-0084A by the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, Spain. . The source of the text is Briz and grupo Val.Es.Co (2001: 74–80). I follow their transcription conventions and provide here a summary of the ones found in the excerpts cited: § Contiguous utterances; = Speaker’s turn continues without interruption throughout an overlapping; [ Beginning of an utterance overlap; ] End of an utterance overlap; - Short untimed pause within an utterance; / Short pause under half a second; // Short pause between half a second and a second; /// Short pause over a second; (5”) Meaningful interval that lasts more than one minute; ↑ Rising shift in intonation; ↓ Falling shift in intonation; PESADO Emphatic or marked intonation; (( )) Fragment impossible to understand; ((siempre)) Doubtful transcription; o ( )o Passage of talk which is nearly whispered. . The concept of the world for Verschueren (1999) limits itself to the three strata – the mental, the physical, and the social world. In contrast, for Mey (1993), the world can encompass the reality of the institutional and ideological structures which underlie individual and social life, which would mean that he includes the societal structures “captured by the term ‘discourse”’ (Mey 1993: 190). . For the notion of metapragmatics and its different conceptions see Reyes (2002). The basis of this study are both Reyes’s (2002) application to communication and, particularly to irony, in Spanish, and Verschueren (1999), who develops an overview of pragmatics, introducing metapragmatics as one of the functions of language (see also Overstreet & Yule 2002). . Metaphors edge the cognitive and the social aspects of language. In colloquial language, metaphor is a matter of utterances in context. However, the question remains open as to what rules guide the use of metaphors and how they are interpreted. . Awareness about language use has been considered as one of the design functions of language, the metalinguistic function (cf. Nöth 1990). . This highlights the importance of consciousness in the act of communicating since there are different kinds of linguistic choices, but some may be automatic while others are “highly motivated” (Verschueren 1999: 187). . In the act of metaphor creation, several mental activities are involved, but the mental activity of analogy is particularly important. Analogy is a mental ability or skill that is employed “in all sorts of nonlinguistic modes of communication or symbolization” as Stern (2000: 13) suggests. . As Goatly suggests, “language constructs these states of affairs [in the world], as well as representing them” (1997: 26). The role of metaphor to construct and at the same time to



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.28 (314)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

represent “the states of affairs in the world” is an important aspect, which I will later relate to the concept of wording the world suggested by Mey (1993). . About this metaphor, see also Kövecses (1988). . Stern (2000: 117 and ff.) considers pragmatic presupposition as the “common knowledge” brought by the participants when uttering and interpreting metaphors. . About “etcétera, etcétera, etcétera,” see Section 4.2.1. . About the continuum in the concept of love, see Sternberg (2000 [1998]: 24). . See also extract (16) Section 4.2.1. . The expressions “estar atado,” “agobiar”, and “pedir” have negative implicatures for the participants’ face or personal image (see later in Section 4.2.1). . This is clearly connected with Andrés’s uncertainty at the moment of expressing his feelings as we will see in Section 4.2.1 in contrast with Blanca’s self-assuredness in Section 4.2.2. . Andrés’s accusation leads to Blanca’s final outburst, which will be analysed in more detail in Section 4.3. . The concept of footing has been used to analyse oral narratives by Koven (2002) and conversational sequences by Antaki, Díaz, and Collins (1996). Their analysis of this concept corresponds approximately to mine. . Levinson (1988: 171) distinguishes between participation roles according to the properties of “transmission” and “message origin.” . Among recipients, on the other hand, Levinson (1988) distinguishes between addressee, target, and audience. He makes more complex versions of both divisions, but these prove useful for identifying the changes that the participants in this interaction negotiate. . Another instance where Andrés voices Blanca’s opinions by attributing some words to her is found in (10) cited in Section 3.1.2. . See above and further Levinson (1988), and for the authorial role in first-person narratives also see Koven (2002). . Other instances of a similar increase in the use of expletive terms can be found in extracts (4), and (8), line 16, in Section 3.1.1. . Andrés’s response is telling since he does not react in the same way when Blanca uses the word “cojones” ‘bollocks’ which can also refer to the male sexual organ, but is an expression frequently used by speakers of either gender. . Holmes shows that differences on antagonistic elicitations between men and women are very marked and that the women in her research “tend to be more sensitive to the positive face needs of their addressees than New Zealand men” (1999: 47). . This conclusion seems to be contrary to García’s conclusions (Chapter 11 in this book) regarding Argentinean women in the context of reprimanding and responding to a reprimand. . According to Mey, metaphors are particularly significant in the process of “wording the world,” a process which Mey identifies in acts such as naming since this is not regarded as an individual act but one that belongs to the community of speakers (1985: 166).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.29 (315)

Metaphors of love: A pragmatic approach

References Antaki, Charles, Díaz, Félix, & Collins, Allan F. (1996). “Keeping your footing: Conversational completion in three-part sequences”. Journal of Pragmatics, 25, 151–171. Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron (1997). “The affective realm”. New Ideas in Psychology, 15(3), 247–259. Briz, Antonio & grupo Val.Es.Co (2001). Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales. Arco Libros: Madrid. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cloven, Denise H. & Roloff, Michael (1993). “The chilling effect of aggressive potential on the expression of complaints in intimate relationships”. Communication Monographs, 60, 199–219. Fussell, Susan R. & Moss, Mallie M. (1998). “Figurative language in emotional communication”. In S. R. Fussell & R. J. Kruez (Eds.), Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication (pp. 113–141). London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Geeraerts, Dirk & Grondelaers, Stefan (1995). “Looking back at anger: Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns”. In J. R. Taylor & R. E. MacLaury (Eds.), Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World (pp. 153–180). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Gibbs, Raymond (1994). The Poetics of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glucksberg, Sam & McGlone, Matthew S. (1999). “When love is not a journey: What metaphors mean”. Journal of Pragmatics, 21, 1541–1558. Goatly, Andrew (1997). The Language of Metaphors. London: Routledge. Goffman, Erving (1967). Interaction Ritual. New York: Pantheon. Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Holmes, Janet (1995). Women, Men and Politeness. London and New York: Longman. Kopytko, Roman (2001). “From Cartesian towards non-Cartesian pragmatics”. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 783–804. Kövecses, Zoltan (1988). The Language of Love. The Semantics of Passion in Conversational English. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Kövecses, Zoltan (1991). “A linguist’s quest for love”. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 8, 77–97. Koven, Michele (2002). “An analysis of speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience”. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 167–217. Labov, William & Fanshel, David (1977). Therapeutic Discourse. Orlando, FL: Academic press. Lakoff, George (1993). “The contemporary theory of metaphor”. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought (2nd ed., pp. 202–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. Levinson, Stephen (1988). “Putting linguistics on a proper footing: Explorations in Goffman’s concepts of participation”. In P. Drew & A. Wootton (Eds.), Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order (pp. 161–227). Oxford: Polity Press.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:01

F: PB12313.tex / p.30 (316)

 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi

Marmaridou, Sophia (2000). Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mey, Jacob (1985). Whose language? Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mey, Jacob (1993). Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Nöth, Wilfred (1990). Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. O’Driscoll, Jim (1996). “About face: A defence and elaboration of universal dualism”. Journal of Pragmatics, 25, 1–32. Overstreet, Mark & Yule, George (2002). “The metapragmatics of and everything”. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 785–794. Planalp, Sally (1999). Communicating Emotion. Social, Moral and Cultural Processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reyes, Graciela (1993). Los procedimientos de cita: Estilo directo y estilo indirecto. Madrid: Arco Libros. Reyes, Graciela (2002). Metapragmática. Lenguaje sobre lenguaje, ficciones, figuras. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. Schiffrin, Deborah (1994). Approaches to Discourse. Oxford, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Stern, Josef (2000). Metaphor in Context. Cambridge, MA and London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sternberg, Robert, J. (2000 [1998]). La experiencia del amor. Barcelona, Buenos Aires, México: Paidós [Spanish translation of Cupid’s Arrow, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.]. Verschueren, Jeff (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold Publishers. Watts, Richard J. (1991). Power in Family Discourse. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:10/02/2004; 8:44

Humour

F: PB123P34.tex / p.1 (317)

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.1 (319)

Chapter 14

Pragmatics of humorous strategies in El club de la comedia Francisco Yus

.

Introduction

A pragmatics of humorous strategies is interested in the analysis of how certain linguistic stimuli (e.g. jokes) favour certain inferential patterns in the audience interpreting them, and how these patterns inevitably involve the mental entertainment of certain assumptions, either contradictory, processed in a specific order, or clashing with accessible background assumptions retrieved as part of the inferential process of interpretation. Cognitive pragmatics, and specifically relevance theory, will be used in this article to unfold some of the humorous strategies underlying the stand-up monologues in El club de la comedia. The analysis will show how small-scale humorous strategies based on the processing of certain stretches of discourse inside the monologues intertwine with largescale ones, which are centred upon the public enjoyment (or reorganisation) of cultural assumptions made mutually manifest by the comedians in the specific context of the comedy venue. Undoubtedly, El club de la comedia is a popular TV programme in Spain. Its format was imported from the American counterpart The comedy club, and it has obtained a large audience. It is made up of a series of monologues narrated by professional actors (who will be referred to as comedians). The greater part of the monologues deals with everyday social issues such as parenting, adolescence, relationships, and so forth, and the extent to which these are supported or not by the audience. In the next sections a pragmatic – relevance-theoretic – account of the humorous strategies used in these monologues of El club de la comedia will be proposed. The main source of examples will be taken from the following two editions with compilations of monologues: El club de la comedia (2001,

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.2 (320)

 Francisco Yus

henceforth ECC 2001) and El club de la comedia contraataca (2002, henceforth ECC 2002).

. Relevance theory, inference, and humorous effects Sperber and Wilson’s (1986, 1995) relevance theory (for comments about this theory, see Sperber & Wilson 1987 and Yus 1998, among others) is a cognitive theory which relies on two biologically rooted cognitive mechanisms which human beings apply when producing and interpreting verbal and nonverbal ostensive stimuli (that is, stimuli making manifest that the addresser intends to make certain assumptions manifest or more manifest to the addressee). The first one refers to the fact that human beings are biologically geared to select (supposedly) the most relevant interpretation of a stimulus among a range of possible interpretations of this stimulus in a specific context. The second mechanism refers to the human ability to metarepresent any expression-token (e.g. an utterance) as representing another expression-token (e.g. a thought), between which there is some resemblance in relevant respects, which often involves the assessment of intentions and attitudes underlying the production of stimuli, either verbal or nonverbal. Since metarepresentations are used in all forms of human communication they are also essential to understand stimuli such as the ones uttered in stand-up comedy performances. Comprehension, according to relevance theory, is a mixture of coding and inference, but greater emphasis is placed on the latter, the former being involved basically in the language-module-based extraction of the logical form of the stimulus (e.g. the utterance) which then has to be enriched pragmatically in order to derive both the explicitly and the implicitly communicated information. In short, according to Sperber and Wilson the comprehension procedure involves two clauses: a. Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects. In particular, test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility. b. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied (Sperber & Wilson 2002: 18). Comprehension, as outlined in (a–b), is a metapsychological endeavour in which the addressee makes hypotheses aimed at recognising the addresser’s informative intention with the aid of a theory of mind module. This typically

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.3 (321)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies

human mental module is dedicated to the attribution of mental states on the basis of the addresser’s communicative behaviour (cf. Sperber & Wilson 2002; Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004). When performing clauses (a–b) above, the human mind analyses the communicative stimulus and attempts to select the most relevant interpretation of that stimulus given the current contextual attributes, and the definition of relevance is formulated in two conditions (Sperber & Wilson 1995): one related to the highest possible interest (in terms of cognitive effects) of the assumptions, and another related to the least effort required to process them. As will be argued in the next sections, the fact that hearers tend to select the first interpretation which offers an optimal balance of its interest (i.e. positive cognitive effects) and the mental effort it requires, and stop comprehension at this point, is one of the key aspects of human comprehension which humorists can predict and manipulate in the creation of humorous effects. Throughout this article it will be argued that, as a general rule, the comedians in El club de la comedia (ECC) base (at least some of) their humorous strategies on the prediction that certain inferential paths will be taken and certain assumptions will inevitably be entertained by the audience as part of their relevance-seeking inferential procedure. . Predicting inferences Humorists design their jokes and larger humorous discourses knowing that certain inferences are more likely to be made in the processing of the stimulus, and that a number of assumptions will necessarily be entertained by the audience in their search for the most relevant interpretation. Sperber and Wilson (2002) acknowledge this ability to predict the mental states and inferential patterns of others as part of the general human tendency to maximise relevance. Specifically, speakers can predict: a. which stimulus in an individual B’s environment is likely to attract B’s attention (i.e. the most relevant stimulus in that environment); b. which background information from B’s memory is likely to be retrieved and used in processing this stimulus (i.e. the background information most relevant to processing it); and c. which inferences B is likely to draw (i.e. those inferences which yield enough cognitive benefits for B’s attentional resources to remain on the stimulus rather than being diverted to alternative potential inputs competing for those resources).



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.4 (322)

 Francisco Yus

In short, it can be stated that humorists design their humorous discourses by resorting to this human ability to predict that certain stimuli will be more relevant than others and that certain assumptions will inevitably be entertained by other people during comprehension. This is the main cognitive mechanism underlying the two approaches to the analysis of humorous discourses within relevance theory which will be sketched in the next section, before moving on to the analysis of the specific humorous strategies used in ECC in Section 3. . The multiple graded / single covert interface In Yus (1997, 2003) a relevance-theoretic analysis of jokes is suggested in which the incongruity-resolution pattern of some humorous discourses is reinterpreted in relevance-theoretic terms (see also Jodłowiec 1991). Within this framework, incongruities are treated as a mental-effort-demanding contrast to the currently held inferential hypotheses (i.e. assumptions in the individual’s short-term-memory store arising from the processing of previous stretches of discourse) which provokes a puzzle (i.e. a cognitive dissonance). Its resolution produces a humorous relief which offsets the supplementary mental effort required. Consequently, some humorous discourses (typically short jokes) contain two areas leading to contradictory lines of processing. In Yus (2003) these areas are labelled MGI and SCI. In short, the speaker communicates an utterance whose first part (labelled the multiple-graded-interpretations part of the joke, or MGI part in short) has several alternative interpretations, which are graded in terms of relevance (different balances of positive cognitive effects and mental effort) within the current context of interpretation. The humorist knows that among the range of possible interpretations of the MGI part of the utterance there is one which is the most likely to be picked up as the intended one (in relevance-theoretic terms, the one consistent with the so-called principle of relevance). The processing of the second part of the utterance (the singlecovert-interpretation part or SCI part in short) produces an incongruity.1 The resolution lies in a single covert, more unlikely interpretation, compatible with the whole utterance (but not with the hearer’s chosen interpretation for the MGI part of the joke). Since the hearer stops his processing at the first interpretation which offers an optimal balance of cognitive effects and mental effort, this latent interpretation is not taken into consideration until the speaker humorously foregrounds it in the SCI part of the joke.2 Although the comedians of ECC performances rely on longer monologues for the creation of humorous effects, this MGI/SCI interface can be found when

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.5 (323)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

comedians embed small canned jokes inside their monologues, as in example (1), where the initial part of the text involving the MGI/SCI interface is about the possibility that the character finally got off with a girl (ligó con una chica), but the second part of this text invalidates this on-line interpretation, providing the covert interpretation fitting the whole text: (1) Es terrible volver a intentar ligar, ni te acuerdas de cómo se hacía. Te vas a una discoteca, te enciendes un cigarrito, te apoyas en la barra. . . Y a esperar a que vengan. Pero no vienen. [MGI→ Y a la primera tía que te hace caso, le preguntas: – ¿Estudias o trabajas? Y ella te contesta: – Estudio ← MGI], [SCI→ no te jode. . . ¿Qué te pongo? ← SCI] (“Volver a empezar”, ECC 2001: 43).

It’s terrible to try to pick up a girl again, you can’t even remember how to do it. You go to a disco, light a cigarette, lean on the bar. . . And wait for girls to come to you. But they never turn up. [MGI→ And when a girl does pay attention to you, you ask her: – Do you study or do you work? And she replies: – Study ← MGI], [SCI→ what the fuck. . . What are you having? ← SCI] (“Starting again”, ECC 2001: 43).

Overt accessible interpretation of the MGI part: The man has managed to attract a woman’s attention. Covert interpretation fitting both MGI/SCI parts: The man has merely drawn the waitress’s attention to serve him at the bar.

. Clashing assumptions Curcó (1995, 1996, 1997, 1998) provides a detailed account of humorous interpretations from a relevance-theoretic perspective. There is no space to review her work in detail, but no doubt one of the main contributions of her work is her analysis of how the addressee of humorous discourses is led to the entertainment of contradictory propositional contents. Basically, her approach amounts to the claim that in humour hearers often find that they have entertained an assumption that they do not hold, or question, for instance, by implicitly expressing a dissociative attitude to it (Curcó 1997: Ch. 4; Wilson & Sperber 1992; Yus 2000, 2001). Besides, the important aspect of incongruity is what interpretive steps the hearer is expected to go through when attempting to resolve it. Indeed, the resolution of incongruities demands extra processing effort (mainly from embedding at least one of the clashing propositions in a certain number of metarepresentational layers aimed at eliminating the con-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.6 (324)

 Francisco Yus

tradiction), which is supposed to be compensated by would-be additional – humorous – effects in return. One of her analyses shows how the hearer is led to entertain two contradictory propositional contents: one is a strongly implicated premise (which Curcó labels key assumption) that normally has to be retrieved by the hearer from background knowledge as part of the process of interpretation. This proposition clashes with an accessible (though not so far accessed) assumption in the context of interpretation (which Curcó labels target assumption). Indeed, some parts of the monologues in ECC can also be analysed using this framework: (2) Yo no tengo nada contra el matrimonio, de hecho, cuando nací mis padres estaban casados y ni me enfadé ni les dije nada (“Miedo al compromiso”, ECC 2001: 35).

I’ve got nothing against marriage, in fact, when I was born my parents were married and I didn’t get angry or tell them anything about it (“Fear of commitment”, ECC 2001: 35).

Target assumption: A newborn baby has no capacity to discern (retrieved from the audience’s encyclopedic knowledge). Key assumption: A newborn baby does have capacity to discern (strongly implicated from (2) above). (3) [A mí], cuando me decían: – Paco se ha casado de penalti.

When people used to tell [me]: – Paco got married because she got pregnant. Exclamaba: I exclaimed: – ¡Será gilipollas! ¡Con la cantidad de – What a jerk! There are a lot of things cosas que hay para que no te pase to avoid pregnancy! For instance, esto! Sin ir más lejos, la marcha atrás withdrawal (“My girlfriend has missed (“A mi novia no le viene la regla”, her period”, ECC 2001: 65). ECC 2001: 65). Target assumption: Withdrawal is a bad way of preventing pregnancies (retrieved from the audience’s encyclopedic knowledge). Key assumption: Withdrawal is a good way of preventing pregnancies (strongly implicated from (3)).

Curiously enough, propositional clashes like the ones exemplified above tend to be uttered at the beginning of the monologue. Normally, the audience expects the remaining body of the monologue to provide humorous evidence to support assumptions which clearly clash with deeply held encyclopaedic (target) assumptions (more on this below).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.7 (325)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

. El club de la comedia: Beyond the joke and into the monologue ECC is based mainly on monologues, although their writers do embed shorter (canned) humorous utterances inside them. The emphasis on the monologue involves a different layout for how the humorous strategies are devised, but this fact does not imply that monologues in ECC lack the strategies typically found in (short) jokes, for example the so-called punch-lines (Salvatore Attardo, pers. comm. 25-3-2002). In general, the overall humorous effects of ECC lie in the contrast between the comedian’s words and the audience’s individually held assumptions about the world we live in (3.2.4 below), but other humorous strategies based on specific stretches of the monologue pepper it in order to enhance a non-stop feeling of amusement in the audience while listening to the monologue. In all this large-scale versus small-scale humorous strategy a basic aspect to address is the fact that the audience attending the performance of ECC are in a physical environment where they expect to be amused. This underlying assumption is essential to understand why certain effort-demanding inferential paths are undertaken for the sake of humour. This issue will be discussed in more detail in the next section. . Getting one’s money’s worth Attending ECC is a pleasurable ritual in which the audience expect to be amused. As such, ECC requires a collective knowledge in the audience about the contents of this ritual and how it is supposed to proceed (Rutter 1997). This macro-social (i.e. collective) background knowledge has consequences on how the members of the audience approach the micro-social (i.e. personal) processing of the monologues in the comedy venue (Yus 2002). Some of the issues which can be covered by this macro-social background knowledge include what can be labelled collective manifestness: the fact that people share the same physical space entails an intersection of the assumptions they can construct and on which they can rely during the comprehension of ECC performances. In other words, there is mutual awareness of the assumptions made (mutually) manifest by the comedian. The comedian, for his part, has to predict which information will cross-cut the audience’s cognitive environments, that is, assess their mutual cognitive environment, and which information is likely to interact in such a way with this environment that humorous effects are generated in the audience (at the same time their cognitive environment will be altered by the comedian’s words, often with an enlargement of its scope). The audience’s personal cognitive environ-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.8 (326)

 Francisco Yus

ments will never be identical, and their degree of overlapping will vary from one audience to another. Another important macrosocial piece of background information is the fact that the audience are normally in the mood to be entertained. The analysis of humorous effects entails an analysis of why people find humorous texts amusing despite the additional demands that these often make to their processing. Jokes are typically based on ambiguities and incongruities which result in increased mental effort, but the expected reward – in terms of feelings of amusement – is supposed to offset this additional effort. The key, then, lies in the fact that the audience use their knowledge of what type of performance ECC is about as part of their humour-seeking processing of the monologues. Therefore, if the audience is warned about the humorous quality of the forthcoming or the just-heard stretch of discourse, they will assume that certain interpretive paths are going to (or have been) favoured due to the intention to create humorous effects, without necessarily rejecting the discourse as irrelevant or nonsensical. What is inevitable is a readjustment of the addressee’s relevance-seeking extensions of context and of his expectations of relevance (mental effort versus cognitive effects) when humorous strategies are detected (Yus 2003). Finally, a last macrosocial factor to take into consideration is how members of the audience are influenced not only by the expectation that what the comedian says is supposed to be amusing, but also by the way in which laughter spreads among the audience. But the claim (in Yus 2002) that laughter in the audience is a signal that the representations made manifest by the comedian’s monologue are widely shared in the audience (3.2.4) has to be followed by a note of caution: the fact that laughter spreads across the venue is no guarantee that the comedian’s intended humorous effects have been achieved, let alone that similar versions of these representations are held by all the members of the audience. . Humorous strategies in ECC Now I will turn to specific humorous strategies which the comedians of ECC use in the creation of humorous effects. The most important strategy is, in my opinion, the comedian’s assessment of the quality and extent of the cultural representations held by the audience (3.2.4), but other strategies are also worth mentioning. In the next sections several smaller-scale strategies will be analysed.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.9 (327)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

.. Layering and relating concepts People store in their minds far more thoughts (i.e. concepts) than words in the language available to communicate them. Within a relevance-theoretic framework, the interpretation of utterances not only involves typically contextbound mental operations such as reference assignment, disambiguation, or free enrichment, but also concept narrowing (or loosening) depending on specific processing demands in the search for relevance (Sperber & Wilson 2002; Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004; Carston 2000, 2002). In a nutshell, it can be claimed that the processing of concepts is context-bound and flexible, and what the hearer selects as candidates to match the intended interpretation of the words encoding the concepts is not the canonical, default meaning of the words uttered, but ad hoc concepts with a number of attributes whose activation is guided by the search for relevance. Assuming this context-specific interpretations of words, Wilson and Sperber (2002) describe Peter’s interpretation of Mary’s utterance in (4b) not as conveying the encoded concept flat (as stabilised in dictionaries, for example) but the related (ad hoc) concept flat*, with a more restricted encyclopaedic entry and a narrower denotation, constructed specifically for this particular occasion, as paraphrased in (4c): (4) a.

[Peter and Mary are discussing their next cycling trip. Peter has just said that he feels rather unfit]. b. Mary: “We could go to Holland. Holland is flat”. c. Holland is flat* (where flat* is the meaning indicated by ‘flat’, and is such that Holland’s being flat* is relevant-as-expected in the context).

Mary’s word “flat” is taken here to warrant only those effects which make it worth processing in the specific context (4a). Since there is no one-to-one correspondence between the dictionary entry “flat” and the ad hoc concept flat*, its relationship is a matter of resemblance, rather than pure description. Flat* is an unglossed version of the word ‘flat’ which retains only the attributes which are relevant for the processing of the utterance, in this case (5): (5) A terrain is flat* if travelling across it involves little or no climbing. (Wilson & Sperber 2002: 615)

Obviously, the biologically rooted relevance-seeking mental procedure should guide the hearer on every occasion to the recovery of the intended concept based on the word encoding it. In this example, flat* carries a range of implications which are intended to satisfy Peter’s expectations of relevance in the context (4a) but which may be irrelevant in a different context.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.10 (328)

 Francisco Yus

Similarly, in ECC we find instances in which the audience’s search for relevant attributes of encoded concepts is exploited in order to generate humorous effects. A particularly frequent source of conceptual exploitation in ECC is the comparison of apparently unrelated concepts. In these cases, the audience is warned that a certain relationship holds for one or several attributes of two ad hoc concepts encoded by two words uttered in sequence. As in example (4)– (5) above, the audience will tend to select only those context-bound concepts which are geared to the maximisation of relevance and will be ready to attempt a search for their intersecting attributes. However, the audience are not expected to reason about that possible conceptual link, since the comedians themselves foreground it immediately after uttering the words encoding these apparently unrelated concepts. The humour lies, rather than in the enjoyment after finding the missing link, in the acknowledgement of the comedian’s innovative intersection of some of the ad hoc attributes attached to the concepts. Some examples would be (6)–(7), in which we find innovative relationships between the concepts encoded by flu/virginity and guilt/hair respectively: (6) La gripe es como la virginidad, sólo Flu is like virginity, you can only get se cura en la cama (“Tengo la gripe”, over it in bed (“I’m down with flu”, ECC 2001: 124). ECC 2001: 124). (7) El sentimiento de culpa es como los pelos del sobaco: naces sin ellos pero te van saliendo con el tiempo (“Cuándo nos sentimos culpables”, ECC 2002: 41).

The feeling of guilt is like the hairs in your armpits: you’re born without them but they start growing as time goes by (“When we feel guilty”, ECC 2002: 41).

Nevertheless, the fact that the comedian provides the key to the humorous relationship between the two concepts does not prevent the audience from engaging in some backwards inference, which is normally necessary in order to grasp the full extent of the intersecting features of these ad hoc concepts and eventually process optimally the explicitly communicated content of the utterance and its intended effects. This is indeed a strategy typically found in ECC, and which differs from other ways of foregrounding conceptual similarities. For instance, cases (6)– (7) should not be equated to a similar humorous strategy, this time based on lexical ambiguity resolution, in which various meanings encoded by a single word are surprisingly activated in the same context and then linked humorously. Consider the Spanish word efervescencia (effervescence), which in the latest edition of the DRAE (Diccionario de la Real Academia Española) appears with two main (default) senses, one literal and one figurative:

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.11 (329)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

a. Emission of fizzy bubbles through a liquid. b. fig Agitation, ardour, heatedness of an individual’s mood. The fact that these meanings are associated with the same word is sufficient for them to be exploited as a humorous connection in the monologue: (8) Yo le disculpo [a mi hijo adolescente], porque está como las aspirinas, en plena efervescencia (“Tengo un hijo adolescente”, ECC 2001: 88).

I forgive him [my teenage son], because he’s like an aspirin, in full effervescence (“I’ve got a teenage son”, ECC 2001: 88).

Finally, a typical feature of the monologues in ECC is the comedians’ foregrounding of inconsistencies in the way people handle their shared language. This strategy is typical of stand-up comedy performances (Yus 2002). In these cases, the audience are given evidence of how inexact the language that they use in their everyday interactions is, the main source of humour being the comedian’s skill in tracing these inconsistencies and reshaping the audience’s attitude towards the words supporting these inconsistencies. The example from ECC quoted in (9) is illustrative: (9) ¿Por qué se llama Predictor el Predictor? ¡Si no predice nada! Cuando sale el circulito ella ya está embarazada! Si fuese Predictor tendría que haberme avisado antes. Yo creo que en vez de Predictor se debería llamar Terminator (“A mi novia no le viene la regla”, ECC 2001: 68).

Why is the Predictor called Predictor? It doesn’t predict anything! When the little ring appears she is already pregnant! If it was a Predictor it should have warned me before. I think that instead of Predictor it should be called Terminator (“My girlfriend has missed her period”, ECC 2001: 68).

.. Implicatures and audience’s responsibility When people communicate, much of the intended information is missing in the meaning decoded from the utterance and has to be supplied contextually by the hearer. In other words, utterances always underdetermine the thought(s) that the speaker intends to communicate. In many humorous strategies at ECC, the hearer is often expected to provide implicated premises which are necessary to derive implicated conclusions. The former “must be supplied by the hearer, who must either retrieve them from memory or construct them by developing assumption schemas retrieved from memory” (Sperber & Wilson 1986: 195). The latter can be deduced from

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.12 (330)

 Francisco Yus

the explicatures of the utterance and the context. In example (10) (from Yus 1999) the implicated premise would be (10b), whereas the implicated conclusion would be (10c). In both cases, the hearer is responsible for the recovery of these implicatures, and A’s inability to supply (10b) as part of the process of comprehension leads to a misunderstanding: (10) a.

A. Nice cat! Is it male or female? B. It’s three-coloured. A. So what? B. Never mind. It’s female, actually. b. All three-coloured cats are female. c. The cat is female.

Curcó’s analysis, to which I referred earlier, involves the clash between, on the one hand, an implicated premise provided by the hearer when searching for an optimally relevant interpretation, and on the other hand a salient assumption which is recoverable from the current context of interpretation. But even without the existence of clashes between assumptions, the hearer’s responsibility in the extraction of implicatures may be, in itself, a possible source of humorous effects. For instance, in (11) the full grasp of the intended interpretation requires the audience’s recovery of (12), which has to be derived for a full understanding of the utterance. The audience, then, have to backtrack in their processing, supply (12) as backwards inference associated with the concepts introduced in the first part of the joke, and then reach the full understanding of the second part of the utterance. The overall effect is bound to be pleasurable. (11) Cuando me preguntaban de pequeñito: – ¿Y tú qué quieres ser de mayor?

When I was a child and was asked:

– And you? What do you want to become when you grow up? Yo siempre contestaba: I always answered: – Médico, abogado, policía, – Doctor, lawyer, policeman, periodista. . . journalist. . . Vamos, que lo que yo quería era salir That is, what I wanted to do is to en una serie de televisión appear on a TV series (“Teachers”, (“Profesores”, ECC 2002: 23). ECC 2002: 23).

(12) Currently, there are many TV series with characters playing doctors, lawyers, policemen, etc. on Spanish TV.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.13 (331)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies

The comedian’s ability to predict this type of inferential recovery of assumptions in the audience is a typical feature of human cognition. As Sperber and Wilson correctly state, an individual A may act on the mental states of another individual B by producing a stimulus which is likely: (a) to attract B’s attention; (b) to prompt the retrieval of certain background information from B’s memory; (c) when jointly processed with the background information whose retrieval it has prompted, to lead B to draw certain inferences intended by A. (2002: 16)

.. Assumptions from processing previous discourse A typical attribute of stand-up comedy performances, ECC included, is the strategy to generate humorous effects by playing with the audience’s short-term memory store of assumptions arising from their processing of the comedian’s already communicated utterances. As a general rule, a human tendency when processing utterances is to use assumptions which have already been processed as “a gradually changing background against which new information is processed” (Sperber & Wilson 1986: 118). The monologues from ECC analysed for this article provide evidence that this is indeed the case. In this section, I will mention two of the possible strategies which the comedian can use to build up humorous strategies. The first one concerns the comedian’s manipulation of the assumptions arising from the audience’s processing of the explicitly communicated information of some (previous) portion of the monologue, which is then invalidated humorously. The difference between this strategy and the MGI/SCI strategy outlined in 2.2 lies in the fact that the assumptions made manifest by this second part do not provide an overall congruent interpretation for the whole text (like the SCI part of the jokes exemplified in 2.2), but simply surprise the audience with a contrast, after a coherent interpretation of the first part has been achieved and is still present in their short-term memory. Example (13) is illustrative: (13) Una mujer puede estar toda una tarde de compras sabiendo de antemano que no va a comprar nada. Entra en la boutique y dice:

A woman can spend the whole afternoon shopping knowing beforehand that she is not going to buy anything. She enters a boutique and says: – Quiero probarme ese vestido, ése y – I want to try on that dress, and that ése. [. . . ] one and that one. [. . . ]



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.14 (332)

 Francisco Yus

La dependienta se percata de que va de farol, y pone cara de odio. Pero a ella le da igual, y se prueba media tienda. A la hora y media, sale dejándoles todo como si hubiesen entrado los bomberos, y nada más pisar la calle comenta: – Nunca compro en este sitio por lo bordes que son las dependientas. . . (“Ir de compras”, ECC 2001: 32).

The saleswoman realises she is just bluffing, and grimaces. But she doesn’t mind, and tries on half the clothes in the shop. After an hour and a half, she leaves the shop, leaving everything as if the firemen had been in, and as soon as she sets foot on the street she says: – I never buy anything in this shop because the saleswomen are so rude. . . (“Going shopping”, ECC 2001: 32).

The second strategy is called re-incorporation, defined by Rutter as “the reappearance of one element of a joke (usually not a punchline) later on in a stand-up performer’s set. That is, a comedian will introduce a topic at some point during his/her performance and then drop it only to return to it later in the act” (1997: 226). Again, the comedian plays with the fact that certain assumptions from the part of the monologue just processed are still present in the audience’s short-term memory, and repeats some portion of discourse in different areas of the same monologue, achieving different effects. One of them is the audience’s acknowledgement that the comedian has total control over what to repeat and where this repetition has to appear. The repeated portion of text can have different sizes. In (14), for instance, the phrase “nine and a half weeks” is repeated. The first time, the audience is encouraged to provide the intertextual link to the film with the same name, process the phrase as a unit, and derive a number of sexual implications. These effects are then invalidated (or at least re-considered) when the phrase is repeated and now the audience has to process it through its parts, take it literally, and infer the character’s negative attitude towards the phrase uttered: (14) Cuando hay pasión te encanta que ella te haga un pase de ropa interior: – Házmelo como en Nueve semanas y media. ¿Nueve semanas y media? Cuando no hay pasión le gritas: – ¡Hace nueve semanas y media que están tus bragas en el bidé! (“Qué pasa cuando acaba la pasión”, ECC 2001: 40).

When there is passion you like her to model underwear for you. – Do it like in Nine and a half weeks. Nine and a half weeks? When there is no passion you shout at her: – It’s nine and a half weeks since your knickers have been in the bidet! (“What happens when passion dies away”, ECC 2001: 40).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.15 (333)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

.. Playing with collective cultural representations Apart from strategies like the ones addressed in the previous sections, there is an interesting line of research on stand-up comedy which is also applicable to ECC. In a nutshell, it can be stated that much of the enjoyment in the audience comes from the collective realisation that certain assumptions made manifest by the comedian are in fact mutually manifest to the audience, ‘cultural’ in a broad sense, which adds to an overall improvement of the audience’s encyclopaedic knowledge of how their social environment is organised and on the rules concerning social behaviour. Therefore, many monologues in ECC focus on ordinary, everyday aspects of lifestyle within a certain social environment, without needing specific discursive strategies to generate humorous effects. In general, human cognition is geared to the maximisation of relevance, and the search for relevance is intended to improve the person’s overall representation of the world (via non-demonstrative inferences made on newly acquired assumptions). In this sense, the human storage of background social information is constantly being updated by in-coming assumptions which either strengthen the person’s privately held assumptions, or contradict them and lead to their erasure, or combine with them to produce new, improved representations (Sperber & Wilson 1986). Whatever the case, people constantly access their encyclopaedic knowledge and update it with relevant information. In order to minimise the effort required for this on-going access, much of the information stored in the person’s encyclopaedic knowledge acquires a schematic and stable quality; it is easy to access by default and used in the absence of other effort-demanding processing. Escandell-Vidal (this volume) makes an interesting proposal of how cognitive and social issues (in terms of principles and norms respectively) can be combined in pragmatic research. The former relies on the inferential faculty of the human mind, specifically designed to react to ostensively communicated stimuli and weigh their relevance against contextual information. The latter has a long-term and a short-term task. The short-term one analyses and categorises incoming information, and the long-term task builds up and updates socially accepted behaviour. This is precisely what occurs during the ECC performances. The audience constantly monitor (via short-term tasks) the comedian’s words against their personal background knowledge generating alterations (via long-term tasks) in the quality and quantity of stable and default background representations. Despite the heterogeneous quality of people’s encyclopaedic storage, we can predict that some of these representations will remain relatively stable in the minds of all of the people living in a certain social environment, and hence also in the smaller-size context of the

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.16 (334)

 Francisco Yus

comedy venue. This is coherent with the view that the social categorisation system is a cognitive sub-system devoted to extracting tacit generalisations from practice (Escandell-Vidal this volume.). These stable representations are cultural representations which are a typical object of assessment by comedians in stand-up performances, and also by the ones at ECC (Sperber 1996). The cultural representations assessed by the short-term and long-term tasks may become humorous when foregrounded, challenged, reinforced, manipulated, etc. by comedians on stage. Several aspects of the comedians’ exploitation of social issues in their performances can be isolated. Some of these are outlined and exemplified below: a. Strengthening the collective quality of cultural representations. When the comedians of ECC communicate their monologues, they make mutually manifest a number of assumptions related to cultural representations. The effect that these assumptions have on the members of the audience depends on the extent to which these members acknowledge their cultural status (as opposed to what I will call personal representations, see sub-section B below). The crucial feature is that ECC provides an excellent environment for the generation and entertainment of similar representations across the audience, that is, representations a version of which is similar in the minds of every member of the audience (cf. Sperber 1994, 1996). Although people’s background knowledge is constantly being updated, mainly through relevance-driven inferential processes on ostensively communicated assumptions, a portion of these representations is indeed rather stable (many of them exhibiting a schematic quality), and is not normally altered by incoming representations through communication. What many monologues in ECC do is to remind the audience that they indeed possess a similar version of the representations made manifest by the comedian, that the comedian’s words unfold (or reinforce) a typically cultural item of their society, which is a good source of humour and also a source of social updating through the audience’s long-term categorisation task. But the audience will also use the short-term task of the social component to label and readjust the comedian’s public representations according to such contextual attributes as the physical setting (they are in a stand-up comedy venue), relationship with the comedian (they pay to be amused), and background knowledge on the purpose of the monologues (whose social connotation is often repeated and stressed by the comedians during the performance). This multi-faceted processing of information surrounding the performance of the monologues allows the audience to frame this collective entertainment of cultural representations as humor-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.17 (335)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

ous and different from other possible ways in which the entertainment of representations might be relevant to the audience. If we have a look at the monologues, we will discover many instances in which a plain description of aspects relevant to the audience’s background knowledge on their social environment is provided, with no overt humorous discursive strategies (apart from the comedian’s skills at uttering the monologue and his/her ability to deal with nonverbal behaviour effectively), but which in any case arouse laughter in the audience. In order to achieve this mutuality of representations, the comedian will normally address cultural issues that are bound to be recognised as such by the audience. One example of a cultural item which is easily recognisable by the audience is the connotations of the term adolescence, and it proves to be successfully addressed by the ECC comedian on stage: (15) 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 (“Tengo un hijo adolescente”, ECC 2001: 87).

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 used to drive me crazy by telling me everything about his class mates, his teachers. . . Now his lips are sealed! He stopped talking, but just like you stop smoking: overnight. When he gets home he locks himself in his room and God knows what he’s doing in there (“I’ve got a teenage son”, ECC 2001: 87).

Another typical strategy in stand-up comedy, and also in ECC, is to directly ask the audience, explicitly searching for confirmation and agreement on the collective quality of the comedian’s words, that is, on whether the audience regard these representations as belonging to their collective background of cultural knowledge. This is an important strategy in ECC, since the comedian “must establish for the audience that the group is homogeneous” (Mintz 1985: 78). At the same time, this kind of ‘direct questioning’ will warn some of the members of the audience that these representations are supposed to be widely shared by the community and not held individually. In (16) we can find this strategy of direct addressing referred to children’s phone calls:

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.18 (336)

 Francisco Yus

(16) A partir de cierta edad, los hijos, cuando están en casa se agarran al teléfono como luchadores de sumo. Y que no lo sueltan, ¿¡eh!?: – Cuelga ya, que llevas media hora.

From a certain age, children, when they are at home, grab the telephone as if they were sumo wrestlers. And they never let go of it, do they? – Hang up, you’ve been talking for half an hour. – Pero si me han llamado a mí. . . – But they called me. . . ¿A ustedes les pasa lo mismo? ¿a qué Does it also happen to you? Do your los hijos no llaman nunca? Siempre children never make phonecalls? It’s les llaman a ellos, ¿pero qué se creen, always others who call, but what do que somos sordos o gilipollas? ¿O they think, that we are deaf or daft? Or deaf and daft? (“Practical advice to get sordos y gilipollas? (“Consejos prácticos para que tus hijos se vayan children to leave home”, ECC de casa”, ECC 2001: 96). 2001: 96).

Finally, another source of humour in this strengthening of collective representations is the comedian’s exposure of the inconsistencies underlying social behaviour, a highly relevant issue for human cognition, always geared to the maximisation of cognitive efficiency related to the surrounding world. Here, typical human actions regarded as collective are questioned and their inconsistencies revealed, and while the audience are laughing they are also readjusting their encyclopaedic knowledge by incorporating a new and fresh point of view to these cultural representations. An example would be (17): (17) Tú estás por la noche en la cama y oyes un ruido extraño, ¿y qué haces? ¡Te tapas con la sábana! ¡Muy bien! ¿Qué pasa, que la sábana es antibalas? ¿Que si viene un malo con un cuchillo no va a poder atravesarla, se le va a doblar la hoja? ¡Hombre, por favor! [. . . ] ¿Y qué pasa si vas por la calle y de pronto ves a alguien y piensas que te va a atracar? Pues te cambias de acera. Seguro que si es un atracador, pensará: “Mierda, otro que se me ha cruzado de acera, qué nochecita llevo” (“Reacciones estúpidas ante el miedo”, ECC 2001: 191, 193).

You are in bed at night and hear a strange noise, and what do you do? You cover yourself with the sheet. Perfect! You think the sheet is bulletproof? Do you really think if a bad guy turns up carrying a knife the blade won’t go through it? That the blade will bend? Come on! [. . . ] And what do you do if you are walking along the street and suddenly you see someone and you think he’s going to mug you? You cross to the other side. Surely if he’s a mugger, he’ll think: “Shit! Another one crossing! What a night!” (“Stupid reactions to fear”, ECC 2001: 191, 193).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.19 (337)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

b. Turning personal beliefs into cultural representations. In Yus (2002) a distinction is made between types of representations which can explain why the interaction between certain monologues in stand-up comedy (public representations) and the representations stored in the audience’s minds (mental representations) may turn out to be entertained as humorous. Some examples from ECC will illustrate the convenience of this distinction. The audience, as human beings, can hold representations as beliefs and possess a metarepresentational ability to infer their own and others’ attitudes concerning the content of the representations they process. They also hold representations with different degrees of strength depending on the validating source supporting them. In Sperber (1997) a distinction is made between intuitive and reflective representations, specifically beliefs. The former are acquired spontaneously by the individual – especially via perception or unconscious inference – and tend to be simple, stable and cross-culturally valid. The latter are acquired mainly through communication (and conscious inference) and their strength is often validated by the (metarepresentational) authority underlying the source. Typical validating sources of reflective representations are parents, education, and – very often nowadays – the barrage of information from mass media discourses. Since authority is essential for the formation of reflective beliefs, it comes as no surprise that comedians value their authority over the audience as one of the keys to a successful performance: If an audience feels superior to you, then you’re in trouble. . . If you can pretend they are superior. There’s a difference there. If an audience feels superior to you, they can be rude. [. . . ] [T]he audience must trust you and you have to be able to lead them by the hand. Once you can lead them by the hand, you can take them through any avenue of comedy. You can take them on a very serious subject and they will go with you. (Joey Bishop, quoted in Wilde 2000: 103 and 113)

Another important feature of human cognition is the ability to hold differing representations for the same referent, as long as their method of mental storage differs. For instance, one can simultaneously hold personal representations (e.g. intuitive and/or reflective beliefs) of the form ‘I believe that p’ (factual assumptions) and metarepresented cultural representations of the form ‘in this culture it is believed that p’ (on the role of metarepresentations in humour see Curcó 1995, 1996, 1997).3 The relationship between these types of representations may range from a high degree of overlapping to a totally distinct quality, which means that, at one end of the continuum, an individual can be aware

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.20 (338)

 Francisco Yus

of what is believed in a culture (e.g. cultural stereotypes) without supporting these beliefs and, at the other end of the continuum, notice how his own beliefs are strengthened and reinforced by cultural similarity. A good example of the first of these limiting cases (differing personal and metarepresented cultural representations) can be found in Pilkington: (18) Richard is a gorilla. (19) a. Gorillas are fierce, nasty, prone to violence. b. Gorillas are shy, sensitive creatures, given to bouts of sentimentality. (2000: 112ff.)

The metaphor in (18) relies on stereotypical qualities regarding the gorilla’s behaviour (19a) which are, then, mapped interpretively onto Richard’s own attributes. However, an ethologist may well have reached a different conclusion intuitively, for instance (19b), after his analysis (e.g. perception) of their behaviour. Even so, and crucially, the ethologist will still be able to understand (19a) when hearing (18). In the specific context of stand-up comedy performances, the members of the audience arrive at the ECC venue with a very personal storage of ‘personal’ and metarepresented cultural representations. Upon hearing the comedian’s monologue which typically deals with cultural stereotypes (e.g. sex roles, relationships, parenting), they will test the comedian’s assumptions made mutually manifest to the audience against their own personal background of representations, sometimes strengthening their personal and metarepresented cultural beliefs, on other occasions, their metarepresented cultural beliefs but not their personal beliefs, etc. In any case, since people who ‘believe that p’ can also identify the cultural stereotypes by means of a metarepresentational ‘in this culture it is believed that p’, cultural stereotypes spread and become mutually manifest regardless of the strength by which they are supported by the members of the audience. The joy of manifestness, as I propose to call this collective awareness of cultural stereotypes, may no doubt be a pleasurable source of humour, often enhanced by the spread of communal laughter in the venue. Koziski holds a similar position: many stand-up comedians jar their audience’s sensibilities by making individuals experience a shock of recognition. This occurs as deeply-held popular beliefs about themselves – even the hidden underpinnings of their culture – are brought to an audience’s level of conscious awareness. (1984: 57)

In particular, the fact that some representations which some members of the audience thought that were individually held turn out to acquire a collective

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.21 (339)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

(i.e. cultural) status during the comedian’s performance is, in itself, a highly relevant piece of information, and no doubt another source of humour in the specific context of the comedy venue.4 Sometimes, the comedian reminds the audience that many of the actions that a person regards special to him/her, are in fact performed by everybody, they are collective actions performed by all the community, and not personal: (20) Cuando estás enamorado no sólo 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” (“Tonterías que hacemos cuando nos enamoramos”, ECC 2001: 17/18).

When you are in love not only do you behave like an idiot. . . but 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 the 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 you, showing off your originality, labelled “Slow music” (“Silly things we do when we’re in love”, ECC 2001: 17/18).

Moreover, comedians in ECC can stir the audience by reminding them of feelings and emotions which they had not previously brought to a conscious level of reasoning, let alone provided an assessment of their collective quality. In this case, the audience is amused at the comedian’s ability to ‘dig’ deep into personal feelings and at the collective ‘conscious’ reasoning of the fact that other members of the audience have experienced similar feelings. This type of alteration in the audience’s cognitive environments may result from the manifestness of subtle impressions arising from the processing of the comedian’s propositional input, which is a typical feature of human communication, since what the communicator intends to make manifest is partly precise and partly vague (Sperber & Wilson 1986) and in this case we would be dealing with mutual manifestness of impressions rather than mutuality of propositions.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.22 (340)

 Francisco Yus

c. Stereotype-(in)consistent cultural representations. Stand-up comedians in general, and the ones in ECC in particular, exhibit a dual and opposite tendency in their performances: either to reinforce or to challenge cultural stereotypes. Their performances make manifest a number of assumptions about deeply held cultural beliefs in the audience. Since human beings are unwilling to erase information from their storage of encyclopaedic information, assumptions challenging this knowledge are assessed by the audience’s cognitive systems and sometimes end up rejected if their strength does not lead to the erasure of the background assumption challenged (Sperber & Wilson 1986). However, as already pointed out, the fact that people can hold parallel personal and metarepresented cultural beliefs on the same issues allows for cultural stereotypes to be entertained even if some members of the audience do not support them personally. Criticisable cultural representations are often challenged by comedians, in an attempt to fight against archetypal cultural representations which linger on despite the development of modern societies. But the mutual manifestness of these challenged representations is not enough. Even if personal representations may well be affected (and re-considered) by the new, in-coming representations from the comedian, the very fact that the comedian underlines the criticisable representations somehow reminds the audience of their metarepresented cultural representations which they indirectly store in their minds, making the spread of cultural stereotypes multifaceted and inevitable. Given the strength of cultural stereotypes, often the comedians at ECC only aim at subverting them just as one more source of humorous effects. A typical strategy is to start the monologue with a cultural-stereotypeinconsistent piece of discourse. As such, stereotype-inconsistent representations are very likely to attract the audience’s attention, producing an immediate cognitive assessment of the audience’s (personal and/or culturally metarepresented) stereotype-consistent background storage. But the remaining part of the monologue is simply an absurd explanation of why the stereotypeinconsistent representations should be supported, thus leaving the audience’s background cultural stereotypes mainly unaffected. An example of this strategy can be found in (21):

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.23 (341)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

(21) Hoy todo el mundo busca tener un cuerpo perfecto. Y yo, como pueden ver, lo he conseguido. Alguno dirá: “¡Pero si está gordo!”. Pues sí, claro. Es que para mi eso es un cuerpo perfecto. La gente está tan obsesionada con perder kilos que no se da cuenta de que estar gordo tiene muchas ventajas (“Ventajas de ser gordo”, ECC 2002: 55).

Nowadays everybody aims at a perfect body. And as you can see, I’ve succeeded. Someone may say: “But he’s fat!”. Well, yes of course. But for me this is a perfect body. People are so obsessed with losing weight that they don’t realise that being fat has a lot of advantages (“Advantages of being fat”, ECC 2002: 55).

The remaining part of the monologue is a succession of absurd explanations supporting the comedian’s stereotype-inconsistent claim made in (21), for instance (22): (22) Los delgados tienen que comer unas cosas asquerosas para mantener su figura, mientras que las cosas que tenemos que comer los gordos para mantener la nuestra están todas buenísimas (“Ventajas de ser gordo”, ECC 2002: 57).

Slim people have to eat revolting things in order to keep their figure, while the things that us fat people have to eat to keep ours are all delicious (“Advantages of being fat”, ECC 2002: 57).

The reader will notice that although (21)–(22) do not affect the audience’s background knowledge on (dis)advantages of being fat/slim, (22) is coherent within the fictional frame initiated by the comedian in (21). The explanation lies in the human ability to engage metarepresentationally in pretence. In (21)– (22) the comedian plays with two different layers of communication: in one layer there is the collective and shared cultural beliefs on being slim/fat, and in another layer there is a pretended scenario which works in the specific ECC context because it echoes the first layer (on layering, see Clark 1996).

. Concluding remarks In this article a pragmatic analysis has been carried out devoted to the humorous strategies used by the comedians at the stand-up performance (and TV programme) El club de la comedia. Among the possible strategies, in this article I have focussed mainly on two types. On the one hand, there are humorous strategies in ECC which focus on specific stretches of discourse and whose intended humorous effects lie in how they are processed. On the other

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.24 (342)

 Francisco Yus

hand, the comedians in ECC also play with the audience’s background knowledge on cultural representations and the effects that might be derived when contrasting this knowledge to the assumptions made mutually manifest during the performance. For instance, some members of the audience may be amused to discover that some assumptions made manifest by the comedian are collective, rather than purely personal, what in this article has been labelled the joy of manifestness. All in all, the study of these varieties of humorous strategies supports a general claim made within pragmatic research: that humour is not an inherent property of texts but, rather, is derived from the mental processes that the hearers have to go through in their search for an optimal interpretation of the utterances.

Notes . Jodłowiec’s (1991) view is similar to the one presented here, but in her analysis the only interpretation consistent with the so-called principle of relevance would be the one in the SCI part of the joke, which, besides, is not supposed to cover (i.e. provide a coherent interpretation of) both MGI and SCI parts. For her, humour lies basically in the reorganisation of contexts, which takes place when shifting from MGI to SCI interpretations. In my opinion, the hearer’s realisation that an alternative – but previously unnoticed – interpretation of the MGI part turns out to be the correct one, also plays an important part in the eventual humorous effect. In other words, MGI and SCI interpretations are not competing ones, but graded and manipulated in the humorist’s search for an appropriate effect. . Needless to say, the addressee has to be willing to engage in the joking game, otherwise incongruities may well produce an undesirable effect in him/her. In Section 3.1 below, it will be argued that the audience of ECC have to be in such a mood that whatever the actors say will be considered (intended-to-be) humorous regardless of the discursive qualities of the discourse uttered. . The distinction between personal and metarepresented cultural is not rigorous, since metarepresented cultural representations are also reflective (like personal reflective beliefs), requiring a validating context (via metarepresentation) for their mental storage, but for methodological purposes I think this distinction can be useful to determine what really goes on in the audience’s minds when confronted with the comedian’s culturally (in)consistent assumptions made manifest through the monologues. . As a direct effect, the cultural quality of these representations spreads across the context of the comedy venue. Lack of space prevents me from pursuing this issue, which I outlined in Yus (2002). Since the comedian’s cultural representations made mutually manifest to the audience interact with their individually arranged set of personal and metarepresented cultural representations, it is inevitable that the comedian’s representations will be altered, however slightly, in the process of transmission.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.25 (343)

Pragmatics of humorous strategies 

References Carston, Robyn (2000). “Explicature and semantics”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 12, 1–46. Carston, Robyn (2002). “Linguistic meaning, communicated meaning and cognitive pragmatics”. Mind & Language, 17(1–2), 127–148. Clark, Herbert H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curcó, Carmen (1995). “Some observations on the pragmatics of humorous interpretations. A relevance-theoretic approach”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 7, 27–47. Curcó, Carmen (1996). “The implicit expression of attitudes, mutual manifestness and verbal humour”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 89–99. Curcó, Carmen (1997). “The pragmatics of humorous interpretations. A relevance theoretic approach”. Unpublished PhD dissertation. London: University College London, University of London. Curcó, Carmen (1998). “Indirect echoes and verbal humour”. In V. Rouchota & A.H. Jucker (Eds.), Current Issues in Relevance Theory (pp. 304–325). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Globomedia / Santillana (2001). El club de la comedia. Madrid: Aguilar. Globomedia / Santillana (2002). El club de la comedia contraataca. Madrid: Aguilar. Escandell-Vidal, Victoria (this volume). “Norms and principles. Putting social and cognitive pragmatics together”. Jodłowiec, Maria (1991). “What makes jokes tick”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 3, 241–253. Koziski, Stephanie (1984). “The standup comedian as anthropologist: Intentional culture critic”. Journal of Popular Culture, 18(2), 57–76. Mintz, Lawrence E. (1985). “Standup comedy as social and cultural mediation”. American Quarterly, 37, 71–80. Pilkington, Adrian (2000). Poetic Effects. A Relevance Theory Perspective. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rutter, Jason (1997). “Stand-up as interaction: Performance and audience in comedy venues”. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation. Salford, England: University of Salford. Sperber, Dan (1994). “The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations”. In L. Hirschfeld & S. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture (pp. 39–67). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan (1996). Explaining Culture. A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan (1997). “Intuitive and reflective beliefs”. Mind & Language, 12(1), 67–83. Sperber, Dan (2000). “Metarepresentations in an evolutionary perspective”. In D. Sperber (Ed.), Metarepresentations (pp. 117–137). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (1987). “Précis of Relevance: Communication and cognition”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10, 697–754. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:57

F: PB12314.tex / p.26 (344)

 Francisco Yus

Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (2002). “Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading”. Mind & Language, 17(1–2), 3–23. Wilde, Larry (2000). Great Comedians Talk about Comedy. Mechanicsburg: Executive Books. Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan (1992). “On verbal irony”. Lingua, 87, 53–76. Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan (2002). “Truthfulness and relevance”. Mind, 111(443), 583– 632. Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan (2004). “Relevance theory”. In G. Ward & L. Horn (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 607–632). Oxford: Blackwell. Yus, Francisco (1997). “La teoría de la relevancia y la estrategia humorística de la incongruencia-resolución”. Pragmalingüística, 3–4, 497–508. Yus, Francisco (1998). “A decade of relevance theory”. Journal of Pragmatics, 30, 305–345. Yus, Francisco (1999). “Misunderstandings and explicit/implicit communication”. Pragmatics, 9(4), 487–517. Yus, Francisco (2000). On reaching the intended ironic interpretation”. International Journal of Communication, 10(1–2), 27–78. Yus, Francisco (2001). “Literal/nonliteral and the processing of verbal irony”. Pragmalingüística, 8–9, 349–373. Yus, Francisco (2002). “Stand-up comedy and cultural spread: The case of sex roles”. Babel A.F.I.A.L (special issue on literary and linguistic aspects of humour), 245–292. Yus, Francisco (2003). “Humor and the search for relevance”. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(9), 1295–1331.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:10/02/2004; 9:02

F: PB123P4.tex / p.1 (345)

P IV

Towards an integrated pragmatic theory

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.1 (347)

Chapter 15

Norms and principles Putting social and cognitive pragmatics together* Victoria Escandell-Vidal

.

Introduction

We all probably agree that the use of language cannot be characterised in terms of grammar only, and therefore a complementary theory is needed to account for linguistic performance: this theory we call pragmatics. However, a quick look at current bibliography is enough to realise that under the same label a wide variety of approaches coexist, each with its own framework, basic tools, and interests. When we say that pragmatics deals with everything that determines the use of language, we are tacitly admitting that actual uses should meet other ‘external’ requirements – requirements different from mere grammaticality. If so, a number of related questions immediately arise: What is the exact nature of these requirements? What is their theoretical status? How are they to be described? What place should they occupy in a pragmatic theory? Answers to these questions have been offered in quite different terms, and notions such as norms, conditions, rules, postulates, maxims, strategies, laws, heuristics, principles have been invoked to account for the underlying regularities that seem to govern linguistic use. The purpose of this paper is to show that some of the various perspectives mentioned above are not necessarily incompatible, and that a design for pragmatic theory can be suggested that encompasses different approaches in a single, unified model. After briefly commenting on the sources of the current diversity, I will present the bases for a modular approach to pragmatics. Different components will be identified, their specificity deriving from the sort of contribution they make to the interpretive process. The distinction be-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.2 (348)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

tween representation and computation – a distinction borrowed from Artificial Intelligence – will prove crucial.

. Two ways of doing pragmatics Though it is true that a large number of different perspectives exist side by side in the domain of pragmatics, two main general trends can be identified: sociocultural approaches and cognitive approaches. These represent the two poles that attract most of the current research in the field. Of course, they are not totally homogeneous models; rather, each group draws together several views and proposals, sometimes with bitter discrepancies between them. But despite these differences, they share defining features, such as research objectives and basic tools, which explains why they all bear some family resemblance. On the one hand, there is a branch of pragmatics concerned with ‘external’ factors, i.e. with those aspects of the selection and interpretation of linguistic form that happen to be determined by social and cultural factors. This includes politeness studies, research on conversational styles, rhetoric, discourse genres and register. On the other hand, we find pragmatics dealing with ‘internal’ factors, such as the cognitive bases for linguistic performance, the inferential processes leading to the final interpretation, or the interface relationship between grammar and pragmatics. Now, I want to claim that the sort of explanations elaborated by sociocultural pragmatics can be conceived of as norms, whilst those envisaged by cognitive pragmatics are better understood as principles. . Socio-cultural pragmatics Let us consider socio-cultural pragmatics first. Its main task is to identify and characterise the norms that underlie the use of language of a given social group. But what are norms? The term can denote two different, though related, notions: on the one hand, it can refer to common practice – normal, usual or habitual behaviour; on the other hand, it can refer to a set of rules and regulations, of socially approved patterns of behaviour. One is the idea of norm as a custom of use; the other is the notion of norm as a convention of use. This apparently neat distinction, however, is not always easy to actually apply: often, common practice derives from socially accepted conventions, so no clear borderline can be easily drawn between them; and, even if there is no identifiable, previously established convention, behaviour that strays from the normal

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.3 (349)

Norms and principles 

path tends to be rejected, so the need for social affiliation also reinforces normal behaviour. Yet, the distinction usually has some psychological reality: when norms are conventions, the individual usually perceives them as something external, socially imposed, that requires formal and explicit instruction; when norms are customary practices, they represent internalised, unconscious patterns that the individual follows without even noticing that he is complying with an unwritten model. The sense in which I am interested for my current purposes is that of widespread tendencies of behaviour, no matter whether they stem from explicit or implicit social conventions, or whether they represent conscious or unconscious patterns of behaviour.1 The task of identifying norms is achieved by analysing the behaviour of a population sample in a series of situations with identifiable explanatory social variables, and drawing generalisations from the distribution of frequencies obtained. Think, for instance, of politeness studies: they try to establish the norms underlying linguistic behaviour, as shown by the speakers’ preferences in a number of different situations (requests, apologies, refusals). In this way, an overall picture of a community’s customary practice can be sketched that makes it possible to compare and contrast it with that of different cultural groups.2 Other culturally determined aspects of linguistic use can also benefit from this kind of approach, such as the preferences in discourse structure and organisation3 or routines in turn-taking and conversational styles.4 Generalisations based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data, thus, contribute to the understanding of language use by bringing norms to light, but they cannot fully predict future action. . Cognitive pragmatics Cognitive approaches represent a different way of doing pragmatics. They aim at identifying principles. A principle is the formalised expression of the behaviour of a system. It is not a statistical generalisation, but a causal, mechanical explanation, a general law with the universal status of the laws of Physics. Models on the cognitive side have put a lot of effort into discovering the principles that govern different aspects of use and understanding of language. Though probably not everyone would agree, I would include Grice at least as a precursor of cognitive approaches. His 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” (Grice 1989: 26), was intended as a general law on human rationality, and exhibits the rigidity that distinguishes principles from other sorts of regu-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.4 (350)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

larities, such as maxims: it is precisely because its validity should be maintained that maxims are flexible and defeasible.5 Grice himself emphasises: I would like to be able to think of the standard type of conversational practice not merely as something that all or most do in fact but as something that is reasonable for us to follow, that we should not abandon. (Grice 1989: 29, his italics)

The same can be said about Sperber and Wilson’s two principles of relevance: the first, or cognitive, principle (“Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance”) is a generalisation about the way in which our minds work; the second, or communicative, principle (“Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance”) has to do with the special way in which intentional communicative behaviour is interpreted (i.e. by assuming that its processing will not impose on the hearer any gratuitous effort, one not properly balanced by an equivalent amount of cognitive effects) (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 260). Unlike Grice’s, Sperber and Wilson’s principles are always in force, so implicatures can never arise as a consequence of flouting them. Levinson’s (2000) Q-, M-, and I-principles are a different attempt in a similar vein: they are intended to establish general conditions both on the speaker’s choice and on the recipient’s interpretation.6 They are always in effect, but since they occupy different places in a hierarchy, the operation of one of them can make others appear as no longer valid. By focusing on the general conditions that govern interpretation, Levinson’s purpose is to restrict the role of individual, once-off inference, and establish the basis for default interpretations. Cognition-oriented theories,7 thus, try to find the biological or cognitive bases that underlie communicative behaviour. By virtue of their very status, principles go beyond observed phenomena, and can make causal predictions about unattested facts. Their predictive power is a must for any theory. However, they are difficult to discover and formulate, partly because of their degree of abstraction.

. A single theory? We have briefly considered the two main ways of doing pragmatics. Now, one could wonder why it should be so. If the various aspects of linguistic use could be reduced to a single set either of norms or of principles, a more economical theory could replace the existing division. This move would seem clearly

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.5 (351)

Norms and principles

desirable, provided that it did not result in any substantial loss in descriptive or explanatory power. But, is this possible? If you are expecting an affirmative answer, I have both good and bad news. The bad news is that the answer must be negative: reducing one of the competing approaches to the terms of the other does not seem an adequate solution. The attempts to explain typical socio-cultural phenomena by resorting to universal principles and inferential aspects in terms of conventions both run into serious difficulties. Politeness studies represent the best-known case.8 Some proposals have been put forward claiming that politeness can be accounted for in terms of universal principles, namely those responsible for implicatures and indirectness: politeness arises as the effect of an implicature, so the more indirect a form is, the more polite.9 Cross-cultural studies, however, soon revealed that proposals invoking rational principles could not explain the existing cultural diversity.10 For instance, the schema Could you please __ ? is a polite form of request for many cultures, the invoked explanation being that asking whether the interlocutor can perform a certain action is a way of requesting without an overt imposition. However, it does not work that way in many other cultures. According to Wierzbicka (1991), it would be interpreted as a standard question in some Slavic cultures; and even worse, it would be perceived as very impolite by Thais, since it would imply that you doubt their ability to do things, as reported in Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1990–1994). Attempts to characterise linguistic behaviour in terms of conventions of usage, leaving no room for any sort of universal processes, would count as a move in the opposite direction. I am not sure that anyone would totally endorse such a radical position. To sum up, a reduction of all aspects of language use to a set of norms or a set of principles does not produce the expected result; on the contrary, it gives rise to important descriptive inadequacies.

. A way to integration The fact that a unified theory with a single kind of basic notion cannot escape from major drawbacks does not mean, however, that any attempt in this direction should necessarily be doomed to failure. The good news is that there is a way of building up a single theory and benefiting from its advantages while avoiding the disadvantages mentioned above. The secret is to abandon reductionism.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.6 (352)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

The idea I want to explore is the following. The two main ways of doing pragmatics show very strong preferences in many respects: each has a particular perspective on its subject (language use as a social product versus language use as a cognitive ability); each analyses a particular set of phenomena (‘external’ or social versus ‘internal’ or psychological); each puts up its explanations in different terms (either by identifying norms, or by postulating principles). Now, to the extent that these two approaches do not come into conflict with each other – or, if they should do, to the extent that any clash of interests could be solved – what such a disparity suggests is that they actually do not represent two ways of doing pragmatics, but rather two different research sub-fields. If this is correct, social and cognitive approaches are not two conflicting views, but two different components of a larger system.11 Incorporating them into a single theory does not imply reducing one to the other, but integrating both of them in a wider architecture as autonomous, though interacting, devices. I want to make it very clear that my proposal is not aimed at suggesting an ecumenical solution, or a form of tolerant eclecticism where various models combine freely, regardless of the consequences for the overall theory; quite on the contrary, what I would like to suggest is that there is a way of integrating social and cognitive perspectives into a single, coherent framework. The remainder of this paper is devoted to sketching how this can be done. . A modular approach Anyone can see that the factors determining the way in which language is used are many and diverse. A fruitful strategy for analysing a very complex product is conceiving of it as the result not of a single, large and complex system, but rather of a set of smaller, interacting subsystems. The approach I will suggest is a modular one. The idea of a modular pragmatic theory is not new. The best-known proposal is that of Kasher (1991), in which a distinction is suggested between different components, each devoted to a specific class of phenomena: basic speech acts (core-pragmatics), ritualised speech acts (amplified core-pragmatics), rational action and implicatures (central pragmatics), turn-taking (talk-in-interaction pragmatics), deixis (interface pragmatics), and non-literal uses (extended pragmatics).12 There are many differences between Kasher’s proposal and mine, but the most important one has to do with the way in which subsystems are distinguished from each other. In his model, a component deals with a particular sort of phenomena: implicatures, conventionalised speech acts, non-literal uses. At

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.7 (353)

Norms and principles 

first sight, this might seem reasonable. However, it is difficult to imagine how such a model would work, since none of those phenomena can be identified before processing. Consider, for instance, the difference between a literal and a non-literal interpretation: it does not lie in the features of the input, but rather appears as the output of a process of interpretation taking into account information from many other sources as well. Since no a priori distinction can be established between them, the system would be unable to decide to which component it should assign the processing of the stimulus. What I want to suggest is that the distinction between components should be established in terms of domains.13 The rationale for a domain is that it should be dedicated to the processing of a particular class of data. It can deal with information of a specific kind and format only; non-complying data are simply filtered out. Each domain processes only the sort of information to which it is sensitive: for instance, the visual module is sensitive to shape, colour and light patterns, and other simultaneous, but non-complying stimuli are simply ignored. Thus, access to a particular component is restricted by conditions on the input. This is precisely the approach that I would like to argue for: the criterion for identifying components must be established in the form of relevant prerequisites (not ex post facto distinctions). Though I will not pursue the matter in detail, the way in which I envisage the differences between the components will become clear later. . Different abilities, different systems If different components are postulated, there must be a criterion for deciding what counts as a component. Even if we put aside all the systems and processes that make up the articulatory and auditory bases of speech, verbal communication still involves different abilities. Knowledge of grammar, of course, must play a major part, but is not enough to account for the way in which we use language – this was our starting point. Cognitive-oriented approaches have overtly stressed the role of inference in natural language understanding: inference bridges the (necessary) existing gap between encoded meaning and utterance interpretation in context. Inference is a general ability that makes it possible to obtain new pieces of information by combining existing ones, following patterns of reasoning. The role of inference in current pragmatics is such that some cognitive theories even equate pragmatics with inference. Relevance Theory sets the boundary line between semantics and pragmatics according to the sort of process involved: decoding processes are a matter of semantics; inference processes

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.8 (354)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

belong to pragmatics.14 Recent developments have even taken one step further, and restrict the domain of pragmatics to accounting for the inferential system specialised in human communicative behaviour – a system different from other similar common-purpose faculties, such as theory of mind.15 Be it a general ability or a communication-specific one, the inferential faculty is specialised enough as to be a separate, autonomous system. There is, on the other hand, some evidence that a social ability should also be distinguished. It guides our behaviour in social interaction and makes it possible for us to adapt to the situation and to the audience’s social profile. According to Jackendoff (1992), its main task is that of developing a coherent picture of the self in society. Its specificity comes, among other things, from the fact that the formation of social concepts does not follow the usual steps for ordinary perception and categorisation, since it invokes elements and relationships with no direct perceptual motivation. Social and grammatical faculties develop as the result of a process by which individuals acquire the pattern(s) of their community. The inferential faculty, on the other hand, is universal in the sense that it is not dependent on cultural habits. Its maturation produces similar results in all humans, regardless of their native language and culture. So far we have considered three abilities that are a part of the systems involved in human communication. Even in a superficial characterisation, such as the one I have just offered, they show clear defining features. The natural hypothesis is that each should have its own set of properties and be subject to different sorts of regularities. . Mechanisms and representations How may we account for the difference between culture-dependent (social and grammatical) and culture-independent (inferential) faculties? Let us consider inference first. Inference in language understanding takes pieces of information obtained from linguistic decoding as their input and combines them with other contextual assumptions to yield new pieces of information,16 but the system itself does not contribute any information of its own. What inference does is to process representations: therefore, it is a processing device, i.e. a computational mechanism that operates on representations taken from different sources. Inference is an ability shared by all mankind, and therefore a good candidate for a universal system. As for the social ability, one could be inclined to think that it can never be a universal system, given that it is culture-dependent. But, on the other hand,

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.9 (355)

Norms and principles

there is evidence that a specific system underlies the formation of social categories, which must be common to all humans. Thus, this ability exhibits a dual nature, with both a universal and a culture-specific side. An explanation can be suggested along the following lines: when speaking of social ability, we are in fact putting two different things under the same label. The social ability is, on the one hand, a universal device for social categorisation designed to produce a set of representations on social relations and interaction; the system is ‘tuned’ to the culture settings, but the device itself is universal. On the other hand, the social ability can also be understood as the set of representations generated by the system, their content being determined by the culture-specific input data. If this view is correct, we can easily account for the difference between universality and culture-specificity in terms of a well-known distinction taken from Artificial Intelligence: the one between representation and computation, that is, between data and operations on data. Mechanisms are, thus, universal, while internalised representations are culture-specific. At this point norms and principles take the leading role again. From the perspective I am adopting here, norms and principles express two different sorts of regularities: norms are generalisations on representations, i.e. on data; principles are generalisations on computational mechanisms, i.e. on operations. Thus, they both are needed in a system in which computational devices and representations are the basic components.

. Overview of an integrated model The distinction between computation and representation provides a way to account for the different status and the different contribution of each component. A unified pragmatic theory must accommodate processing devices and representations and give norms and principles their proper place. In the following sections I will try to sketch a possible way to do this. My proposal will be necessarily speculative – and probably rather unorthodox. I do not aim at presenting a fully elaborated model, but rather at identifying the desiderata of each component and suggesting a particular articulation between them. . The inference system A theory of inference is a theory of a universal device; hence its main task is that of identifying the general principles that govern inferential processes. Three



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.10 (356)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

basic issues must be addressed: first, what are the input criteria, i.e. the requirements imposed on the information that enters the system?; second, what are the operations performed by the mechanism?; and finally, what are the output conditions, i.e. what requirements must the processed entities meet before exiting the system? No existing theory has addressed these issues in these particular terms, but still some partial answers can be borrowed from those on offer. Various proposals about the nature of inferential processes have been put forward. Sperber and Wilson (1990) committed themselves to a view of spontaneous inference as a non-demonstrative process including deductive devices, though not the whole range of available deductive patterns are used. Levinson (2000: §1.6) supports the idea that non-deductive (i.e. non-monotonous, non truth-preserving patterns, such as induction, abduction, practical reasoning, default logics, etc.) should be largely preferred. It is perfectly plausible that different situations trigger different sorts of strategies. Much work is still needed before one could take sides on this matter. In any case, identifying and restricting the main reasoning patterns should be a major task for a theory of pragmatic inference. However, this is not enough. Inference is a very powerful, recursive process, so any conclusion obtained can be the input for a new cycle of processing. If this is correct, the question is: when does the mechanism stop? Is there any principle restricting its operation? Relevance Theory can offer some tools for a suitable answer. Consider the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure (previously known as the Criterion of consistence with the principle of relevance), which reads as follows: a. Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects. In particular, test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility. b. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied. (Sperber & Wilson 2002: 18) The generalisation under (b) can be conceived of as a principle imposing restrictions on the recursive operation of inference. Relevance is a balance between positive cognitive effects and processing effort.17 Thus, clause (b) states what I would call the output condition: when the expected level of relevance is reached the system stops.18 If the expected level of relevance is obtained, the system delivers an interpretation; if not, then the process is set in motion again and new assumptions are added to it, until the expectations are fulfilled. So far we have considered the issue of the operations performed by the system and the output conditions. What about the input conditions? Linguistic

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.11 (357)

Norms and principles 

and extra-linguistic, contextual pieces of information are combined to produce an interpretation; however, not just any piece of non-linguistic knowledge is used. How do we select them? A theory of inference must set the requirements to be met by the pieces of information that enter the system; in other words, what we need is a restrictive theory of context. The Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure can again provide an answer: accessibility. From the whole set of internalised assumptions of an individual only a few are accessible at a given time: those stored in working memory. A piece of information can be made accessible, or more accessible, through linguistic decoding and situational activation; put in other words, accessibility is a function of linguistic and situational information over working memory. Only more salient, activated assumptions are allowed into the inferential system. Thus, accessibility involves both a restriction of the search space and a hierarchical organisation of the available information. Obviously, the principles governing reasoning patterns, and input and output conditions must be further detailed and elaborated, but the articulation I have suggested can serve as a starting point. The working of the mechanism can be schematically represented as in Figure 1.

DECODED INFORMATION SITUATION

PRINCIPLES

WORKING MEMORY

Input conditions

ACCESSIBILITY

Processing device

INFERENCE PATTERNS

Output conditions

RELEVANCE YES INTERPRETATION

Figure 1. The inferential system

NO

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.12 (358)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

. The social system What we usually call culture is a collection of ways of thinking and behaving that members of a group learn as a result of the process of socialisation and that determine their beliefs and behaviour. Once acquired, they tend to remain stable and are hardly modified, let alone removed, both at the individual and the social level.19 How do cultural representations spread? Sperber (1994) provides an account in terms of epidemiology of representations.20 Though adequate for a number of cases, this view is biased towards explicit aspects of culture, that is, those depending on the reiterated communication of representations. However, not all aspects of culture are learnt from explicitly expressed representations. As Bourdieu (1980) notes, our internalised knowledge of cultural practices is acquired from practices themselves, as a result of a generalisation on observed behaviours. The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices – more history – in accordance with the schemes engendered by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. (Bourdieu 1980: 55)

True, common practice can also receive explicit reinforcements – as when we tell children what to do; but this does not rule out the trend towards correlating actions and situations.21 The component devoted to forming social representations would have to be articulated in a way that could be compatible with its dual nature as a processing system and as a set of representations. Thus, on the one hand, it should describe the general principles that govern what, following Jackendoff (1992), I will call the social categorisation system, and its input and output conditions; on the other, it should identify the set of social representations generated by the system, which can be described in terms of norms. The social categorisation system would be sensitive to socially dependent features, such as power, distance, age, sex, or degree of imposition, among others. These are, in fact, the social categories usually used in politeness theories. They are universal as basic notions, but their particular content is not: any language would exhibit uses dependent on the status of the partners, for instance, regarding their relative age or power, though the exact way in which this would determine the choice of linguistic forms would vary from culture to culture.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.13 (359)

Norms and principles 

Once initialised (i.e. once its parameters are set for the first time), the working procedure would remain the same. The social component has both a long-term and a short-term task. The short-term, on-line task is that of analysing and categorising incoming pieces of behaviour. The way in which each extralinguistic situation is characterised (according to variables such as setting, relationship to the partner, purpose, etc.) is crucial to the readjustment of communicative activity: if a situation is understood as one of, say, requesting, the sequence of actions will tend to adjust to the internalised corresponding schema; otherwise, it will receive a negative evaluation. As Bourdieu puts it: . . . the habitus tends to generate all ‘reasonable’, ‘common-sense’, behaviours (and only these) which are possible within the limits of these regularities, and which are likely to be positively sanctioned because they are objectively adjusted to the logic characteristic of a particular field, whose objective future they anticipate. At the same time, ‘without violence, art or argument’, it tends to exclude all ‘extravagances’ (‘not for the likes of us’), that is, all the behaviours that would be negatively sanctioned because they are incompatible with the objective conditions. (1980: 55–56)

The long-term task is that of building and updating a set of related representations on socially accepted behaviour. So, we can envisage the social categorisation system as a cognitive sub-system devoted to extracting tacit generalisations from practice. These are not compulsory laws or universal abstractions, but norms in the sense defined above, i.e. expressions of statistically usual behaviour. As such, they join the database that makes up the memory store. Thus, the social subcomponent can be better explained if seen as a processing system that produces both a set of lasting, internalised structured representations and an on-line conceptualisation of current situation. This can be summarised in Figure 2. . Integrating the subcomponents In the previous sections, I have sketched a brief outline of two components (social and inferential), their tasks and subtasks and their constraints; however, for an integrated theory the main point is their articulation. How are these components related to each other? Since inference and social categorisation are mechanisms and social norms are representations, this question amounts to asking how mechanisms and representations integrate. And the answer is easy: representations are the input and the output of mechanisms.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.14 (360)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

OBSERVED BEHAVIOUR

PRINCIPLES

Processing device

NORMS

Representations

SOCIAL CATEGORISATION

SOCIAL REGULARITIES

CURRENT SITUATION LABELLING

LONG TERM MEMORY

Figure 2. The social categorisation system

Think of the social categorisation system. Like any other categorisation device, it takes data from perception and elaborates on them, by organising, structuring and labelling them, to turn them into a coherent picture. Its output is a set of representations, some to be used in the on-line processing, some to be stored in the long-term memory. These two kinds of output representations are used in different ways. When activated, old representations stored in the long-term memory access the working memory; when made salient and accessible (i.e. when complying with the input conditions), they can enter the inferential system if needed. As for the on-line task, the categorisation of the current situation is kept in the short-term memory for a while. This conceptualisation (a set of representations), in turn, imposes adjustments on the input and output conditions of the inferential system. In fact, it acts on accessibility (the input condition) by activating, i.e. by bringing to the working memory the norms associated to the current situation. Thus, these norms are ready to be used in the inferential processing.22 For instance, when entering a shop, the norms and schemata that have to do with the relationship between the customer and the shop assistant are immediately activated and create culturally determined expectations. The analysis of the situation also acts on the output condition, by adjusting the level at which the expectation of relevance will be reached: for instance, we

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.15 (361)

Norms and principles 

set it at different points for a chance encounter and for a press conference. Thus, if an utterance meets the basic expectations, relevance is straightforwardly satisfied and inferential processing stops: all behaviours complying with the norms usually go unnoticed (just like a grammatical sentence does). But, on the contrary, if the utterance does not satisfy the expectations, it triggers some extra computation cycles and adds new representations until an interpretation fulfilling the expected level of relevance is obtained.23 In a sense, norms act as filters: they make salient everything that does not conform to them. Think of the inferential system now. It takes as its input a set of representations, both from linguistic (decoded) and non-linguistic sources, both of internal and external origin, including those regarding the current situation, that have been made accessible. The system processes them and produces a new set of representations: the interpretation. In addition, it has to be noted that the integration between social and inferential systems does not merely go one way. Inferred conclusions are representations too and, as such, they can be treated as new input data for social categorisation as well, thus providing new samples of social behaviour. This is also the necessary feedback linking again the two components. The articulation of these two components can be represented as in Figure 3.

. Some consequences I have sketched a proposal in very general terms. In fact my concern has been to suggest an architecture for an integrated pragmatic theory, rather than a particular theory. I have tried to put the emphasis on the main desiderata, on the identification of different components and their articulation, not of the actual norms and principles. Thus, the sort of design I have suggested is compatible with a number of different models, each with its own primitives and explanations. I do not intend to argue for a specific theory here; however, some tentative suggestions have been made regarding particular aspects. Of course, the proposal has to be fleshed out in much more detail, but nevertheless, I think that, even if sketchy, it can still serve as the basis for the derivation of various interesting implications. The approach I have suggested makes it possible to overcome one of the most serious obstacles for pragmatics: the paradox of the level of theorising. The problem is the following. We assume that decoding cannot account for the interpretation of an utterance: no algorithm can fully determine it; contextual information must also be taken into account. The context of interpretation

SOCIAL CATEGORISATION

Figure 3. The architecture of an integrated pragmatic theory

OBSERVED BEHAVIOUR

SOCIAL REGULARITIES

CURRENT SITUATION LABELLING

LONG TERM MEMORY

INTERPRETATION

YES

RELEVANCE

INFERENCE PATTERNS

ACCESSIBILITY

WORKING MEMORY

NO

DECODED INFORMATION

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59 F: PB12315.tex / p.16 (362)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.17 (363)

Norms and principles 

varies from utterance to utterance: no two contexts are totally identical. But if this is so, then we are left with ever different, unique, one-off tokens, which resist scientific generalisations: if pragmatics should operate at this level only, it would irremediably be doomed to failure. The problem is, thus, that science cannot operate at the personal level. To escape this problem, a level of abstraction should be reached so as to find invariants. There are two ways of doing this: first, by moving to the sub-personal level – a level of mechanical necessity, free from individual desires or intentions; second, by moving to a supra-personal level – a level of statistical regularities, not subject to the individual’s will either. The first strategy amounts to identifying principles, generalisations governing cognitive systems that are common to all humans. The second one focuses on norms, i.e. on statistical regularities. They both are combined in the suggested architecture. Some more practical consequences can also be drawn. The first one has to do with the debate about the existence (and, if so, about the status) of pragmatic competence. In a model that distinguishes between computation and representation, the answer is straightforward: a competence exists whenever we can find a consistent set of internalised representations (i.e. a body of knowledge). So in the present case, there is something we can call competence, but it is limited to pieces of knowledge, not to mechanisms. Cultural norms and patterns of behaviour qualify as the objects of a pragmatic competence to the extent that they are acquired, internalised, and stored. Thus, different individuals can show various degrees of mastery – they can be more or less competent – but the mastery of a particular set of norms does not guarantee a similar skill in other domains: for example, an individual with a good tacit command of the norms governing conversation in non-formal settings can be absolutely incompetent in formal settings. Such differences arise as the result of a poor or insufficient exposure to the relevant situations, not as a consequence of differences in the processing systems themselves. Mechanisms, on the other hand, show a similar performance, regardless of the level of competence or education of individuals; this suggests that the term competence is not applicable here. This has implications for second language learning as well. Cultural misunderstandings usually come up when communicative habits are transferred from one language/culture to a different one. Acquiring communicative competence in a foreign language would involve re-setting the social categorisation mechanisms and generating a new set of norms, according to the cultural standards of a different community. Though teaching methods make every effort to provide the students with relevant generalisations, this does not seem to be enough. The reason may be the following: native speakers internalise social patterns directly

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.18 (364)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

from practice, by generalisation over a whole range of situations, and therefore these acquire the status of probabilistic norms; at the same time, practice tunes the social categorisation system and determines its on-line output, i.e. the current situation labelling. Students, however, are presented with examples followed by explicit explanations in the form of rules without exception. Now, what explicit explanations do is to add new representations to long-term memory but they can hardly modify the working of the social categorisation system once and for all. The result is that even if the relevant generalisations for a new culture have been learned, these are not automatically related to the social categorisation labelling, so the current situation will be categorised as in the native culture and will still trigger the activation of its old corresponding norms, bypassing the newly acquired ones. Thus, explanations can hardly replace the original settings of the social categorisation faculty.

. Modelling the mind: The lost connection My proposal has been elaborated within the standards of symbolic cognitivism and particularly by adopting two basic assumptions: first, the distinction between representation and computation; second, the idea that the mind can be conceived of as a symbolic system that processes and stores internal symbolic representations (i.e. representations made of a combination of symbols according to the system’s own specific rules). Knowledge is the set of stored representations (no matter what its actual format is), and learning entails adding new representations to the existing database and updating its contents. Using stored pieces of knowledge involves inferential processes, which combine available representations, both external and internal, to yield new assumptions. Symbolic cognitivism, however, has been recently challenged by a new model in Artificial Intelligence: connectionism.24 Its starting point is a computational architecture that tries to emulate the working of neurons. Cognitive activity involves a set of parallel, distributed and dynamic computational processes carried out by a high number of small processing units. These units have no intrinsic content, but each can exhibit a different degree of activation; also the connections linking each unit to others can be different. Thus, two processes differ in the level of activation of each unit and in the weight of the connections between the units. There is no database, no explicit representation of knowledge, as representationalism claims; as a consequence, learning cannot entail adding new pieces of information to a memory storage, but rather adjusting the connectivity patterns for each sort of input until fixing them.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.19 (365)

Norms and principles 

Apparently, connectionism obtains good results in all those areas in which classical cognitivism runs into difficulties, such as performing activities and adapting to unexpected circumstances. Now, if pragmatics has to do with linguistic activity and linguistic activity is precisely a matter of adapting to circumstances, maybe – one could wonder – we have chosen the wrong, representationalist, paradigm and we had better reconsider our approach. The decision, I think, crucially depends on our objectives. There is every likelihood that the brain will work at the neuron level as connectionists claim, and also that the computational implementation will have to be carried out by using a neural network architecture. Yet, there is an aspect in which representationalism is still far superior: that of its ability to help us describe, depict, and understand phenomena. Paradoxically, a disconnection between descriptive capacity and causal explanation results from adopting a connectionist view: when we try to describe external regularities in behaviour, we come up against the problem that there is not a parallel, internal explanation in terms of underlying processes; similarly, when we consider the regularities in the computational processes, these do not correlate with external regularities. Put in other words, whilst a neural network can satisfactorily emulate a certain sort of behaviour, no relevant, interesting generalisation can be drawn on the basis of internal processes, activity flow and weight of connections only. As Laks (1996) admits, no direct link can be established between phenomena and the way they arise. The moral of the story is: we must relativise the status of our explanations. When we postulate the existence of different cognitive systems and mental processes, or when we explain certain phenomena as a result of certain internal representations – as I have done – , we must keep in mind that what we are producing is a functional and descriptive characterisation that can help us understand and explain how things are, but we should be careful not to mistake the explanation for the facts; this does not mean, however, that our explanations must be necessarily wrong and consequently abandoned – at least, not as long as they provide us with suitable views on difficult issues. Our theories are merely convenient representations, useful tools for better capturing the intricate complexity of our own behaviour, not scale models of our brain. Thus, we can suggest a model of reality without claiming the reality of the model.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.20 (366)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

. Conclusion In the previous sections I have discussed some aspects of the divorce between social and cognitive pragmatics. I have tried to show that they could never reduce to one another. In determining what is adequate to a given situation different factors are involved: some of them are general principles and their operation is not affected by culture; others are norms that stem from socially repeated practices. Yet, they all play a determining role in a characterisation of communicative activity. I have tentatively put forward an integrated model in which both social and inferential components can occupy their rightful place, and I have tried to draw a provisional outline of how it could work. Of course, I might be wrong. I would be prepared to admit that the solutions I have favoured are not the only ones, not even the best ones; that the architecture of my model calls for substantial changes; that the details of my proposal can be improved to better capture the essence and diversity of the communicative activity. And still, there is a point in which I would like to believe I am right – otherwise, I would not dare impose on your time: pragmatics has reached an outstanding level of development, both in social and inferential approaches; now, it is time to work on an integrated theory, one in which the two existing perspectives could fruitfully combine. Such integrated model would have to contain partial theories on the various capacities that take part in linguistic activity and make an explicit proposal about the way in which they are linked together. Only in this way will we be able to account at the same time for what is universal and what is culture-specific; only in this way will we be able to edge closer to a better, fuller, and richer understanding of human communication.

Notes * This is a revised version of a plenary paper given at the First UK Symposium on Hispanic Linguistics (School of Language, Law and International Studies, University of Surrey, April 2002). I am very grateful to the organisers (Rosina Márquez-Reiter and María Elena Placencia) and the audience for stimulating debate, and also to Aoife Ahern, Manuel Leonetti, Begoña Vicente, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. This research has been partially supported by a grant from the Spanish Department of Education and Culture, DGICYT PB98-0707, “Gramática e interpretación en la teoría de la relevancia”. . See Section 5.2 for further discussion. . Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989); Oleksy (Ed.) (1989); Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1990– 1994); Wierzbicka (1991); Watts, Ide and Ehlich (Eds.) (1992); Placencia (1992); Sifianou

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.21 (367)

Norms and principles 

(1992); Gass and Neu (Eds.) (1993); Haverkate (1994); Scollon and Scollon (1995); le Pair (1996); Gass (1999); Fukushima (2000); Márquez-Reiter (2000); Placencia and Bravo (2002). . Berman and Slobin (Eds.) (1994); Connor (1996); Vázquez (web page). . Mey (1993); Gallardo Paúls (1996); Tusón Valls (1997). . A sort of hierarchical relationship is also observable among maxims, in that one maxim can be flouted to comply with a higher one. This happens, for instance, when the maxim of quantity is violated in order to abide by the maxim of quality. .

The Q-principle: Speaker’s maxim: Do not provide a statement that is informationally weaker than your knowledge of the world allows, unless providing an informationally stronger statement would contravene the I-principle. Specifically, select the informationally strongest paradigmatic alternate that is consistent with the facts. Recipient’s corollary: Take it that the speaker made the strongest consistent with what he knows (. . . ). (Levinson 2000: 76) The M-principle: Speaker’s maxim: Indicate an abnormal, non-stereotypical situation by using marked expressions that contrast with those you would use to describe the corresponding normal, stereotypical situation. Recipient’s corollary: What is said in an abnormal way indicates an abnormal situation, or marked messages indicate marked situations (. . . ). (Levinson 2000: 136) The I-principle: Speaker’s maxim: The maxim of Minimization. “Say as little as necessary”; that is, produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your communicational ends (bearing Q in mind). Recipient’s corollary: The Enrichment rule. Amplify the informational content of the speaker’s utterance, by finding the most specific (his italics) interpretation, up to what you judge to be the speaker’s m-intended point, unless the speaker has broken the maxim of Minimization by using a marked or prolix expression. (Levinson 2000: 114)

. See also Horn (1984); Blakemore (1992); Carston (1999, 2002a, 2002b), among many others. . I cannot present the whole line of argumentation here. A more detailed discussion can be found in Escandell-Vidal (1995, 1996). . Searle (1969, 1975); Lakoff (1973); Brown and Levinson (1987). . Matsumoto (1989); Watts, Ide and Ehlich (Eds.) (1992); Multilingua 12 (1993); Scollon and Scollon (1995); and most of the references in Note 2. . This view has been defended in Escandell-Vidal (1996, 1998). . See also Pléh (2000) for a different proposal. . See, among others, the papers in Hirschfeld and Gelman (Eds.) (1994). . Carston (1999). . Sperber and Wilson (2002); Carston (2002a).

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.22 (368)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal . Consider the following dialogue: A: B:

– No tendría que ir hoy: habrá un atasco tremendo. . . “He shouldn’t go today: there will be a tremendous traffic jam. . . ” – No te preocupes por eso: Juan vive en Majadahonda. “Don’t worry: he lives in Majadahonda.”

Apparently, B’s answer is totally irrelevant. . . unless a piece of information is added to the context, namely the assumption that people who live in Majadahonda (a dormitory town near Madrid) are used to traffic jams, so Juan would not be particularly upset. The selection and addition of exactly this content depends on inference and, in the present case, world knowledge. . Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995, 2002). . Incidentally, it is not difficult to restate the results of Levinson’s (2000) heuristics in these terms: for instance, a prolix, marked or unusual expression requires a greater processing effort, which has to be rewarded with extra effects, hence the search for an unusual reading. . Strauss and Quinn (1997); Janney and Arndt (1992, 1993); Jackendoff (1992); Kasper (1992). . Consider a social group (. . . ). Each member of the group has, in his or her head, millions of mental representations, some short-lived, others stored in long-term memory and constituting the individual’s ‘knowledge’. Of these mental representations, some – a very small proportion – get communicated repeatedly, and end up being distributed throughout the group, and thus have a mental version in most of its members. When we speak of cultural representations, we have in mind – or should have in mind – such widely distributed, lasting representations. (Sperber 1994: 33) . Hofstede (2001) presents a similar view, according to which social values are acquired in the family and further reinforced during institutionalised education. Different cultures give priority to different values, which explains cultural diversity. . See Escandell-Vidal (1996) for a more detailed discussion. . In Escandell-Vidal (1998) a fully exemplified argumentation is provided. . Rummelhart et al. (1986); Laks (1996); Clark (1997), among others.

References Berman, Ruth A. & Slobin, Dan I. (1994). Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Blakemore, Diane (1992). Understanding Utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, House, Juliane, & Kasper, Gabriele (Eds.). (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood: Ablex. Bourdieu, Pierre (1980). The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.23 (369)

Norms and principles 

Carston, Robyn (1999). “The semantics/pragmatics distinction: A view from relevance theory”. In K. Turner (Ed.), The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View (pp. 85–125). Oxford: Elsevier. Carston, Robyn (2002a). “Linguistic meaning, communicated meaning and cognitive pragmatics”. Mind and Language, 17(1–2), 127–148. Carston, Robyn (2002b). Thoughts and Utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. Clark, Andy (1997). Being There. Putting Brain, Body and Mind Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Connor, Ulla (1996). Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Second Language Writing. Cambridge: CUP. Escandell-Vidal, Victoria (1995). “Cortesía, fórmulas convencionales y estrategias indirectas”. Revista Española de Lingüística, 25, 31–66. Available at http://www.uned.es/ sel/pdf/ene-jun-95/25-1-31-66.pdf Escandell-Vidal, Victoria (1996). “Towards a cognitive approach to politeness”. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Turner (Eds.), Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics (Vol. II: Discourse Strategies) (pp. 629–650). Oxford: Pergamon. Also in Language Sciences, 18(3–4), 629– 650. Escandell-Vidal, Victoria (1998). “Politeness: A relevant issue for relevance theory”. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 11 (Special issue devoted to Relevance Theory), 45–57. Fukushima, Saeko (2000). Requests and Culture: Politeness in British English and Japanese. Bern: Peter Lang. Gallardo Paúls, Beatriz (1996). Análisis conversacional y pragmática del receptor. Valencia: Episteme. Gass, Susan (1999). Interlanguage Refusals: A Cross-cultural Study of Japanese-English. Berlin: Mouton-DeGruyter. Gass, Susan & Neu, Joyce (Eds.). (1993). Speech Acts across Cultures. Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter. Grice, Paul (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haverkate, Henk (1994). La cortesía verbal. Estudio pragmalingüístico. Madrid: Gredos. Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. & Gelman, Susan A. (1994). Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hofstede, Geert (2001). Culture’s Consequences. Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations across Nations. London: Sage. Horn, Larry (1984). “Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and Rbased implicature”. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, Form and Use in Context. Linguistic Applications (pp. 11–42). Washington: Georgetown University Press. Jackendoff, Ray (1992). Languages of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Janney, Richard W. & Arndt, Horst (1992). “Intracultural tact vs intercultural tact”. In R. J. Watts, S. Ide, & K. Ehlich (Eds.), Politeness in Language. Studies in its History, Theory and Practice (pp. 21–41). Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter. Janney, Richard W. & Arndt, Horst (1993). “Universality and relativity in cross-cultural politeness research: A historical perspective”. Multilingua, 12, 13–50. Kasher, Asa (1991). “Pragmatics and Chomsky’s research program”. In A. Kasher (Ed.), The Chomskyan Turn (pp. 122–149). Oxford: Blackwell. Kasper, Gabriele (1992). “Pragmatic Transfer”. Second Language Research, 3, 203–231.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.24 (370)

 Victoria Escandell-Vidal

Kasper, Gabriele & Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (Eds.). (1993). Interlanguage Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine (1990–1994). Les interactions verbales (3 vols.). Paris: Armand Colin. Lakoff, Robin (1973). “The logic of politeness, or minding your P’s and Q’s”. Proceedings of the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 345–356. Laks, Bernard (1996). Langage et cognition. L’approche connexionniste. Paris: Hermes. Leech, Geoffrey (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. Levinson, Stephen (2000). Presumptive Meanings. The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Márquez Reiter, Rosina (2000). Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Matsumoto, Yoshiko (1989). “Politeness and conversational universals. Observations from Japanese”. Multilingua, 8, 207–221. Mey, Jacob (1993). Pragmatics. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Oleksy, Wieslaw (Ed.). (1989). Contrastive Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. le Pair, Rob (1996). “Spanish requests strategies: A cross-cultural analysis from a an intercultural perspective”. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Turner (Eds.), Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics (Vol. II: Discourse Strategies) (pp. 651–670). Oxford: Pergamon. Placencia, María Elena (1992). “Politeness in Ecuadorian Spanish and British English”. Language Learning Journal, 6, 80–82. Placencia, María Elena & Bravo, Diana (2002). Actos de habla y cortesía en español. Munich: LINCOM Europa. Pléh, Csaba (2000). “Modularity and pragmatics: Some simple and some complicated ways”, Pragmatics, 10(4), 415–438. Rummelhart, David E. et al. (Eds.). (1986). Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Scollon, Ron & Scollon, Susie (1995). Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Searle, John (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John (1975). “Indirect speech acts”. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Speech Acts (Syntax and Semantics, 3) (pp. 59–82). New York: Academic Press. Sifianou, Maria (1992). Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece. A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sperber, Dan (1994). “The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations”. In L. A. Hirschfeld & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture (pp. 39–67). New York: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan (2000). “Metarepresentations in an evolutionary perspective”. In D. Sperber (Ed.), Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (pp. 117–137). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (1986/1995). Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (1990). “Spontaneous deduction and mutual knowledge”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 179–184.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 12:59

F: PB12315.tex / p.25 (371)

Norms and principles

Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (2002). “Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading”. Mind and Language, 17(1–2), 3–25. Strauss, Claudia & Quinn, Naomi (1997). A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tusón Valls, Amparo (1997). Análisis de la conversación. Barcelona: Ariel. Vázquez, Graciela (web page). Project ADIEU (Akademischer Diskurs in der Europäischen Union) http://www.fu-berlin.de/adieu/vazquez/ Watts, Richard J., Ide, Sachiko, & Ehlich, Konrad (Eds.). (1992). Politeness in Language. Studies in its History, Theory and Practice. Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter. Wierzbicka, Anna (1991). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter.



TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:02

F: PB123CON.tex / p.1 (373)

Contributors

AIOFE AHERN is working on her PhD thesis in the Department of Spanish Language and Linguistics at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Madrid. Her research topic is the semantics and pragmatics of the indicative and subjunctive moods in Spanish, and her areas of interest include relevance theory and the semantics/pragmatics interface, as well as the relation between grammar and pragmatics. ISOLDA E. CARRANZA obtained her PhD in linguistics at Georgetown University (Washington, DC) in 1996. Some of her publications are Two-Way Immersion Education (Delta Publishers) (as a co-author); Conversación y deixis de discurso, Córdoba (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba) and articles in international journals such as Narrative Inquiry, Discourse & Society, Oralia, and Revista Iberoamericana sobre Discurso y Sociedad which report her work on conversation, classroom discourse, and fieldwork interviews. She is a researcher in the field of discourse analysis at the National Research Council of Argentina and is a full professor at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. MARIANNA CHODOROWSKA-PILCH is a lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She works on the linguistic encoding of politeness, grammaticalization, discourse analysis, and other areas of pragmatics related to politeness. Dr. Chodorskwa-Pilch’s work has been published in international journals. In particular, her research has focused on grammatical devices and discourse markers, which convey politeness in natural conversations. CARMEN CURCÓ is Profesora Titular in Linguistics at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where she teaches pragmatics, semantics and general linguistics. She received her PhD in linguistics from University College London with a thesis on relevance theoretic pragmatics. Her published work includes studies on the interpretation of humorous discourse, figurative language, and politeness. She is also co-editor of a collection of papers on applied linguis-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:02

F: PB123CON.tex / p.2 (374)

 Contributors

tics in Latin America. Her main current research interests are in the areas of cognitive pragmatics and language contact phenomena. VICTORIA ESCANDELL-VIDAL is Profesora Titular in Spanish Linguistics at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Madrid. She is the author of the first Spanish textbook on pragmatics: Introducción a la Pragmática (Ariel). Her research interests include cognitive pragmatics, especially its interface with grammar. She has devoted several papers to developing some aspects of procedural content: “Intonation and procedural Encoding: The case of Spanish interrogatives”, Current Issues in Relevance Theory (John Benjamins); “Los enunciados interrogativos. Aspectos semánticos y pragmáticos”, Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Real Academia Española/Espasa); “Categorías funcionales y semántica procedimental”, Cien años de investigación semántica (Ediciones Clásicas), with M. Leonetti; “Coercion and the stage/individual Distinction”, From Words to Discourse (Elsevier), with M. Leonetti; “Echo-syntax and metarepresentations”, Lingua, 112, 2002. She has written on other topics, such as the theory of politeness (“Towards a cognitive approach to politeness”, Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics, Pergamon Press; “Politeness. A relevant issue for relevance theory”, RAEI, 11, 1998), and the syntax of noun phrases: Los complementos del nombre (Arco/Libros). CARMEN GARCÍA is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Spanish Discourse Analysis at Arizona State University, where she is Director of the Lower Division Spanish Language Programme in the Department of Languages and Literatures. She received her PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University in 1985. Her research is in discourse analysis, cross-cultural communication, and the application of discourse analysis research to foreign language teaching. She has co-authored several college-level Spanish textbooks and published many articles, chapters in books, and reviews in scholarly journals. She is a frequent speaker and presenter at regional, national, and international professional conferences and a member of the American Association of Applied Linguistics, The American Council on the teaching of Foreign Languages, and the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. NIEVES HERNÁNDEZ FLORES is an MA graduate in Spanish philology from the University of Salamanca and she has a PhD in languages and intercultural studies from the University of Aalborg, Denmark. She is member of the coordinating board of EDICE (Estudios de Discurso de Cortesía en Español). Her main research interests are socio-cultural pragmatics, politeness theory, and discourse studies. She teaches communication, discourse analysis,

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:02

F: PB123CON.tex / p.3 (375)

Contributors 

and socio-cultural pragmatics in the Spanish Department at the Copenhagen Business School. LEO HICKEY holds degrees in Law and Languages from University College Dublin and the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. He is a Research Professor in the European Studies Research Institute at the University of Salford, where he held the Chair of Spanish from 1986 to 1999. His publications are mainly on Spanish linguistics, stylistics, and pragmatics. They include a volume of Spanish pragmastylistics (Curso de Pragmaestilística, Coloquio), two edited volumes on The Pragmatics of Style (Routledge) and The Pragmatics of Translation (Multilingual Matters) and several papers on legal translation. At present he is working on a collective volume entitled Politeness in Europe (Multilingual Matters). MANUEL LEONETTI is Profesor Titular in Spanish Linguistics at the Universidad de Alcalá, (Madrid). His main interest is on the Syntax-Semantics and Semantics-Pragmatics interfaces, and his publications are related to two general research topics namely, relevance theory (in particular, the conceptual semantics / procedural semantics distinction, as in “Categorías funcionales y semántica procedimental”, with V. Escandell-Vidal, in Cien años de investigación semántica (Ediciones Clásicas), and “Coercion and the stage/individual distinction”, with V. Escandell-Vidal, in J. Gutiérrez-Rexach (Ed.), From Words to Discourse. Trends in Spanish Semantics and Pragmatics (Elsevier) and the grammar of noun phrases (definiteness, specificity, anaphora and nominal arguments, as in “El artículo”, Chapter 12 in I. Bosque and V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, Volume I (Espasa-Calpe). NURIA LORENZO-DUS is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Wales Swansea, where she is involved in the department’s distance-learning PhD programme. She has research interests in the fields of cross- and intercultural pragmatics, oral proficiency assessment, and media discourse. Dr. Lorenzo-Dus has published widely in Spain and the UK, including contributions to edited volumes and journals such as Journal of Pragmatics and Journal of Sociolinguistics. ROSINA MÁRQUEZ REITER is Senior Lecturer in Spanish Language and Linguistics at the University of Surrey where she teaches and researches (Spanish) socio-pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Her current research interests include socio-pragmatic variation with particular reference to Spanish as well as pragmatics in general, discourse analysis, and politeness theory. Her pub-

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:02

F: PB123CON.tex / p.4 (376)

 Contributors

lications include articles in scholarly journals on (contrastive) speech acts as well on politeness theory (Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay, John Benjamins), she is currently writing a book on The Pragmatics of Spanish (Palgrave/Macmillan) (with M. E. Placencia). PAUL MEARA is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Wales Swansea. He is best known for his work on vocabulary acquisition. His web site (http://www.swan.ac.uk/cals/calsres/index/) contains a very large bibliographical database covering research on vocabulary since 1960, and a number of useful research tools and vocabulary tests. Swansea is also home to an innovative distance-learning PhD group, which is also focused on vocabulary issues. This group grew out of Professor Meara’s interest in research training for postgraduate students. MARÍA ELENA PLACENCIA holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Lancaster. She is Lecturer in Spanish and Linguistics at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her main areas of interest are (socio)pragmatics, cross- and inter-cultural communication, and foreign language teaching. Her publications include studies on politeness and different aspects of communicative style in Bolivian, Ecuadorian, and Peninsular Spanish and British English as well as aspects of pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish and foreign language teaching. She is currently writing a co-authored book on The Pragmatics of Spanish (Palgrave/Macmillan) and is working on a co-edited volume on Politeness in the Spanish-Speaking World. MARTINA SCHRADER-KNIFFKI is a graduate of the Free University of Berlin where she completed her Master’s degree in Romance and German Philology with specialization in linguistics, and the University of Bremen, where she obtained her PhD in Romance Linguistics with a dissertation on language contact and politeness in a Spanish-Zapotec bilingual group of speakers in the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. She has published a number of articles about language contact, pragmatics, Zapotec language, and forms of verbal politeness. She works as a research assistant at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her main areas of investigation are language contact and pragmatics in Spanish America, language contact in Brasil, Amerindian languages in Mexico and Brasil (Zapotec, Nheengatú), and historical (socio) linguistics. MIRANDA STEWART is Senior Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. Her research interests include interactional pragmatics–pronominal usage in

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:1/07/2004; 15:02

F: PB123CON.tex / p.5 (377)

Contributors 

French and Spanish; negotiation of face in dialogue interpreting (with I. Mason); politeness in feedback in Spanish and English; the sociolinguistics of Spanish (The Spanish Language Today, Routledge). She is currently co-editing (with Professor Leo Hickey) Politeness in Europe (Multilingual Matters). EDUARDO URIOS-APARISI is Assistant Professor at the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at the University of Connecticut, Storrs and was Visiting Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa and a researcher in the Departamento de Filología Española at Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. His areas of interest include grammaticalisation of discourse markers, the study of metaphor in context, and the expression of emotions from a pragmatic perspective. He has collaborated with G. Reyes and E. Baena in the book Ejercicios de Pragmática, volume 2 (Arco/Libros), and has published in a diversity of topics including metaphor, Greek comedy and literature, and creative writing. FRANCISCO YUS teaches pragmatics at the Universidad de Alicante, Spain. He has a PhD in linguistics and has specialised in the application of pragmatics (especially relevance theory) to media discourses and conversational issues. He has made two applications of pragmatics to characters in alternative comics (Conversational Cooperation in Alternative Comics, Universidad de Alicante; El discurso femenino en el cómic alternativo inglés, Universidad de Alicante), proposed a pragmatic verbal-visual model of communication in media discourses (La Interpretación y la Imagen de Masas, Diputación de Alicante, Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert), studied the written-oral interface (La preeminencia de la voz, Universidad de Alicante), and developed a pragmatic approach to Internet-mediated communication (Ciberpragmática, Ariel). His latest research deals with the application of relevance theory to the analysis of misunderstandings and irony in conversation, as well as to the production and interpretation of humorous discourses.

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:10/07/2004; 9:27

F: PB123IN.tex / p.1 (379)

Index

A action patterns 158, 159, 169–171 affiliation 267, 268, 272, 349 anaphora 15, 22 Anglo-American School/tradition of pragmatics 4, 6, 11, 15, 22, assertion 37, 38, 47, 53, 306 asymmetrical 128, 208, 232, 234, 245, 250, 254, 258, 259, 309 autonomy 267, 268, 275–277 B bracket 205, 211, 219, 223 C closeness 121, 122, 125, 128, 129, 133, 134, 148, 150, 220, 232 closings 93, 126, 129, 130, 133, 134 comedy 319, 320, 325, 329, 331, 333–335, 337–339, 342 communicative style 16, 18–20, 23, 122 competence/skills (interactional) 81, 82, 86, 93, 94 conditional 57–73, 105, 190 context selection 179, 187, 195, 197, 198 conversational organisation 15 cue (contextualization) 211, 214, 218 D deixis 7, 9, 10, 15, 22, 204, 352 directive 21, 44, 45, 47–50, 52, 54, 67, 68 discourse (business negotiation) 18, 19, discourse (competence) 86 discourse (conversational) 223 discourse (courtroom) 203, 204, 217

discourse (didactic) 6 discourse (and gender) 233 discourse (humorous) 321–323 discourse (media) 6, 90 discourse (persuasive) 16 discourse (political) 6, 17, 22 discourse analysis 4, 5, 7, 10, 180, 206 discourse completion tests 17, 18 discourse marker(s) 5–7, 11, 15, 21, 23, 37, 126, 146, 148, 149, 152, 179–183, 191–193, 197, 203–208, 211–220, 223, 224 distance (social) 58–63, 65, 66, 70–73, 101, 102, 121, 128, 129, 132–134, 141, 146–148, 150, 162, 163, 220, 232, 258, 279, 358

E European School/tradition of pragmatics 4, 22

F face 16, 17, 58, 63, 69, 100–104, 106–112, 114–116, 129, 232, 233, 236, 247–250, 256-259, 265–272, 274–281, 289, 301, 302, 306, 309, 310, 312, 314 face enhancement (function of politeness) 265, 266, 268–272, 274–280 face-threatening 59, 65, 87, 100, 102, 108–112, 114, 115, 237, 265, 270, 277, 279, 281, 301 footing 210, 211, 212, 215, 216, 219, 289, 301, 302, 304, 308, 309, 312, 314

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:10/07/2004; 9:27

F: PB123IN.tex / p.2 (380)

 Index

formality 83, 87, 88, 94, 126–129, 146–148, 150, 152, 208, 220, 224 frame(s) 232, 235, 236, 247, 250, 251, 258, 259 G genre 204, 208, 213–215, 220, 224 grammaticalisation 15, 21, 58, 60, 68, 71–73, 197–199 H hedging 103, 107, 115 heterogeneity 204, 214, 215, 217, 223 humorous strategies 319, 321, 322, 325, 326, 328, 329, 331, 341, 342 humour 9, 14, 146, 152, 323, 325, 328, 329, 334, 336–339, 342 I impositive 16, 57–63, 65–72 indicative 21, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42–47, 49, 51, 52, 54 inference 35, 36, 44, 48, 51, 58, 63, 66, 180, 184, 185, 186, 197, 206, 292, 320, 321, 328, 330, 331, 333, 337, 350, 353–357, 359, 368 informality 128, 129, 146, 147, 150, 216 L love (romantic) 287–290, 292, 293, 295, 296, 298, 300–302, 305, 309, 310, 312, 314 M metaphor 10, 14, 53, 58–60, 65, 73, 287–291, 295, 298, 309, 310, 313, 314, 338 metaphor (conceptual) 10, 14, 53, 58–60, 65, 73, 292–293, 296, 298, 300, 302, 310, 313, 314, 338 metaphorical utterances 287, 290, 291 metapragmatic awareness 289, 290, 292, 312

metapragmatics 290, 313 metonymic 58, 59, 308 mitigation (function of politeness) 268, 269, 272, 274, 275, 278, 281 mood 15, 21, 35–37, 39–54, 58, 105 mutual manifestness 339, 340 N norms 15, 21, 86, 88, 122, 162, 333, 347–352, 355, 358–361, 363, 364, 366 O openings 93, 126, 128, 129, 133, 134, 150 oral proficiency 79, 80, 82, 88, 89, 93 P performance 213, 220, 223 politeness 8–10, 15–17, 19–21, 23, 57–60, 62, 63, 65–73, 86, 99, 100, 103, 108, 110, 114, 115, 123, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163, 169–171, 205, 231–234, 236, 237, 239, 241, 245, 246, 251, 252, 254, 255, 258, 259, 265–272, 274–281, 289, 301, 306, 309, 348, 349, 351, 358 politeness (positive/negative) 58, 59, 103, 108, 110, 114, 232–234, 237, 239, 241, 245, 246, 252, 254, 255, 271, 272, 279, 289, 301, 306 politeness strategies 19, 69, 86, 103, 108, 110, 114, 163, 169, 171, 231–234, 236, 237, 239, 241, 245, 246, 252, 254, 255, 258, 259, 269, 271, 280, 289, 306 power 50, 54, 101, 102, 107, 108, 110, 115, 220, 233, 234, 245, 247, 248, 250, 251, 254, 258, 259, 279, 288–290, 301, 302, 308–310, 358 pragmastylistics 9 pragmatics (cognitive) 319, 347, 348, 349, 366 pragmatics (cross-cultural) 157, 158 pragmatics (intercultural) 8 pragmatics (socio-cultural) 348

TSL[v.20020404] Prn:10/07/2004; 9:27

F: PB123IN.tex / p.3 (381)

Index 

presentational 100, 102–104, 106–110, 115 presupposition 42, 53, 103, 106, 110, 115 principles 11, 204, 206, 333, 347–352, 355, 357, 358, 361, 363, 366 proactiveness (interactional) 146, 150, 152 procedural meaning 11, 179, 182–186, 191–193, 195, 197–199

R reactiveness (interactional) 146, 150 register 85, 86, 88, 204, 208, 215–218, 220, 291, 292, 308, 348 relevance 8–10, 35–37, 42, 46, 49, 52, 53, 181–187, 195, 198, 206, 220–322, 326–328, 333, 350, 356, 360, 361 relevance theory 8–11, 46, 182–185, 319, 320, 322, 353, reparation (function of politeness) 268, 272, 274, 276, 278 representations 36, 47, 184–186, 191, 197–199, 326, 333–338, 340, 342, 354, 355, 358–361, 363–365, 368 representations (cultural) 326, 333, 334, 336–338, 340, 342, 358, 368 reprimanding 231–235, 237, 239, 241–248, 251, 252, 254–260 respect 58, 59, 63, 68, 71, 121, 124, 128, 134, 148, 150, 163, 169, 233, role-play(s) 16–18, 79–90, 92–95, 233, 235–237, 247, 258, 260

S selectional 100, 102–104, 107–110, 114, 115 self-justification 104, 115 selling strategies 123–126, 134, 138, 141, 146, 150, 151 service encounters 14, 18, 20, 21, 121, 123, 126 siempre (discourse marker) 179, 187–197, 199 social categorisation 334, 355, 358–361, 363, 364 social meaning 212, 220, 270 speech act 5, 7–9, 11, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 57, 59, 60, 63, 67, 70–74, 86, 115, 157, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172, 199, 204, 205, 212, 233, 258, 259, 265, 270, 352 stand-up comedy 320, 329, 331, 333–335, 337, 338 subjunctive 21, 35, 37–54, 104–106, 222 symmetrical 205, 208, 232, 258 T telephone talk 19 threat to face 101, 104, 265, 266, 269, 270, 275, 277, 278 V verb types

58, 61, 71, 72

W word token/type 84

In the Pragmatics & Beyond New Series the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

TROSBORG, Anna (ed.): Analysing Professional Genres. 2000. xvi, 256 pp. PILKINGTON, Adrian: Poetic Eﬀects. A relevance theory perspective. 2000. xiv, 214 pp. MATSUI, Tomoko: Bridging and Relevance. 2000. xii, 251 pp. VANDERVEKEN, Daniel and Susumu KUBO (eds.): Essays in Speech Act Theory. 2002. vi, 328 pp. SELL, Roger D.: Literature as Communication. The foundations of mediating criticism. 2000. xiv, 348 pp. ANDERSEN, Gisle and Thorstein FRETHEIM (eds.): Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude. 2000. viii, 273 pp. UNGERER, Friedrich (ed.): English Media Texts – Past and Present. Language and textual structure. 2000. xiv, 286 pp. DI LUZIO, Aldo, Susanne GÜNTHNER and Franca ORLETTI (eds.): Culture in Communication. Analyses of intercultural situations. 2001. xvi, 341 pp. KHALIL, Esam N.: Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse. 2000. x, 274 pp. MÁRQUEZ REITER, Rosina: Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. A contrastive study of requests and apologies. 2000. xviii, 225 pp. ANDERSEN, Gisle: Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. 2001. ix, 352 pp. COLLINS, Daniel E.: Reanimated Voices. Speech reporting in a historical-pragmatic perspective. 2001. xx, 384 pp. IFANTIDOU, Elly: Evidentials and Relevance. 2001. xii, 225 pp. MUSHIN, Ilana: Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance. Narrative Retelling. 2001. xviii, 244 pp. BAYRAKTAROĞLU, Arın and Maria SIFIANOU (eds.): Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries. The case of Greek and Turkish. 2001. xiv, 439 pp. ITAKURA, Hiroko: Conversational Dominance and Gender. A study of Japanese speakers in ﬁrst and second language contexts. 2001. xviii, 231 pp. KENESEI, István and Robert M. HARNISH (eds.): Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse. A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer. 2001. xxii, 352 pp. GROSS, Joan: Speaking in Other Voices. An ethnography of Walloon puppet theaters. 2001. xxviii, 341 pp. GARDNER, Rod: When Listeners Talk. Response tokens and listener stance. 2001. xxii, 281 pp. BARON, Bettina and Helga KOTTHOFF (eds.): Gender in Interaction. Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse. 2002. xxiv, 357 pp. McILVENNY, Paul (ed.): Talking Gender and Sexuality. 2002. x, 332 pp. FITZMAURICE, Susan M.: The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English. A pragmatic approach. 2002. viii, 263 pp. HAVERKATE, Henk: The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood. 2002. vi, 241 pp. MAYNARD, Senko K.: Linguistic Emotivity. Centrality of place, the topic-comment dynamic, and an ideology of pathos in Japanese discourse. 2002. xiv, 481 pp. DUSZAK, Anna (ed.): Us and Others. Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures. 2002. viii, 522 pp. JASZCZOLT, Katarzyna M. and Ken TURNER (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 1. 2003. xii, 388 pp. JASZCZOLT, Katarzyna M. and Ken TURNER (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 2. 2003. viii, 496 pp. LUKE, Kang Kwong and Theodossia-Soula PAVLIDOU (eds.): Telephone Calls. Unity and diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures. 2002. x, 295 pp. LEAFGREN, John: Degrees of Explicitness. Information structure and the packaging of Bulgarian subjects and objects. 2002. xii, 252 pp.

103 FETZER, Anita and Christiane MEIERKORD (eds.): Rethinking Sequentiality. Linguistics meets conversational interaction. 2002. vi, 300 pp. 104 BEECHING, Kate: Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French. 2002. x, 251 pp. 105 BLACKWELL, Sarah E.: Implicatures in Discourse. The case of Spanish NP anaphora. 2003. xvi, 303 pp. 106 BUSSE, Ulrich: Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus. Morpho-syntactic variability of second person pronouns. 2002. xiv, 344 pp. 107 TAAVITSAINEN, Irma and Andreas H. JUCKER (eds.): Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. 2003. viii, 446 pp. 108 BARRON, Anne: Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics. Learning how to do things with words in a study abroad context. 2003. xviii, 403 pp. 109 MAYES, Patricia: Language, Social Structure, and Culture. A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. 2003. xiv, 228 pp. 110 ANDROUTSOPOULOS, Jannis K. and Alexandra GEORGAKOPOULOU (eds.): Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. 2003. viii, 343 pp. 111 ENSINK, Titus and Christoph SAUER (eds.): Framing and Perspectivising in Discourse. 2003. viii, 227 pp. 112 LENZ, Friedrich (ed.): Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and Person. 2003. xiv, 279 pp. 113 PANTHER, Klaus-Uwe and Linda L. THORNBURG (eds.): Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. 2003. xii, 285 pp. 114 KÜHNLEIN, Peter, Hannes RIESER and Henk ZEEVAT (eds.): Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium. 2003. xii, 400 pp. 115 KÄRKKÄINEN, Elise: Epistemic Stance in English Conversation. A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. 2003. xii, 213 pp. 116 GRANT, Colin B. (ed.): Rethinking Communicative Interaction. New interdisciplinary horizons. 2003. viii, 330 pp. 117 WU, Ruey-Jiuan Regina: Stance in Talk. A conversation analysis of Mandarin ﬁnal particles. 2004. xiv, 263 pp. + index. 118 CHENG, Winnie: Intercultural Conversation. 2003. xii, 279 pp. 119 HILTUNEN, Risto and Janne SKAFFARI (eds.): Discourse Perspectives on English. Medieval to modern. 2003. viii, 243 pp. 120 AIJMER, Karin and Anna-Brita STENSTRÖM (eds.): Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora. 2004. viii, 279 pp. 121 FETZER, Anita: Recontextualizing Context. Grammaticality meets appropriateness. 2004. x, 272 pp. 122 GONZÁLEZ, Montserrat: Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative. The case of English and Catalan. xvi, 398 pp. + index. Expected Summer 2004 123 MÁRQUEZ REITER, Rosina and María Elena PLACENCIA (eds.): Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish. xv, 377 pp. + index. Expected Summer 2004 124 VINE, Bernadette: Getting Things Done at Work. The discourse of power in workplace interaction. 2004. ix, 267 pp. + index. 125 LERNER, Gene H. (ed.): Conversation Analysis. Studies from the ﬁrst generation. vi, 297 pp. + index. Expected Fall 2004 126 WU, Yi’an: Spatial Demonstratives in English and Chinese. Text and Cognition. xviii, 226 pp. + index. Expected Fall 2004 127 BRISARD, Frank, Michael MEEUWIS and Bart VANDENABEELE (eds.): Seduction, Community, Speech. A Festschrift for Herman Parret. vi, 196 pp. + index. Expected Fall 2004 128 CORDELLA, Marisa: The Dynamic Consultation. A discourse analytical study of doctor-patient communication. xii, 247 pp. + index. Expected Fall 2004 129 TABOADA, María Teresa: Building Coherence and Cohesion. Task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish. xvii, 244 pp. + index. Expected Fall 2004 130 HALMARI, Helena and Tuija VIRTANEN (eds.): Persuasion Across Genres. A linguistic approach. Expected Fall 2004

A complete list of titles in this series can be found on the publishers website, www.benjamins.com