Spanish Pragmatics

Spanish Pragmatics Rosina Márquez Reiter and María Elena Placencia Spanish Pragmatics Also by the authors Rosina Má...

Author: Rosina MÃ¡rquez Reiter | MarÃa Elena Placencia

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Spanish Pragmatics

Rosina Márquez Reiter and María Elena Placencia

Spanish Pragmatics

Also by the authors Rosina Márquez Reiter, Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A Contrastive Study of Requests and Apologies Rosina Márquez Reiter and María Elena Placencia (eds) Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish María Elena Placencia and Diana Bravo (eds) Actos de Habla y Cortesía en Español

Spanish Pragmatics Rosina Márquez Reiter University of Surrey

and

María Elena Placencia Birkbeck College, University of London

© Rosina Márquez Reiter and María Elena Placencia 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-0070-8 hardback ISBN-10: 1-4039-0070-1 hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-0071-5 paperback ISBN-10: 1-4039-0071-X paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Márquez-Reiter, Rosina. Spanish pragmatics / Rosina Márquez Reiter and María Elena Placencia. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4039-0070-1 (cloth) – ISBN 1-4039-0071-X (paper) 1. Spanish language – Discourse analysis. 2. Pragmatics. 3. Spanish language – Social aspects. 4. Courtesy. I. Placencia, María E. (María Elena) II. Title. PC4434.M377 2005 460.1¢41 – dc22 2004065061 10 14

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of tables

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Abbreviations

x

1 Introduction

1

2 Speech Act Theory: Examining Language at the Utterance Level 2.0 Introduction 2.1 Origins of speech act theory 2.2 Austin 2.2.1 Background 2.2.2 Austin’s theory of performatives 2.2.3 Austin’s theory of speech acts 2.2.4 A classiﬁcation of illocutionary forces 2.2.5 The relevance of Austin’s ideas for (socio)pragmatics 2.3 Searle 2.3.1 Features of speech acts and Searle’s general approach to their study 2.3.2 Conditions and rules for speech acts 2.3.3 A taxonomy of speech acts 2.3.4 Indirect speech acts 2.3.5 The relevance of Searle’s proposals for sociopragmatics 2.4 Speech act theory and the analysis of discourse 2.5 Uptake of the theory by Hispanists 2.5.1 Theoretical developments 2.5.2 Empirical speech act studies by Hispanists 2.5.3 Summary 3 Conversation Analysis: Examining stretches of talk 3.0 Introduction 3.1 Origins of the discipline 3.2 Working methodology v

5 5 6 7 8 9 12 14 15 16 16 21 24 26 30 36 41 41 55 76 79 79 80 82

vi

Contents

3.2.1

3.3

3.4 3.5

Data source and issues on data collection methodology and transcription 3.2.2 Approach to data analysis CA’s main contributions 3.3.1 The sequential organization of talk 3.3.2 The organization of turn-taking 3.3.3 The overall organization of talk 3.3.4 Preference organization 3.3.5 The organization of laughter 3.3.6 Topic organization Relevance of CA for sociopragmatics Work by Hispanists incorporating CA analytical concepts 3.5.1 Turn-taking 3.5.2 The overall organization of conversation 3.5.3 The organization of laughter 3.5.4 Preference organization 3.5.5 Topic organization 3.5.6 Summary

4 Examining Linguistic Politeness Phenomena 4.0 Introduction 4.1 A classiﬁcation of politeness models 4.1.1 The Cooperative Principle 4.1.2 The conversation maxim view 4.1.3 The conversational contract view 4.1.4 The face-saving view 4.1.5 The emotive communication view 4.1.6 The rapport management view 4.2 Perspectives on Hispanic politeness 4.2.1 Pragmalinguistic views 4.2.2 Reappraisals by Hispanists of Brown and Levinson’s approach 4.2.3 Alternative models by Hispanists 4.3 Hispanic empirical politeness studies 4.3.1 Studies of speech act realization and politeness from the face-saving point of view 4.3.2 The (im)politeness of political discourse from the face-saving point of view 4.3.3 Politeness in ‘informal’ conversations from the sociocultural point of view

82 87 91 92 94 97 100 104 105 107 111 112 125 132 135 138 141 143 143 144 145 148 153 154 162 163 164 166 171 172 177 177 186 188

Contents vii

4.3.4

Politeness in service encounters from the face-saving and sociocultural perspective Summary

189 190

5 Examining Sociopragmatic Variation 5.0 Introduction 5.1 Towards a deﬁnition of sociopragmatic variation 5.2 Studies on (socio)pragmatic variation 5.2.1 Variation in speech act realization 5.2.2 Variation in conversational organization 5.2.3 Politeness variation 5.3 Summary

191 191 191 197 197 201 205 210

6 Research Methods in Sociopragmatics 6.0 Introduction 6.1 Collecting ‘natural’ discourse? 6.2.1 Naturalistic data: ﬁeld notes from observation 6.2.2 Recording and transcribing natural data 6.3 Elicited data 6.3.1 Role plays 6.3.2 Rating scales 6.3.3 Verbal reports 6.3.4 Discourse completion tests 6.3.5 Multiple-choice questionnaires 6.4 Triangulation 6.5 Ethics

213 213 214 215 217 220 221 223 224 225 227 228 229

Notes

231

References

242

Author Index

274

Subject Index

279

4.4

List of Tables 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15

Components of a speech act Austin’s classes of illocutionary forces Searle’s characterization of speech acts Utterances with the same propositional content performing different illocutionary acts Searle’s rules for requests Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts Direction of ﬁt of different classes of speech acts Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) levels of directness Haverkate’s (1979) characterization of speech and interpretation acts Haverkate’s (1979) impositive speech acts Guariglia’s (1996) taxonomy of speech acts for Spanish Sociopragmatic studies on directives by Hispanists Sociopragmatic studies on expressives by Hispanists Sociopragmatic studies on commissives by Hispanists Sociopragmatic studies on assertives/representatives by Hispanists

viii

12 14 17 18 23 24 25 33 42 45 49 61 71 75 75

Acknowledgements We are grateful to Antonio Bañón Hernández, Lars Fant, Carmen García, Henk Haverkate, Silvia Iglesias Recuero, Graciela Reyes, and Miranda Stewart for their valuable comments on earlier versions of different chapters. We would also like to thank staff at Palgrave Macmillan and Jill Lake, in particular, for her patience and encouragement. Last but not least, we would like to thank our partners and family for their unconditional support during the preparation of this book. R.M.R. M.E.P.

ix

Abbreviations AE AS AuE BE BS CA CbS CC ChS DCT DCTask ES IC IL IL-BC LAS MS NAS PnS PvS RP SL&C US USAS VS

American English Argentinian Spanish Australian English British English Bolivian Spanish conversation analysis Cuban Spanish cross-cultural Chilean Spanish discourse completion test discourse completion task Ecuadorian Spanish intercultural interlanguage interlanguage-bilingual context ‘Latin American’ Spanish Mexican Spanish Northern Andean Spanish Peninsular Spanish Peruvian Spanish role play single language and culture/intra-cultural Uruguayan Spanish USA Spanish Venezuelan Spanish

x

1 Introduction

Within the past three decades, different deﬁnitions of pragmatics have been proposed (Bar-Hillel, 1971; Haberland and Mey, 1977, 2002; Kasher, 1977; Dascal, 1983; Leech, 1983; Levinson, 1983; Mey, 1985, 1998; Biletzki, 1996). These reﬂect not just the different approaches to the study of pragmatics, but also the interdisciplinary nature of pragmatics itself. There appears to be a consensus whereby pragmatics is concerned with the examination of the use of language in context, or language users and conditions of use (Haberland and Mey, 1977; Blum-Kulka, 1997). The emphasis on users derives from the distinction, originally made by Charles Morris, between syntax, semantics and pragmatics within his theory of signs: syntax examines the relationship of signs to other signs; semantics studies the relations of signs to the objects to which they refer; and pragmatics explores the relationships between signs and their users (Morris, 1938). Although unanimous, this view is limited as it does not elucidate precisely which phenomena would come under the study of the use of language; nor does it address the debate about whether the ﬁeld should be demarcated at all. In fact, there is no agreement as to whether pragmatics encompasses other disciplines, such as sociolinguistics and/or discourse analysis, to mention just two (Mey, 1998; Hickey, 2004), or vice versa (Fasold, 1984; Schiffrin, 1994; Coulmas, 1990; Coupland and Jarowski, 1997; Calsamiglia Blancafort and Tusón Valls, 1999; Jarowski and Coupland, 1999; Cortés Rodríguez and Camacho Adarve, 2003). In any case, any attempts at setting disciplinary boundaries could be problematic in as much as a theoretical limitation of the scope of pragmatics may result in a restriction in its growth. Modern pragmatics began as the ‘wastebasket’ of semantics (Bar-Hillel, 1971; Reyes, 1990); that is, as a means for dealing with an array of phe1

2

Spanish Pragmatics

nomena that did not adequately ﬁt within the endeavours of semantics in the 1970s, and became, for some scholars, simply another level of linguistic analysis, in addition to semantics and syntax (Lakoff, 1973). Interest in the ﬁeld was initially prompted by the work of Austin in the 1950s (Austin, 1962), and subsequently other language philosophers (Searle, 1969; Grice, 1975 [1967]). Through the work of these scholars, language began to be looked at in a new light; that is, not only as a tool for describing the world but also for transforming it. Additionally, it added a new focus on language and communication; namely, the connections between expressed and implied meaning. The examination of the social and cultural aspects of language use, developed largely by the work of sociolinguists (Brown and Gilman, 1972[1960]; Labov, 1966) and ethnographers of communication (Hymes, 1972 [1964]), was also inﬂuential in establishing what we understand pragmatics to be today. The work of these scholars brought to the fore the embeddedness of language in its sociocultural context, thereby discarding the view that language should be studied as an abstract or idealized system (Chomsky, 1957). The current lack of consensus regarding the focus and scope of the ﬁeld is not surprising, given the multitudinous relations, between language and its users and the diversity of perspectives from which these relations can be examined. For example, some scholars focus on the effect of sociocultural factors on such relations, while others concentrate on inferential processing in communication. These two ways of exploring the relations between language and its users are known as sociocultural and cognitive pragmatics, respectively. Sociocultural pragmatics is ‘concerned with “external” factors, that is, with those aspects of the selection and interpretation of linguistic form that happen to be determined by social and cultural factors’ (Escandell Vidal, 2004, p. 348). On the other hand, cognitive pragmatics deals with ‘ “internal” factors, such as the cognitive basis for linguistic performance, the inferential processes leading to the ﬁnal interpretation’of meaning (p. 348).1 In other words, present-day pragmatics is an interdisciplinary endeavour, at the intersection of different ﬁelds, including, amongst others, linguistics, discourse analysis, philosophy, sociology, (cultural/ linguistic) anthropology, and cognitive and cross-cultural psychology. As such, there cannot be one all-embracing pragmatics theory with a uniﬁed methodology since a number of diverse theories have developed out of different research interests and programmes. In our view, pragmatics is thus best broadly understood as a perspective on communication; more speciﬁcally, as the cognitive, social, and cultural study of communication (Verschueren, 1995).

Introduction 3

Given the breadth and scope of the ﬁeld, any collection in pragmatics is inevitably a selection. We have chosen, therefore, to focus only on the sociocultural rather than on the cognitive aspects of pragmatics, in light of the wealth of research in the area. More speciﬁcally, we concentrate on three key areas within the Anglo-American School of Pragmatics (Levinson, 1983; Verschueren, 1999); namely, speech acts, conversation, and politeness as sociocultural manifestations of communication. Within these areas, we cover the main theoretical developments essentially from an Anglo-American perspective; that is, speech act theory and politeness theory, since a School of Spanish pragmatics does not as yet exist (Hickey, 2004). We also look at conversation analysis, which offers a sociological stance on language and social interaction, and we attempt to develop a new topic in the pragmatics of Spanish: the study of pragmatic variation. In doing so, we draw on the frameworks and units of analysis provided by speech act theory, conversation analysis and politeness theory and we aim to bring to the fore an area of increasing interest in the pragmatics of Spanish. More importantly, unlike other books on pragmatics, as we have deﬁned the area here, we offer a comprehensive but not necessarily exhaustive overview of the empirical studies that have been undertaken, from a sociocultural pragmatic perspective, in different varieties of Spanish.2 The studies covered here can be deﬁned as sociopragmatic since the main goal of the empirical work surveyed is to uncover the cultural norms that underlie the communicative patterns of a given social group in a given sociocultural context. Although the pragmatics of Spanish enterprise has grown signiﬁcantly since 1990 (Cortés Rodríguez, 2002) and although, too, some of the developments in the various areas covered by that enterprise are published in outlets that are not easily accessible, this book represents substantial coverage of the ﬁeld. The book should be seen as a resource book that will help students with a prior knowledge of linguistics to familiarize themselves with the fundamental concepts in sociopragmatics and the work of leading scholars in the sociopragmatics of Spanish. It is also hoped that, owing to its extensive bibliography, the book will constitute a useful resource for fellow researchers and academics in the ﬁeld. Each chapter of the book deals with a different area of sociopragmatics. Chapter 2 focuses on the use of language at utterance level; more speciﬁcally, it presents Austin’s and Searle’s theory of speech acts and their application to the analysis of discourse, as well as theoretical and empirical contributions by Hispanists inspired by the work of scholars

4

Spanish Pragmatics

in this area. Chapter 3 looks at key contributions from conversation analysis to the study of stretches of talk and the uptake of these contributions by Hispanists. Chapter 4, one of the longest chapters in the book, as it deals with the area within sociopragmatics of Spanish that has received the most attention, examines key theories of linguistic politeness and developments proposed by Hispanists. Chapter 5 develops the area of sociopragmatic variation, building on the theories and concepts previously presented in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, and reports on the studies that have (implicitly) examined pragmatic variation in Spanish. Finally, Chapter 6 looks at the research methods generally employed to explore discourse from a sociopragmatic perspective. Wherever possible, concepts and ﬁndings are illustrated with examples taken from natural discourse and from the work of scholars in the ﬁeld. It should be noted that these examples have been reproduced from a variety of sources and we have thus opted largely to keep the conventions employed by the authors themselves. Some inconsistencies in the way the examples are presented are, therefore, unavoidable. In this book we report on the available published research up to the time of publication. In this sense the book should be seen as an ongoing project, awaiting new developments in the sociopragmatics of Spanish.

2 Speech Act Theory: Examining Language at the Utterance Level

2.0 Introduction As suggested in Chapter 1, we can date the emergence of modern pragmatics to the early 1970s when linguists turned to speech act theory. This theory was developed within the philosophy of language in the 1950s and 1960s in order to account for aspects of meaning, such as the status of sentences other than declaratives and the relation between [the utterance of] a sentence and the act it performs, which the truthconditions semantics approach to meaning, predominant at the time (2.2.1), could not account for. Speech act theory rests upon the central notion of language as action – we do things with words, we do not simply describe states of affairs – and it attempts to deﬁne the links between meaning, language, and action (Schiffrin, 1994). As such, speech act theory represented a new conception of language for linguists, with a novel, if not revolutionary, approach to meaning. The impact of the theory on various branches of linguistics has been far-reaching. Speech act theory has been applied to semantics and syntax (Fillmore, 1971; Sadock, 1974), cross-cultural communication (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), collection of studies), and applied linguistics (Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993) and Gass and Neu (1996), collections of studies). As Verschueren (1999) suggests, however, it was not long before linguists, and pragmaticists in particular, moved away from the consideration of speech acts as ‘the basic building blocks in terms of which all of linguistic action could be understood’ to the study of stretches of talk and conversation (see Chapter 3), with the focus not on language as ‘action’, but as ‘interaction’ (p. 37). In this chapter, we consider the following: the origins of the theory and its main tenets, as outlined in the work of J. L. Austin and John Searle; 5

6

Spanish Pragmatics

the relevance of their work for sociopragmatics; some of the limitations of the theory for the examination of discourse; and, ﬁnally, the uptake of the theory by Hispanists, where we will discuss some theoretical developments and, more extensively, the applications of the theory to the examination of speech acts in Spanish. Here, it is important to note that most Hispanists working in the area have not concerned themselves with speech act theory as a theory of meaning; rather, they have employed the basic units of analysis provided by the theory to explore the use of Spanish in different social and cultural contexts.

2.1 Origins of speech act theory The origins of speech act theory within the Anglo-American tradition of pragmatics lie in the work of the British language philosopher, J. L. Austin, particularly in his 1955 William James lectures at Harvard University, which were posthumously published in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words. In this seminal work, Austin shows that we ‘do’ things with words and that there are conditions associated with the successful performance of speech acts in speech situations. However, the American language philosopher John Searle, one of Austin’s disciples, who was also inﬂuenced by the work of H. Paul Grice (4.2.1) and Gottlob Frege, is credited with having expanded and systematized Austin’s ideas with the proposal, amongst others, that speech act performance is rule-governed. The central tenets of what is known today as the ‘classical theory’ (Parret, Sbisà and Verschueren, 1981) are contained in Speech Acts: An Essay on the Philosophy of Language (Searle, 1969) and in Searle’s 1975 and 1976 publications. It is mainly the work of these two philosophers and the impact it has had on (Spanish) sociopragmatics that we consider here. We are aware, however, that, at the time Austin was developing his ideas in Oxford in the 1940s, some of the key notions upon which the theory rests were also being explored independently by other scholars. One of these scholars is Ludwig Wittgenstein, another language philosopher, who was based in Cambridge in the 1910s. There, he was a pupil of Bertrand Russell, the great British humanist philosopher, but his later work, published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1958), is of relevance to speech act theory. Here, Wittgenstein emphasizes the need to examine the meaning of words as they are used in reality, hence the slogan ‘meaning in use’, and deals with the notion of language as action through the concept of ‘language games’. Language games are rule-governed activities, such as giving orders and

Speech Act Theory 7

reporting events, in which people take part and in relation to which the meaning of utterances has to be examined. Austin, however, makes no reference to Wittgenstein’s work, and many hold the view (Berlin, 1973; Levinson, 1983) that Austin was not inﬂuenced by Wittgenstein’s ideas. In any case, it is Austin’s work and not Wittgenstein’s that has been the most inﬂuential within linguistics (cf. Thomas, 1995). We are also aware of the work of Erwin Koschmieder (1929), brought to the fore by Keck and Stubbs (1984). Koschmieder is a little known Slavicist who dealt with the notion of language as action under the term Koinzidensfall. This term corresponds to what Koschmieder deﬁned as ‘a “coincidence” between the utterance of a sentence and the action to which it refers’ (Keck and Stubbs, 1984, p. 306). However, Koschmieder was unknown in the English-speaking academic community and Keck and Stubbs (1984) attribute this to the limited scope of his work and to the fact that he published in German and in less well-known journals. Yet another scholar who may have inﬂuenced Austin’s thinking is Alan Gardiner. He was essentially an Egyptologist and not a linguist; nonetheless, he put forward a linguistic theory which is contained in The Theory of Speech and Language (Gardiner, 1951 [1932]). His work, according to Taylor (1988), planted the seeds for many of the original ideas developed by Austin and Grice, and by British linguists such as Firth. Some ideas relevant to Austin’s proposals are Gardiner’s deﬁnition of ‘speech’ (in contrast with ‘language’) as a situation-dependent activity, and the notion of ‘acts of speech’, which are purposeful and fundamentally social acts that need to be examined in real-life settings (Taylor, 1988). However, there is no reference to Gardiner in Austin’s work. In short, with respect to the origins of speech act theory, we are inclined to concur with Taylor’s observation that ‘[i]t is difﬁcult to assign the precise origins of such ideas as the speech act . . . and pragmatic force to any particular linguist or philosopher of the period’ since ‘[i]t is apparent that many were working in the same direction’ (1988, p. 133). Yet, as stated earlier, it is Austin’s work and its systematisation by Searle that have been greatly inﬂuential and, therefore, it is their work we consider here.

2.2 Austin To help the reader understand the signiﬁcance of Austin’s work, we begin by examining brieﬂy the background against which his ideas were presented, after which we provide an account of Austin’s theory of per-

8

Spanish Pragmatics

formatives. This is followed by a description of his theory of speech acts. We proceed to present Austin’s taxonomy for illocutionary ‘forces’ and we conclude this section with a brief consideration of the relevance of Austin’s work for sociopragmatics. 2.2.1 Background The prevalent view in philosophical circles in Austin’s time was that of logical positivism which advocated the ideal of a logically perfect language, as represented in the thinking of Rudolph Carnap and Moritz Schlick. Within this view, ordinary language was regarded as defective, or as Mey (2001) puts it, ‘a bastardized and illegitimate variant of the pure language of logic’ (p. 23) that needed to be cleansed from its imperfections to attain the ideal. The meaning of a proposition consists in what veriﬁes it; that is, what tests it for truth or falsity: hence, the focus of study was on statements, and statements that were unveriﬁable were regarded as pseudo-statements. In the ﬁeld of linguistics, also under the inﬂuence of logical positivism, an approach based on conditions of truth and falsity of declarative sentences, known as truth-conditional semantics, prevailed too. Although truth-conditional semantics could adequately account for phenomena such as synonymy and entailment (Kempson, 1977), it was not able to account for sentences other than declaratives. Within Austin’s own philosophical circle in Oxford, where he worked from the late 1930s, Alfred Jules Ayer was a strong supporter of the veriﬁcationist approach. For him, ‘[t]he bona ﬁdes of all putative statements of fact’ were ‘to be determined by the criterion of veriﬁability’ (Holiday, 1988, p. 170). Austin opposed ‘all-or-nothing philosophies’ with dichotomies such as ‘veriﬁable’ and ‘unveriﬁable’ expressions and ‘empirical and logical truths’ (Berlin, 1973, p. 13). For Austin (1962), distinctions between truth and falsity were found to be problematic since, as he said, ‘truth and falsity are . . . not names for relations, qualities, or what not, but for a dimension of assessment – how the words stand in respect of satisfactoriness to the facts, events, situations . . . to which they refer’ (1962, p. 149). Stating that ‘France is hexagonal’, for example, may be true ‘up to a point’, and thus good enough for a topranking general, for instance, but not a geographer (1962, p. 143); according to Austin, therefore, it is not possible to afﬁrm categorically that this particular statement, as others he considered, is false. Concerning the emphasis on logical truths at the time and the disregard for ordinary language, which was considered to be logically defective, Austin believed that it was useful to look at ordinary language for

Speech Act Theory 9

distinctions of meaning that would be reﬂected in differences in usage. In fact, as Berlin (1973) explains, Austin thought that ‘the only reliable method of learning about types of action, knowledge, belief, experience, consisted in the patient accumulation of data about actual usage’ (p. 13). Although Austin’s ‘accumulation of data’ did not involve what would at present be understood as systematic data collection, many of his examples, unlike Searle’s, as we will see in 2.3, derive from speciﬁc social contexts. The examination of language in its social context is precisely what concerns sociopragmaticists at present. 2.2.2 Austin’s theory of performatives Austin (1962) observed that language is used not only to describe the world, either truly or falsely, by means of statements, but also to ‘do’ things. He considered utterances such as the following: (1) I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth. (p. 5) (2) I do (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife). (p. 5) He noticed that, in grammatical terms, utterances of this type have the appearance of statements but are actually not intended to impart information about facts. As such these utterances cannot be subjected to tests of truth and falsity. Instead, Austin (1962) proposed that they should be considered part of a class of utterances he termed ‘performatives’, where ‘the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action’ (p. 5). On the other hand, he reserved the label of ‘constatives’ for statements that describe, report, or constate something. Austin (1962) also proposed that performatives can be assessed as ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’, rather than true or false, depending on whether the intended act was brought into effect. The conditions that would need to be met for the successful performance of a particular act received the name of ‘felicity’ conditions. Austin grouped these conditions into two categories: the A–B and the G conditions: (A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further, (A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. (B.1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and

10 Spanish Pragmatics

(B.2) completely. (G. 1) Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves, and further (G. 2) must actually so conduct themselves subsequently. (Taken from Austin, 1962, pp. 14–15) Austin proposed that failure to follow the A–B conditions would result in the act not being performed. For example, if the person performing the speech act of naming a ship does not have the authority to do so, the naming of the ship would not have taken place; that is, the act would have ‘misﬁred’. On the other hand, he proposed that if G conditions are not met, the act is still achieved, but in this case it is ‘an abuse’, where the act is hollow, as in making a promise and not intending to keep it. In order to distinguish performatives from constatives, Austin (1962) turned to grammar. He started by considering ‘classic’ examples of performatives which he referred to as ritualized performatives, as in ‘I name’ and ‘I do’. He observed that utterances of this type share two features: (a) they both occur in the ﬁrst person singular, and (b) the verbs in both are produced in the present indicative Austin went on, nevertheless, to discount these features as essential to the deﬁnition of performatives given that ordinary language can provide examples of performatives in the second or third person, in the singular as well as in the plural, and with the verb in the passive voice. One such example would be: (3) Passengers are warned to cross the track by the bridge only. (p. 57) Other features Austin (1962) discounted as distinctive markers of performatives are mood and tense. With respect to mood, it will be recalled that the classic examples include the present indicative as in ‘I name’ or ‘I do’. However, Austin observed that the imperative is also used as a performative, as in: (4) Turn right. (p. 58)

Speech Act Theory 11

He labelled utterances of this type ‘implicit performatives’, whereas he reserved the term ‘explicit performatives’ to refer to utterances exhibiting a performative verb, as in (1) above. As to tense, although the classic examples, or what could be termed the prototypical examples, are in the present, Austin provided examples where the past can be employed, as in (5) below, to convey the meaning of a present indicative performative, which is the case in (6): (5) You did it. (p. 58) (6) I ﬁnd you guilty. (p. 58) Yet another test Austin (1962) proposed is that of expanding performatives such as (5) above to explicit forms as in (6), also above, in order to make apparent ‘both that the utterance is performative, and which act it is that is being performed’ (p. 62). However, Austin did not regard this test as unproblematic either. He found, for example, that there is no explicit performative for certain acts, for instance, insults: (7) *I insult you. (p. 68) Thus, after having painstakingly considered and discounted, as distinctive markers of performative utterances, those grammatical features and tests described here, together with others, Austin (1962) went on to provide arguments against his original thesis. He did so in order to demonstrate that the distinction between performatives and constatives is untenable, arguing that, when we issue any utterance, we are, after all, doing something. One of these arguments is that statements are also subject to the infelicities to which performatives are liable. Additionally, statements also need to secure ‘uptake’, a term Austin (1962) employs to refer to whether the interlocutor takes the meaning and the force of an utterance as intended (2.2.3). A statement conveying a protest, for example, needs to be taken as such for the act to be successful. Moreover, the issuing of statements is also accompanied by perlocutionary acts (2.2.3), which Austin deﬁnes as ‘the consequential effects on the feelings, thoughts or actions of the audience’ (p. 101). Statements can, for example, persuade interlocutors to change their beliefs, irritate them, or intrigue them. Conversely, Austin also showed that some performative utterances might be subject to tests of truth and falsity, at least in part. In (8) below, for example, ‘that the bull is about to charge’ can be evaluated as true or false: (8) I warn you that the bull is about to charge. (p. 55)

12 Spanish Pragmatics

Having shown the collapse of his theory of performatives, Austin then turned his attention to a description of a general theory of speech acts, which we consider in the next section. The debate as to whether performatives constitute a special class of utterances and whether they can be distinguished from constatives, however, was not closed with Austin’s conclusion (Walker, 1969; Warnock, 1973; Holdcroft, 1974). It continues at present with the view, advocated by some, that performatives are statements (Bach and Harnish, 1979; Searle and Vanderveken, 1985; Searle, 1989; Harnish, 1997), a view that others contest (Grewendorf, 2002; Martinich, 2002).1 2.2.3 Austin’s theory of speech acts As noted earlier, Austin remarked that, in doing something with words, several acts are performed at the same time. In saying something, that is, in uttering certain words with a certain sense and reference, we are performing a ‘locutionary’ act. At the same time, we are conveying a certain force. This is the ‘illocutionary’ act. And ﬁnally, we are bringing about or achieving something, such as persuading our interlocutor. This is the ‘perlocutionary’ act (2.2.2). Consider the following example: (9) (ES) An attractive young man is going past a group of young women in the street. One of the women shouts the following at him: Bombón! (Placencia and Yépez, 1999, p. 102). He smiles and carries on walking. By uttering this speech act which, in the context described, appears to function as a piropo,2 the speaker can be said to have performed the acts speciﬁed in Table 2.1:

Table 2.1 Components of a speech act Locutionary act

Uttering of words with a certain sense and reference

Bombón was the word uttered metaphorically to refer to the good looks of the young man going past.

Illocutionary act

Uttering of words with a certain force

The force conveyed was that of a piropo.

Perlocutionary act

The effect brought off by the utterance

As a consequence of hearing this utterance, the recipient felt ﬂattered, surprised or amused (hence his smile).

Speech Act Theory 13

With respect to illocutionary acts, an important distinction Austin (1962) made is between ‘attempting’ to perform a particular act and successfully ‘bringing off’ the act in question. He said, for example, that we may thank someone, but fail to do so because our interlocutor takes the utterance as ironical, or that we might offer an explanation that may be taken, but was never intended, as an apology. Through examples of this type, Austin highlighted the ambiguity of illocutionary (and locutionary) acts, a phenomenon that he considers to be widespread: deliberate, or unintentional, ambiguity of meaning or reference is perhaps as common as deliberate or unintentional failure to make plain ‘how our words are to be taken’ (in the illocutionary sense). (Austin, 1962, p. 116) The ‘uptake’ of an utterance, (2.2.2), would be an indicator of the success in the performance of a particular act. The uptake can be seen in the response an interlocutor gives since, as Austin pointed out, many acts invite a response by convention, so an order, for example, invites some response of obedience.3 Piropos to strangers in the street, such as the one in (9) above, do not require a verbal response; however, a nonverbal response, such as a smile, suggests the act was not only taken as intended, but was also accepted. Through the notion of uptake, Austin gave the hearer an important role within his theory of speech acts. Nonetheless, he did not consider other possible reception roles (Levinson, 1988), such as that of bystanders, for whom piropos, for example, also appear to be performed. Finally, with regard to the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, Austin (1962) warned us not to confuse the achievement of an intended effect through the performance of an act, that is, bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution, with the consequences the act, once completed, may have (the perlocutionary effect). Austin, however, was aware of the complexity of distinctions of this type, which are related to distinctions between ‘attempt’ and ‘achievement’, ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional’ (p. 110). Thus, in uttering the piropo in (9) above, the female speaker may have been performing mainly for her group of friends through a display of boldness, since the uttering of piropos or compliments with a sexual or amorous tone has, in the past, been the preserve of male participants (Achugar 2002). There are, however, other unintended effects, such as embarrassing the young man or getting him to stop and talk to the group of girls, which she could also have achieved.

14 Spanish Pragmatics

Having proposed a distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, Austin (1962) then set out to provide a preliminary classiﬁcation of illocutionary forces in ‘families of related and overlapping speech acts’ (p. 150), and it is this we consider in the next section. 2.2.4 A classiﬁcation of illocutionary forces Austin (1962) proposed to start a classiﬁcation of illocutionary forces by going through verbs listed in a dictionary and applying the test of the ﬁrst person singular present indicative (active form) in order to distinguish verbs that name or report a speech act from those that do not. This procedure, however, led him in practice to a classiﬁcation of speech act verbs rather than illocutionary forces (Searle, 1976). The following are the ﬁve general families Austin distinguished:

Table 2.2 Austin’s classes of illocutionary forces Classes of illocutionary forces

Examples

Verdictives

Those that deliver a ﬁnding, ofﬁcial or unofﬁcial, upon evidence or reasons as to value or fact

Convict, ﬁnd, acquit, characterize

Exercitives

Those that refer to the exercising of powers, rights or inﬂuence

Appoint, name, vote, urge, order, warn

Commissives

Those that commit the speaker to doing something, including declarations or announcements of intention

Promise, swear, undertake, intend

Behabitives

Those that have to do with attitudes and reactions to social behaviour

Apologize, thank, deplore, compliment

Expositives

Those used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and references

Afﬁrm, deny, argue, ask, tell, concede

Source: Adapted from Austin, 1962, pp. 151–62.

Austin (1962) was, nevertheless, not entirely happy with his classiﬁcation, particularly with the last two categories, ﬁnding, for example, that some verbs could belong to more than one category (for example, ‘urge’ can be both an exercitive and an expositive, and ‘swear’ both a commissive and an expositive), and that categories, such as that of the

Speech Act Theory 15

behabitives, included verbs that were too heterogeneous. Being aware of these and other problems, Austin did not regard his classiﬁcation as deﬁnitive; owing to his premature death, however, he was unfortunately not able to develop it further. This task, nonetheless, was taken up by Searle (1976) who, focusing on illocutionary forces (rather than verbs), attempted to offer a principled classiﬁcation (2.3.3), the usefulness of which, as we will see, has been criticized by some scholars (Flowerdew, 1990, in 2.3.3). 2.2.5 The relevance of Austin’s ideas for sociopragmatics Central to pragmatics are Austin’s ideas regarding the world-transforming aspect of language – saying is doing – that underlie most current theories of language use, and the concomitant distinction between the surface form (locutionary act) and the intended force or function of an utterance (illocutionary act). The emphasis at present is, nonetheless, on language as ‘interaction’ and not only as ‘action’. The notion of language as interaction does appear in Austin’s work in his consideration of the collaborative nature of some acts, such as making a bet, and, crucially in the notion of uptake underlying the performance of illocutionary acts in general. Unfortunately, it is not developed in Searle’s theory (2.3). It is also present in Austin’s concept of the perlocutionary act, which neither Austin nor Searle expanded, however. Austin’s work points to key issues in present-day pragmatics, such as the indeterminacy of utterances in relation to the multiple forces an utterance may have in different contexts and how participants in interaction may exploit this state of affairs (Leech, 1981a, 1983; Thomas, 1995), as well as certain issues of context. Regarding the latter, Austin (1962) stresses, from his ﬁrst lectures onwards, that although words can lead to the performance of an act, they are not usually ‘the sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed’ (p. 8) (his italics); the circumstances, including persons and other actions, also need to be appropriate. He alludes, for example, to the social roles of the participants when he says that ‘for naming the ship, it is essential that I should be the person appointed to name her’ (p. 8). In fact, a large number of the examples that Austin provides come from institutional settings and Austin shows their embeddedness in social and cultural contexts (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992). The need to examine language in context is also made explicit in Austin’s last lecture, where he says that ‘[t]he total speech-act in the total speech-situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating’ (1962, p. 149) (his italics). As we will see in the next section,

16 Spanish Pragmatics

however, in Searle’s systematization of Austin’s ideas, on the whole context no longer includes the social setting, where Austin’s speech acts were embedded; rather, it is speciﬁed at an abstract level as Searle is mainly concerned with an overall characterization of language. Finally, Austin’s ideas also take into account aspects of sequencing (3.3.1) when referring to the right timing of utterances, and the role of paralinguistic cues (for example, tone of voice) that may affect the force of an utterance. These are matters that, at the present, concern pragmaticists, too. Overall, however, Austin’s legacy is, as suggested by Levinson (1983, p. 237) a piece of work ‘rich with suggestions’ that are not fully developed. Searle, whose work we consider next, expanded and systematized Austin’s ideas, as already stated in the introduction. For some, nevertheless, Searle has also made the theory more rigid (Levinson, 1983), on omitting important interactional and social aspects in the production and understanding of meaning that were considered by Austin.

2.3 Searle In this section we provide an account of the central tenets of Searle’s classical theory, as formulated in his 1969, 1975 and 1976 publications.4 We start with a brief consideration of some features of speech acts and Searle’s overall approach to their study. We then provide an outline of Searle’s conditions and rules for speech acts. Subsequently, we look at Searle’s proposal for a taxonomy of speech acts, his treatment of indirect speech acts, and the import of his work for sociopragmatics. We conclude this section with a consideration of some of the issues that the application of speech act theory to discourse has raised. 2.3.1 Features of speech acts and Searle’s general approach to their study Like Austin, Searle (1969) assigns speech acts a central role in linguistic communication as he sustains that, rather than symbols, words, or sentences, ‘speech acts’ constitute the ‘basic’ or ‘minimal’ units of linguistic communication (p. 16). But how does his notion of speech acts differ from that of Austin’s? Searle retains Austin’s idea that the performance of a speech act involves the performance of various acts at the same time (2.2.3). Nevertheless, Searle subdivides Austin’s ‘locutionary’ act into the ‘utterance’ and the ‘propositional’ acts, as described in Table 2.3:

Speech Act Theory 17 Table 2.3 Searle’s characterization of speech acts Austin

Searle

Locutionary act

Utterance act – the uttering of words Propositional act – the act of referring and/or predicating

Illocutionary act

Illocutionary act – the act of asserting, questioning, etc.

Perlocutionary act

Perlocutionary act – the effects or consequences of the illocutionary act

Thus, using Searle’s distinctions, when we say, (10) (ES) El tanque [de gasolina] está vacío. (Placencia, 1999) our utterance of the words that make up this sentence would constitute the performance of an utterance act. At the same time, we would be performing the propositional act of referring to an object, that is, to el tanque, and predicating something about that object, in this case, está vacío. We would also be performing the illocutionary act of asserting, or perhaps complaining if you had borrowed our car and returned it with an empty tank, and the perlocutionary act of making you feel guilty, and ideally getting you to go and ﬁll up the tank. Searle’s (1969) differentiation between the propositional and the illocutionary act is important since different utterances may share the same propositional content, and yet perform different speech acts. If we employ variations of the same example, we can imagine situations where the utterance of sentences with the same propositional content can result in the performance of different speech acts. The following example in the context of a mother who does not want her children to drink too much coke and who is letting them know that she is aware of how much is left in the bottle in the fridge illustrates this point: (11) (US) Mother to her children: La botella está llena,¿eh?5 The following table illustrates possible illocutionary acts of utterances with the same propositional content.

18 Spanish Pragmatics Table 2.4 Utterances with the same propositional content performing different illocutionary acts Utterances sharing the same propositional content

Possible illocutionary acts

La botella está llena. ¿Está llena la botella? ¡La botella está llena! ¡Ojalá que la botella esté llena!

Asserting and warning Requesting information Asserting and expressing surprise Expressing a wish; issuing a warning

Nonetheless, the illocutionary act constitutes the central speech act notion for Searle, as it did for Austin, and, in fact, the term ‘speech act’ is at present employed in the literature as synonymous with ‘illocutionary act’ or ‘illocutionary force’ (Thomas, 1995). Two deﬁning features of speech acts, which Searle (1969) stresses, and which are also present in Austin’s characterization of performative acts (2.2.2), are intentionality and conventionality. Intentionality distinguishes speech acts from other verbal activities that are not purposeful. In uttering a speech act, the speaker intends to produce ‘certain effects’ on the hearer (p. 48) and, the hearer in turn, can be said to have understood the utterance if he/she has recognized the speaker’s intentions. In short, for Searle, the effects on the hearer correspond to his/her understanding of the speaker’s intention; in other words, an utterance like (12) below should be taken in the appropriate context as a promise rather than a mere description: (12) (MS) To a friend: A las cinco estaré en tu casa. (Rall, 1993, p. 3) A different matter is the consequence or the perlocutionary effect that this utterance might have on the hearer. For instance, the hearer might feel unhappy if he/she does not really want the act stated in the promise in (12) to take place. Searle (1969), however, stresses that meaning is not only a matter of intention but also one of convention: under certain conditions, the utterance of a particular expression counts as a particular act. Thus, (12) above uttered in the appropriate circumstances counts as a promise; that is, the statement of an action in the simple future, ﬁrst person of the indicative, would constitute a conventional means of issuing a promise. Through use, particular linguistic realizations can also become conventionalised for speciﬁc participants in speciﬁc contexts, so La botella está

Speech Act Theory 19

llena, ¿eh? in (11) above, and its variants, might have the conventionalized force of a warning for the family where that utterance is frequently used. Conventionality underlies Searle’s proposal that the performance of speech acts is rule-governed, and thus, that speaking a language is performing speech acts according to certain conventional rules. Although Searle is careful to say that convention does not apply all the time, the notion of convention is implicit in the rules he proposes. These are ‘constitutive’ rules; that is, rules that deﬁne or create an activity, a speech act, in this case. These rules stand in contrast with ‘regulative’ rules, those that regulate ‘an activity whose existence is logically independent of the rules’ (p. 34). To distinguish between these two types of rules and clarify their application to speech acts, Searle draws some parallels with games, such as football and chess. He says that [t]he [constitutive] rules of football or chess, for example, do not merely regulate playing football or chess, but as it were they create the very possibility of playing such games. The activities of playing football or chess are constituted by acting in accordance with (at least a large subset of) the appropriate rules. (Searle, 1969, pp. 33–4) In the same vein, there would be constitutive rules underlying speech acts, such as promising or requesting, a substantial part of which would have to be followed for an utterance to count as the intended act. ‘X counts as Y’ is precisely one of the forms in which constitutive rules are expressed, as we shall see in 2.3.2, whereas regulative rules take the form of ‘Do X’ or ‘If Y do X’ (Searle, 1969, p. 34). Constitutive rules would be universal since, according to Searle, different realizations of promises, such as ‘I promise’ in English, or te prometo, as we say in Spanish, are just ‘different conventional realizations of the same underlying rules’ (p. 39). However, studies such as Rosaldo’s (1982) on speech acts among the Illongots, and studies among Hispanists, and, respectively, Rall’s (1993) and Schrader-Kniffki’s (2004) on promises in monolingual and bilingual contexts in Mexico (see 2.5) provide evidence against the universality of speech act rules. For Rall (1993), for example, it is important to take into account how time is conceptualized in a particular cultural group in the analysis of promises. The Mexicans in her study, who seem to have a more ﬂexible notion of time than Germans such as herself, do not seem to be bound by promises, such as mañana te hablo, which they make. Utterances of this type appear to have become somewhat routinized for the Mexicans, but seem to have been interpreted literally by the German participant in this case.

20 Spanish Pragmatics

Unlike Austin, Searle (1969) sees the enterprise of describing speech acts as a task related to the study of de Saussure’s (1959 [1916]) langue; that is, as part of the study of the knowledge of the language system shared by a community. Austin, as it will be recalled (2.2.5), emphasised the need to examine actual social situations of use; that is, de Saussure’s (1959[1916]) parole. Also in contrast with Austin, Searle (1969) methodologically foregrounds, à la Chomsky, native speakers’ intuitions. In his view, native speakers have internalized speech act rules since, as he says, ‘[t]o learn and master a language is (inter alia) to learn and to have mastered these [speech act] rules’ (2), so native speakers have a knowledge of the rules that can be described: My knowledge of how to speak the language involves a mastery of a system of rules which renders my use of the elements of that language regular and systematic. By reﬂecting on my use of the elements of the language I can come to know the facts recorded in linguistic characterizations. And those characterizations can have a generality which goes beyond this or that instance of the use of the elements in question . . . because the rules guarantee generality.’ (Searle, 1969, p. 13) As such, Searle’s development of the theory is criticized by some for having brought the focus back from language as social practice in Austin’s work to the individual and to idealizations and abstractions of language (Pratt, 1981; Cicourel, 1987).6 Before proceeding, in the next section, to describe Searle’s speech act conditions and rules, we wish to consider brieﬂy one ﬁnal feature of speech acts; namely, the way in which Searle (1969) attempts to represent the connections between speech act performance rules and rules for the uttering of linguistic elements. According to Searle (1969), there is a ‘principle of expressibility’ in operation that stipulates that ‘whatever can be meant can be said’ (p. 20). This means that, although we might choose to say more or less than what we mean, it is always in principle possible to say exactly what we mean. The following is an example Searle offers to illustrate his principle: (13) Are you going to the movies? (p. 19) In response to this question we might reply with a simple ‘yes’, thus choosing to say less than what we mean; that is, ‘Yes, I am going to the

Speech Act Theory 21

movies’ (p. 19). However, it is always possible for us to say exactly what we mean since ‘there is a possible sentence (or sentences) the utterance of which in a certain context would in virtue of its (or their) meaning constitute a performance of that speech act’ (p. 18). The principle of expressibility can, therefore, also be interpreted as meaning that it is always possible to make the meaning of an utterance explicit by employing an explicit performative.7 Yet, as Austin noted (2.2.2), there are acts, such as insults, that cannot be performed by means of an explicit performative. So, is it really possible to have a syntactic representation for every illocutionary force (Kannetzky, 2002)? Additionally, are (more or less) explicit forms like those in (14) and (15) below pragmatically equivalent (see also Kannetzky, 2002)? (14) (PnS) Customer to waiter going past: ¿Podrías traerme un café? (Placencia, 1999) (15) (US) Colleague to colleague: Te pido que me traigas un café. We can see with requests, like (14), and their realization with an explicit performative as in (15), that even though both have the same illocutionary force, they represent, as we will see in section 2.3.4, different levels of directness, and possibly, different contexts of use. 2.3.2 Conditions and rules for speech acts It will be recalled that Searle (1969) deﬁnes speaking a language as performing speech acts according to constitutive rules. Searle bases these rules on a deﬁnition of the ‘necessary’ and ‘sufﬁcient’ conditions for the successful or non-defective performance of speech acts (p. 54). The outlining of these conditions, which we consider ﬁrst below, is one of the ways through which Searle systematizes Austin’s work (or makes it rigid). Searle (1969) takes promises as an example of how speech act conditions can be articulated and distinguishes general from (speech act-) speciﬁc conditions. The general conditions include, among others, basic conditions for communication; for example, speakers and hearers being able to (a) speak the language; and (b) hear each other. The speech actspeciﬁc conditions, on the other hand, refer to the propositional content of the speech act since the proposition needs to be of a certain type (that is, propositional content conditions), the conditions in the world that need to obtain prior to the performance of the act (that is, preparatory conditions), the conditions for the act to be sincere (that

22 Spanish Pragmatics

is, sincerity conditions), and the condition that indicates how the act should count as (that is, the essential condition). The conditions for promises are the following: Propositional content conditions: S (speaker) expresses the proposition that p in the utterance of T In expressing that p, S predicates a future act A of S Preparatory conditions: H would prefer S’s doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H (hearer) would prefer his doing A to his not doing A It is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events Sincerity condition: S intends to do A Essential condition: S intends that the utterance of T will place him under an obligation to do A (Abridged from Searle, 1969, pp. 57–61) In (16) below, where the speaker, a male employee (E), makes an explicit promise to his boss in response to a reprimand for being constantly late to work, we can see how Searle’s conditions apply: (16) (AS) E prometo que no va a volver a pasar igualmente, o sea, mi padre ya se está recuperando, o sea (García, 2004a, p. 252) With respect to the propositional content, the utterance prometo que no va a volver a pasar, illustrates that the proposition predicates a future act of E. Additionally, the act predicated is an act that B would prefer E to do (a preparatory condition). Moreover, it was not obvious to B that the speaker would do it (another preparatory condition), hence the reprimand. By uttering this p, E displays his intention to do A (sincerity condition) and places himself under the obligation to do A (essential condition). Searle (1969) goes on to formulate the conditions outlined above into rules, providing a description of the rules for requests, advice, and a few other speech acts, and suggesting that the rules can be extended to other speech acts. Thus, Searle distinguishes four types of rules. These we illustrate in Table 2.5 with reference to requests:

Speech Act Theory 23 Table 2.5 Searle’s rules for requests Speech act rules

Requests

Propositional content rules specify that the proposition needs to be of a certain type

The proposition predicates a future act A of H

Preparatory rules refer to the conditions in the world that need to obtain prior to the utterance of a particular speech act

H is able to perform act A, S believes H is able to perform act A, It is not obvious that H will do A in the normal course of events.

Sincerity rules outline the conditions for an act to be sincere

S wants H to do act A

Essential rules indicate how the act should count

Counts as an attempt to get H to do A

Nevertheless, Searle (1969) explicitly indicates that he sets out to describe conditions, and, therefore, rules that will account for ‘full blown’ ‘explicit performatives’ (2.2.2) and paradigmatic cases (that is, where there is a close correspondence between the sentence form and the illocutionary force), and not for elliptical forms, hints and metaphors, and what he calls ‘marginal’, ‘fringe’ or ‘partially defective’ cases (pp. 55–6). It follows from this that the conditions Searle outlines correspond to abstractions or idealizations of speech acts, and it can be predicted that difﬁculties will arise when real-life cases are considered. Alston (1991), amongst others, notes that ‘the trouble of taking “nondefective promising” as our analysandum is that there are indeﬁnitely many ways in which promises can be defective, vis-à-vis their standard social function.’ (pp. 59–60). Defective instances would be, for example, promising things that are impossible or foolish to do which may, nevertheless, serve a social function, such as demonstrating interest or goodwill; for instance, I may say ‘I promise it’ll [the weather] be ﬁne’ meaning ‘I really want you to come hill walking with me’.8 Alston thus seems to underscore the futility of a system that can account for a restricted set of cases only. Thomas (1995) makes similar remarks regarding everyday apologies. She notes that what analysts encounter more frequently are not paradigm cases; rather, they are less clear forms, where the application of Searle’s speech act rules can be problematic, as in the case of apologies made on someone else’s behalf or for events such as poor weather over which the person has no control. Hence, Thomas states that ‘[p]roduc-

24 Spanish Pragmatics

ing formal rules for the way in which speech acts operate is immensely appealing’, but she goes on to say that ‘unfortunately the rules only work in very restricted circumstances’ (1995, p. 102). On the other hand, the pervasive use of indirect forms (2.3.4) in conversation where there is no one-to-one correspondence between the propositional content of an utterance and its force, led scholars, such as Fraser (1974a), to question the usefulness of Searle’s speech act rules, ﬁnding Grice’s (4.2.1) proposal for the existence of principles that guide language use a more viable and fruitful option. The work of Leech (1981a, 1981b, 1983) is of particular interest in this respect (see 4.1.2.2). Although Searle was of the view that it was possible to devise rules for different speech acts, he was also of the belief that speech acts could be grouped in relation to the basic uses they served, and a few other shared features; hence his taxonomy of speech acts, which we consider below. 2.3.3 A taxonomy of speech acts Searle (1976) believed that the number of uses of language is not indeﬁnite and that the uses can, therefore, be classiﬁed into a few categories. Taking Austin’s (1962) classiﬁcation of illocutionary forces (2.2.4) as a point of departure, Searle proposed a taxonomy to cover the ﬁve basic uses of language he identiﬁed: telling people how things are; trying to get them to do things; committing ourselves to doing things; expressing our feelings and attitudes; and bringing about changes through utterances (Searle, 1976, p. 23). Table 2.6 below summarizes Searle’s taxonomy.

Table 2.6 Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts Categories

Basic uses

Examples

Representatives/ assertives

Telling people how things are

Assert, inform predict, state

Directives

Trying to get people to do things

Ask, command, plead, request

Commissives

Committing ourselves to doing things

Promise, pledge, vow, favour

Expressives

Expressing our feelings and attitudes

Congratulate, compliment, praise

Declarations

Bringing about changes through utterances

Appoint, christen, declare, adjourn

Speech Act Theory 25

As can be seen, the group of commissives is the only category from Austin’s classiﬁcation retained by Searle although he excluded from this category non-illocutionary verbs such as ‘intend’. To arrive at a consistent and principled taxonomy, Searle (1976) takes into account different dimensions of speech acts, the following three being the most important ones: (1)

The ‘illocutionary point (or purpose)’ of the act. This basically corresponds to Searle’s essential condition (2.3.2). Commands, for example, share the same illocutionary point (that is, attempting to get H to do A) with requests and pleas but not with promises.9 (2) The ‘direction of ﬁt’ between words and the world. According to Searle (1976), ‘[s]ome illocutions have as part of their illocutionary point to get the words (more strictly, their propositional content) to match the world, and others to get the world to match the words’ (p. 3). For instance, when making an assertion, I attempt to match my words to the world. The direction of ﬁt, according to Searle, exhibited by the different speech act types is shown in Table 2.7. (3) The ‘expressed psychological states’. Different psychological states or attitudes towards the propositional content are expressed by different illocutionary acts. These correspond to the sincerity condition of the act performed. For instance, promises, vows, and pledges express the speaker’s intention to do X, whereas commands and requests express the speaker’s desire that the hearer do X and expressives express feelings and attitudes.10 While Searle’s taxonomy is regarded by some scholars as an important improvement on the preliminary classiﬁcation Austin had given, in that it is guided by ‘general principles’ (Martinich, 2002, p. 95), for other scholars the notions of illocutionary point and direction of ﬁt, which are at the basis of the taxonomy, are problematic as they are unclear (Alston, 1991; Siebel, 2002); for others (Muelder Eaton, 1981), the value of developing taxonomies of speech acts is in itself unclear, particularly

Table 2.7 Direction of ﬁt of different classes of speech acts Direction of ﬁt

Representatives/assertives Directives and commissives Expressives Declarations

Word-to-world Ø World-to-word ≠ Direction of ﬁt not relevant Double direction of ﬁt ´

Type of illocution

26 Spanish Pragmatics

if they are of such a general nature (Flowerdew, 1990). There are still others for whom Searle’s taxonomy is incomplete as they claim that many other things are done with language. Minimal responses, for example, aha; mhm; sí, sí, sí, that display listenership (see 3.5), are not covered by his classiﬁcation. Scholars like Kannetzky (2002) express an even more extreme view when they say that there can never be a complete taxonomy of speech acts since, on the one hand, subdivisions guided by the aim of the analysis are always possible, and, on the other, the creative use of language results in members of the taxonomy being used in new ways, rendering any taxonomy incomplete: ‘If the use of language is creative, that is, if it can be used in unpredictable contexts and for new purposes, then a taxonomy is always incomplete’ (p. 74). Nevertheless, other scholars, such as Clark (1996), regard Searle’s classiﬁcation useful ‘as a gross classiﬁcation’ and also in terms of ‘its widely accepted nomenclature’ (p. 137). In fact, Searle’s taxonomy has served as a point of departure for a number of speech act studies in different languages including Spanish (Koike, 1998; Márquez Reiter, 2000). At any rate, the interest in classifying the things we can do with words, within particular contexts in some cases, has caught the attention of scholars who came after Austin and Searle. These include Fraser (1974b, 1975), Sinclair and Coulthard (1975); Labov and Fanshell (1977); Bach and Harnish (1979); Verschueren (1980); Vincent and Castelfranchi (1981) and Wierzbicka (1987), amongst others. Interest in this area can also be found in the work of Hispanists, such as Haverkate (1994) and Guariglia (1996), in particular (see 2.5.1). 2.3.4 Indirect speech acts The notion of indirectness is employed to denote cases where the surface or literal meaning of an utterance does not correspond to its illocutionary force. A direct correspondence for requests, for example, can be found when imperative sentences are employed, as in (17) below. In cases like these, ‘the communicative intent and the nature of the act to be carried out’ are speciﬁed in ‘unambiguous terms’ (Blum-Kulka, 1997, p. 44). Requests may also be realized indirectly, by interrogative sentences, normally associated with questions, like the ones in (18), or declarative sentences, normally associated with assertions, like those in (19). To a (17) (18) (19)

friend at a party (ES): Tráeme algo de comer por favor que ya no aguanto del hambre. ¿Me puedes traer algo de comer? Me muero de hambre. (Examples taken from Placencia, 1999)

Speech Act Theory 27

It will be recalled that the propositional content rule for requests speciﬁes that the proposition should predicate a future act A of the hearer (2.3.2). In (17), in addition to specifying the act that the speaker would like the hearer to perform (tráeme algo de comer), the utterance also speciﬁes the agent of the act, that is, tú. While this is also true for (18), here the request or Searle’s (1975) ‘primary’ act is phrased as another speech act (Searle’s ‘secondary’ act); that is, as a question concerning the ability of the hearer to carry out the act. In contrast, in (19) there is no mention of the act to be carried out or of who should carry it out. Utterance (17) is thus a clear instance of a direct request while (18) and (19) constitute instances of indirect requests. Searle was certainly not the ﬁrst to attempt to describe and account for indirectness phenomena (see Grice, 1975 [1967] and Gordon and Lakoff, 1975 [1971], amongst others). Yet, it is important to consider his distinction of different types of indirectness, namely, conventional and non-conventional indirectness, as it is his classiﬁcation that has been widely employed in speech act studies. It is also of interest to see the way Searle attempts to explain how literal meanings relate to indirect meanings and what motivates people to use indirectness. As Dascal (1983) states ‘[o]ne task of a theory of indirectness is to spell out the mechanisms whereby “reasons” are found to reject the direct interpretation’, and another, to ‘inquire about its possible function(s)’ (p. 137). With respect to directives in particular, Searle (1975) distinguishes conventional from non-conventional realizations. The former are cases where certain syntactic forms that have become ‘conventionally established as the standard idiomatic forms’ (p. 76) are employed, as in (18) above or the following example: (20) (US) ¿Me podés atender el teléfono? (Márquez Reiter, 2000, p. 90 (our emphasis)) The conventions Searle (1975) refers to are ‘conventions of usage’ rather than meaning conventions (p. 76). Expressions such as me puedes/me podés do not have a requestive force in their meaning; yet, through use, they have become conventional expressions for requests while there are other expressions that may share the same propositional content meaning, for example, eres capaz de . . . (are you able to . . .), but lack the ‘request potential’ (p. 69) of conventionalized forms. As to form, Searle (1975) shows that conventionally indirect speech acts are derived from the conditions for their realization: in uttering a

28 Spanish Pragmatics

request, for instance, the preparatory condition may be questioned or asserted. The following examples illustrate conventional indirectness in relation to the preparatory and sincerity conditions of four speech acts: Preparatory condition(s): Offers: S is able to perform the act (21) (PnS) Travel agent to customers: ¿Podría ayudar a uno de vosotros? (Chodorowska-Pilch, 2004, p. 63) Promises: S predicates a future act A of S (22) (MS) To friend or acquaintance: Mañana te hablo. (Rall, 1993, p. 3) Sincerity condition: Apologies: S regrets act A (23) (CbS) Discussant in a radio show: . . . Y lo siento mucho [. . .] (Ruzickova, 1998, p. 130) Thanks: S feels grateful or appreciative for A (24) (AS) To a friend: ¡Es precioso! ¡Me viene fantástico! (Ferrer and Sánchez Lanza, 2002, p. 82) Searle (1975) focuses on requests in greater detail and considers conventionally indirect forms in relation to ﬁve types of sentences (pp. 65–6); we illustrate these with requests in Spanish: Sentences concerning H’s ability to perform A: (25) (ES) To a hospital information desk clerk: buenos días me puede prestar un esferitoŸ (Placencia, 1998, p. 84) Sentences relating to S’s wish or want that H will do A: (26) (PnS) To a hospital information desk clerk: quería saber la habitación de la niña XXŸ (Placencia, 1998, p. 83) Sentences pertaining to H’s doing A: (27) (ES) To a stranger whose dog has fouled the speaker’s front garden: ¿No va a limpiar lo que hizo su perro? (Placencia, 1999)

Speech Act Theory 29

Sentences regarding H’s desire or willingness to do A: (28) (PnS) Employee to apprentice in an ofﬁce: ¿ . . . te importaría prestarme el ordenador por un minuto? (Márquez Reiter, 2002, p. 141) Sentences concerning reasons for doing A: (29) (US) Employee to trainee in an ofﬁce: Tenés que atender el teléfono. (Márquez Reiter, 2000, p. 89) Non-conventional forms of indirectness, on the other hand, are described by Searle (1975) as cases where no such systematic conventions are present, like the request in (19) above (Me muero de hambre), or the reply to the request/suggestion in (30) below, which constitutes an indirect refusal. (30) (PnS) A: ¿Por qué no me acompañas esta tarde a por las entradas del teatro? B: Entonces, X, ¿cuándo estudio física? (González Mangas, 2000, p. 102) Searle (1975) attempts to explain ‘how it is possible for the hearer to understand the indirect speech act when the sentence he hears and understands means something else’ (p. 60). His suggestion is that hearers rely on speech act rules, mutually-shared information and general conversational principles in the line of those proposed by Grice (1975 [1967]) (4.2.1). For the hearer to understand B’s response in (30) above as a rejection, he/she needs to go through several steps of reasoning; these involve considering, amongst other things, that the speaker is ‘cooperating in the conversation and that therefore his remark is intended to be relevant’ (1975, p. 63), mutually-shared information pertaining to studying and going to the theatre, and the preparatory conditions for the acceptance of a proposal. Considerations of this type direct the hearer to the conclusion that the illocutionary force intended does not correspond to the literal meaning and, therefore, that there is an alternative illocutionary force.11 Given the speed and limited effort with which conventionally indirect speech acts are processed, Searle’s proposal, nevertheless, has been subject to criticism, particularly from a relevance theory perspective, as conceived by Sperber and Wilson (1986). Finally, Searle (1975) brieﬂy touches upon the function of indirectness with particular reference to requests when he suggests that politeness constitutes the ‘most prominent motivation for indirectness’

30 Spanish Pragmatics

(p. 76). According to him, ‘ordinary conversational requirements of politeness normally make it awkward to issue ﬂat imperative sentences’ (p. 64), hence the choice of indirect forms. This is a view largely shared by other scholars (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Leech 1983) (see 4.1), which others, nevertheless, regard as ethnocentric. Rosaldo (1982), for example, reports on cultural variation in the use of imperatives in relation to her study of the speech of Ilongots, referred to earlier. She ﬁnds that ﬂat directives, in contrast with Searle’s description for English, are the norm amongst Illongots. Along the same lines, Wierzbicka (1985) stresses that the avoidance of ﬂat imperatives, that Searle describes, should be regarded as a requirement for English, and not necessarily for all languages since, in her view, the use of indirectness is tied to cultural norms and assumptions. For other scholars, the use of indirectness may have other motivations, too. Dascal (1983), for instance, lists ‘communicative efﬁcacy’ and the lack of an alternative form, amongst other reasons. According to him, the choice of indirectness may be a matter of instrumental rationality since indirectness may be in some contexts ‘the best available means to achieve an end’ (p. 159), or it may be the only choice owing to the nature of what we want to say; that is, because ‘of the existence of limits to what can be said explicitly and precisely’ (p. 159). This last observation, incidentally, brings into question Searle’s principle of expressibility (2.3.1). 2.3.5 The relevance of Searle’s proposals for sociopragmatics As remarked earlier, speech act theory has exerted a great deal of inﬂuence in linguistics. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, it attracted linguists’ attention in terms of the new focus of study it provided (that is, the examination of speech acts) and the interest in testing some of its central claims against actual situations of use that the theory generated. As a result, there has been a wealth of studies that have contributed to developing and systematizing some key notions, such as that of indirectness, providing ‘pragmatic criteria for sorting out different types of indirectness’ (Blum-Kulka, 1997, p. 59). More widely, speech act studies have offered characterizations of their realization in different sociocultural contexts and languages. These characterizations, in turn, have contributed to some understanding of universal and culture-speciﬁc features of language use. In fact, the profusion of speech act studies in the 1980s and early 1990s played a signiﬁcant role in the constitution of the sub-disciplines of pragmatics that are now known as cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics, sub-disciplines largely associated

Speech Act Theory 31

with the work of Blum-Kulka and her colleagues (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Kasper and Blum-Kulka, 1993). Given the impact it has had on (Spanish) speech act studies, we consider it appropriate, then, to look brieﬂy at the work of Blum-Kulka and her colleagues within the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, 1984; Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). Blum-Kulka and her colleagues carried out a cross-cultural study of the realization patterns of requests and apologies in seven languages, including Argentinian Spanish (AS, hereafter) (2.5.2), with the aim of examining the extent to which ‘the rules that govern the use of language in context vary from culture to culture and from language to language’ (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, 1984, p. 196). They were also interested in examining intra-cultural situational variability, relative to social and individual constraints, as well as variability in the realization patterns employed by native and non-native speakers of the languages studied within the project. In relation to this last aim, their study was motivated by the results of previous research on interlanguage that showed that second language learners can display ‘pragmatic errors’ (Edmondson et al., 1984) or ‘pragmatic failure’ (Thomas, 1983) in speech act performance, owing to differences in speech act realization rules between L1 and L2 (Blum-Kulka, 1982). The data examined within the CCSARP consisted of written responses to a discourse completion test, a production questionnaire designed to elicit requests and apologies from informants (see 6.3). The questionnaire was administered to native and non-native speakers of the languages studied within the project. For the analysis of the data, Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) constructed a coding scheme that largely builds on Searle’s (1975) notion of conventional indirectness and his description of the types of linguistic realizations for conventionally indirect speech acts (2.3.4). It distinguishes, in the ﬁrst place, between ‘alerters’, ‘head acts’ and ‘supportive moves’: Alerters: Head act: Supportive moves:

opening utterances, such as terms of address or attention getters, that precede the request the minimal unit that can realize a request12 units external to the request that modify its impact by either mitigating or aggravating the force of the utterance.

The following example illustrates these elements:

32 Spanish Pragmatics

que tengo hambre.

}

} Alerter

por favor tráeme algo

}

(31) (ES) Raquel,

Head act

Supportive move (Placencia, 1999)

Additionally, Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) framework distinguishes between external modiﬁcation (that is, modiﬁcation external to the act) as in the use of the supportive move in (31), which provides a reason for the request, and internal modiﬁcation which is modiﬁcation to the head act itself through lexical (for example, por favor) or syntactic devices. The purpose of modiﬁcation in both cases is to downgrade, as in (31) above, or upgrade the force of the head act. The following are additional examples of both types of modiﬁcation: external, as in (32) and (33), and internal, as in (34): Preparators: Utterances that prepare the hearer for the ensuing request (32) (US) Employee to manager/ess: La verdad que tengo que pedirte un favor enorme . . . Disarmers: Utterances that are intended to ‘disarm’ the hearer against a possible refusal to the ensuing request (33) (US) Employee to manager/ess: . . . yo sé que vos tenés auto y que lo cuidás mucho pero bueno ta. Te lo voy a pedir . . . Diminutives: (34) (US) Employee to trainee: Atendeme el teléfono por un minutito . . . (Examples taken from Márquez Reiter, 2000, pp. 130–7). Moreover, under the notion of ‘perspective’, Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) framework differentiates between speaker and hearer dominance or orientation in request performance, depending on whether the request is realized from the view point of the hearer, the speaker, both or impersonally: Hearer dominance: (35) (PnS) To colleague: borra eso Lolita cariño (‘You’) (Placencia, 1998, p. 85).

Speech Act Theory 33

Speaker dominance: (36) (PnS) To hospital information desk clerk: quería pegatinas (‘I’) (Placencia, 1998, p. 105) Speaker and hearer dominance: (37) (ES) Mother to child: Antes de salir, ¿dejamos alzando los juguetes? (inclusive ‘we’) Impersonal: (38) (PnS) Hace falta colocar esta mesa en el rincón (Haverkate, 1979, p. 100) As to speciﬁcation of the head act, loosely based on Searle’s (1975) distinctions (2.3.4), Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) propose three different levels of directness that can be realized by different types of strategies. In Table 2.8, we exemplify these levels with variations of the same example in ES, adapted, for illustrative purposes, from an original utterance: Table 2.8 Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) levels of directness Directness levels Direct requests13

Some linguistic realizations Mood derivable:

Tráeme X de la cocina.

Explicit performatives:

Te pido que me traigas X de la cocina.

Hedged performatives:14

Tengo que pedirte que me traigas X de la cocina.

Locution derivable:

Tienes que traerme X de la cocina.

Want statement:

Quiero que me traigas X de la cocina.

Conventionally indirect requests

Preparatory strategy:

¿Puedes traerme X de la cocina?

Suggestory formula:

¿Por qué no me traes X de la cocina?

Non-conventional indirectness

Strong hints

¿Vas a la cocina ahora?

Mild hints

Hay X en la cocina.

This classiﬁcation, nevertheless, is not without problems. With respect to want statements, for example, it should be noted that Searle (1975), as seen in 2.3.4, presents this category as an instance of conventional indirectness, whereas Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) regard it as an

34 Spanish Pragmatics

instance of the class of direct or impositive speech acts. Unlike moodderivable requests, want statements, as noted by Márquez Reiter (2000, p. 84), are indirect from the point of view of their linguistic encoding since the speaker does not perform the act directly. However, as Márquez Reiter (2000, p. 91) also notes, the expression of a speaker’s wants/needs through wants/needs statements is ‘less tentative’ than if he/she chooses to express his wants/needs through query preparatory or suggestory formula strategies. This then justiﬁes its inclusion within the category of direct or impositive speech acts. In any case, tentativeness, in her view, needs to be distinguished from indirectness:15 Tentativeness . . . is more ﬂexible than indirectness in that it can occur in the head act and/or in the peripheral elements of the request; thus it can modify the request internally and/or externally making it sound less coercive or less forceful. (Márquez Reiter, 2002, p. 136) One of Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) main ﬁndings is that conventional indirectness is the strategy that is preferred overall in the different languages they examined. Studies on other languages, such as Indonesian (Hassall, 1999), and a number of studies on requests by Hispanists, as we will see in 2.5, provide further evidence for Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) claims in this respect (García, 1993; Vázquez Orta, 1995; Le Pair, 1996; Márquez Reiter, 2000, amongst others). The choice of a particular directness level, as Blum-Kulka et al. (1989, p. 278) suggest, and as will be discussed in Chapter 4, is ‘related to’, although not ‘coextensive’ with politeness. Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), however, ﬁnd that, while conventional indirectness appears to be the preferred strategy overall in the different languages they examined, there are differences in terms of ‘conventions of meaning’ and ‘conventions of form’ employed across languages. It will be recalled that Searle (1975) discussed ‘conventions of usage’ underlying the use of conventional indirectness (2.3.4). Based on Clark (1979), Blum-Kulka (1989) proposes two further distinctions for conventions of usage: conventions of means and conventions of form, both of which she regards to be ‘pragmalinguistic’ in nature; that is, acting mainly ‘on properties of the utterance’ (Blum-Kulka, 1989, p. 42) (see also 2.4). The former refer to the kinds of sentences that are standardly used as indirect requests and that specify a semantic device by which an indirect speech act can be performed; for example, a question concerning H’s ability to do X, as in (18) (¿Me puedes traer algo de comer?) and in (20)

Speech Act Theory 35

(¿Me podés atender el teléfono?) above. The latter, on the other hand, refer to the actual choice of words to realize the speech act as in puedes/podés rather than eres capaz de. In this respect, Blum Kulka warns us that the universality of conventional indirectness ‘should be regarded as a matter of shared pragmatic properties, rather than as a matter of cross-linguistic equivalence in form and usage’ (1989, p. 37). Whether the use of ‘equivalent’ request strategies in two languages means the same thing for participants is, as we will see in 2.5.2, the object of examination in Márquez Reiter et al. (in press). As far as non-conventional indirectness is concerned, Weizman’s (1989, 1993) work on requestive hints is of interest given the reﬁnements to the categories that she proposes. She distinguishes different substrategies that vary in type and degree of ‘opacity’. With respect to type, opacity can be found at the level of the illocutionary force, that is, when the utterance ‘does not provide sufﬁcient indication as to its intended illocutionary force, and the illocutionary intention is therefore “deciphered,” as it were, only if the hearer ﬁlls the gap with the help of contextual knowledge’ (Weizman, 1989, p. 76), or at the level of the propositional content, ‘where sentence meaning does not provide sufﬁcient indications as to the content of the act, but its illocutionary force is not necessarily obscure’ (p. 76). In relation to degree, for Weizman, opacity is scalar and can range from complete to relative opacity with respect to both the illocutionary force and the propositional content. With regard to the latter, for example, one of the following substrategies may be employed: Reference to the requested act: (39) I haven’t got the time to clean up the kitchen. (p. 82) Reference to the hearer’s involvement: (40) You’ve left the kitchen in a mess. (p. 83) Reference to related components: (41) The kitchen is in a mess. (p. 83) Weizman (1989) regards reference to the requested act as the most transparent realization because ‘naming the requested act narrows the range of alternative interpretations, thus shortening the interpretation process required from the hearer’ (p. 83). On the other hand, reference to related components would be the most opaque realization, whereas reference to the hearer’s involvement would render an intermediate degree of opaqueness.

36 Spanish Pragmatics

In connection with the illocutionary force, Weizman (1989) also discusses three substrategies that range from relative transparency (42) to extreme opacity (44): Questioning hearer’s commitment: (42) Are you going to give us a hand? (p. 85) Questioning feasibility: (43) Do you have a car? (p. 85) Stating potential grounders: (44) I’ve just missed my bus and I live near your place. (p. 86) With all these distinctions, which Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) present and exemplify in great detail, systematic intra-cultural and cross-cultural analyses of requests and other speech acts have been greatly facilitated.16 As we will see in 2.5, their framework has exerted a great deal of inﬂuence on speech act studies in Spanish, despite the fact that a detailed framework, that is in many ways comparable to theirs, had previously been developed by Haverkate (1979).

2.4 Speech act theory and the analysis of discourse The signiﬁcance of speech act theory and the contribution it has made to linguistics is unquestionable. Nevertheless, a number of linguists have highlighted several limitations of the theory as developed by Searle. Problems arise particularly when the theory is applied to discourse; that is, to language above the utterance level in speciﬁc social contexts. As remarked earlier, Searle never intended to provide descriptions of ‘actual structures’ of natural languages since he regarded this as a task for linguists so, as, Leech and Thomas (2000 [1988], p. 11) rightly maintain, the fact that pragmatics was born out of philosophical abstractions ‘partly explains the difﬁculties that linguists encountered in the application of pragmatic models to the analysis of natural discourse’ (our translation). The most salient limitations that have been identiﬁed relate to the following aspects: the problems the notion of intention poses in the identiﬁcation of speech acts in discourse; redeﬁnitions of speech acts in the course of an interaction; over-reliance on the utterance level for the assignment of illocutionary force; the minimal role assigned to the hearer within the theory; the static view of language and context underlying the theory; and the incompleteness of Searle’s taxonomy. Owing to the elusiveness of the notion of intention, the identiﬁcation and

Speech Act Theory 37

labelling of speech acts has been found to be problematic. Streeck (1980), for example, maintains that it is ‘highly debatable that . . . intentions could in any way be located and identiﬁed with certainty by hearers or analysts (p. 150).17 The problem of identiﬁcation of the speaker’s intention is compounded by the fact that an utterance may perform multiple acts simultaneously (Franck, 1981), and the analyst may feel forced to choose one rather arbitrarily. The result may well be that ‘a more ﬁxed and deﬁnitive interpretation than the speakers themselves would agree upon at the given moment’ (Franck, 1981, p. 229) may be assigned to a particular utterance. This problem is ampliﬁed when written production questionnaires (see 6.3) are employed, where, without the aid of paralinguistic features, it is even more difﬁcult for the analyst to determine how a particular utterance should be interpreted. For instance, in (46) below, it is not unproblematic to determine the force of por favor. Depending on the intonation, this utterance could be regarded as a mitigating device or as an intensifying one. In the latter case, the speaker’s intention may be that of conveying irony/sarcsm and, therefore, of expressing a negative evaluation, which, given the context where it was uttered, might be interpreted as a(n) (indirect) complaint (see also Arellano (2000) in 2.5.1). (45) (VS) Señora por favor si quiere pasear su perro no deje que haga sus necesidades aquí. (Bolívar, 2002, p. 49) Difﬁculties in assigning a force to an utterance have also been highlighted by studies, such as Labov and Fanshel’s (1977), on therapeutic discourse, which show, for example, the cumulative effect the repetition of a speech act can accomplish. A request that is repeated a number of times may turn into a command, or a plea. Likewise, an invitation may be redeﬁned over the course of an interaction as a command (Streeck, 1980). These are phenomena that cannot easily be accounted for by Searle’s rule model, owing to its atomistic nature. Other scholars have underlined the over-reliance within the theory on the utterance level for the assignment of force, claiming that the global activities in which speech acts are embedded may also play a role in the deﬁnition of their force. Levinson (1979) refers to Wittgenstein’s (1958) suggestion that ‘having a grasp of the meaning of utterances, involves knowing the nature of the activity in which the utterances play a role’ (p. 365).18 For instance, if interpreted in isolation, (46) below may

38 Spanish Pragmatics

be regarded as a plea for free milk whereas, within the context of a corner shop transaction, it constitutes a fairly standard request for a product in that particular sociocultural context. (46) (ES) Regáleme unas tres lechecitas por favor. (Placencia, forthcoming) Searle’s focus on the individual’s production and understanding of meaning has also been criticized. For Streeck (1980), the emphasis should rather be on communication as a joint accomplishment by at least two people in the roles of speaker and hearer.19 In this respect, Clark (1996) claims that ‘[t]here is something missing in this picture of speech acts. At the center are speakers and what they do, but if there are any listeners, they are nowhere to be seen’ (p. 137). As such, speech act theory is regarded by some as a reductionist (Streeck, 1980) or a monologistic (rather than dialogical) (Linell, 1996) approach to verbal communication.20 Related to the above criticisms is Franck’s (1981) observation that speech act theory offers a static rather than a dynamic view of language. With this criticism, Franck refers, for example, to aspects of sequentiality (see 3.2.1) in the examination of utterance meaning that are not taken into account within speech act theory. The force of an utterance cannot be determined by speech act rules alone; the position of the utterance within a sequence also needs to be examined (see also Schegloff, 1988). For instance, for the utterance pancito in (47) below (turn 03) to be understood as a request for a product, the sequences within which it occurs need to be examined, in conjunction with considerations of the overall goal of the activity, as discussed with respect to example (46) above. (47) (ES) 01 Customer 02 Shopkeeper 03 Customer 04 Shopkeeper 05 Customer

buenos días Sebastián cómo está don Ramirito buenos días /cómo le va/ pancito cuántos diez (Placencia, 2004, p. 222)

Finally, with respect to Searle’s taxonomy, some scholars regard it as incomplete given that it does not cover a number of other things, such

Speech Act Theory 39

as organizational aspects of interaction, that are done with language. Amongst these are minimal responses (for example, mmm, sí) which, according to Franck (1981), accomplish a variety of local tasks. Responses like these cannot necessarily or exclusively be subsumed under the speech act ‘statement of agreement’, for example. In the following extract from a telephone conversation, one can see the use of a range of these utterances by C to display listenership to A, who is explaining in detail the process the sale of some cars underwent. All of C’s responses indicate that C is listening and following what A is saying and that C is assuming, for the time being, the listener role. At the same time, some of the utterances (for example, claro, ya) convey a more or less explicit expression of agreement. (48) (ES) (A = answerer; C = caller) A verás ese ese carro todos los carros y todos los implementos se les registró y se les hizo avaluar C aha A por dos (.) dos personas C mmm A los carros avaluaron (.) el mecánico ( ) y un mecánico Bastidas que tienen en Cuenca pues C sí A /( )/ se llevó los carros les chequearon y les revisaron y les pusieron un avalúo C /sí aha/mmm A Esos avalúos no coinciden el uno es menos el otro es más C ya A ahora esos avalúos se hicieron con el ﬁn de /( )/ tener una idea pues de cuánto valen no^ C /claro/ claro A entonces (.) se les va a poner a la venta (Placencia, 1990) Pre-closing devices, such as bueno (well) or bueno entonces (well then) (see 3.3.3) are other instances of utterances whose function cannot be adequately explained in speech act theory. In the same vein, Linell (1996) considers other actions, such as initiating repair and making an assessment or second assessment, that do not ﬁt under Searle’s categories. In relation to this, Linell (1996) accentuates the point that speech act theory gives all acts an equal status, and protests

40 Spanish Pragmatics

that there are in fact acts that are ‘typically responsive in character’ (p. 137), by which he means that they presuppose certain prior acts. At ﬁrst glance, however, all these criticisms stand in stark contrast with the multiplicity of speech act studies available on different languages and contexts (Blum-Kulka, 1997). In other words, if the theory is regarded as problematic in so many ways, how can its fruitfulness in empirical research be explained? Blum-Kulka (1997) shed light on this matter with her observation that the effectiveness in the application of the theory is found mostly in the study of single speech acts rather than in stretches of discourse (p. 59). As the reader will see in 2.5, this is a situation which speech act studies by Hispanists also attest to. A number of scholars have highlighted the strengths of speech act theory although the majority seem to concur that it needs to be modiﬁed and supplemented to account for discourse. For instance, Streeck (1980) stressed the functions speech acts perform in the construction of social events. He said that speech act performance ‘plays a part in the negotiation of social relationships amongst participants and situates exchanged information (propositions) in these relational contexts’ and that, as such, ‘[s]peech acts are . . . involved in the interactive constitution of normative orders of human relations’ (p. 152) (his emphasis). However, he was of the view that speech act performance needs to be examined ‘within a larger framework of interaction analysis’ (p. 152). More explicitly, for Streeck, the usefulness of the theory for the study of discourse is dependent upon whether the interactional context of speech act performance and the intersubjective constitution of speech act forms and functions are adequately considered (p. 151). More recently, Geis (1995) attempted to come to the rescue of the theory, downplaying the role of sequentiality in the structuring of conversations. Nevertheless, he also proposed some important modiﬁcations, including the re-evaluation of speech acts as social rather than linguistic acts, hence his preference for the term ‘communicative actions’ (p. 9). Additionally, he proposed the abandonment of the thesis, implicit in the theory, that illocutionary forces can be systematically mapped into individual sentences, and suggested the inclusion of some interactional effect to account for politeness phenomena, as well as the examination of speech acts in relation to the type of interactions they are embedded in. Another scholar with similar views is van Rees (1992), who admitted that speech act theory must be combined with other theoretical insights concerning, for example, conventions of usage, general communica-

Speech Act Theory 41

tive principles, and principles of rational inference, in which notions such as interactional and sequential context do indeed play an important part. (p. 34) Van Rees also stressed, however, that it is not the case that the theory has no use at all. This is a view with which we concur in the sense that there are notions that have derived or evolved from the theory that have been fruitfully applied (for example, propositional content v. illocutionary force; indirect speech acts). A theory that provides a framework for the analysis of discourse, and that offers insights into a larger number of elements in verbal communication, is conversation analysis (CA). We consider this theory in the next chapter. We will see, however, that some of the criticisms that have been made of speech act theory are relevant also to CA, and that the application of the CA framework to discourse is not problem-free either.

2.5 Uptake of the theory by Hispanists In the ﬁrst part of this section, we shall start with the work of the Dutch Hispanist, Henk Haverkate, which expands over a period of more than two decades. More speciﬁcally, we shall focus on his contributions to speech act theory as represented in two of his publications: Impositive Sentences in Spanish. Theory and Description in Linguistic Pragmatics (1979) and Speech Acts, Speakers and Hearers (1984). Both publications form the basis for his seminal work on speech acts and politeness (La cortesía verbal, 1994), for which he is better known amongst Hispanists, and which we discuss in Chapter 4. We will then look at contributions by other Hispanists, speciﬁcally, at: Guariglia’s (1996) proposal for a classiﬁcation of speech acts in Spanish; Ortega Olivares’s (1986) consideration of how certain tags (apéndices modalizadores, for example, ¿sabes?) modify the force of assertives and other speech acts; Alba de Diego’s (1995) attempt to deﬁne requests for permission; and Herrero Moreno’s (2002) characterization of speech acts that express disagreement (that is, dissentives). 2.5.1 Theoretical developments In his early work, Haverkate (1979) suggested important revisions to speech act theory, some of which are at present still relevant to the study of verbal communication. He was amongst the ﬁrst, and not just within

42 Spanish Pragmatics

the community of Hispanists, to identify the overemphasis on the speaker within Searle’s theory, proposing instead that communication should be regarded as a joint activity between a speaker and a hearer. This led him to distinguish, under the umbrella term of ‘linguistic communication acts’, ‘speaker’s’ speech acts from ‘hearer’s’ interpretation acts: Linguistic communication acts 䉳

䉳 Speech acts

Interpretation acts

Except for the ‘allocutionary act’, a new category Haverkate proposes, and the absence of the perlocutionary act, which Haverkate discusses as the perlocutionary ‘effect’,21 speech and interpretation acts would have parallel subacts as indicated in Table 2.9. Observe how they relate quite closely to Austin’s (2.2.3) and Searle’s (2.3.1) analyses. Table 2.9 Haverkate’s (1979) characterization of speech and interpretation acts Austin

Searle

Haverkate Speech act

Locutionary act

Interpretation act

Utterance act

Utterance act

Listening act

Propositional act

Referring act22

Act of interpreting reference

Predicating act

Act of interpreting predication

Illocutionary act

Act of interpreting illocution

Allocutionary act

Act of interpreting allocution

Illocutionary act

Illocutionary act

Perlocutionary act

Perlocutionary act

The ‘allocutionary’ act refers to ‘the selection by the speaker of those linguistic devices which he thinks optimally serve the purpose of eliciting from the hearer a positive reaction to his speech act’ (Haverkate, 1979, p. 11). The success of an act would thus reside in the allocution-

Speech Act Theory 43

ary act being ‘positively evaluated’ by the hearer (p. 13); hence the importance of the selection of an appropriate allocution.23 According to Haverkate (1979), there is a set of allocutionary devices for each act and these would vary in force or ‘strength’ according to the illocutionary act. There can be mitigating, neutral, and reinforced forms, as illustrated in the following examples, which correspond to Searle’s (1969) class of assertives: (49) (PnS) Mitigating manifestation: Creo que ese coche es de mi vecino. (50) (PnS) Neutral manifestation: Ese coche es de mi vecino. (51) (PnS) Reinforced manifestation: Estoy absolutamente convencido de que ese coche es de mi vecino. (Examples taken from Haverkate, 1979, p. 12) The selection of allocutionary strategy or optimal linguistic device for the successful accomplishment of a speech act would be determined by socio-psychological factors, such as the type of relation obtaining between the participants. More speciﬁcally, building on Brown and Gilman’s (1972 [1960]) notions of power and solidarity, Haverkate (1979) distinguishes between relations where the speaker has power over the hearer, those where the hearer has power over the speaker, and those where there is no power relation (that is, amongst equals), and attempts to explain some speech acts realizations, such as the choice of an order over a request, with reference to these relations. The choice of allocution would also determine whether the intended perlocutionary effect is attained. Haverkate (1979) points out that, ‘in order to create in the hearer a certain psychological state, the speaker makes use in particular of allocutionary devices’ (p. 14). In fact, Haverkate maintains there is a causal relation between allocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects. He argues, for example, ‘in order to bring it about that the hearer feels threatened, he [the speaker] may curse, use abusive language, etc.’ (p. 14). Haverkate (1979) postulates that the description of the allocutionary component is an important goal of any speech act theory. In other

44 Spanish Pragmatics

words, in his view, in addition to a description of illocutionary act rules, ‘the theory must be able to show in which way these rules are formally represented by the linguistic output of the speech act’ (p. 93). Within this framework, Haverkate sets out to describe the linguistic representation of impositive acts, a subclass of Searle’s (1969) directives, with reference to Peninsular Spanish (PnS, hereafter). Impositives are deﬁned by Haverkate as those acts aimed at inﬂuencing the behaviour of the hearer for the beneﬁt of the speaker. Such a class within Haverkate’s proposals stands in opposition to that of non-impositive speech acts where the hearer is the one who beneﬁts from the action as in the case of invitations (see Leech’s, 1983, similar consideration under the notion of the cost-beneﬁt scale, Chapter 4). Haverkate describes a number of allocutionary devices, such as the use of vocatives as attention-getting devices (see Blum-Kulka et al.’s, 1989 notion of ‘alerters’ in 2.3), as in (52) (PnS) ¡Carlos, ven aquí! (p. 17) Nonetheless, Haverkate (1979) examines additional morpho-syntactic devices, such as personal pronouns (tú v. usted) and interjections (for example, eh and ah). Amongst the latter group, he distinguishes ‘hearer-based’ from ‘speaker-based’ (see Blum-Kulka et al.’s notion of ‘hearer/speaker orientation/dominance in 2.3), the former operating as response-eliciting devices in directives, like (53) below, and the latter as expressions of feelings or emotions of S in response to the communicative situation (54): (53) (PnS) Vamos, no te pongas así. (54) (PnS) ¡Anda, el gato se ha escapado! (Haverkate, 1979, p. 18) For illustrative purposes, we now turn to look at some examples of realizations of impositive speech acts, conﬁning ourselves to those that relate to the propositional content rule (that is, the proposition predicates a future act A of the hearer). Haverkate notes that there is variation in terms of whether the expected act is speciﬁed and whether the hearer is referred to explicitly as the agent, as in the following set:

Speech Act Theory 45 Table 2.10 Haverkate’s (1979) impositive speech acts (55) (PnS) Tráeme un vaso de agua.

+ full speciﬁcation of the action + explicit reference to H

(56) (PnS) ¿Podrías tráerme un vaso de agua?

+ full speciﬁcation of the action + explicit reference to H

(57) (PnS) Conviene encender la luz.

+ full speciﬁcation of the action - explicit reference to H

(58) (PnS) ¿Está abierta la puerta?

+ partial especiﬁcation of the action - explicit reference to H

(59) (PnS) Quisiera que no estuviera tan oscuro aquí.

- speciﬁcation of the action - explicit reference to H

Source: Haverkate, 1979, pp. 96–104.

This observation leads him to propose a directness-indirectness pole. Contrary to Searle (1975) (2.3.4) and Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) (2.3.5), Haverkate identiﬁes not only (55) but also (56) as instances of the directness end of the pole in as much as they fulﬁl the propositional content rule. He regards (59) only as a clear instance of indirectness, given that there is no speciﬁcation of the action or an explicit reference to the hearer (see also Haverkate, 1984). On the other hand, (57) and (58) would be placed along a continuum, with the former towards the directness end, given the full speciﬁcation of the action, but the absence of a reference to H; the latter would be towards the indirectness end, owing to the partial speciﬁcation of the action, coupled by the absence of reference to the hearer. Although the notion of conventional indirectness is absent from Haverkate’s work, he does refer to the use of conventional devices for the realization of direct impositive acts. It should be noted, however, that while Haverkate’s criteria for distinguishing between direct and indirect impositives appears to be straightforward at ﬁrst sight, it is problematic. Haverkate fails, for example, to account for the different social effects that a request phrased as an imperative, as in (55) above, can have, in comparison with one phrased as a question concerning the hearer’s ability to do X, as in (56). Utterances such as (55) and (56) may have a similar impact in certain Spanish varieties, such as, PnS and Uruguayan Spanish (US, hereafter); however, this impact may not necessarily be the same in other Hispanophone cultures, as Márquez Reiter (2002, p. 138) suggests. With respect to Searle’s or Blum-Kulka et al.’s non-conventional indi-

46 Spanish Pragmatics

rectness, Haverkate distinguishes ‘transparent’ from ‘opaque’ indirect impositives, depending on whether the propositional content explicitly indicates or not the state of affairs that the speaker wants to bring about (see Weizman’s, 1989, criteria to distinguish levels of opacity in hints in 2.3.5). Finally, as Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), Haverkate (1979) discusses the devices employed to mitigate or ‘reinforce’ impositive speech acts. With respect to requests, the former include, amongst other devices, the use of performative sentences as in (60), tags (see also Ortega Olivares, 1986, below), as in (61) and hypothetical sentences expressing rewards, as in (62): (60) (PnS) No hagas eso, te lo ruego. (p. 85) (61) (PnS) Pásame la mantequilla, ¿quieres? (p. 86) (62) (PnS) Si no se lo dices a papá, te daré un caramelo. (p. 86) With reference to orders, reinforcing devices also include, amongst other devices, performative sentences as in (63), interjections, as in (64), and vocatives, as in (65): (63) (PnS) Te digo que les esperes aquí. (p. 81) (64) (PnS) Venga, déjala en paz inmediatamente. (p. 82) (65) (PnS) ¡Deja eso, idiota! (p. 82) In Haverkate (1984), the focus is on referring strategies. He discusses neutral, reinforcing, and mitigating referring strategies as ‘standard’, focalizing and defocalizing expressions: Standard

Focalizing Defocalizing

Employed by speakers who do not wish to focus explicitly on the way they see their interactional relation with the hearer Employed to make prominent the role of the referent in the state of affairs described Employed to minimize or keep silent the role of the referent in the state of affairs described

Speech Act Theory 47

An instance of a standard referring expression would be the use of we to refer to the speaker and someone else. As to focalizing expressions, Haverkate (1984) considers subtypes of hearer and speaker reference, exempliﬁed in (66) and (67): Speaker reference: (66) (PnS) A: ¿Y quién marcó los dos goles? B: ¡Este pecho (este pechito)! (p. 58) (our emphasis) Hearer reference: (67) (PnS) Cierra la puerta Juan. (p. 68) (our emphasis) Likewise, with respect to defocalizing expressions, Haverkate (1984) considers various subtypes, including ‘pseudo-inclusive’ strategies as in (68), employed by speakers in a position of authority or power: (68) (PnS) Y ahora vamos a acostarnos tranquilamente. (p. 87) (our emphasis) Additionally, Haverkate considers in great detail the strategic effects speakers want to bring about in employing the different expressions he discusses. In short, from the brief account of Haverkate’s (1979, 1984) work presented here, of particular interest is his reincorporation of the hearer into the picture. This is achieved through: his notion of the linguistic communication act, which is constituted by speakers’ and hearers’ acts; considerations of (cost-)beneﬁt (to speaker/hearer) for the classiﬁcation of speech acts as impositive or non-impositive; and his proposal of a new component of the speech act, namely, the allocution. This refers to linguistic choices the speaker makes in relation to an (implied) assessment of the hearer and the type of relationship obtaining between speaker and hearer, and the effects the speaker wants to achieve. The allocutionary component involves the inclusion of another level of analysis, for which Haverkate provides a very detailed framework. His framework, as can be seen from the foregoing account, includes many of the elements of Blum-Kulka et al. However, in addition to the problems that have been already highlighted, the different elements in Haverkate’s framework are not integrated into a clear model and lack the simplicity of Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), making its application for cross-linguistic comparisons difﬁcult. It is true that Haverkate only set

48 Spanish Pragmatics

´

out to describe impositives with reference to PnS, so it would be unfair in some ways to criticize his framework for not being adequate for crosslinguistic comparisons. Nonetheless, if his claims are to be tested against other varieties of Spanish, this is a task his framework does not facilitate. We now move on to consider Guariglia’s (1996) proposal for a classiﬁcation of speech acts in Spanish. We are aware that his proposal does not seem to have had much impact in the work of Hispanists. This could possibly be attributed to the difﬁculty there still is at present for many scholars in accessing works in outlets that are not of international circulation (see Chapter 1). However, we include it here since it is the only attempt, as far as we know, to offer a classiﬁcation of speech acts in Spanish. We then continue in this section with Alba de Diego’s (1995) consideration of requests for permission, and Herrero Moreno’s (2002) attempt to characterize speech acts that express disagreement (that is, ‘dissentives’). The latter is of particular interest in that the author draws on conversation analysis (see Chapter 3) to deﬁne a speech act that is a responsive rather than an initiating act (Wunderlich, 1980). Building on Searle’s (1976) as well as Habermas’s (1981, 1984) proposals for a taxonomy of speech acts, Guariglia (1996) offered a classiﬁcation for speech acts in Spanish. His taxonomy consists of seventeen types of speech acts, which the author groups into ﬁve basic categories: enunciativos, activitivos, institutivos, expresivos and interlocutivos. Following Searle, to arrive at this classiﬁcation, Guariglia considered preparatory and sincerity conditions of speech acts; their illocutionary point and the ‘direction of ﬁt’ (2.3.3) that different acts imply; that is, direction from the world to the words (≠), viceversa (Ø) or both ways ( ). However, drawing on Habermas’s work, the author also took into account direction of ﬁt from the ‘inner world’ of the speaker to the hearer (Æ), as in the conveyance of sentiments or emotions that the speaker wants to share with his/her interlocutor. On the other hand, for Guariglia, certain acts imply interaction or dialogue between speaker and hearer, which he represented with a horizontal arrow in both directions (´). This is the case of concessives (for example, aceptar), for which a preparatory condition is that the hearer has previously requested or proposed something. Thus, unlike Searle, Guariglia, in his classiﬁcation, attempts to take into account whether a particular speech act is an initiating or a reacting/responsive act (Wunderlich, 1980). Table 2.11 details Guariglia’s (1996) proposal:

Speech Act Theory 49 Table 2.11 Guariglia’s (1996) taxonomy of speech acts for Spanish Global category of speech act

Subcategory

Examples

Enunciativos Ø

Problemáticos

Puede + inﬁnitive; es posible

Asertóricos (aﬁrmativos y negativos)

Aﬁrmar; sostener; negar

Apodícticos

Tener que; deber; es necesario

Institutivos

´

Activitivos ≠

Expresivos Æ

Interlocutivos ´

Apelativos

¡Eh!; ¡Atención!

Volitivos

Querer; proponer; desear

Exhortativos

Pedir; sugerir; rogar; present subjunctive ﬁrst person plural (hablemos)

Yusivos

Deber in third person impersonal (se debe); se ha de; se ruega + inﬁnitive

Compromisivos

Jurar; consentir; garantizar

Declarativos

Declarar; renunciar; nombrar

Ejercitivos

Decretar; condenar; absolver

Optativos

¡Ojalá! + present subjunctive; present subjunctive (Dios te oiga)

Emotivos

Alegrarse; entristecerse; condolerse

Evaluativos

Preferir; proponerse; ser + value predicate

Interrogativos

Afﬁrmative interrogative sentences (¿Quién vino?); indirect interrogatives (pregunto si viene)

Asociativos

With verbs that express a necessarily shared activity (ej. pactar; acordar; discutir) in the ﬁrst person plural, present subjunctive

Concesivos

Subjunctive in the third person of ser, impersonal form (ej. bueno, sea); aceptar; conceder

Rehusativos

Disentir; rechazar; rehusar

Guariglia’s categories and subcategories need further clariﬁcation since, for instance, the label activitivo seems applicable to more than one global category. His taxonomy can also be criticized for a lack of parsimony, on the one hand, and for not being general enough as to be of universal application, on the other. As to the latter point, however,

50 Spanish Pragmatics

the author’s aim as he states it is far less ambitious than Searle’s since he is only concerned with the Spanish language, and possibly other romance languages (1996, p. 85). Ortega Olivares (1986) examined how certain speech acts, mainly a range of assertives and exhortatives, are modiﬁed by apéndices modalizadores, such as ¿sabes?, ¿comprendes? and ¿entiendes? These are discourse markers, produced with rising or rising-falling intonation, normally following a particular speech act (p. 272), as illustrated in these examples: Assertives: (69) (PnS) Ha venido mucha gente al funeral ¿sabes? (p. 274) Exhortatives: (70) (PnS) Le agradecería que lo hiciera así, ¿sabe? (p. 280) Desideratives: (71) (PnS) ¡Ojalá se case pronto! ¿sabes? (p. 282) According to Ortega Olivares (1986), these apéndices have the function of providing a justiﬁcation for the head act (enunciado-base) in question so (69) above can be paraphrased as ‘Te comunico que ha venido mucha gente al funeral, y lo hago porque creo que esta información no la sabes y es importante para ti’ (p. 275) (see Blum-Kulka et al.’s, 1989, ‘supportive moves’ in 2.3.5). Likewise, (70) above can be paraphrased as ‘Le agradecería que lo hiciera así; sepa Ud. que hay algo que justiﬁca este ruego’ (p. 282), and ﬁnally, (71) can be paraphrased as ‘A le dijo a B que deseaba que se casara pronto, dándole a entender que este deseo no era descabellado’ (p. 283).24 According to the author, the justiﬁcation the speaker offers may sometimes be made explicit as it is in the following example: (72) (PnS) Mira: tira tú delante ¿sabes?, que soy el más ﬂojo de los dos. (p. 279) Of special interest is Ortega Olivares’s suggestion that the inclusion of such apéndices can make the head act, particularly in the case of exhortatives, ‘[. . .] más admisible a los ojos del oyente’ (p. 282). This would also apply to desideratives such as (71) above in that [c]uando el hablante llega a presumir que la emisión de su deseo ocasiona algún asombro o resulta más o menos inesperada al oyente, no

Speech Act Theory 51

le resta otro recurso que no sea añadir-¿sabes? a aquélla y asegurarse, con esta decisión, la inoperancia de tales reparos. (Ortega Olivares, 1986, p. 283) In other words, utterances of this type can have a mitigating function (see Chapter 4). This is a topic scholars have more recently explored within speciﬁc sociocultural contexts, as in the work of ChodorowskaPilch (2002) on the function of ¿(me) entiendes? in offers in interactions in travel agencies in Spain (see also Chodorowksa-Pilch, 1997).25 Alba de Diego (1995) offered a characterization of requests for permission, which constitute a subclass of exhortatives, or directives, and, more precisely, of requests in general. According to the author, one key feature that distinguishes requests for permission from requests in general is that, in the latter, the hearer is the person to carry out the action stated in the request whereas, in the former, the speaker is only seeking consent from the hearer to carry out the action himself/herself or for someone else to carry it out. The following examples illustrate these two possibilities: (73) (PnS) Papá, ¿puedo coger tu coche este ﬁn de semana? (p. 15) (74) (PnS) Papá, ¿puedes dejarle a Juan coger tu coche este ﬁn de semana? (p. 15) Alba de Diego (1995) observes that requests for permission can represent a threat to the balance of the social relationship between speaker and hearer, as they may constitute intrusions into the interlocutor’s space and the action in the request is not for the beneﬁt of the hearer, but the speaker (Leech, 1983). The author then goes on to consider linguistic means available to speakers to produce polite requests for permission. These include the use of politeness markers (indicadores de cortesía) and grammatical structures. Among the former, she considers politeness markers that offer ‘repair’ and those that provide a justiﬁcation for the threat. Instances of mechanisms offering repair preceding the request are perdón, perdona/-e; con permiso (p. 17), and si no te/le importa or si no tienes/-e inconveniente (p. 18), following the request. As to grammatical structures, Alba de Diego considers the use of a range of interrogatives that can be employed to realize requests for permission with poder, permitir, or dejar, amongst several other means: (75) (PnS) ¿Puedo coger el periódico? (p. 19)

52 Spanish Pragmatics

(76) (PnS) ¿Me deja coger el periódico? (p. 19) (77) (PnS) ¿Me permites coger tu coche? (p. 19) Some of the structures the author describes are of the ‘hybrid’ type in that they may include an imperative, followed by an interrogative element, as in the following example: (78) Permíteme coger el periódico, ¿de acuerdo? (p. 21) Additionally, Alba de Diego (1995) describes implicit realizations that have become conventionalised in Spanish, such as ¿me permite?, employed, for example, to ask a person to move aside when he/she is standing, blocking the entrance to a building (p. 22). Alba de Diego then goes on to consider the use of declaratives and imperatives as well as indirect cases to realize requests for permission, as in the following examples: (79) (PnS) (Por favor), le agradecería que me dejara pasar. (p. 22) (80) (PnS) Por favor, permítame coger el periódico. (p. 22) And ﬁnally, the author looks at indirect realizations of requests for permission where the act in question is not mentioned and where there is no explicit reference to the hearer, as in this example: (81) (PnS) Voy a cogerle el periódico, si no es molestia. (p. 23) It should be noted, however, that Alba de Diego’s examination of requests for permission, although detailed, does not appear to be grounded in a speciﬁc corpus. As she herself suggests, therefore, it would be of interest to see how such requests are realized in speciﬁc situations, in different sociocultural contexts. Depending on the context, a request may (not) constitute an intrusion in the interlocutor’s space. Likewise, a particular linguistic form may not convey politeness since there are no forms that are intrinsically polite (see Chapter 4). With respect to her own (2002) study of speech acts through which disagreement with (aspects of) a previous speaker’s utterance is

Speech Act Theory 53

expressed, Herrero Moreno discusses how, in the literature, such acts have received different labels: actos disentivos (disentir; rechazar) and disputativos (disputar, objetar), for example. The latter have been described in the literature as conveying a higher degree of intensity in their illocutionary force as compared to the former (Moreno Cabrera, 1994). Herrero Moreno argues, however, that it is difﬁcult in practice to distinguish, with accuracy, variation in intensity between the two types and, therefore, such distinction loses its value. Thus, she proposes opting for one single term to embrace both types; namely, that of actos de desacuerdo or actos disentivos. Another issue of contention in the classiﬁcation of acts of the type that Herrero Moreno (2002) highlights is whether it is appropriate to distinguish between dissentive assertives and dissentive expressives. Although authors such as Bach and Harnish (1979) have proposed such a distinction, in Herrero Moreno’s opinion, an adequate justiﬁcation is still missing. The rationale in favour of this distinction which Herrero Moreno proposes is based on the modality employed to realize dissentive assertives or dissentive expressives: the former are produced as declaratives whereas the latter are produced with an expressive modality, associated with emotive intonation. In other words, dissentive assertives declare disagreement in the form of ‘declaro (comunico) mi desacuerdo (rechazo, refutación, oposición) con X’ (2002, p. 225), whereas dissentive expressives carry it out directly in that ‘la enunciación de un acto disentivo expresivo está provocada por los sentimientos experimentados ante determinados objetos o situaciones’ (p. 225). Additional features that Herrero Moreno (2002) attributes to dissentives, for which she draws on conversation analysis (see Chapter 3), include the following: • Dissentives constitute second pair parts; that is, they occur as reacting rather than initiating acts (Wunderlich, 1980). • Dissentives express disagreement or reject certain aspects of the ﬁrst pair part, often, but not exclusively, the propositional content expressed. Sometimes, the interlocutor may be rejected via a criticism of the propositional content he/she expressed. Other times, the illocutionary force (for example, a question) rather than the propositional content as such may be rejected, as in (82) (PnS) A: ¿Vas a ir a casa de Maite a estudiar? B: ¡A ti qué leches te importa! (p. 222)

54 Spanish Pragmatics

• By and large, dissentives constitute ‘dispreferred responses’ (see 3.3.4). As such, it is common to ﬁnd realizations of these acts where the speaker, motivated by sociocultural norms, attempts to mitigate or minimize disagreement, as in B’s reply in the following example: (83) (PnS) A: Tráeme mi cartera, por favor. B: Lo siento, no sé dónde está. (pp. 234–5) On the other hand, Herrero Moreno remarks that there are contexts where participants seek to maximize disagreement, so disagreement can sometimes be expressed explicitly and with no mitigation, and it may constitute a direct attack to the interlocutor, as in B’s reply in the following example: (84) (PnS) A: No, es que los niños están mejor con la madre hasta los dos o tres años. B: ¡Pero tú qué vas a opinar de la educación familiar, tú que eres una cualquiera, que no sabes hacer la O con un canuto! ¡Ten un poco de dignidad y vergüenza y cállate! (p. 231) Finally, Herrero Moreno’s (2002) consideration of whether, in the Gricean sense (see 4.1.1), dissentives are cooperative acts or not is also worthy of comment. At ﬁrst sight, it may be claimed that all dissentives are non-cooperative (Hernández Paricio, 1985). For Herrero Moreno, however, it is important to distinguish between dissentives that are cooperative, even when disagreement is expressed, and those that are not. The former are those that, among other functions, contribute to livening up (dinamizar) the conversation (2002, p. 237), whereas the latter are those that may lead to the abrupt closure of an interaction (Moeschler, 1985) since they constitute confrontational acts. Nonetheless, as with Alba de Diego’s requests for permission, which were considered above, one caveat which obtains to Herrero Moreno’s characterization of dissentives is that it does not seem to be grounded in a particular corpus of spoken data; hence, the claims she makes may be of limited value. For instance, her suggestion that disagreement will often be realized through forms that mitigate or minimize disagreement does not seem to match Santamaría García’s (2002) (see 3.5.4) ﬁndings for PnS in this respect. In her analysis of interactions from the Corpus

Speech Act Theory 55

Oral de Referencia de la Lengua Española Contemporánea (CORLEC), Santamaría found that very little prefacing of disagreements, which can be employed to mitigate the disagreement, occurred. This, then, seems a good point at which to look at empirical works on speech acts carried out by Hispanists. 2.5.2 Empirical speech act studies by Hispanists In this section we provide an account of empirical speech act studies on different varieties of Spanish, using Searle’s taxonomy of speech act types (2.3.3) as a point of departure.26 As the reader will see, directives and expressives have been the most extensively studied speech acts in Spanish. To our knowledge, there are only a few studies on commissives and assertives. There are also some studies that deal with reacting speech acts, such as compliment responses, which do not adequately ﬁt under Austin, Searle or Haverkate’s taxonomies. These will be considered here within the initiating speech act category as, in most studies dealing with initiating and reacting acts, both acts are presented together. With respect to the varieties of Spanish that have been examined, the reader will see that PnS is the variety that has received the most attention, followed by Argentinian (AS), Ecuadorian (ES), Peruvian (PvS), US, and Venezuelan Spanish (VS), which have received somewhat less attention; on the other hand, there are a number of varieties, such as Nicaraguan Spanish, for which no speech act studies appear to be available. A few of the speech act studies reviewed here can be described as pragmalinguistic in orientation as they are essentially concerned with the description of linguistic features in the realization of speech acts and might only indirectly deal with sociocultural aspects. The majority of studies, however, aim to describe features of the communicative style of speciﬁc sociocultural groups, with reference to particular social variables. These studies, which essentially have what we call a ‘sociopragmatic’ orientation (see Introduction and Chapter 5), can be further classiﬁed in relation to whether they constitute intra-cultural (that is, the study of a single language and culture),27 cross-cultural (that is, the contrastive study of the language of two cultural groups), or intercultural (that is, the study of the shared languages of two cultural groups in interaction with each other)28 studies. As the reader will note, most studies by Hispanists ﬁt under the intra- and cross-cultural categories. A good number of these studies also seek to relate speech act realization patterns with underlying sociocultural norms. For this purpose, they appeal to different theories of politeness (see 4.1), Brown and Levinson’s

56 Spanish Pragmatics

(1978; 1987) being the most widely employed. To avoid unnecessary repetition, however, the results of these studies will be considered in Chapter 4 (4.3). Additionally, there are interlanguage studies which, following BlumKulka and Sheffer (1993), are taken here to include not only those studies related to second language learning, with which the term is normally associated (that is, second language speech act performance in this case), but also studies in bilingual settings.29 The latter focus on variation in the realization patterns between bilingual and monolingual groups or possible inﬂuences of one of the languages on the realization patterns of a particular speech act. The former tend to focus on issues of appropriateness in the realization of speech acts in L2, in contrast with L1 performance.30 Nonetheless, some studies, such as Le Pair (1996), make use of interlanguage data to highlight differences in the conversational style of the groups examined rather than to address issues of appropriateness. As will be seen, the number of interlanguage studies by Hispanists is rather limited. Most studies depart from Searle’s approach to study speech acts in the abstract, aiming instead to characterize the communicative style of particular groups through their speech act performance, for which they employ different frameworks of analysis. In this way, they can make use of corpora corresponding to interactions in speciﬁc sociocultural contexts, within particular geographical areas, or with participants in experimental studies with (relatively) homogeneous characteristics in terms of sociological variables and belonging to particular linguistic/cultural groups. Thus, they do not have to fall back on examples invented in a vacuum or on researchers’ intuitions as competent or native speakers of the language. As a result, the inﬂuence of different disciplines concerned with the examination of language in context can be observed in the majority of studies reviewed for this chapter. The disciplines that have been the most inﬂuential are the ethnography of speaking, as represented in the work of Hymes (1967; 1972b) with the notions of speech community, speech event and communicative competence, and interactional sociolinguistics, as in the work initiated by Gumperz (1978; 1982) on interethnic communication. More recently, conversation analysis, as advanced by H. Sacks, E. Schegloff, G. Jefferson (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 1972 [1968]) (see Chapter 3), has also had an inﬂuence, particularly in terms of the type of data employed; that is, the use of naturally occurring rather than elicited data (see 6.1, on this dichotomy) and on method-

Speech Act Theory 57

ological developments (for example, the use of detailed transcriptions). In recent years, speech act studies in Spanish have also received some inﬂuence from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989, 1995; van Dijk, 1993) in relation to the need to take into account considerations of power and ideology at the macrolevel in the examination of language use, and from functional systemic linguistics, as in the work of Halliday (1994 [1985]). Nevertheless, except for a few cases, the classiﬁcation of speech act studies according to the framework of analysis is not always straightforward as researchers may draw from more than one framework. Having said this, certain studies, such as those in the line of Blum-Kulka et al.’s work, which derive more directly from Searle’s concerns and proposals, may be regarded as more central to sociopragmatics than others. In terms of methodology, the inﬂuence from research in second language acquisition can also be observed in a large number of studies. Production questionnaires, such as the so-called ‘discourse completion tests’ (DCTs) (6.3.3) (Levenston, 1975; Blum-Kulka, 1982) and different types of ‘role plays’ (6.3.1) (Cohen and Olshtain, 1981) are two kinds of elicitation methods, originally employed to test learners’ sociolinguistic competence in L2, that have also been widely employed in crosscultural and even single-language and culture speech act studies. Our account of speech act studies by Hispanists starts with pragmalinguistic studies, subdivided into directives and expressives. It is followed by a consideration of sociopragmatic studies, subdivided into directives, expressives, and commissives and assertives. Given the space constraints, we present the framework, context and some basic ﬁndings of the different studies without delving into issues of the generalizability, representativity or validity of the results. 2.5.2.1 Pragmalinguistic studies In this section we consider ﬁrst studies on directives, speciﬁcally the work of Bustamante-López and Niño-Murcia (1995) on ‘northern Andean Spanish’ (NAS, hereafter), and Ferrer and Sánchez Lanza’s (2002) on AS. We then move on to consider Ferrer and Sánchez Lanza’s (2002) work on expressives also in AS. 2.5.2.1.1 Studies on directives. Bustamante-López and Niño-Murcia’s (1995) is a study on requests and commands (that is, Haverkate’s [1979] impositives) in NAS, a variety Bustamante-López and Niño-Murcia deﬁne as the Spanish spoken in that part of the Andean region which

58 Spanish Pragmatics

stretches from the south of Colombia to the south of Ecuador (see also Lipski, 1994). This is one of the few studies that follows Haverkate’s (1979) rather than Blum-Kulka et al.’s proposals. Based on instances taken mostly from ‘natural’ conversations, Bustamante-López and NiñoMurcia provide examples of the grammatical forms speakers of NAS employ, such as the use of tú, vos and usted, in relation to considerations of social distance and (a)symmetry in the interaction. They describe, for instance, how the use of vos, as in (85) below often occurs among equals: (85) (NAS) Worker to a colleague: Abrí [la puerta]. ( p. 888) They also describe mechanisms available in NAS to attenuate commands, such as the use of diminutives that can be attached to the imperative form, as in (86) below, or the inclusion of particles such as ‘nomás’ (Toscano Mateus, 1953), as in (87): (86) (NAS) Hagamelito. (p. 889) (87) (NAS) Venga nomás. (p. 889) Additionally, Bustamante-López and Niño-Murcia note the use of synthetic future forms, as well as periphrastic forms, as in (88) and (89) below, respectively, for the issuing of softened commands. (88) (NAS) Escribirásnos, María. (p. 889) (89) (NAS) Dejarás cerrando esa ventana. (p. 891) The authors discuss possible Quichua inﬂuence on the realization of some directives in NAS, which they attribute to the long contact between Spanish and Quichua in the area. Ferrer and Sánchez Lanza (2002) describe invitations and other directives with reference to examples of usage obtained through observation, questionnaires and recordings of naturally occurring interactions in Rosario, Argentina.31 They distinguish, for instance, between ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ invitations, depending on whether a performative verb is employed or not, as in (90) and (91) below, respectively:

Speech Act Theory 59

(90) (AS) To a friend: Che, te invito a un asado ¿querés venir? (p. 95) (91) (AS) To a friend: ¡Hola! ¿Cómo andás? Te llamo para avisarte que el sábado nos reunimos en casa para comer un asado . . . (p. 97) They also provide examples of mitigated or reinforced invitations, depending on whether mitigators, such as the use of interrogative forms, (92) below, or reinforcers such as repetition, (93) below, are employed. (92) (AS) Negra, ¿por qué no te venís con el gallego a comer esta noche? (p. 100) (93) (AS) Vení conmigo a Mar del Plata. Pero vení ¿eh?, vení en serio . . . (p. 102) Ferrer and Sánchez Lanza’s description of invitations includes a consideration of responses, which, drawing on conversation analysis (see Chapter 3), they classify into two categories: preferred or unmarked forms and dispreferred or marked forms. An example of the former is (94), where the recipient of the invitation perceives it as something positive and produces an expression of gladness (‘reacción de alegría’) about the prospect of the event, and an example of the latter is (95), which shows the occurrence of hesitation markers preceding the refusal: (94) (AS) A: Te invito a un asado. B: Bueno, ¡bárbaro!, ¿cuándo?, ¿en tu casa? (p. 105) (95) (AS) A: ¿Te gustaría que para el 12 de octubre nos fuéramos a Colonia? B: Mm . . . A: Son dos días, nada más. B: Sí, ya sé que son dos días pero . . . No los puedo dejar solos a mis Uiejos. (p. 107) 2.5.2.1.2 Studies on expressives. Ferrer and Sánchez Lanza (2002) describe the realization of greetings and leave-taking, amongst other expressives, in AS (Rosario). They offer an account of different types of semantic formulae employed to realize greetings and leave-takings, such

60 Spanish Pragmatics

as those alluding to health, like the greeting in (96) and the leave-taking expression in (97): (96) (AS) ¿Qué tal? ¿cómo estás? (p. 31) (97) (AS) ¡Que te mejores! (p. 31) They explain variation in use in relation to considerations of age, social distance and power. For instance, across generations of informants, informal forms are preferred when greeting friends. Simple leavetaking forms such as chau, are employed by younger participants while older participants also employ forms with temporal components such as hasta mañana. Greetings are duplicated when there is a great deal of familiarity between the participants; however, duplication is also related to the length of time elapsed since the last encounter. We now move on to consider those studies where more attention is given to the connections between linguistic realizations of speech acts and sociocultural norms. 2.5.2.2 Sociopragmatic studies We start this section with studies on directives, which are the speech acts that have received the most attention among Hispanists. We then consider studies on expressives, and ﬁnally, studies on commissives and assertives. 2.5.2.2.1 Studies on directives. Table 2.12 provides a summary of studies on directives, presented in chronological order. The summary includes information on the speciﬁc speech act examined, the perspective employed (for example, single-language and culture v. cross-cultural), the language variety/varieties studied, and the type of data employed. As the reader will notice, requests are the speech acts that have received the most attention amongst directives. Most of these works constitute cross-cultural studies that make use of different types of role plays, or of elicited data based on DCTs, in line with the work established by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). Additionally, a large number of these studies attempt to relate speech act realization patterns to politeness orientations, and will, therefore, be discussed in Chapter 4, as remarked earlier. There are also a few studies that focus on ‘pragmatic variation’ (5.1) across varieties of Spanish which, to avoid unnecessary repetition, will only be considered in in 5.2.1.

Table 2.12 Sociopragmatic studies on directives by Hispanists Speciﬁc directive(s) examined

Author and year of publication

Type of study

Broad language variety/ varieties examined

Type of data employed

Requests and suggestions

Rintell (1981)*

IL-CC

Latin American Spanish (L1) and AE (L2)

RP

Requests in a range of contexts

Blum-Kulka and House (1989)

CC

AS, AE, German, Hebrew, CanadianFrench

DCT

Requests and commands

Koike (1989)*

IL

American learners’ Spanish (L2) and AE (L1)

RP

Requests for a service and responses

García (1993)*

SL and C

PvS

RP

Requests and suggestions

Koike (1994)*

CC

MS and AE

Oral questionnaire

Telephonemanagement requests

Placencia (1994)**

CC

ES and PnS

Recordings of naturallyoccurring conversations and RP

Requests in a range of contexts

Vázquez Orta (1995)*

CC

PnS and BE

DCT

Requests in a range of contexts

Le Pair (1996)*

IL-CC

Dutch learners’ Spanish (L2) and PS (L1)

‘Oral’ DCT

Requests in a range of contexts

Márquez Reiter (1997)*

CC

US and BE

DCT 61

62

Table 2.12 Continued Speciﬁc directive(s) examined

Author and year of publication

Type of study

Broad language variety/ varieties examined

Type of data employed

Requests and other speech acts

Puga Larraín (1997)**

CC

ChS and PnS

Participant observation

Requests and other speech acts

Curcó (1998)**

CC

MS and PnS

Questionnaire

Requests in service encounters

Placencia (1998)**

CC

ES and PnS

Field notes from observation of naturally-occurring interactions

Requests in a range of contexts

Díaz Pérez (1999)*

CC

PS and BE

DCT

Requests in a range of contexts

Arellano (2000)

S

USAS

DCT with a multiple choice format

Requests in a range of contexts

Márquez Reiter (2000)*

CC

US and BE

(Open) RP

Orders, suggestions, recommendations

Hardin (2001)**

CC

ChS, USAS and PnS

Recordings of TV adverts

Instructions, requests for information and payments

Placencia (2001)

IC-IL

BS

Field notes from observation of naturally-occurring interactions; interviews

Requests in a range of contexts

Ballesteros Martín (2001, 2002)*

CC

PnS and BE

DCT

Requests and other speech acts

Curcó and De Fina (2002)**

CC

MS and PnS

Questionnaire

Requests for a service and responses

García (2002)*

SL and C

VS

RP

Requests in a range of contexts

Márquez Reiter (2002)**

CC

US and PnS

(Open) RP

Requests in a range of contexts

Lorenzo and Bou (2003)

CC

PnS and BE

DCT

Requests in a range of contexts

Márquez Reiter et al. (in press)

CC

PnS and BE

(Open) RP, interviews, questionnaires

Responses to requests

Schrader-Kniffki (2004)

IC-IL

MS (the Spanish of the Zapotecs and standard Spanish)

Field notes from observation and recordings of naturallyoccurring interactions

Advice

Hernández Flores (1999)*

SL and C

PnS

Recordings of naturallyoccurring interactions

Invitations

García (1999)* Ruiz de Zarobe (2000/ 2001)*

SL and C SL and C

VS PnS

RP Open questionnaire

Refusals to invitations

García (1992)* Félix-Brasdefer (2003)*

SL and C CC-IL

PvS LA Spanish (L1); American learners’ Spanish (L2) and AE (L1)

RP RP

* Studies that focus on politeness orientations (see Chapter 4). ** Studies on pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish (see Chapter 5).

63

64 Spanish Pragmatics

Regarding those studies that do not have the examination of politeness phenomena as their main aim or subsidary aim, Blum-Kulka and House’s (1989) study of requests in AS in contrast with Canadian French, German, Hebrew and Australian English, is amongst the ﬁrst in the area. The study is based on data obtained by means of a DCT comprising ﬁve situations, which represented variation in terms of the social distance obtaining between the participants, power and ranking of the imposition. The focus in the study was on directness levels. Despite some situational variation encountered, the overall results indicated that conventional indirectness is the most frequently used main type of strategy for all the languages examined, including AS, whereas hints were found to have a very low incidence in all languages. The use of impositives, on the other hand, showed considerable variation with respect to situation, with the Argentinian data depicting the highest variation and the highest use, at least in two situations.32 Ensuing studies on requests in a similar vein are García (1993); Vázquez Orta (1995); Le Pair (1996) Márquez Reiter (1997, 2000); Díaz Pérez (1999), and Ballesteros Martín (2002). Worthy of note here are some general patterns that emerge from these studies. In terms of head acts, a recurrent pattern is the overall higher frequency of conventional indirectness in PvS (García, 1993), PnS (Vázquez Orta, 1995; Le Pair, 1996; Díaz Pérez, 1999), and US (Márquez Reiter, 2000). This is a pattern that is in line with Blum-Kulka and House’s (1989) ﬁndings for the different languages they examined, and would provide support for the universality of conventional indirectness. Nonetheless, with respect to preferred substrategies of conventional indirectness, differences have been found in all cross-cultural studies. Le Pair (1996), for example, found that there was some variation as to certain conventions of means and of form between PnS and Dutch learners’ Spanish (L2). Yet another interesting result from these cross-cultural studies, also in line with Blum-Kulka et al.’s ﬁndings, is that the use of direct forms tends to be higher in Spanish when compared with British English (BE, hereafter) or Dutch, and that the incidence of non-conventional indirectness is low or non-existent in Spanish (Vázquez Orta, 1995; Le Pair, 1996; Márquez Reiter, 1997; Díaz Pérez, 1999). Finally, some general patterns for internal and external modiﬁcation have also been identiﬁed. For instance, Vázquez Orta (1995), Díaz Pérez (1999) and Ballesteros Martín (2002) found that syntactic and lexical downgraders were less frequent in PnS than in BE. Motivated by the manifested overall preference for conventional indirectness found across languages, Márquez Reiter et al. (in press), carried

Speech Act Theory 65

out a cross-cultural study of requests in Spanish and English in which they explore differences in the perception of conventionally indirect requests in PnS and BE. More speciﬁcally, they attempt to determine whether requests that are pragmatically equivalent, such as (98) and (99) below, represent similar expectations of hearer compliance on the part of the speaker. (98) (PnS) ¿Me podría dejar el libro . . . ? (Márquez Reiter et al., in press) (99) (BE) Can I possibly borrow it? (Márquez Reiter et al., in press) For this purpose, they employed open role plays (Márquez Reiter, 2000) to elicit request data, play-back interviews to explore participants’ level of certainty, and questionnaires based on the results of the elicited data and interviews, to relate head act realizations with levels of certainty. Their ﬁndings suggest that there is, in fact, a difference in perception of compliance between speakers of BE and PnS. Additionally, the study showed that, despite the fact that similar linguistic strategies were employed by both groups in ‘similar’ situations, there were different expectations on the part of the two groups in relation to the social roles they played, which Márquez Reiter et al. link to differences in social values. Their ﬁndings support Spencer-Oatey’s (1996) observation that people’s conception of role relations may vary signiﬁcantly across cultures. On the other hand, the results from this study also support BlumKulka et al.’s (1989) proposal that the universality of conventional indirectness needs to be regarded as a matter of shared pragmatic properties, rather than cross-linguistic equivalence, referred to earlier. Two studies on requests with rather dissimilar ﬁndings from those described above are those of Arellano (2000) and Lorenzo and Bou (2003). The former is based on a discourse completion test with a multiple choice format that was administered to 100 Mexican-American farm workers in California, 50 men and 50 women of different ages (teenagers to over 40). Through this questionnaire, Arellano investigated Mexican-Americans’ use of (in)directness (from imperatives to hints) and mitigation strategies in the production of requests in a number of contexts where level of authority and imposition were varied. Subjects were found to be more direct with low levels of imposition and more indirect when the hearer was the authority. However, overall, the author found that the imperative with por favor, as in (100) below was the preferred structure, without there being any signiﬁcant differences between men and women.

66 Spanish Pragmatics

(100) (USAS) Deme un vaso de agua, por favor. (p. 331) Questions with mitigation, preceeded by si or no, as in (101) and (102) below, were also selected considerably more frequently than questions without mitigation.33 (101) (USAS) ¿Sí me da un vaso de agua? (p. 331) (102) (USAS) ¿No me sirves de comer? (p. 331) Without mitigation, hints, as in (103) below, had the most occurrences, and the imperative on its own, the least. (103) (USAS) Ya me voy a sentar en la mesa. (p. 331) (meaning ‘sírveme’) Arellano’s conclusion is that ‘it seems that without mitigation, participants do base the frequency of their choices on the level of indirectness’ (p. 329). On the other hand, when mitigation is introduced, Arellano reports that ‘[i]ndirectness no longer plays an important role; rather, mitigation overpowers indirectness in every structure’ (p. 329). It would be of interest to see whether similar results can be arrived at through the analysis of a different corpus of data (for example, naturally occurring interactions). As Arellano notes, the use of a written questionnaire presents some limitations in that, for example, it cannot represent paralinguistic aspects, which may change the force of an utterance. As Arellano (2000) suggests, depending on the intonation employed, an imperative form may sound friendly on its own (p. 330). Additionally, it is not entirely clear where the utterances chosen for the questionnaire derived from; that is, questions about appropriacy of the forms offered to informants may be raised (see Chapter 6). As to Lorenzo and Bou’s (2003) work, it is a study of perception of appropriate requests among Spanish and British undergraduates. It was based on a discourse completion test that comprised six different situational contexts, where power and social distance were controlled, and that yielded 793 requests. Using Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) framework, their aim was to describe preferred request patterns in the two sociocultural contexts and their connection with gender as one facet of individuals’ identities. They examined the realization of alerters, overall

Speech Act Theory 67

request strategies (that is, direct, conventionally indirect and nonconventionally indirect strategies) and supportive moves. With respect to the former, they found an overall preference for the avoidance of alerters in the Spanish corpus, with women, however, using them slightly more frequently than men. On the other hand, men were found to use formal attention getters such as disculpe more often than women. Males were also found to employ informal attention getters such as eh, and oye whereas women did not use these forms. No major gender differences were found for the BE corpus either; however, some variation was encountered in relation to speciﬁc situations. In situations where there was social distance between the participants, women used formal attention getters, such as ‘excuse me’, considerably more frequently than informal ones (for example, ‘hi’) whereas there was not as large a discrepancy in the choice of (in)formal alerters by men. With respect to overall request strategies, both men and women in the Spanish corpus were found to use mainly direct strategies, with some gender variation in some situations. For instance in a situation with +P (power) and +SD (social distance), both men and women opted for conventional indirectness (‘query preparatory’); however, women were found to use direct forms (that is, hedged performatives and want statements) more frequently than men. Women were also found to prefer not to employ supportive moves more often than men. On the other hand, women were found to produce thanking tokens more frequently than men. As to the British corpus, Lorenzo and Bou (2003) found that both men and women used similar strategies in relation to the power and distance variables. Conventional indirectness seemed to be the preferred form; on the other hand, they found some gender variation with respect to internal modiﬁcation according to situation Thus can I have . . . ? was preferred by both men and women in one situation and could . . . ? in another. The use of supportive moves also varied with situation, with the situation with +P and +SD eliciting a higher number of supportive moves than any other situation. Women, however, were found to use more supportive moves than men. On the other hand, British women, unlike Spanish women, were not found to be more direct than British men. Throughout their analysis, Lorenzo and Bou (2003) highlight the complexity of the connections between linguistic choices in the realization of requests and gender, as well as politeness to a lesser extent. They also stress the need to move away from a consideration of men and women as ‘dichotomous’ and ‘homogeneous’ groups (p. 188). As to how their results compare with the results of other studies on requests in PnS

68 Spanish Pragmatics

(Vázquez Orta, 1995; Ballesteros Martín, 2001, amongst others), it is difficult to make clear comparisons since the situations examined are not the same across studies. In their favour is the large sample they examined; on the other hand, theirs, as with Vázquez Orta’s (1995) and Ballesteros Martín’s (2001), amongst other studies, is a study of what undergraduates regard as appropriate behaviour rather than of actual occurrences. The need to examine requests in naturally occurring interactions or employ other instruments of data collection, including perhaps some statistical analysis, to assess how the social variables correlate with linguistic realisation in Peninsular Spanish emerges from this study. While the studies considered so far have dealt with the examination of realization patterns in one variety of Spanish in contrast with a different language or with interlanguage performance, there are other studies that focus on variation across varieties of Spanish (Placencia, 1994, 1998; Márquez Reiter’s, 2002). These studies, as indicated earlier, are considered in 5.2. since they constitute instances of pragmatic variation. In addition to the studies on directives considered so far, most of which are cross-cultural, there are two intercultural studies: Placencia (2001) and Schrader-Kniffki (2004). Drawing from pragmatics, linguistic anthropology and critical discourse analysis and based on ﬁeld notes from non-participant observation of service encounters and interviews, Placencia’s (2001) study focuses on the use of formal v. familiar address terms by service representatives in interactions with members of the white-mestizo and the indigenous population in the production of instructions and different types of requests in Bolivian Spanish (BS). While white-mestizo members of the public were found to be addressed with the formal form usted, as in (104), below, indigenous ones were found to be addressed with the familiar forms vos or tú, as in (105): (104) (BS) To a white-mestizo participant: Cancele y se va arriba. (p. 207) (105) (BS) To an indigenous participant: Andá pagá allá. (p. 207) Additionally, Placencia found that other markers of respect and consideration in the context examined, such as the use of titles (for example, señora) and politeness formulas (for example, por favor), tended to be employed by the service providers in interactions with whitemestizos only. Two examples she provides to illustrate differences in usage with regards to this point are the following:

Speech Act Theory 69

(106) (BS) To a white-mestizo participant: Siéntese señorita. Un poco más atrás por favor. (p. 208) (107) (BS) To an indigenous participant: Más atrás sentate.

(p. 208)

Taking into account the broader sociocultural context of the interaction, Placencia suggests that the linguistic behaviour observed highlights what appear to be institutionalized discriminatory linguistic practices against the indigenous population, through which otherness is marked and respectability is conferred or withheld. Schrader-Kniffki (2004), drawing on ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodological conversation analysis and cross-cultural pragmatics, and making use of extensive ﬁeld work data, which included the observation, recording and analysis of social interactions, examines a speciﬁc request and its response in the form of a promise in an interaction in Spanish between members of the Zapotec indigenous group of Mexico and a Hispanophone. Through a consideration of a different conception of promises within the two cultural groups represented in the study, Schrader-Kniffki highlights problems that can arise in intercultural communication, owing to differences in the action patterns that each group follows: the Hispanophone in Schrader-Kniffki’s (2004) key example had requested that the Zapotecs as a group should work on the building of a house, for which the Hispanophone was providing funding; the Zapotecs had ‘agreed’ to do this. However, when coming to visit the building site, the Hispanophone’s expectations were dashed as he found only a few Zapotecs doing the work. This ﬁnding led him to reproach the Zapotecs’ behaviour, as illustrated in the following extract: (108) Hispanophone addressing Zapotecs (extract): sí me dijeron todos no sí no(?) domingo sí (NN)34 vamos a trabajar no pero nadie me dijo (NN) yo no tengo tiempo no voy a poder trabajar nadie me dijo (NN) no tengo yo tengo alguna cosa urgente(. . .)todos dijeron sí (NN) vamos a venir pero yo llegué a las nueve nueve y media para ver si estaban trabajando bien animados para terminar pero cuatro personas allí (. . .) (pp. 160–1) Schrader-Kniffki explains that the Zapotecs had made a promise in response to the Hispanophone’s request knowing that it could not be fully redeemed because, at the time, the group was busy with harvesting tasks; however, the making of a promise, rather than a refusal, was

70 Spanish Pragmatics

a preferred response for the Zapotecs in that context, as a sign of respect to the Spanish speaker, and as a way of avoiding conﬂict. This was something the Spanish speaker found difﬁcult to understand, as he seemed to expect the sincerity that Searle attaches to promises. Therefore, as the extract above illustrates, the Hispanophone’s preferred response by the Zapotecs would have been a clear refusal to his request, in the form of no tengo tiempo, no voy a poder trabajar, for example. 2.5.2.2.2 Studies on expressives. Expressives have also received considerable attention by Hispanists, as can be seen in Table 2.13. The ﬁrst work under this category is Valdés and Pino’s (1981) study of compliment responses by Mexican-Americans in southern New Mexico, USA. This is a study carried out in the conversation analytic tradition and is thus considered in 3.5.4. Following the work of Pomerantz (1978) and Valdés and Pino (1981) as well as Wolfson (1983) on compliments in American English, Yáñez’s (1990) study examined the production of both compliments and compliment responses among Chicano women in southern New Mexico. Her study was based on data mostly corresponding to ﬁeld notes from observation of compliment exchanges in a variety of social settings, including weddings, family reunions and church meetings. With respect to compliments, she found, for example, that Chicano women, like the participants in Wolfson’s study, employed a restricted set of syntactic patterns: (A) Qué + ADJ + NP: (109) (USAS) ¡Qué bonito cojín! (B) Qué + ADJ + VERB + NP (110) (USAS) ¡Qué bonito se te ve el pelo! (C) NP + VERB + ADJ (111) (USAS) Oye, esta salsa te salió rica.

(p. 82)

Yáñez (1990) also observed that a rather restricted set of adjectives was employed, bonito/a constituting the most frequently used. With respect to responses, Yáñez found most of Pomerantz’s patterns, as well as some of the additional realizations identiﬁed by Valdés and Pino (1981), such as the use of a fragmented politeness formula (see 3.5.4).

Table 2.13 Sociopragmatics studies on expressives by Hispanists Speciﬁc expressive(s) examined

Author and year of publication

Type of study

Broad language variety/ varieties examined

Type of data employed

Apologies

Cordella (1990)* Ruzickova (1998)*

CC SL and C

ChS and AE CbS

Márquez Reiter (2000, 2001)*

CC

US and BE

RP Recordings of naturallyoccurring conversations (Open) RP

Yáñez (1990)

IL-BC

Chicano Spanish

Cordella et al. (1995)

SL and C

‘Southern Cone’ Spanish

Placencia and Yépez (1999) De los Heros (2001)**

SL and C

ES

SL and C

PvS (two sub-varieties examined)

Valdés and Pino (1981)***

IL-BC

Recordings and ﬁeld notes of naturally occurring interactions DCT

Praise, compliments (including piropos)

Compliment responses

Field notes from naturallyoccurring interactions Field notes from observation of naturally-occurring interactions Field notes from observation of naturally-occurring interactions DCT

Lorenzo-Dus (2001)*

CC

The Spanish of Mexican Americans PnS and BE

Complaints

Bolívar (2002)

SL and C

VS

DCT

Thanks

Hickey (2004)*

SL and C

PnS

Notes from participant observation

71

* Studies that focus on politeness orientations (see Chapter 4). ** Studies on pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish (see Chapter 5). *** Study in the conversation analytic tradition (see Chapter 3).

72 Spanish Pragmatics

More recently, Cordella et al. (1995) examined compliments in Spanish produced by Argentinians, Chileans and Uruguayans living in Australia, in contrast with compliments in English by Australians. Instances of compliments were collected through observation in a variety of contexts. The analysis which Cordella et al. provide includes an examination of the effect of social distance, gender and age in the production of compliments. Their results for Australian English compliments are in line with those of previous studies (Holmes, 1988) in that they found, for example, that people in the ‘bulge’ (Wolfson, 1988), that is, those who are neither intimates nor strangers, receive more compliments than the ones outside the bulge. They also found that females produced more compliments to female than to male addressees. In Spanish, female speakers were also found to produce more compliments to female friends; however, Cordella et al. found that intimate and stranger males (that is, outside Wolfson’s bulge) paid more compliments to younger females than male friends (that is, inside Wolfson’s bulge). They relate these ﬁndings to the function compliments may fulﬁll in Spanish (for example, strangers employ compliments as a starting point in a friendship). Placencia and Yépez (1999) also examined compliments, focusing on the topic of compliments and their form and function within a particular social group in Quito, along the lines of Manes and Wolfson (1981), Manes (1983) and Wolfson (1983). The study is based on data gathered through participant observation. With respect to the topic of compliments, Placencia and Yépez found compliments on appearance, such as (112) below, to be the most common. This is in line with Manes’s (1983) ﬁndings for AE. (112) (ES) To a colleague: ¡Tan elegante usted hoy! (p. 105). In addition to appearance, compliments on personality traits/qualities, achievement, and possessions were found. Concerning appearance, one difference Placencia and Yépez found in relation to AE concerns the occurrence of compliments on ‘natural beauty’ in ES only, as in (113) below. According to Manes (1983), compliments on personal appearance in AE focus on aspects that are the result of a person’s effort, rather than on natural attractiveness. (113) (ES) To a friend: ¡Qué linda cinturita tienes! (p. 100)

Speech Act Theory 73

With respect to form, as reported for AE, syntactic and semantic formulae were also found to be employed in ES although a wider range of forms, including the use of more or less explicit comparisons and metaphors as well as less ﬁxed forms were found in ES. Finally, concerning function, overall interactional functions, similar to those that Wolfson (1983) describes for AE, were identiﬁed for the Quiteño compliments. These, however, did not include piropos, a subset of compliments with amorous or sexual intent (Achugar, 2001; 2002), as in (114) below, which have not been described for AE. (114) (ES) To a stranger in the street: ¡Igualita a la reina de Quito! (p. 102) Placencia and Yépez also describe, however, some intracultural variation in the use of compliments in relation to characteristics of the participants. Based on data gathered by means of a DCT, Bolívar (2002) examined the form complaints take, among a group of female university students in Venezuela (Caracas), in relation to two situations that varied with respect to the degree of social distance obtaining between the participants and the type of offence: breaking a promise in the private sphere of interaction in one case, and breaking a citizen’s norm (norma ciudadana) in the public sphere in the other. Building on previous work on complaints (for example, House and Kasper, 1981 (on English and German); Olshtain and Weinbach, 1987 (on complaints by native and non-native speakers of Hebrew); and Trenchs, 1995 (on English and Catalan), Bolívar (2002) describes the complaints in her study as being constituted by sequences of up to ﬁve acts, with those made up of three being the most common. This feature is illustrated in example (115) below, which includes an evaluation of the person who committed the offence and two directives in the form of a request for repair and a warning, and in (116), which consists of an alerter in the form of an apology, a moralizing instruction and a request for repair: (115) (VS) To a friend who has borrowed a car and returned it with an empty tank: ¡Eres un inconsciente!/Dame dinero para llenarlo yo./No te lo presto más. (p. 46) (116) (VS) To a stranger whose dog has fouled the speaker’s front entrance: Disculpe pero/ este no es sitio para que su perro haga sus necesidades,/ por favor retire eso de mi entrada. (p. 49)

74 Spanish Pragmatics

Bolívar, however, reports on some situational variation in the choice of strategy. Alerters and requests for repair, for example, were found to occur more frequently in the situation in the public sphere. 2.5.2.2.3 Studies on commissives and assertives. There appear to be only a few studies on commissives and assertives, as Tables 2.14 and 2.15 show. From these, only Rall’s (1993), on promises in MS, and Pilleux’s (1996), on a range of assertive acts in ChS do not deal with politeness orientations, and are, therefore, considered in this section. Rall’s (1993) study is based on participant observation and personal accounts (see Chapter 6) and seeks to provide evidence against the universality of speech act rules, as proposed by Searle (1969), highlighting instead culture-speciﬁc aspects in the realization of promises. More speciﬁcally, Rall focuses on variation in the conceptualization of time (that is, temporal deixis) by Mexicans and the non-Mexicans in her study, as expressed in promises, which can result in misunderstandings and bewilderment by the latter. She provides examples of unfulﬁlled promises of both the canonical type, as (117) below, where the speaker undertakes the obligation to carry out the act predicated for the beneﬁt of the hearer but does not carry it out, and the less canonical cases such as arrangements, as in (118) below, and acceptances to invitations, where the arrangement or the acceptance is not fulﬁlled either (or not on time). (117) (MS) Mañana te hablo (p. 2) (118) (MS) ¿Cuándo nos vemos – ¿Mañana a las cinco? – No, mañana no puedo. – ¿Qué tal el miércoles? – De acuerdo, hasta el miércoles a las cinco’ (p. 2) When it comes to describing the rules for promises, then, Rall stresses the need to take into account the conception of time in the culture under scrutiny. Pilleux (1996), on the other hand, offers a sociolinguistic study on variation in the use of different assertives35 in ChS (Validivia) in relation to the traditional variables of sex, social class (estrato social) and age. The study is based on recordings of semi-formal sociolinguistic interviews. With respect to the ﬁrst variable, the analysis shows that women tend to make more use of a wider range of acts, such as describing, narrating, expressing emotion, giving an opinion, dissenting, and summarizing, that they tend to reinforce what has been said before

Table 2.14 Sociopragmatic studies on commissives by Hispanists Speciﬁc commissive(s) Examined

Author and year of publication

Type of study

Broad language variety/ varieties examined

Type of data employed

Promises

Rall (1993)

SL and C

MS

Notes from observation; accounts

Offers

Chodorowska-Pilch (2002)*

SL and C

PnS

Recordings of naturallyoccurring interactions

Offers and promises

Hardin (2001)**

CC

ChS, USAS and PnS

Recordings of TV adverts

* Study that focuses on politeness orientations (see Chapter 4). ** Study that focuses on pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish (see Chapter 5).

Table 2.15 Sociopragmatic studies on assertives/representatives by Hispanists Speciﬁc assertives examined

Author and year of publication

Type of study

Broad language variety/ varieties examined

Type of data employed

A range of assertives/ Representatives

Pilleux (1996)

SL and C

ChS

Recordings of informal sociolinguistic interviews

Assertions

Bravo (2002)*

SL and C

AS

Recordings of elicited discussions

Reprimands and responses to reprimands

García (1996)* García (2004a)* García (2004b)**

SL and C SL and C CC

PvS AS PvS and VS

Structured RP Structured RP Structured RP 75

* Studies that focus on politeness orientations (see Chapter 4). ** Study that focuses on pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish (see Chapter 5).

76 Spanish Pragmatics

through repetition, and that they tend to soften their remarks more often than men. Men, on the other hand, were found to make use of a narrower range of acts. Those acts which men employed more often than women included informing, asserting, conﬁrming and selfcorrecting. These differences led Pilleux to describe women as appearing to be ‘more open’ than men, and men as appearing to have more ‘self-control’ and to be more ‘moderate’ and ‘objective’ (Pilleux, 1996, p. 161) (our translation). As far as reference to difference among classes goes, Pilleux notes that participants from the upper stratum, for example, dissent, deny, and assess more often than those in the other strata. Thus, according to Pilleux, participants in the upper stratum appear to be more to the point (más concretos), objective and critical than participants in the other strata. Nonetheless, he ﬁnds that some features are shared among the upper and lower strata, and among the middle and the lower strata. Finally, with respect to age, Pilleux also lists a few differences that lead him to suggest that the younger participants in his study are more ‘expressive’ and ‘spontaneous’ than those in the two older generation groups in his study (p. 162) (our translation). 2.5.3 Summary To recapitulate, in this section we have seen the diversity of speech act studies that have been carried out on different varieties of Spanish, in different contexts and within different frameworks. It was noted that the variety that has been most widely studied is PnS, and that while a number of Latin American varieties are represented in the foregoing account, there are others for which no studies seem to be available. In any case, the number of studies that are available overall is relatively limited, with just over a dozen studies on PnS, three or four on other varieties (for example, VS), and just one in some cases (for example, BS). It was also noted that the speech act types that have been most widely examined are directives, followed by expressives. Commissives and assertives were found to have received only limited attention. It was highlighted that a number of studies emphasize what seem to be universal traits, such as the use of conventional indirectness for the realization of requests. However, they also show features that display some culture-speciﬁcity, such as preference for particular conventions of form, and the use of different mechanisms for internal and external modiﬁcation of head acts. Among the limited number of speech acts that are presented as displaying a relatively high component of culturespeciﬁcity are promises, as in Rall’s (1993) study. A task for Hispanists would be to identify and describe other speech acts that display a pro-

Speech Act Theory 77

minent component of culture-speciﬁcity or that are speciﬁc to Hispanic cultures.36 With regard to the type of perspective employed, it was noted that there are nearly as many single-language/single-culture as cross-cultural studies and that there are only a few intercultural and interlanguage studies, the latter including a few in bilingual contexts. Among the cross-cultural studies, a group of studies that examines pragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish was identiﬁed. It is expected that crosscultural studies of this type, as well as intercultural studies, will increasingly generate more interest, given the higher level of mobility within the different Spanish-speaking communities in recent years, which has given rise to more intercultural contact and, with it, the possibility of intercultural conﬂict. More intercultural studies in language contact situations with the indigenous populations of Latin America are also expected. This would go hand in hand with a more frequent use of naturally occurring data. Interestingly enough, the vast majority of the studies reported in this section are based on a standard dialect or the dialect spoken by educated, and generally, also middle class participants or informants. Bearing in mind the research carried out in neighbouring disciplines, such as sociolinguistics, it would be desirable to ﬁnd out similarities and differences in the linguistic realization of speech acts in different social strata.

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3 Conversation Analysis: Examining stretches of talk

3.0 Introduction In this chapter we look at the approach to the examination of conversation or stretches of talk advocated by conversation analysts, aspects of which have been highly inﬂuential in sociopragmatics. We refer here to ‘ethnomethodological’ conversation analysis or CA, as it is commonly labelled, rather than to linguistic or other approaches to the study of conversation (Markee, 2000). That is, we refer to the approach to the examination of ‘talk-in-interaction’ (Schegloff, 1982) which was developed in the 1960s by Harvey Sacks, together with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, and which has its roots in ethnomethodology, a branch of sociology (see 3.1). Within this approach, talk-in-interaction is regarded as ‘the primordial site of sociality’ (Schegloff, 1986) in that ‘the organization of persons dealing with one another in interaction is the vehicle through which those institutions [‘(the) society’ – the economy, the polity, the law, etc.] get their work done’ (p. 112). The object of study for conversation analysts is, therefore, how talk is used in the construction of social (inter)action. For sociopragmaticists, the examination of language as a vehicle for social interaction is also central, although not from the same perspective (see 3.4). As we will see in section 3.5, most work carried out by Hispanists where CA analytical concepts are employed cannot be labelled ethnomethodological as their work reﬂects a different understanding of reality (see chapter 6). The goal of most Hispanists is to go beyond the description of structures of talkin-interaction to the explanation of their use in relation to sociocultural factors, and to achieve this goal, they may make use of experimental rather than naturally occurring data. Over the past three decades, CA has expanded enormously and, as Firth (1996, p. 237) rightly claims, has emerged as ‘one of the most 79

80 Spanish Pragmatics

powerful and inﬂuential methodologies hitherto developed to analyse talk’, producing a large body of ﬁndings on the nature of talk, albeit mostly within English-speaking communities (Wagner, 1996). CA’s considerable inﬂuence on different branches of linguistics, including sociopragmatics, discourse analysis, and, more recently, applied linguistics is unquestionable. As Wagner (1996) suggests, however, CA concepts and terminology have been imported and applied in these areas in a way that is detached from the epistemological context in which CA developed. This observation also appears to be true for most of the work carried out by Hispanists interested in verbal interaction, where a growing body of research displaying CA inﬂuence can be found (3.5). The breadth of conversation analytic work is such that, within a single chapter, only a selective account is possible. Here, therefore, we devote our attention mainly to those CA developments that have been most inﬂuential within sociopragmatics.1 We start with a brief sketch of the origins of the discipline, and follow this with a consideration of the type of data employed within the ﬁeld, and of issues related to the approach to data collection, transcription and analysis adopted by conversation analysts. Next, we examine CA’s main contributions and consider then the relevance of CA for sociopragmatics. Finally, we provide an account of the work by Hispanists who incorporate CA analytical concepts.

3.1 Origins of the discipline CA’s precursors were a group of sociologists, mainly Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, who had moved away from structural functionalism, the dominant (macro) sociological approach at the time.2 Within structural functionalism, society was conceived as ‘an external system . . . a whole superior to its constituent parts, in which the active human agent exercised little signiﬁcant role in constituting and transforming institutions, structures and ideas’ (Swingewood, 1999, p. 59). Sacks, who is regarded as CA’s founding father, was greatly inﬂuenced by the work of the American sociologist Harold Garﬁnkel, who developed ethnomethodology, a phenomemological (micro) approach to sociology (6.1), which gives primacy to social actors in their ‘accomplishment’ of everyday life (Garﬁnkel, 1967).3 This approach advocates that there is no objective, external social order to be described, but that social order is constructed and sustained by social actors in their everyday interactions. The object of interest for sociologists should, therefore, be the study of the shared ‘methods’ of practical reasoning which

Conversation Analysis 81

social actors or ‘members’ use to understand and produce social interaction, hence the label ‘ethnomethodology’. These methods are grounded in common-sense knowledge and unstated rules and assumptions. The rules referred to are not external rules that determine or shape behaviour, but rules or practices to which social actors appear to display an orientation in their interaction. Since such practices are ‘repeated’ and ‘patterned’, their ‘methodical character’ can be examined and described (Psathas, 1998, p. 291).4 Three key notions from within ethnomethodology that underpin CA work are accountability, reﬂexivity and indexicality. Methods of reasoning are ‘accountable’ in the sense that they are displayed in the construction of social interaction and are thus available for inspection and recognition to both social actors and analysts; that is, they are ‘observable’ and ‘reportable’. Related to this notion is the idea that actions are ‘reﬂexive’: ‘[t]hey help to construct and elaborate the very context in which they are an intelligible – accountable – part’ (Firth, 1995a, p. 273, his emphasis). As Firth explains, actions are not ‘causally’ but ‘reﬂexively’ related to context. Finally, (linguistic) actions are ‘indexical’; that is, they need to be interpreted with reference to the context in which they occur. For Garﬁnkel, ‘understanding is accomplished not on the basis of pre-established shared meanings, but procedurally and contextually’ (Firth, 1995a, p. 273, his emphasis) since linguistic actions do not have a ‘ﬁxed’, but ‘motile’ meaning which is nevertheless ‘discoverable’ through methods of practical reasoning and contextual information (Firth, 1995a, pp. 272–3). Sacks and his colleagues objected to the abstraction of talk within conventional sociology into a priori categories that distorted the actual social interaction. In other words, they objected to the treatment talk was given in as much as it was regarded not as a matter of study per se, but as a manifestation of something else (for example, of people’s attitudes and beliefs). In this respect, Schegloff remarks, in his introduction to Jefferson’s (1995 [1992]) compilation of Sacks’ lectures, that Sacks’s proposals from the start reﬂect a ‘distinctive and utterly critical recognition . . . that talk can be examined as an object in its own right, and not merely as a screen on which are projected other processes’ (Schegloff, 1995 [1992], p. xviii).5 Having noticed the pervasiveness of talk in ordinary life, Sacks and his colleagues thought it was reasonable and worthwhile to study talk per se. They were guided by Sacks’s idea that a ‘detailed’ study of ‘small phenomena’ could provide an ‘enormous understanding’ of human action (Atkinson and Heritage, 1984a, p. 18) an idea, which as Atkinson and Heritage rightly comment, has

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been validated over the years by the extensive adoption, in a range of disciplines, of the methodological orientations proposed by Sacks. With ethnomethodological concerns in mind, Sacks and his collaborators set out to discover and describe the ‘technology’ or ‘machinery’ of conversation; that is, the ‘rules’, ‘techniques’, ‘procedures’ or ‘methods’ that members of a society employ to generate ‘orderly features’ in everyday interaction (Sacks, LC2, p. 339).

3.2 Working methodology In section 3.2.1, we look at key aspects of the methodology of conversation analysts, including the type of data they examine and issues on data collection methodology and transcription, as well as the contexts of social interaction that have been the object of analysis within CA. In 3.2.2 we consider some aspects of their approach to data analysis, which we contrast with practices within sociopragmatics. 3.2.1 Data source and issues on data collection methodology and transcription In the ethnomethodological tradition, conversation analysts are interested in examining everyday social interaction. The data they collect for analysis is, therefore, taken from ‘naturally occurring interactions’, which they preserve through audio or video recordings and then transcribe for analysis (see below and Chapter 6). The use of constructed examples is avoided as the aim of CA is to describe actual procedures employed in the construction of social interaction through talk, rather than speculate about possible behaviour. One of the merits of the approach is precisely that CA researchers were among the ﬁrst scholars to examine naturally occurring data. At the time CA started, the practice, within linguistics, was still to investigate isolated examples of language confected by the analyst: ﬁrst, sentences in line with Chomskyan linguistics and, then, utterances, under the inﬂuence of speech act theory (see Chapter 2). Sacks was of the view that it was difﬁcult to invent sequences of conversation that would conform with real use: One cannot invent new sequences of conversation and feel happy with [sic.] them. You may be able to take a ‘question and answer’, but if we have to extend it very far, then the issue of whether somebody would really say that, after say, the ﬁfth utterance, is one which we could not conﬁdently argue. One doesn’t have a strong intuition for sequencing in conversation.6 (Sacks, LC2, Lecture 1, p. 5, cited in Silverman, 1993, p. 736)

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For the same reasons, the use of simulated data, as employed within sociopragmatics (see Chapter 2), is also discouraged within CA. In this respect, Heritage (1989), sustains that role plays and other experimental techniques ‘are apt to restrict both the range and the authenticity of the activities which are elicited through their use’ (p. 23, but see below and Chapter 6). Their basic guiding principle for data collection is, therefore, the use of ‘authentic’ interactions, as described by Zimmerman:7 The logical place to observe that organization [of interaction] is an occasion where talk and conduct are not contrived, channeled, or constrained for research purposes. (Zimmerman, 1988, p. 420) This stance, however, has been the object of some heated debate as reﬂected in recent discussions appearing in Discourse Studies (Speer, 2002; ten Have, 2002). For Speer (2002), for example, the (implicit) idea in CA work that naturally occurring data is ‘better’ than contrived or researcher-prompted data cannot be adequately sustained. In her view, ‘all data are researcher-prompted and thus contrived’ (Speer, 2002, p. 516, her emphasis) in the sense that, once participants are informed of the recording and permission to carry it out is sought, the data stop being ‘natural’ (see also 6.2.1; Fant, 1992a). This constraint comes from ethical considerations in data collection, which, incidentally, do not appear to be discussed by many conversation analysts. We agree with Potter and Wetherell (1995) who suggest that it is possible to talk about a continuum of ‘naturalness’ based on the degree of ‘researcher involvement’. It is clear that data from ‘closed role plays’ (see 6.3.1), for example, is the result of a high degree of researcher involvement whereas data from ‘open role plays’ (see also 6.3.1) is less so, and data corresponding to interactions that would have taken place, irrespective of the researcher actions; that is ‘entirely independently of the actions of the researcher’ (Potter and Wetherell, 1995, p. 217) is at the other end of the continuum.8 The technical possibility of making audio-recordings was certainly a determining factor for the development of CA in the 1960s. It enabled conversation analysts to preserve interactions with all their details, for example, false starts, pauses, repetitions, insertion of interjections and other features, which would otherwise go unnoticed or would be very difﬁcult, if not impossible, to remember if the researcher had to reconstruct the interaction from memory. This possibility led them to the development of a detailed transcription system that attempts to capture

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all those ﬁne details of talk that are at the core of their theoretical claims. The following are some of the features which conversation analysts (may) represent in a transcription, as proposed by Gail Jefferson (see Atkinson and Heritage, 1984b):9 Overlaps (1) Tom: I used to smoke a lot Bob: He thinks he’s real tough (Example from Atkinson and Heritage, 1984a, p. ix) Intervals within utterances timed in tenths of a second (2) C: mira (0.6) si nosotros pedimos (0.6) la otra prueba (1.2) y la . . . (Example from Kjaerbeck, 1998, p. 352) Characteristics of speech delivery, including, amongst several others: a. vowel lengthening (:), as in cla:ro b. rising inﬂection (?), as in eh?, or c. rising (B) and falling (?) shifts in intonation, as in this example: (3) S: Eh: quizás sola B mente, ? bueno esto no tanto en las preguntas personales pero en la sección . . . (Lines extracted from example provided by Koike, 1998, p. 219) Nonvocal activities such as applause and gaze direction: a. Quiet (x) and loud (X) applause: (4) Audience: xxXXXXXXXXXXXXxxx (Example from Atkinson and Heritage, 1984a, p. xv) b. Gaze direction: That of the speaker is marked above his/her turn whereas that of the addressee is marked below the speaker’s turn. (5) Beth: . . . . X____________________________

Don:

Terry- Jerry’s fa scinated with elephants . . . . . X____________________ (Example from Atkinson and Heritage, 1984a, p. xiv)

However, it can be argued that the possibility of working with audio and/or video-recordings does not guarantee rigour as researchers will

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only attend to those features that are noticeable to them. As Ochs put it when discussing the use of recordings, the problems of selective observation are not eliminated with the use of recording equipment. They are simply delayed until the moment at which the researcher sits down to transcribe the material from the audio- or videotape. (Ochs, 1979, p. 44) That there is selectivity in the transcription work of CA practitioners is more recently acknowledged by Hutchby and Drew who are convinced that [t]he transcription system of course is a selective system . . . transcripts aim to provide a detailed but accessible rendering of those features that, for CA researchers, prove to be the most relevant for analysing the methods by which participants concertedly accomplish orderly and intelligible social interaction. (Hutchby and Drew, 1995 p. 184) On the other hand, there is the risk that the detailed transcriptions which conversation analysts provide might highlight features that were not necessarily relevant to participants in the interaction. In this respect, Graddol et al. (1987) claim that: one must be careful about supposing that interactional nuances which emerge only after hours of painstaking study by a diligent researcher were particularly salient to the original participants. (Graddol et al., 1987, p. 192) Audio-recordings and their corresponding transcriptions were also considered advantageous by conversation analysts in that they render the possibility of executing various analyses of the same data, thus promising, to use Hopper’s (1989, p. 58) words, a stricter ‘textual empiricism,’ since such data can be open for inspection to different scholars. However, in addition to the fact that ‘recordings are not usually available to readers of CA research reports’ (Hammersley, 2003, p. 759), if rigour is sought, analyses by other researchers would in theory require the production of new transcripts since theoretical decisions are made during the transcription phase (Ochs, 1979). Given that transcribing is

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a very time-consuming task, the advantage of the possibility of carrying out thorough subsequent analyses seems to be limited. Furthermore, the use of recordings is considered beneﬁcial, as compared to observation, for example, in that ‘any detail which escapes ﬁrst notice can be retrieved on second, third, fourth or however many analyses’ (Benson and Hughes, 1983, p. 29). Moreover, as Schegloff (2002) puts it more recently, recordings allow the possibility of ‘repeated examination of particular specimens’ thus facilitating ‘our overcoming the relentless blinders of familiarity which can keep us from seeing what is really going on, and how it gets to be that way’ (p. 284). For Hammersley (2003), however, the fact that analysts can slow down the recording, stop and replay it, would be an indication that we do not relate to recordings in the same way participants orient to a social interaction when they are taking part in it. This would mean that an analyst’s interpretation of what went on, does not necessarily, or entirely, correspond to participants’ own interpretation. This is a criticism Hammersley makes as part of his broader criticism of CA analysts’ emphasis on what is observable in the data alone (see below). For him, ‘recordings are not the same as the social interaction they record’, but are part of a ‘much wider realm of happenings’ (p. 759) that would need to be considered to account for what went on in a particular segment of interaction. This is a view that is reﬂected in sociopragmatic work through the inclusion of exogenous features of context in the analysis of talk. The interest of conversation analysts from the start has been on ‘everyday conversational interaction’, by which they mean not only ‘chats’ but also talk in a variety of contexts (for example, service contacts and therapy sessions) (Schegloff 1972 [1968]). For Sacks, conversation is ‘something that we can get the actual happenings on tape’ (LC2, p. 26) and details of something that actually happens were needed in Sacks’ view if one is to have a ‘science of social life’. From the wide range of conversational interaction available for inspection, conversation analysts started off with service telephone conversations: calls to psychiatric hospitals (Sacks, LC1, Lecture 1), and calls to and from a police station (Schegloff 1972 [1968]). Soon their focus of interest expanded to include ‘everyday’ or ‘mundane’ telephone conversation (Schegloff and Sacks, 1974 [1973]; Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks, 1977; Sacks and Schegloff, 1979). Conversation analysts found telephone conversations advantageous in that they thought such conversations allowed them to put themselves in the same position as that of the participants; in other words, they had access to the audio-aural channel only, which would thus free them from the

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problem of dealing with non-verbal aspects of face-to-face interactions. In later work, however, conversation analysts focused more and more on face-to-face interaction and some also attempted to take into account aspects of non-verbal interaction (Goodwin, 1980, 1984). In the early years of the discipline, conversation analysts intentionally avoided the examination of talk within institutional settings, such as courts and hospitals, since they thought that such talk could be restricted (Benson and Hughes, 1983). For example, the protocol that is likely to be found in institutional settings means that it is common to ﬁnd more or less ﬁxed rules regarding who should speak ﬁrst, for how long and the type of contributions the person can make. Within the past two decades, however, the interests of conversation analysts have expanded to include the examination of a wide range of institutional talk; that is, interactions where institutional identities or tasks are made relevant through talk.10 The work of Atkinson and Drew (1979) on talk in court marks a starting point in this direction (see also Atkinson [1984] on public speaking and audience response).11 Of particular interest are Boden and Zimmerman’s (1991), and Drew and Heritage’s (1992) seminal collections of studies. They include, among other topics, work on news interviews (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1991; Greatbatch, 1992); interviews associated with a job-training programme (Gumperz, 1992); doctor-patient interaction (ten Have, 1991; Heath, 1992); and talk in small claims courts (Atkinson, 1992). Additionally, CA has been applied to the study of negotiation in different contexts, as reﬂected in Firth’s (1995b) collection of studies. This collection includes, among others, studies on social worker–client interaction (Linell and Fredin, 1995), business meetings (Marriott, 1995) and general practitioner–patient consultations (ten Have, 1995). In this collection, as well as in McHoul and Rapley’s (2001), attention has also been given to institutional talk mediated by technology, displaying renewed interest in telephone talk, as in Firth’s (1995c) study of telephone negotiations between Danish sellers and buyers in the Middle East, and Kelly’s (2001) examination of telephone talk to request services of city council staff. Ordinary conversation is, nevertheless, taken as a point of reference for the analysis of institutional talk. As Zimmerman and Boden remark, for conversation analysts, the basic mechanisms of naturally occurring conversation constitute ‘a kind of “bedrock” out of which all other forms of interaction are built’ (1991, p. 18). 3.2.2 Approach to data analysis One of the central claims of conversation analysts is that they do not approach data with preconceived ideas about what they are going to

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ﬁnd. Their method is to attend to categories to which participants appear to orient themselves in the interaction, and which they aim to discover through repeated listening of the recorded interaction. This is emphasised by Hopper when he sustains that Mostly, [conversation] analysts listen for nothing, returning repeatedly to recordings, and to writing descriptions of speakers’ accomplishments. Repeated listening is the daily work of analysis. (Hopper, 1989, p. 59) In fact, this approach is regarded as another of their virtues, as remarked by Levinson who maintains that ‘CA as practised by Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, Pomerantz and others, is a rigorously empirical approach which avoids premature theory construction’ (1983, p. 286). It is precisely the open-mindedness that their method allows that has led conversation analysts to the discovery of a wide range of features of talk. However, it is difﬁcult to accept that they approach data without any preconceived ideas, or to use Moerman’s words (1988, p. 6), ‘with virgin ears and eyes’. As Stokoe and Smithson (2001) more recently remark, analysts draw upon their own interpretive resources to discuss participants’ orientation to a particular category and this is unavoidable. In fact, a criticism of CA formulated by these authors is that ‘[. . .] culture and commonsense knowledge, of both members and analysts, are largely unacknowledged and unexplicated resources in CA’ (Stokoe and Smithson, 2001, p. 39). This is a view scholars within sociopragmatics would also share. Another related characteristic of the CA approach is that, unlike many scholars in sociopragmatics who seek to identify the linguistic patterns of a cultural group by examining numerous instances of a particular behaviour (cf. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989), conversation analysts may focus on single extracts; that is, on one interaction as opposed to a number of interactions, which they analyse in depth. Wooton justiﬁes the use of single extracts as follows: The detailed analysis of a single data extract . . . may yield a speciﬁcation of interactional considerations bearing on it which can prove valuable in shaping our ideas about the nature of particular phenomena contained within it. Furthermore, detailed analyses of single extracts can be undertaken with a view to demonstrating how a variety of different forms of conversation organisation intersect in a given instance. (Wooton, 1989, p. 256)

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For many scholars within sociopragmatics, analyses based on single extracts would be regarded as problematic since questions of data representativity would arise (see 3.4 below). Conversation analysts, on the other hand, examine recurrent patterns but do not seek to make generalizations for particular groups. This would go against the underlying assumption that guides CA work; namely, that there is no ‘external system’ regulating social life (see 3.1). Conversation analysts take the stance that social action is organized ‘on a case by case, action by action, basis’ and that on every occasion, participants ﬁnd, for example, ‘whether and when to laugh . . . whether and when to applaud’ (Schegloff, 1987, p. 102). As such, any and every single social encounter is of interest to the analyst, including deviant cases. In this respect, in his discussion of responses to ﬁrst pair parts (see section 3.3.1 below) which applies to other features of talk, Wooton maintains that within the framework of conversation analysis infrequently occurring responses would be as signiﬁcant as those of frequent occurrence to the task of specifying forms of conversational organisation which are in some sense shared and accessible to members of the society under investigation. (Wooton, 1989, p. 243) Conversation analysts, however, are concerned with the ‘reproducibility’ (Wooton, 1989) of analyses in the sense that other investigators should be able to ‘understand and replicate the procedures of analysis that have been employed’ (p. 238). Finally, another important characteristic of the approach of conversation analysts is that, like scholars within sociopragmatics, they emphasize the role of context in the examination of talk. There are, however, some important differences in their conception of this notion. For many researchers within sociopragmatics, particularly those interested in speech acts in the line of Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) work, the focus has been, to use Tracy’s words (1998, p. 6), on context as a ‘variable’: linguistic patterns are examined in relation to features of the situation that are manipulated in the data collection process, mainly social distance, power and ranking of the imposition (see Chapter 4), with characteristics of the participants (for example, age and sex) often being kept constant. In this respect, context within sociopragmatics appears to be regarded as what Pomerantz (1998, p. 124) refers to as the ‘analyst’s resource’. On the other hand, there are two inter-related features that charac-

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terize the approach to context and data analysis followed by conversation analysts: they regard utterances as being both ‘context-shaped’ and ‘context-renewing’ (Heritage, 1989). In other words, the meaning of an utterance for conversation analysts is shaped by its placement within a sequence (see 3.3.1); at the same time, each utterance creates the context for the next utterance(s). This means that their view of context is a dynamic one in which each utterance produced renews the context for the next (Heritage, 1989). Additionally, conversation analysts claim to restrict themselves to what is observable in the data; that is, to those features of context that participants in an interaction appear to attend to. In other words, conversation analysts avoid appealing to features of context beyoud what is evident in the text itself and do not approach the data with elements of context speciﬁed in advance. For instance, when it comes to gender or social class, it is their view that these categories should be discussed only if the interaction under inspection shows that participants orient to these notions and display this orientation to each other. As Schegloff (1992a) proposes, participants in an interaction have diverse identities to which they may orient and there are different aspects of the situation they may attend to. As such, the issue for the analyst is to determine ‘which of the possible characterizations of context (whether of setting or of participants) can be shown to be relevant’ to the participants in the interaction’ (Schegloff, 1992a, p. 195) (his emphasis) (see also Schegloff, 1997). In this respect, conversation analysts treat talk as ‘invoking its context’ whereas in a good part of work within sociopragmatics, the discussion has focused on ‘context impacting on talk’, to use Schegloff’s words (1992a, p. 197). In this sense, the approach within CA is to treat context as a ‘participant’s’ rather than an analyst’s resource (Pomerantz, 1998, p. 124). Nonetheless, the validity of conversation analysts’ strict adherence to features of context that appear in the text only and their related claim that they avoid placing categories before the text has been contested recently, particularly from the perspective of gender studies, discourse analysis and (social) psychology (Billig, 1999; Stokoe and Smithson, 2001; Turnbull, 2003). Turnbull (p. 176), for example, highlights the fact that both participants in an interaction and analysts need to import or access ‘exogenous context’ in order to take part in and understand an interaction. Conversation analysts’ claims for rigour by strictly adhering to what participants display through talk has also previously been the object of criticism in relation to discussions of the advantages CA offers over

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speech act theory for the description of talk-in-interaction. Van Rees (1992), for example, rightly remarks that conversation analysts resort to their intuitions, too, in discussions of the actions participants ‘display’ in a particular interaction; that is, conversation analysts make use of common-sense knowledge or notions they bring, for example, of what an ‘invitation’ or ‘giving directions’ is. The author refers for illustrative purposes to the analysis of an extract provided by Schegloff (1984) in which he explains that although B’s ﬁrst utterance in the excerpt looks syntactically like a question, it is not a ‘question’ that A ‘answers’ but an ‘invitation’ (in question form) that she ‘accepts’. (Schlegloff, 1984, p. 31, cited in van Rees, 1992, p. 36) Van Rees (1992) remarks that it ‘remains unclear how Schegloff knows that his claim as to how B understands the utterance is correct’ (p. 62). If his answer is to be found in the subsequent turn, then, again, the same problem arises for that subsequent turn. For Taylor and Cameron, conversation analysts are in a bind in this respect: if they strictly apply the principle of accountability (3.1) to their data, they end up in an ‘inﬁnite regress’ in that ‘the function of any turn in the sequence A, B, C, D, . . . can only be determined by ﬁrst determining the function of the next turn, which itself can only be determined by ﬁrst determining the function of the turn following it, and so on’ (Taylor and Cameron, 1987, p. 122). On the other hand, they can choose to rely on intuition ‘to identify the conversational work a turn is doing’, but this is a ‘method the ethnomethodological approach was designed, at least in part, to improve’ (p. 122). More recently, Hammersley (2003) voiced a similar criticism when he proposed that if CA data is made up of the analyst-as-member’s interpretation of the transcripts and/or recordings,12 ‘questions arise about the status of those interpretations’ since interpretations rely on intuitions (p. 760). This author’s criticism is related to the question of ‘membership’ in CA: of what a ‘member’ is a member of. For Hammersley, the nature of ethnomethodology prevents conversation analysts from specifying the boundaries of membership and consequently, ‘of what would (and would not) count as a member’s interpretation of a recording or transcript’ (p. 760).

3.3 CA’s main contributions The main aspects of the organization of talk examined by conversation analysts in relation to the ‘machinery’ of talk’ are: the sequential orga-

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nization of talk, the organization of turn-taking, the overall organization of talk and preference organization, including the organization of repair. Additionally, amongst other features of talk, conversation analysts have looked at topic organization, the organization of laughter ( Jefferson 1979, 1984, 1985), and non- or quasi-lexical speech objects, such as and ‘uh huh’ or ‘oh’ (Schegloff, 1982; Heritage, 1984a). They have also examined techniques for inviting audience response (Atkinson, 1984, 1985; Heritage and Greatbatch, 1986) and non-vocal activities including gesture and gaze (Goodwin, 1984).13 Here, we brieﬂy describe the ﬁrst six topics listed above, which are the areas that have received most attention within Hispanic sociopragmatics.14 3.3.1 The sequential organization of talk Conversation analysts observed that utterances occurred in sequences in the form of pairs (A-B) and chains (for example, A-B-A-B) (that is, one after the other), and that the value or meaning of an utterance was greatly dependent upon its location in the sequence in which it occurred. These observations gave rise to their notion of the sequential organization of conversation, which attempts to explain how utterances are tied to each other (Schegloff and Sacks 1974 [1973]). A key component of this notion, and indeed of the ‘technology’ of talk, is that of ‘adjacency pairs’; that is, pairs of utterances occurring in adjacent position, as in greetings (for example, hola – hola) and leave-taking expressions (for example, chao – chao). The rule governing adjacency pairs is that the production of the ﬁrst pair-part (for example, ﬁrst greeting) sequentially implicates the production of the second pair-part (for example, second greeting). If the rule is turned around, it means that when a ﬁrst pair part is produced (for example, a question), whatever utterance the other speaker produces will count as a second part (for example, an answer) because of its placement within the sequence; that is, the production of the ﬁrst element makes the second element ‘conditionally relevant’. As such, when a slot for a second pair part is created and is not ﬁlled, its absence is observable and becomes accountable (see notion of accountability in 3.1). This view stands in contrast with that held by speech act theorists, where the function of utterances is assessed in terms of speech act rules (see Chapter 2), which are independent of considerations of the positioning of an utterance within a sequence. The fact that utterances occur in pairs was ﬁrst noticed by Sacks when he examined calls to an emergency psychiatric hospital. He found, for instance, that when a person (A) issued a ‘hello’ as a greeting, the other person (B) returned a similar greeting. Likewise, he found that when

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staff at the hospital answered with ‘This is Mr Smith. May I help you?’, callers tended to provide an answer with a name (for example, ‘Yes, this is Mr Brown’) (Sacks, 1995 [1992]; LC1, p. 4); that is, the answer staff members produced, created a slot for a reply with a name. If the slot for a name was not ﬁlled by a caller, the staff member would then ask explicitly for the caller’s name at some point, as in ‘Would you give me your name?’ Sacks found that explicit requests for a name tended to generate different types of sequences. For instance, if the caller’s reply to the request was ‘no’, then the staff member would then ask why and the caller would provide an account. In other words, if the slot is not ﬁlled, as expected, this becomes an observable and accountable feature of talk, as remarked earlier. Whether a slot is ﬁlled with an appropriate or expected response or not is a phenomenon studied by conversation analysts under the notion of ‘preference’ (see 3.3.4 below). Conversation analysts note, however, that responses to ﬁrst parts are not always adjacent to ﬁrst parts since ‘insertion sequences’ may occur in between. The following is an instance of this phenomenon, where the corresponding second pair-part for the ﬁrst question is delayed by two turns: (6) (ES) (AP stands for adjacency pair) AP1

AP2

A: ¿Vas a salir? B: ¿Por qué? A: Estoy esperando una llamada pero tengo que ir a hacer una compra. B: No. A: Si me llaman, diles que regreso en veinte minutos.

The ﬁrst utterance in the exchange above can also be examined as constituting a ‘pre-sequence’, the ﬁrst part of a chain that signals an upcoming request in this case. Sequences like these were considered by Sacks (LC2, Lecture 1) in relation to invitations; for example, the utterance ‘What are you doing tonight?’ signals that an invitation is forthcoming, but the occurrence of the invitation proper will depend on the answer provided to that ﬁrst question; that is, different types of sequences can be generated. Adjacency pairs play a central role in the structuring of talk owing to the diverse functions they can fulﬁl. In relation to the turn-taking system (see 3.3.2), they are employed in the selection of the next speaker and can thus facilitate the smooth exchange of turns. Additionally, adjacency pairs display understanding of the previous utterance. For

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instance, the production of an answer displays that the preceding utterance was understood as a question (see principle of accountability in 3.1 above). When trouble arises in conversation, adjacency pairs are employed to repair it (see ‘repair’ in 3.3.5). For instance, when one speaker cannot hear/understand the other, he/she can ask for repetition or request for clariﬁcation through a ﬁrst pair part, as in this example: (7) (Telephone conversation) (ES) Caller: . . . entiendo que s(x) se publica mañana en la prensa Answerer: sí sí sí sí Caller: cómo Answerer: tres días se hace publicar (Placencia, 1990) Additionally, adjacency pairs ensure attention from the other speaker since ﬁrst pair-parts can occur any time in an interaction. Thus, conversation analysts suggest that conversationalists have a built-in motivation to listen as they have to pay attention in case they are selected as next speakers. Finally, conversation analysts’ examination of the sequential organization of talk has also included the analysis of larger sequences in line with the work of Sacks (1974), and Schegloff (1992a). As not much attention has been given to these sequences by Hispanists, they are not considered further in this section. 3.3.2 The organization of turn-taking Another major contribution made by conversation analysts was the development of a turn-taking model to explain how people coordinate the exchange of turns at talk (Sacks et al., 1974). It is based on their observation of various commonplace facts that had gone unnoticed by other scholars. These include, amongst others, the following: (a)

In any social activity (including conversation) people participate in an organized fashion; that is, through the exchange of turns; (b) Overwhelmingly, one party talks at a time; (c) Speaker-change is a recurrent phenomenon and it is commonly carried out without any gap or overlap; if overlap occurs it tends to be brief. There are mechanisms to repair the trouble overlapping speech gives rise to; and (d) There is variation regarding the order and size of turns and length of conversations as well as people’s use of turn-allocation techniques.

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These observations led Sacks et al. (1974) to propose a model consisting of two components – the turn-constructional component and the turnallocation component – and a set of rules. The ﬁrst component is intended to account for how participants know when to start a turn in relation to features of the other speaker’s turn, and the second in relation to turn-allocation procedures. Turns may be constructed by different ‘unit-types’ including ‘sentential, clausal, phrasal and lexical constructions (p. 702), in other words, they can vary in form and length. The ﬁrst possible completion of one of these units constitutes what Sacks et al. refer to as an initial transition-relevance place (TRP). As to the turn-allocation component, speakers may select the next speaker or may self-select. The following constitute the rules governing turn construction and the exchange of turns: 1

2

For any turn, at the initial transition-relevance place of an initial turn-constructional unit: (a) The party selected as next speaker by the current speaker has the right and is obliged to take next turn to speak; (b) If the current speaker does not select a next speaker, then a participant may self-select; (c) If the current speaker does not select a next speaker, he or she may continue unless someone else self-selects; If at a TRP, 1(a) or 1(b) does not operate and the current speaker has continued, then the rule-set a–c re-applies at the next TRP. (Adapted from Sacks et al., 1974, p. 704)

As can be observed, Sacks et al.’s model involves the notion of participants’ rights and obligations in conversation. If the current speaker selects the next speaker, only the speaker selected has the right and obligation to start a turn at the ﬁrst possible TRP. Within this model, overlaps and interruptions thus appear to be presented by conversation analysts as a failure in the operation of the turn-taking system. A number of limitations of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s turn-taking model have been highlighted. One of them is the fact that in real use turn transitions are not always as smooth as suggested in the model, with the occurrence of simultaneous speech not being uncommon. In this respect, Cameron claims that the simplest systematics model assumes that ‘one at a time’ is both normal and fundamental: there is no obvious place in the model for

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simultaneous speech which is neither an error nor a violation, but merely a normal feature of certain kinds of talk. (Cameron, 2001, p. 93) Cameron refers to studies such as Coates’s (1996) and her own (Cameron, 1997) that show respectively that simultaneous speech with a supportive function is common in the talk of women and men friends. Therefore, their studies suggest that simultaneous speech is not always seen as problematic, as some Hispanists also suggest in relation to different situational and sociocultural contexts (Fant 1989, 1992b, in 3.5.1). Another related limitation concerns the disregard of conversation analysts of constraints on participants’ rights and obligations beyond the ‘internal machinery’ of conversation; these include participants’ relative status in an interaction or the rules of the interaction. Conversationalists appear to be presented as being void of motivations or goals and operating in a social vacuum (Wells, 1981; Hjelmquist, 1982; Ventola, 1987; Thomas, 1989).15 Overlaps and interruptions, for example, can be explained in relation to features of the relationship obtaining between the participants, such as the existence of power asymmetry, where the more powerful participant feels entitled to interrupt the less powerful one; on the other hand, in relation to symmetry and degree of distance (that is, where the participants are equals and are well-acquainted), they might also feel entitled to interrupt to show interest, or simply because they know in advance what the other person is going to say. In this respect, Hjelmquist says that it might be the case that both parties conceive of each other as equal and act accordingly, implying that interruptions will be rare. This latter state of affairs might also mean that both parties interrupt each other with equal rights. (Hjelmquist, 1982, p. 33) In any case, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s turn-taking model laid the foundations for developments in research into the organization of talk. With modiﬁcations, it was employed from the start to account for different types of talk, as can be seen in the work of Atkinson and Drew (1979) in a legal setting, Cuff and Sharrock (1985) in a variety of meetings (for example, family meetings with experts to discuss a problem; community meetings), and Greatbatch (1988) in news interviews, to mention a few of the works on turn-taking in the relatively early days of CA.16

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3.3.3 The overall organization of talk In addition to a consideration of the organization of talk or conversation at the sequential level, conversation analysts have examined its organization at the overall level; that is, section by section. Their observation is that conversations are ‘segmented events which are marked off in some fashion with beginnings, middles, and ends’ (Benson and Hughes, 1983, p. 162), and that entry and exit from a conversation is jointly coordinated by participants. Conversation analysts have focused on the opening and closing sections of telephone conversations in particular as these conversations are activities with clear boundaries, at least in terms of where the conversation starts and where it ends. Initial considerations by Sacks include examining who speaks ﬁrst, why the ‘answerer’ is not necessarily the ‘called’ person, who introduces ﬁrst topic and how the closing of the call is organized (Silverman, 1998, p. 110). Detailed work on openings can be found in Schegloff (1972 [1968]); 1979 and 1986). Through the analysis of calls to and from a police station, Schegloff (1972 [1968]) described the initial sequence with which entry into telephone conversations is coordinated. This is the ‘summons–answer’ sequence consisting of the ringing of the telephone that acts as a summons and the initial reply to the summons by the answerer (normally ‘hello’ in domestic calls). Schegloff also described what he calls the ‘distribution rule’ operating in telephone conversations; namely, that the answerer speaks ﬁrst. It was of interest for Schegloff, however, to account for one deviant case in his data where the slot for the second part was not ﬁlled by the answerer; that is, where the caller rather than the answerer spoke ﬁrst. He found that the caller initiated a second summons–answer sequence by producing a ‘hello’ since contact through the summons– answer sequence needs to be established ﬁrst before the conversation proceeds any further. In a later study, Schegloff (1979) focused on the second sequence in domestic telephone calls in American English: the ‘identiﬁcation–recognition’ sequence. The author provided a detailed description of the different forms through which callers in their ﬁrst turn display recognition or lack of recognition of the answerer. In fact, Schegloff considered nine procedures that conversationalists use on their own or that they combine. These include the use of greeting terms such as ‘hello’, the answerer’s name or address term in interrogative or quasi-interrogative intonation contours such as ‘Harriet?’, self-identiﬁcations as in ‘hello it’s me’, and the use of the so called switchboard requests as in ‘Is Jessie

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there?’ (Schegloff 1979, pp. 28-32). He found that overwhelmingly callers (and answerers) in domestic calls displayed a preference for ‘other-recognition’. In other words, conversationalists prefer to be recognized by their interlocutor rather than provide a self-identiﬁcation. Self-identiﬁcations are resorted to when other procedures have failed. A canonical pattern for telephone conversation openings consisting of four slots – a summons–answer sequence, an identiﬁcation/recognition sequence, a greeting sequence and a how-are-you sequence – was later proposed by Schegloff (1986): (8) 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Schegloff’s (1986, p. 115) canonical opening: ring (summons–answer sequence) Hallo, Hello Jim? (identiﬁcation/recognition sequences) Yeah, ’s Bonnie. Hi, (greeting sequence) Hi, how are yuh (how-are-you sequences) Fine, how’re you, Oh, okay I guess Oh okay. First topic (reason for the call)

Openings in other types of telephone conversations (for example, service conversations) are to be regarded as variations of this canonical opening as ordinary talk is seen as the predominant medium of social interaction (Drew and Heritage, 1992). As far as closings are concerned, conversation analysts were faced with the problem of explaining how conversationalists go about ending a conversation given the existence of a turn-taking machinery (3.3.2) that could in principle generate an ‘indeﬁnitely extendable string of turns to talk’ (Schegloff and Sacks, 1974 [1973], p. 237). The difﬁculty is that at every TRP (3.3.2), speaker change can occur and a new turn can be generated. Schegloff and Sacks found that conversationalists tackle this problem by employing a number of procedures to ‘suspend’ the TRP. These are (pre)closing devices that signal the speakers’ desire to end the conversation and can take the form of ‘warrants’ such as ‘okay’, ‘well’ and ‘so’. If the other speaker agrees, as in (9) below (buenoo – hale), then conversationalists move towards the ‘terminal exchange’, the ﬁnal exchange with which the conversation is terminated, as in the last two turns (hasta luego – hasta luego) in the same example:17

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(9) (PnS) B Buenoo A Hale/ luego nos vemos pa’ comer B Nos vemos luego/ hasta [luego A [Vale/ hasta luego (Example taken from Gallardo Paúls, 1993a, p. 83) This example also illustrates the use of another closing procedure which Schegloff and Sacks (1974 [1973]) describe: reinvocations of material dealt with earlier, arrangements in this case (nos vemos pa’ comer), which may have constituted the reason for the call.18 Conversation analysts’ work in this area generated a great deal of interest in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Numerous studies were carried out in different languages in an attempt to determine whether the patterns conversation analysts had described for American English were universal or whether there was cultural variability. Work in this line was prompted by Godard’s (1977) study of openings in French and American English, and Siﬁanou’s (1989) examination of openings in Greek and British English, which suggested cultural variability (see also Pavlidou, (1994) in relation to German and Greek, amongst others), followed by studies on closings (Placencia 1997a; Pavlidou 1998) also suggesting such variability. This debate, which is ongoing (see Luke and Pavlidou’s collection of papers (2002) on telephone openings), appears to be related to issues stemming from the principles that guide conversation analytic work (see 3.2 above). These issues include sole and ‘strict adherence’ to conversational data for any claims that are made and reference to any contextual feature (for example, culture or ethnicity in this case) only to the extent to which it is a feature ‘invoked’ by participants in the interaction (see 3.1 above and 3.4 below). Within sociopragmatics, under the inﬂuence of the ethnography of speaking (see Chapter 6), language patterns are considered to be, albeit not exclusively, culturallymotivated so many pragmaticists seek to uncover underlying sociocultural norms reﬂected in talk. In relation to this, pragmaticists pay special attention to linguistic choices that participants make to realize turns at talk, choices that provide insight into underlying norms (for example, a preference for a particular politeness orientation (see Chapter 4)).19 Additionally, while conversation analysts focus on ‘how’ interaction is accomplished, pragmatists are also concerned with the ‘why’ conversational interaction is accomplished in a particular way; that is, with the motivations underlying particular choices (Thomas, 1989; Placencia, 1997a). Heritage (1999) appears to be one of the few

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conversation analysts who is open to a consideration of the ‘why’ question as reﬂected, for example, in his remarks with regard to Lindström’s (1994) study on openings in Swedish telephone conversations: Lindström entertained the possibility that there may be a ‘trust’ component to this conduct [providing a self-identiﬁcation when answering the phone]. Persons in ‘low trust’ environments respond to the telephone with informal sounding responses like ‘hello’. . . . In higher trust environments, persons may self-identify – something that almost never happens in calls to private homes in low-trust environments like Los Angeles. (Heritage,1999, p. 71) In recent years, interest in telephone conversation openings has extended to other languages, as can be seen in Taleghani-Nikazm’s (2002) study on openings in Persian, for example, and new contexts, as in Cheepen’s (2000) examination of ‘small talk’ in openings in human and machine-operated telephone interactions, as well as Rasmussen and Wagner’s (2002) study of openings of telephone conversations in a multilingual setting. Concerning Spanish, however, not much work has been carried out in this area as will be seen in section 3.5. 3.3.4 Preference organization Conversation analysts have found that conversationalists tend to orient to certain responses to ﬁrst-parts of adjacency pairs, such as compliments (Pomerantz, 1978), ﬁrst assessments (Pomerantz, 1984), and invitations (Drew, 1984). Responses can take the form of acceptance in the case of invitations or offers, for example, or agreement in the case of opinions, assessments and suggestions, or conversely, they can take the form of refusals and disagreement. Examples (10) and (11) below illustrate, respectively, the expression of agreement and disagreement with an assessment (in bold): (10) (ES) A: ¡Qué chévere ese cuadro! B: ¡Ah! Es tenaz! . . . (Example taken from Placencia and Yépez, 1999, p. 113) (11) (USAS) A: Qué guapa se puso la Nena. Ya es toda una mujercita. B: Es que no l’as visto chupán::dose el dedo. (Example taken from Valdés and Pino, 1981, p. 68)

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Conversation analysts claim that the ﬁrst type of responses (that is, acceptance and agreement), are normally ‘preferred’ seconds, whereas the second type (that is, refusals and rejections) tend to constitute ‘dispreferred’ ones. However, given the indexical nature of talk (see 3.1), the converse situation can be true. For instance, when a person downgrades himself/herself, the preferred response is a disagreement rather than an agreement (Pomerantz, 1984).20 The notion of preference, however, has given rise to some confusion, as pointed out by Boyle (2000), in that there does not seem to be a completely uniform view of what it stands for. Some conversation analysts make it clear that they are not referring to individual preferences. For instance, in their analysis of repair mechanisms (see below), Schegloff et al. (1977, p. 362) state that they use the term ‘preference’ ‘technically to refer not to motivations of the participants, but to sequence- and turn-organizational features of conversation’. As such, preferred seconds are described in structural terms as forms that are less elaborate than dispreferred ones. The latter are often characterized by the occurrence of a delay in the response; that is, marked by silence or hesitation, and may be preceded by other items, as in example (12) below, where an employee refuses his boss’s request to stay at work late, prefacing his refusal with a number of other utterances: (12) (MS) Mire, me da mucha pena decirle esto [regret/apology] pero lo que pasa es que ahorita tengo un compromiso [reason/explanation] y no sé si pueda asistir. [indeﬁnite reply] Si puedo, el lunes llego un poco más temprano [alternative] pero ahora no lo puedo acomodar. [refusal] (Example taken from Félix-Brasdefer, 2003, p. 249) On the other hand, scholars like Levinson (1983) allude to the frequency of occurrence of certain forms, presenting preferred forms as the most frequent ones, and dispreferred, as the least frequent. In turn, Heritage (1984b, p. 269) refers to the interpersonal function of (dis)preferred forms when he says that ‘preferred format actions are normally afﬁliative in character while dispreferred format actions are disafﬁliative’. Heritage goes on to say that preferred format actions are generally ‘supportive’ of ‘social solidarity’ while dispreferred ones are ‘destructive of it’. In this respect, Czyzewski (1989, pp. 52–3, cited in Boyle, 2000, p. 588) is of the view that both preferred and dispreferred actions ‘contribute in different ways to social solidarity’. This author associates pre-

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ferred actions with Goffman’s ‘supportive interchanges’ and dispreferred actions, with Goffman’s ‘remedial interchanges’. Finally, Boyle (2000, p. 589), building on Bilmes’s (1988) work on the topic, and with reference to Sacks’s lectures, proposes that the deﬁning criterion for (dis)preferred forms should be ‘noticeable absence’ and ‘accountability’. As such, preferred forms would be forms that are ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ or ‘seen but unnoticed’, and dispreferred ones, those where an expected action is noticeably absent. However, he makes a further distinction between dispreferred forms that are ‘noticeable and accountable, but not sanctionable’ and those that are ‘noticeable, accountable, and sanctionable’. The absence of an expected greeting, for example, would constitute one of these forms, depending on whether conversationalists choose to treat it as sanctionable or not, and display this in their talk, based on their indexical knowledge of the context in which the interaction is taking place. Another point of interest that Boyle (2000) makes is that the notion of preference has normally been associated with responses to ﬁrst-pair parts. However, the author suggests that it can also be applied to ﬁrst pair parts. For example, failing to offer a ﬁrst-pair-part greeting when it is expected is an absence that will be noticed. The early work of conversation analysts on preference also covers the use of repair mechanisms (cf. Schegloff et al., 1977); that is, mechanisms which participants employ to deal with problems that arise in the construction of conversational interaction, such as misunderstandings, mishearings, and misproductions (for example, mispronunciations and content errors). The following example from a telephone conversation illustrates both a mishearing and what seems to be a lack of understanding. In turn 08, the answerer indirectly requests the caller to repeat his utterance, and in turn 10, to clarify it. (13) (ES) 07 Caller: 08 Answerer: 09 Caller: 10 Answerer: 11 Caller: 12 Answerer:

¿qué hay de bueno bien (laughter) ya te: (.) echaste atrás ¿ah ¿ya te echaste atrás qué cómo así en el matrimonio estoy ya tranquilo (Placencia, 1990)

The basic claim of conversation analysts is that there is an intrinsic repair mechanism operating in conversation within which certain pro-

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cedures are preferred over others. Schegloff et al. (1977) report that conversationalists exhibit a preference for self-repair (that is, repair effected by the same speaker) over other-repair (that is, repair effected by some other participant).21 Example (13) above would exemplify an instance of self-repair at the request of the other participant. The following example, on the other hand, illustrates self-repair within the same turn of a speaker: (14) (PnS) porque// resulta que en Champán // no habíaa- éramos excedente- había excedente de gente// (Gallardo Paúls, 1996, p. 113) The work of conversation analysts in this area, however, has received some criticism. For example, Zahn (1984) objects to the fact that no frequency data is provided by Schegloff et al. to support their ﬁndings, which is important if they claim that preferred forms occur more frequently (see also Holtgraves, 2002). In this respect, Schegloff (1993, p. 119) remarks that conversation analysts’ use of terminology such as ‘occasionally’ or ‘massively’ relates to ‘an investigator’s sense of frequency over the range of a research experience’, not a ‘count’. A second criticism Zahn makes is that conversation analysts do not attempt to look beyond the sequential organization of conversation to account for people’s apparent preference for self-correction. He is of the view that often self-correction rather than other-correction occurs simply because the other participant does not know what that correction is going to be so he/she cannot provide it. In other instances, Zahn ﬁnds that other-repair is the only possibility when the speaker is not aware of the existence of trouble, so it is difﬁcult to talk about preferences when there is only one alternative. Additionally, based on a study of his own, Zahn also claims that the occurrence of self-repair or other-repair mechanisms depends on the type of problem arising. In his study, when the problem facing the interactants was one of wording, he found that 90 per cent of the time, selfrepair occurred, whereas when a participant in a conversation ‘asserts something untrue or in error and does not realize s/he is doing so’ he found other-repair likely to result (Zahn, 1984, p. 62). Finally, Zahn also found that the type of problem was in turn related to the degree of acquaintance between the participants: Initial interactions most often involve problems of wording and much less so problems of ambiguity or error while interactants

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with a history of communicating exhibit an exact reversal of this pattern. (Zahn, 1984, p. 63) It has also been suggested that politeness concerns might underlie the occurrence of repair mechanisms (Placencia, 1991). In some interactions, participants might let mishearings pass in order not to make the other participant lose face or not to lose face themselves by appearing to have problems in hearing or understanding. Criticism of the lack of attention to the motivation behind patterns of preference in most CA work can also be found in the work of Thomas (1989), Placencia (1997a), Cameron (2001), and Holtgraves (2002). For these authors, it is important to take into account conversationalists’ face needs in the examination of patterns of preference. Cameron (2001, p. 97), for instance, proposes that ‘[t]he particular patterns [of preference] described by CA . . . could be seen as outcomes of the general politeness principles set out by researchers like Brown and Levinson (1987)’. From the point of view of CA, such lack of attention is understandable given the goals and underlying assumptions of the discipline. However, for sociopragmaticists, it constitutes an important limitation (see 3.4 below). 3.3.5 The organization of laughter Conversation analysts have extended their examination of orderliness in talk-in-interaction to non-lexical activities, such as laughter (Jefferson, 1984, 1985; Jefferson, Sacks and Schegloff, 1987). For the novice in conversation analysis, the production of laughter may be associated, as Atkinson and Heritage (1984a, p. 297) suggest, with spontaneity or instinctive behaviour and, therefore, may not be considered to be an orderly activity; however, conversation analysts have shown that, in fact, its production is systematic and that laughter can be managed and described as an ‘interactional resource’ ( Jefferson, 1985, p. 34). A seminal work in this area is Jefferson (1979), in which the author shows how participants invite their interlocutors to laugh and how the latter take up or decline such invitations. With respect to invitations to laugh, one of the mechanisms Jefferson described is the production of laughter by the speaker upon his/her completion of an utterance. If the other participant accepts the invitation, then s/he will show it by also producing laughter. Otherwise, s/he may ignore the laughter and respond with more talk on the topic of the utterance preceding the laughter. Other conversation analysts that have contributed to the development of this area include Clayman (1992) and Glenn (1995). Clayman examined afﬁliative and disafﬁliative uses of laughter by audiences in polit-

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ical debates. In a similar vein, Glenn (1995) looked at the use of laughter to promote distance or feelings of superiority, or bonding and afﬁliation, building on Clayman’s (1992) work and Jefferson’s (1972) distinction between ‘laughing at’ and ‘laughing with’.22 3.3.6 Topic organization Topic organization is an area that, given its complexity, has had a slower development compared to other areas of conversational organization (Atkinson and Heritage, 1984a). Here we look at two key contributions, made by Schegloff and Sacks (1974[1973]) and Button and Casey (1984), that have served as the basis for further developments in the area.23 Schegloff and Sacks (1974 [1973]) examined topic organization with reference to closings (3.3.3). It will be recalled that for the initiation of the closing, Schegloff and Sacks describe the use of pre-closing devices such as ‘well’ and ‘okay’. When utterances of this type are placed at the ‘analysable’ end of a topic, they indicate that the speaker has nothing new to say. It is precisely at this point that the co-participant in a conversation can introduce a new topic or what Schegloff and Sacks refer to as ‘unmentioned mentionables’. A mentionable is ‘what gets talked about in a conversation’ (p. 242), not necessarily constituting the ‘ﬁrst topic’. By ﬁrst topic, Schegloff and Sacks mean the topic that is accorded ‘a certain special status in the conversation’ (p. 243), which participants may treat as the reason for the conversation. Schegloff and Sacks noted that participants may not want to attach a ﬁrst-topic importance to a particular mentionable. They also consider the fact that mentionables need to be produced in a ‘ﬁtted’ manner; that is, they need to be held off until they can ‘occur naturally’ (p. 43.) It is the closing structure that can provide a place for the ﬁtting of unmentioned mentionables, through the use of pre-closing offerings. Utterances such as ‘well’ and ‘okay’ constitute invitations for the production of unmentioned mentionables. If the invitation to close is declined, then the closing proceeds. Finally, they considered ways in which new materials may be introduced in the closing section, but that would be marked in some way, as in the case of what they refer to as ‘misplaced marking’ (Schegloff and Sacks, 1974, p. 258); that is, utterances that are ‘out of place’ (p. 258). An instance of this would be the occurrence of introductions that are normally carried out at the beginning of a conversation rather than at the end. While Schegloff and Sacks (1974[1973]) focused on the introduction of new materials for conversation in the closing section, Button and Casey (1984) examined how a topic can be generated by means of ‘topicinitial elicitors’ (see below) after not only closings, but also openings and topic boundings. The latter are turns that sequentially mark the

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closure of a topic (Schegloff and Sacks, 1974 [1973]). Building on Sacks’s notion of ‘stepwise’ topical movement that describes cases where one topic ﬂows into another, and that of ‘boundaried’ topical movement that describes cases in which a new topic follows the closure of the previous topic, Button and Casey, examine environments where a topic that is segmented from other topics is produced. They refer to threepart exchanges consisting of: • a topic-initial elicitor that is presented as an enquiry that allows for the reporting of a newsworthy event • the production of the newsworthy event as a possible topic initial • the topicalizer; that is, the utterance that allows for the possible topic initial to be developed. Example (15) below illustrates three-part exchanges of this type, apparently occurring after the conversation has been in progress for some time: (15) (PnS) F: ¿Más que contar? topic-initial elicitor A: El sábado/ es la comida de tu abuela. topic initial F: Ah/por ﬁn es este sábado? topicalizer (Example taken from Gallardo Paúls, 1993a, pp. 49–50) Following closing components, topic-initial elicitors (for example, ¿más que contar?, ¿y qué más?) mark out prior topic and indicate at the same time that whatever comes next will be further talk; that is, the topic proceeds from the inquiry rather than from a prior topic. On the other hand, after openings, topic initial elicitors (for example, ¿qué haces?/¿qué estás haciendo?) mark an inquiry into immediately current events as ‘ﬁrst’ newsworthy items rather than ‘further’ newsworthy events. Finally, after topic-bounding turns, topic initial elicitors take the form of enquiries, such as ¿cómo le ha ido?, through which they elicit a report on events that are dislocated from the prior talk and that are new to the conversation. The production of a newsworthy event is, according to Button and Casey (1984), the preferred answer to topic-initial elicitors but ‘negative’ responses may also occur; that is, the co-participant may decline to produce a newsworthy event, indicating that there is nothing to report. Alternatively, a negative response may be produced (that is, a ‘no-news report’), as in (16) but may be followed by a report:24

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(16) (ES) Answerer: oye y qué hay de bueno Caller: nada mayormente estoy aquí en IETEL . . . (Placencia, 1990)

3.4 Relevance of CA for sociopragmatics The inﬂuence of CA on (Hispanic) sociopragmatics is unquestionable, as remarked earlier, both methodologically and with regard to its focus of study. With respect to data collection methodology, the use of recorded material has permitted more detailed and rigorous analyses of speech acts and other features of discourse.25 However, it is not uncommon to ﬁnd sociopragmatic studies where rather ‘narrow’ transcriptions (see Chapter 6) are provided even though the emphasis is on the linguistic realization of a particular utterance only (for example, whether a direct or an indirect strategy has been employed). That is, given the emphasis on the linguistic elements of an utterance, conversational resources that are represented in a transcription, such as the use of pauses or silence, tend to be underexplored in (Hispanic) sociopragmatic studies. CA methodology has been, in any case, only partially adopted by many researchers in (Hispanic) sociopragmatics in the sense that although they may use recorded material with detailed transcriptions, the recorded material employed largely corresponds to data obtained through experimental means (see Chapters 2 and 4). As remarked in 3.2, conversation analysts reject the use of experimental data. One of the advantages of the use of such data is that the representativity of the sample analysed and the generalizibility of ﬁndings can be better guaranteed; however, this is of no concern for most conversation analysts. In this respect Holtgraves observes that [c]onversation analytic researchers have . . . demonstrated little concern with the representativeness of the conversations on which their analyses are based. Talk is analysed if it is available; there is no attempt to randomly sample instances of conversational interaction. Therefore, the generalizability of their ﬁndings is not known. (Holtgraves, 2002, p. 119) Criticism of this type has been dismissed by conversation analysts as a misunderstanding of the discipline:

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to charge conversation analysis for its statistical failings is not only to have misunderstood its very ways of formulating its interest, but to have not even understood the sorts of problems that have led to its formulations in the ﬁrst place. (Button 1988/1989, p. 340) With respect to this discussion, Schegloff (1993) states that he is not against quantiﬁcation per se; however, he argues that ‘quantititative analysis is . . . not an alternative to single case analysis, but rather is built on its back’ (p. 102). His view is, therefore, that it is necessary to ﬁrst have a thorough understanding of the feature of talk under investigation before attempting quantiﬁcation. For example, it is assumed by some scholars that utterances such as ‘mm’, ‘hm’, ‘uh huh’, ‘yeah’, ‘huh?’ and ‘what?’ are instances of the same class of items; that is, of backchannel signals (Duncan and Fiske, 1977). Nonetheless, Schegloff notes, for example, that ‘huh?’ and ‘what?’, as compared to the other forms, perform a different kind of action and generate a different kind of sequence. Thus, in Schegloff’s view, quantiﬁcation is premature if there is no thorough understanding of the environments in which different of the so-called ‘backchannel’ items may occur and the functions they may perform: We need to know what the phenomena are, how they are organized, and how they are related to each other as a precondition for cogently bringing methods of quantitive analysis to bear on them. (Schegloff, 1993, p. 114) Moreover, Schegloff is of the view that quantiﬁcation may not be possible with certain complex conversational phenomena and that, even with domains that are quantiﬁable, it is yet to be seen what the payoffs of quantitative analyses will be. Along the same lines, Heritage (1999, p. 70) makes a distinction between most CA work where quantiﬁcation has not been essential, given that the focus has been on ‘identifying’ and ‘analyzing’ practices of interaction, and a few studies where there has been a case for quantiﬁcation, such as his own with Greatbatch (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1986), where the authors were concerned with the connection between rhetorical ﬁgures and ‘mass’ response. He suggests, nonetheless, that questions about the distribution of interactional practices where quantiﬁcation is needed are likely to arise now that the ﬁeld has accumulated a large body of ﬁndings. CA has also contributed to a (gradual) change of focus within (His-

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panic) sociopragmatics from individual speech acts to sequences where the function of an utterance is explained in relation to its placement within a sequence rather than in isolation. Additionally, CA has contributed to increased attention to endogenous features of context in sociopragmatic analyses; that is, to examining context not as given but as negotiated in interaction, on a turn-by-turn basis. In this respect, it is right to say that CA has provided sociopragmatics with ‘ways of rethinking and re-describing the phenomena of language’, to use Button and Lee’s words (1987, p. 3). Furthermore, CA has contributed to a signiﬁcant increase in the number of topics examined within (Hispanic) sociopragmatics. Largely under the inﬂuence of CA, speech acts are no longer the only units of analysis, but also turn-taking, laughter, topic management and the overall organization of particular types of interactions, as will be seen in section 3.5 below. This has meant that the search by sociopragmaticists for patterns of cultural variability in conversational interaction includes at present a wider range of topics than it did in the early years of the discipline, when the focus was on variation in the realization of speech acts. A question that often arises in discussions of the relationship between CA and other areas is whether there can be compatibility or convergence in the approaches employed by CA and linguistics (Wooton, 1989; Holtgraves, 2002), or CA and social psychology (Button and Lee, 1987; Hopper, 1989).26 Social psychology shares some methodological and analytical assumptions with some of the work within (Hispanic) sociopragmatics. Views on the compatibility of approaches were initially more pessimistic (Button and Lee, 1987) than they have been in recent years (Holtgraves, 2002). Button and Lee’s stance, which may be said to reﬂect the state of affairs in the early years of pragmatics as a discipline, where under Searle’s (1969) inﬂuence (see Chapter 2), there was not much concern for the study of language in its social context and where very little or no ‘natural’ data was employed is that the establishment of a relationship between C.A. and linguistics is highly problematic. Linguists do not concern themselves with social activities, social organisation or natural data. . . . A prospective marriage is made even more remote by the fact that much of contemporary linguistics employs the same ‘constructive’ type of methodology that characterises traditional sociology and from which ethnomethodologists broke away in the ﬁrst place. (Button and Lee, 1987, p. 3)

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On the other hand, Holtgraves’s view (2002, pp. 119–20) is that the conversation analytic approach is not necessarily incompatible with more traditional, experimental methodologies. This can be seen in Heritage and Greatbatch’s study (1986), referred to earlier, where a quantitative analysis of the feature examined is provided (also see Thomason and Hopper, 1992). In this sense, Roger and Bull’s synthesis of how CA and social psychology may beneﬁt from each other may be applicable to CA and some work within sociopragmatics: conversation analysis could beneﬁt from the rigours of quantiﬁcation and inferential statistics to avoid the risks of generalising too much from single examples, while psychologists could beneﬁt from the rigours of close textual analysis in reﬁning the sensitivity of their classiﬁcation systems. (Roger and Bull, 1989, p. 7) However, there are areas that are more clearly incompatible given that the two disciplines represent different paradigms with different aims and assumptions. One of these areas is the use of experimental data, which conversation analysts reject (see section 3.3), and another area concerns differences in the levels of analysis CA and sociopragmaticists offer (that is, the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ questions). Concerning the latter, it may indeed be feasible for pragmatists to incorporate, into their analyses of discourse, features of talk described within CA and to examine the why of the patterns observed, of which participants may not show any awareness during the actual interaction. However, owing to the type of assumptions about social reality and agency underlying the conversation analytic approach, an examination of the motivations of verbal behaviour, such as face considerations, cannot easily ﬁt within a CA perspective. As Markee explains, CA is profoundly agnostic about the value of explanations that are derived from etic theories of social actions because these explanations are not grounded in members’ constructions of their own naturally occurring behaviors. (Markee, 2000, p. 28) In this sense, convergence seems unlikely and, as Hopper (1989) suggests, researchers need to take sides. The view within sociopragmatics, however, would be that strict reliance on the text alone can result in an impoverished or limited description of verbal interaction (Haslett, 1987)

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and, by implication, of social actors (Hammersley, 2003). In this respect, criticism of CA’s treatment of language in social interaction would be similar to the criticism which ethnomethodology and, by default, CA has received within sociology; namely, that ethnomethodology ‘places sociological analysis too narrowly within the microcontexts of everyday social interaction’ (Swingewood, 1999, p. 63) (our emphasis).27 As Hammersley (2003) remarks, although CA has shown that focusing on how the social world is ‘constituted’ or ‘constructed’ through our actions can be ‘illuminating’, there is more to social life than conversation analysts can tell. For sociopragmaticists, the inﬂuence of culture in social interaction, for example, is something that cannot be underestimated or overlooked. On the other hand, it is also clear that (Hispanic) pragmaticists could beneﬁt from exploring ‘naturally occurring’ data more widely, treating context more dynamically and paying closer attention to what participants’ talk displays about what they attend to during interaction.

3.5 Work by Hispanists incorporating CA analytical concepts Some aspects of CA analytical framework methodology, in particular the use of detailed transcripts of audio/video recordings of interactions, as well as some basic analytic concepts (for example, adjacency pairs) and terminology, as in, análisis de la conversación, alternancia de turnos have become of widespread use among Hispanists. However, for a good part of the work available within Hispanic sociopragmatics, CA’s inﬂuence does not go much further than the adoption of some aspects of data collection/transcription (3.2) and some basic concepts (3.3).28 Compared to the area of speech acts (Chapter 2) and politeness phenomena (Chapter 4), the body of work with concerns more akin to the conversation analytic approach has experienced a slower growth. This growth can be subsumed under ﬁve main headings: the organization of turntaking, the overall organization of conversation, the organization of laughter, preference organization, and topic organization. Turn-taking is the area that has received, until now, most attention. However, as remarked in 3.0, it is important to point out that the majority of the studies to be considered in the following sections cannot be classiﬁed as ethnomethodological, but rather as sociopragmatic. Their aim is to provide an interpretation of the structures that they describe in relation to sociocultural factors. In addition, a number of these studies depart from the characteristic CA approach of examining ‘natural’ data, opting

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for elicited data instead so that relationships between linguistic activities and sociocultural factors may be more clearly established. 3.5.1 Turn-taking In this section, we focus mainly on studies where aspects of turn-taking (for instance, the occurrence of overlapping speech and interruptions, listener activity and turn-taking systems) are examined as features of the communicative style of a particular Spanish-speaking group. The majority of these are contrastive studies, where Swedish, Danish or English interactions serve as a point of contrast. There are also a few studies where interactions in two varieties of Spanish are analysed contrastively. The latter, however, are regarded here as instances of what we call ‘sociopragmatic’ variation across varieties of Spanish (5.2) and are presented in Chapter 5 (see 5.3). We start our overview with empirical studies carried out in Scandinavia, followed by studies carried out in Spain, Mexico and Chile. Our overview also includes some works that deal with those theoretical aspects of turn-taking that we think are relevant to sociopragmatic studies.29 In Scandinavia, there is a considerable body of contrastive research, developed in the late 1980s and the 1990s, in the area of business negotiation discourse with the aim of identifying the communicative style of Spaniards, Mexicans, Swedes and Danes (Fant 1989, 1992b, 1995, 1996; Bravo 1993, 1996; 1998a; Grindsted 1995). It is based on comparable videotaped simulations, conducted as part of a professionally managed course on business negotiation in Mexico, Spain, Denmark and Sweden; thus, the interactions were not elicited for research purposes. Fant (1989) is the ﬁrst scholar who explored aspects of turn-taking in Peninsular Spanish in contrast with Swedish. Drawing on intercultural communication and national mentalities (Samovar and Porter, 1976; Hofstede, 1984), Fant posited a number of sociopsychological dimensions underlying perceived differences between Spanish and Swedish (communicative) styles of negotiation; these he illustrates through the analysis of turn-taking, back-channelling devices, and initiative/ response patterns. With respect to turn-taking, Fant found that Sacks et al.’s (1974) turn-taking system (see 3.3.2) ﬁts well with Swedish conversations but not with Spanish ones. In the latter, the rule ‘current speaker elects next speaker’ does not seem to work; rather, the ﬂoor seems to be open to anyone who signals interest in taking part in the conversation. Fant also observed that in Spanish interactions, turn exchange proceeds in an irregular way (that is, through interruptions),

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unlike in Swedish interactions, where interruptions are less frequent. Fant associated the occurrence of this phenomenon with Spaniards’ tendency towards ‘self-afﬁrmation’ (cf. Thurén, 1988) (see 4.2.3.1). In relation to back-channelling, Fant examined (non)verbal behaviour and observed that, unlike Swedes, Spaniards use gaze abundantly and fewer verbal devices to display attention to the speaker (see also Fant, 1995). Finally, Fant examined the distribution of initiatives and responses in conversation. Initiatives are turns that do not link up with any preceding turn whereas responses are turns that do not take the dialogue further. Responses can be ‘self-linked’ (addressed to the speaker’s own preceding turn) or ‘other-linked’ (addressed to the interlocutor’s preceding turn). Fant noted that Spaniards produce a much higher number of self-linked responses than Swedes. He also found that abortive initiatives in Spanish conversations are a great deal more frequent than in Swedish ones. Based on the observed differences in conversational style, Fant made some predictions about problems that may arise in intercultural encounters between Spaniards and Swedes. For instance, interruptions carried out by Spaniards may be interpreted by Swedes as a sign of aggression, and self-linking as a manifestation of egocentrism. In a later study, Fant (1992b) examined features of the communicative style of Spaniards and Swedes focusing on their use of verbal and non-verbal signals for turn-taking and for giving feedback in conversation. He noted once more that, compared with Swedish interactions, there are more occurrences of overlapping speech, as well as fewer periods of silence within and between turns. Additionally, his ﬁndings suggest that, while in Swedish interactions, turns are not seized but yielded through a combination of gaze and intonation, there are more turn-grabbing phenomena in Spanish interactions. As for gaze, when the ‘new speaker’ takes over from the ﬁrst speaker, Fant observed that while in Swedish interactions, the speaker averts his/her gaze, in Spanish interactions, eye-contact is not avoided. Fant related the differences encountered to a preference for ‘conversational distance’ by Swedes and ‘conversational immediacy’ by Spaniards, with the use of overlap indicating immediacy, and the use of silence, distance. Grindsted (1995) examined turn-taking patterns in PnS vis-à-vis Danish. The author found that whereas Danish negotiators clearly display a preference for dyadic interactions where one participant from each negotiating party alternates in turn-taking, Spaniards exhibit a less marked preference for such sequences, with polyadic sequencing (that is, two members of one party interacting with one of the other party) being a common phenomenon. In relation to this, Grindsted observed

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that, while Danish participants appear to establish from the start a clearcut role distribution that results in dyadic participation and linear progression in the negotiation, Spaniards appear to be unwilling to have such a distribution, but rather all seem to want to ‘join the game on equal terms’ and take a ‘central position’ in the interaction space (1995, p. 215). The result is that Spaniards, according to Grindsted, seem to move in circles rather than linearly. Like Fant (1992b), Grindsted related these and other of her ﬁndings to a preference for ‘immediacy’ over ‘distance’ on the part of Spaniards where the shift from a dyadic turn-taking pattern to a polyadic one ‘marks a shift from “regulated” speech to “spontaneous” speech’. Grindsted interpreted this as a sign of ‘increased immediacy’ (1995: p. 207). Also in the area of business negotiation, Kjaerbeck (1998) examined negotiation strategies in Mexican Spanish and Danish, based on comparable, but different simulations that were also part of a training course for professional negotiators in Mexico and Denmark. Kjaerbeck found that two turn-taking formats are employed in the negotiations she examined: one as proposed by Sacks et al. (1974) (3.3.2), and the other, along the lines of turn-taking in story-telling (Sacks, 1995 [1992]), where ‘normal’ turn-taking behaviour is suspended and where the speaker has the right and obligation to continue until he/she has completed his/her speech. The latter format can be observed in relation to what Kjaerbeck refers to as the ‘larger argumentational project’ (1998, p. 349) in business negotiations. According to the author, argumentational discourse units, which are made up of turns that comprise ‘a series of syntactically complete turn units’ (p. 349) are projected through various mechanisms that include the use of ‘prefaces’, as in (17): (17) (MS) A: hm m (clearing his throat) (.) sí claro me permiten que yo intervenga (0.8) e: e en apoyo aquí de mi compañero (1.1) creo que este producto ... (p. 349) By means of a preface, as in this example, the speaker gets the ﬂoor for himself/herself and projects a larger discourse unit, suspending the TRP (3.3.2) and other possible TRPs until the speaker has concluded his/her part. According to Kjaerbeck, discourse units can also be projected by other devices, such as ‘metalinguistic brackets’, or formulations that represent talk about what the parties are doing with their talk (Garﬁnkel and Sacks, 1970), such as yo te quisiera comen tar . . . (Kjaerbeck, 1998, p. 351), and attention-getting devices such as mira . . . (p. 352). The author found that both Mexicans and Danes use similar discourse unit

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projection devices. However, one difference she identiﬁed is that Mexicans, unlike Danes, do not produce response tokens after prefaces; in other words, Mexican speakers do not expect a display of acceptance from their interlocutor in order to continue with their turn. Finally, Kjaerbeck looked at the discourse unit components that follow discourse unit projection devices. The author found that, while discourse units in Danish negotiations consist of the statement of the speaker’s ‘position’ or viewpoint on a particular matter, followed by an ‘account’ or explanation which also projects the completion of the discourse unit, in Mexican negotiations, there is often a third element (‘consequence’ or effects of the speech produced), which projects the completion of the discourse unit. Based on Kjaerbeck’s ﬁndings, one might speculate that, in intercultural interaction between Mexicans and Danes, turnexchange may be problematic if Danes take Mexican ‘accounts’ as the ﬁnal component of a discourse unit; that is, overlapping speech may occur. Additionally, in terms of communicative style, Mexicans may be perceived by Danes as being too ‘verbose’ in that they seem to produce longer discourse units; they may also be perceived as imposing in that, when Mexicans project the discourse unit with a preface, they do not wait for approval from their interlocutors to proceed with their turn. In this respect, a parallel may be established with the less frequent use of verbal backchannel devices in business negotiations of Spaniards, compared with Swedes, as described by Fant (1989) above. With reference to Spain, there is also a considerable body of research on turn-taking based on different types of conversational data, including monolingual, cross-linguistic, intercultural and bilingual data in a variety of contexts. Studies based on monolingual data (PnS) focus on the turn-taking system of particular communicative activities (Gurruchaga, 1981) and on overlapping talk and (un)smooth speaker exchange, as in the work of Bengoechea Bartolomé (1993) and Bañón Hernández (1997) (see also Gurruchaga, 1981). Cross-linguistic/ contrastive studies include the work of Bou Franch and Gregori Signes (1999) on listeners’ activities that support speakers’ talk in BE and PnS conversation, and García Gómez (2000) on the turn-taking system in talk shows in Spain and Great Britain. Within intercultural studies, we consider Raga Gimeno and Sánchez López’s (1999) examination of silence in the exchange of turns in interactions between Chinese and Spanish participants. Finally, we include here Moyer’s (1998) work on turn-taking in bilingual interactions in Gibraltar, where she looks at the choice of language (that is, Spanish or English), at the level of the turn, segment of turns and overall conversation.30 Within Spanish pragmatics, Gurruchaga’s (1981) examination of the

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turn-taking system of a Spanish radio programme (Discusión abierta) constitutes the ﬁrst study in the area. Its aim was to explore the applicability of Sacks et al.’s (1974) turn-taking system for conversation (3.3.2) to a different communicative activity: a discussion programme in which the presenter and eight other participants debate a particular topic. In line with Sacks et al.’s (1974) prediction that different turn-taking systems are involved in other ‘speech-exchange systems’, such as meetings, interviews or debates (p. 701), Gurruchaga found some important deviations from Sacks et al.’s model. She found that, while the radio discussion started under rule 1a (3.3.2), since the ﬁrst speaker (the presenter) selected the next speaker who took up his turn, the second speaker did not select a next speaker and the ﬁrst speaker regained control of the ﬂoor. This pattern, which recurred several times in the ﬁrst half of the discussion, is explained by Gurruchaga in relation to a consideration of the role and status of the participants. As the presenter of the programme, the ﬁrst speaker is entitled to direct the discussion, allocating turns and getting the ﬂoor back if s/he so wishes; other participants display to attend to the speaker’s role as presenter by not self-selecting or allocating the role to a different person: (18a) (PnS) Presenter: Vamos a ver, entonces, perdón, se enfrenta ahora la posibilidad de que el deporte reste de tal manera dedicación a lo demás que pueda anular estas posibilidades. Lino, ¿crees en ello, sí o no? Lino: Pues no, no creo // en eso. Presenter: No//Eem ¿Benedicto? Benedicto: Yo tampoco creo // en ello de ninguna manera. (p. 209) Gurruchaga, however, found that, while in the ﬁrst half of the discussion participants adhered to the pattern just described, one of the participants in the second half did not do so, giving rise to a conﬂictive situation. The participant involved was a woman, Rosa, who refused to provide a direct answer to the presenter’s yes/no question above: (18b) Presenter: Bueno, ha sido el ponente de esta discusión. ¿Rosa? Rosa: Yo creo que estáis sacando las cosas de quicio, porque es que // Presenter: NO, SÍ O NO. PERDÓN, Rosita. (p. 210)

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As the example shows, the presenter interrupts the woman and attempts to get her to provide a speciﬁc yes or no answer, thus exerting control over the development of the discussion. The conﬂict continues for a few more turns, giving rise to participants’ self-selection and interruptions. This rather problematic second half of the interaction is explained by Gurruchaga as being the result of a clash of norms: while the presenter and the other participants follow closely the radio discussion turntaking norms, Rosa, the female participant seems to follow the rules operating in conversation; that is, she expects to be allowed to ﬁnish her turn since that is one of her basic rights. Additionally, Gurruchaga attributes the conﬂict to matters of status. According to her, the more status one possesses the less the risk of being interrupted and women, who in her view tend to have an inferior status, appear to be interrupted more. Bengoechea Bartolomé (1993) also addressed the examination of turntaking in relation to gender, coming to a different interpretation of interruptions within the context she examined. The author looked at this phenomenon in interactions between women in managing positions and their subordinates (both men and women) in Spain, taking Zimmerman and West’s (1975) study of interruptions in female–male interactions as a point of departure. According to these authors, men tend to hold the ﬂoor longer, interrupt more often, and are less willing to give up the ﬂoor. This is interpreted as a sign of dominance whereas women’s communicative style is identiﬁed with weakness and powerlessness. Bengoechea Bartolomé attempted to determine whether it is right to associate interruptions with dominance. In the ﬁrst place, the author found that, contrary to Sacks et al.’s (1974) claim that speaker exchange occurs with very little or no overlap (see 3.3.2), there is overlap in the interactions she examined, particularly in those among women. It is common for the women in her study to ‘insert’ comments in other women’s turns and accept the insertion of other women’s comments in their own turns, and without the women feeling offended. As such, in line with Tannen’s (1991) proposal, Bengoechea Bartolomé suggested that interruptions should not necessarily be regarded as ‘violent’ acts but that they can constitute ‘cooperative’ acts depending on the context of their occurrence (see also Cameron, 1997, 2001, in 3.3.2). Bengoechea Bartolomé’s ﬁndings appear to lend support to Fant’s (1992b, 1995) studies, considered above, which report that the phenomenon of overlapping speech and interruptions is more common in Spanish than in Swedish interactions. Bañón Hernández (1997) offered a characterization of interruptions

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mainly based on the examination of this phenomenon in radio and television programmes in Spain. His study, however, is not aimed at describing Spaniards’ patterns of interruption as such, but rather at providing a detailed description of types of interruptions (for example, ‘exogeneous’ v. ‘endogenous’ interruptions, depending on whether the originator of the interruption is external to the conversational interruption or not; ‘macrointerruption’ v. ‘microinterruption’, depending on whether the entire interaction, or a turn within the interaction, is affected; ‘irruptions’ v. ‘disruptions’, when someone unexpectedly takes part in an interaction or interrupts to depart from it; interruptions with and without overlap; interruptions to other participants v. selfinterruptions). At the same time, he provided an analysis of the processes involved in the identiﬁcation of interruptions, in their realization and in the responses interruptions generate. Thus, the study constitutes a de rigueur reference for scholars interested in the phenomenon of unsmooth speaker exchange in Spanish.31 Of particular interest for sociopragmatics is Bañón Hernández’s consideration of the relationship between interruptions and politeness. If seen as violations of Sacks et al.’s (1974) turn-taking model (3.3.1), interruptions can be considered to be expressions of impoliteness (Brown and Levinson, 1987) or bad manners. For Bañón Hernández, nevertheless, whether an interruption is polite or impolite depends on a range of factors, the form the interruption takes being one of the most crucial. According to Bañón Hernández, interruptions can be mitigated and there are two basic types of mitigating devices that are employed in the contexts he examined: ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’. The former include, for example, instances where the speaker shows awareness that he/she is going to interrupt, as in example (19) below, and the latter, time expressions such as un momento, and un segundo, as in example (20): (19) (PnS) Schwarz: [Por cierto, voy] a interrumpir . . . (p. 43, our emphasis) (20) Ruiz:

[Dejen], déjenme [un segundo, por favor] (p. 43, our emphasis)

According to Bañón Hernández, interruptions with mitigators are less impolite than those without them. The author also notes, however, that it is important where the mitigator is placed; in other words, an inter-

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ruption is more polite if the mitigator is placed in turn-initial position. Equally important is the number of mitigators employed as the more mitigators used, the ‘softer’ the interruption. Other factors Bañón Hernández suggests need to be taken into account in determining the degree of (im)politeness of interruptions and whether they can be categorized as essentially ‘soft’ (suaves) or essentially ‘abrupt’ interruptions include the following: • Whether the interruption occurs with overlap or not; for example, interruptions produced during a speaker’s pause are less impolite than those with turn overlap • Whether it constitutes a transgression of the norms of a particular discursive genre • Whether the speaker has explicitly requested not to be interrupted • Who the producer and addressee of the interruption are; for example, interruptions are more polite if they are produced by a speaker with a certain ‘contextual’ power, as is the case of the moderator in a chaired discussion, or more impolite if they are addressed to such a speaker • What the purpose of the interruption is; for example, interruptions are less impolite if they are done to ensure an equal distribution of turns • Whether it is the case of successive or single interruptions (the former can be regarded as more impolite than the latter) • The length of a speaker’s turn; for example, an interruption is less impolite if the interruptee has already used much of his/her speaking time. With respect to listeners’ activities, building on Schegloff (1982) and Oreström (1983), Bou Franch and Gregori Signes (1999) provided a contrastive study of listeners’ turns (Fant’s [1989, 1992b] examination of backchannelling communication) that contribute to reinforcing the roles of speaker and hearer in an interaction, and that are employed to show (lack of ) interest in, understanding of, or agreement with the current speaker’s contribution. The study is based on three (elicited) dyadic conversations between male and female participants within the 19–24 age group: one between two native speakers of (British) English, another between two native speakers of PnS, and a third between a native speaker of PnS interacting in English (L2) with a native speaker of English (L1). Bou Franch and Gregori Signes identiﬁed both cross-linguistic as well as gender-based differences in the use of listeners’ responses.

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Cross-linguistically, the participants in the English conversation were found to employ a considerably higher number of listener responses as compared to the Spanish participants. The authors noted, however, that non-verbal responses, which were not the focus of their study, appeared to be used more in the Spanish as compared to the English conversation. This would correspond to Fant’s (1989; 1995) ﬁndings, reported above, in relation to the more frequent use of gaze by Spaniards, compared to Swedes, in business negotiation discourse. As to the form of listener responses, while the colloquial ‘yeah’ is the most common form in English, and sí, is the most common in Spanish, Bou Franch and Gregori Signes report that non-verbalized forms such as ‘mm’ and ‘mhm’ are less frequent in the Spanish corpus. On the other hand, the authors found that repetitions of the preceding turn were more common in the Spanish data. As far as gender-related differences are concerned, in the interaction between native speakers of English, the male participant was found to make use of a larger and wider range of listener responses, with ‘yeah’ being the most common. By contrast, in the interaction between native speakers of Spanish, the female participant produced the highest number of listener responses, showing a clear preference for sí. With respect to the interaction between a native speaker and a non-native speaker of English, Bou Franch and Gregori Signes observed that both participants make a higher use of listener responses compared to the interactions between native speakers of the two languages. They attribute this to el mayor esfuerzo comunicativo y la necesidad de negociar el signiﬁcado de forma más consciente y explícita que en conversaciones entre nativos conduce a ambos interlocutores a un uso mayor de emisiones, para marcar acuerdo y animar a proseguir. (Bou Franch and Gregori Signes, 1999, p. 132) Finally, on considering the implications of their study for intercultural communication, Bou Franch and Gregori Signes suggested possible areas of ‘pragmatic failure’ (Thomas, 1983) in interactions between native speakers of Spanish and English. In such areas, the former, for example, might produce only a limited number of verbal listener responses, thus running the risk of projecting an image that is ‘excesivamente pasiva, poco participativa o desinteresada’ (Bou Franch and Gregori Signes, 1999, p. 132). On the other hand, Bou Franch and Gregori Signes’s ﬁndings relating to the interaction between the native and non-native speaker of English would suggest that in intercultural interaction par-

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ticipants do not necessarily employ their ‘standard’ linguistic patterns, but create new patterns even when interacting in their own language. In other words, results of this type would point to the limitations of cross-cultural research in the study of intercultural communication (see also Häggkvist and Fant, 2000, in 3.5.2). A contrastive study on turn-taking in talk shows, based on four extracts, is offered by García Gómez (2000). Amongst other features, García Gómez analysed the number and nature of turns produced by hosts and guests and the speaker selection techniques employed, as these reﬂect ‘institutional’ or ‘conversational’ talk. The author found that both British and Spanish hosts participate more often than anyone else, thus having more chances to guide the interaction and to control speaker exchange. García Gómez interpreted this turn-taking system as a manifestation of the institutional character of the interaction. The author also identiﬁed an elicitation–response sequence at the beginning of the programme and each time a new guest was introduced. Thus, the study shows that participants orient to the institutional character of the activity through this sequence, by restricting themselves to producing questions (as hosts) and answers (as guests). García Gómez, however, identiﬁed, in addition, elements in the interaction where participants display an orientation to the conversational character of the encounter, where they are freer to interact and where other rules apply: overlap and interruptions are common in these sections; guests are also found to self-select to initiate a new course of action and to have access to different types of activities such as questioning and commenting, in addition to responding. Building on Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) three-part exchange (inform, elicit and direct) 32 García Gómez described the turn design in these sections as also consisting of a three-part exchange: questioning, responding and commenting, as in the following example: (21) (PnS) Initiating move: Elicitation A: ¿El poder no crea adicción? Responding move: Challenge B: No. Follow up move A: Ay, ¡por favor! (p. 109) Of interest to sociopragmatics is the fact that García Gómez showed that behaviour of similar characteristics, rather than of differences, can be

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found cross-linguistically, while variation in communicative behaviour can occur within the same speech activity and that this derives from the roles participants play and the part of the activity they are involved in. We can speculate that this may be a result of marketing and globalization processes which bring about the ‘standarization’ of (media) discourses. A study of turn-taking in intercultural interactions, based on video recordings of (elicited) informal conversations between Chinese learners of Spanish and Spanish participants, is found in Raga Gimeno and Sánchez López (1999). More speciﬁcally, the authors focused on problems that arise in the interactions examined when, on the part of the Chinese participants, silences occur at TRPs (3.3.2), and on the type of compensatory mechanisms participants (fail to) employ in such situations. For the authors, Spaniards are not used to such silences and are, therefore, likely to interpret them as a lack of comprehension, needing a reinstatement of their contributions in some way or another. Problems of this type, according to Raga Gimeno and Sánchez López, can lead to ‘minorization’ or negative stereotyping (Py and Jeanneret, 1989). Raga Gimeno and Sánchez López’s (1999) examined interactions between Spaniards, and Chinese participants with different levels of proﬁciency in Spanish, ﬁnding that different types of communication problem arose in each case. One example they provide is of an interaction with a Chinese participant at beginner’s level, who had been in Spain just under a year. When the Spanish participant asked his interlocutor where he was from (¿De qué país eres?) (p. 1352), a two-second silence after his question occurred which the Spanish participant interpreted as a lack of comprehension. This led him to rephrase his question as ¿De qué país vienes?; however, his question overlapped with the beginning of the Chinese participant’s reply. A two-second silence occurred once more and the Spanish participant again rephrased his question. The authors report on the occurrence of a similar sequence when the Spanish participant asked a question on a different topic. According to the authors, one of the problems in this interaction was that the Chinese participant did not use the compensatory mechanisms that Spaniards would employ when producing delayed replies. Such mechanisms would include, for example, looking away or producing unarticulated sounds, which would hint that a reply was on its way. In interactions with Chinese participants with an (upper) intermediate level of Spanish, Raga Gimeno and Sánchez López (1999) found that silences between turns were shorter but still longer than those produced by the Spanish participant. The authors noted that the Chinese par-

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ticipants at this level did produce certain unarticulated sounds, such as eee, or mmm, to signal they were taking the ﬂoor, and that they looked away when there was an excessive delay in their production of the turn. However, the authors also noted that, when looking away, one of the Chinese participants, unlike his/her Spanish counterpart, looked high above his/her interlocutor’s head. Additionally, they found that one of the Chinese participants employed a mechanism not encountered in the repertoire of the Spanish participants, namely, ‘la enunciación de un tópico no conﬁgurado sintácticamente’ (Raga Gimeno and Sánchez López, 1999, p. 1354), such as Valencia, Valencia . . . el clima de Valencia me encanta, in response to a question on the weather in Valencia. Finally, Raga Gimeno and Sánchez López observed that, when the Spanish participant attempted to take the ﬂoor, which had been allocated to the Chinese participant, the latter employed excessive compensatory strategies that gave the impression that the speaker was trying to impose himself/herself, and verging on the impolite. These mechanisms included speaking louder, repeating certain expressions, not looking away and also employing certain hand gestures (‘gestos directivos explícitos’) (p. 1354). The authors explain that the Chinese participants in their study appear not to be used to employing these mechanisms, at least in the situation examined. Finally, a study focusing on bilingual interactions is that of Moyer (1998). Building on the work of Auer (1995) on the sequential organization of code-switching, Moyer (1998) examined bilingual conversational activities in Gibraltar. With examples taken from a range of bilingual interactions, Moyer describes language choices at three levels of conversational organization: at the level of the entire conversation, at the intermediate level within the same conversation where a language may be chosen for a limited number of turns, and at the lowest level, within a turn or turn-constructional unit. She explains conversationalists’ language choice in relation to a number of factors, including alignment with a given group. According to Moyer (1998, p. 228), the selection of Spanish, after a general agreement has been reached by the participants to communicate mainly in Spanish, ‘reproduces one of the styles frequently used with family and friends’. Selecting Spanish as the main language would be a type of strategy employed to achieve closeness since, as Moyer (p. 228), says, it ‘sets the tone and opens the door to more intimate topics of conversation and to more friendly interpersonal relations’. The choice of language at the highest level, that is at the level of the entire conversation, however, may be determined by external factors, such as the institutional context (for example,

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English is employed as the medium of instruction in a classroom context). Outside Scandinavia and Spain, it is important to mention the work of Cordella and Forbes (1998) on turn-taking in Chilean Spanish and Musselman Shank’s work (2002a; 2002b) on turn-taking in Mexican Spanish.33 Cordella and Forbes (1998) examined turn-taking in argumentative discourse in Chilean Spanish as part of a larger study on the inﬂuence of gender on the dynamics of argumentative discourse. The study is based on recordings of elicited group discussions by university students in Santiago. Three groups were set up; one comprising three males and one female, another three females and one male, and a third comprising two males and two females. One of the aspects Cordella and Forbes examined is turn length, employing the label ‘short’ for turns consisting of one short utterance and ‘long’ for those consisting of two or more utterances. On average, males were found to produce a higher number of ‘long’ turns than females, and females, a higher number of ‘short’ turns. Another aspect Cordella and Forbes analysed is utterance abortion; that is, cases where ‘a speaker terminates his/her turn after a second participant has tried to take the ﬂoor’ (1998, p. 52). They found that, on average, females tend to abort more utterances than males, providing males with more opportunities to hold the ﬂoor. However, they also highlighted some variation with respect to the composition of the group. They suggested that in groups with balanced gender ratios in particular males have an advantage over women. Based on a corpus of everyday conversations taken from particular social networks in Mexico city, Musselman Shank (2002a) examined the function of turns aimed at providing feedback to the speaker. She refers to these as ‘pseudo feedback turns’ (pseudo turnos de realimentación) (see Bou Franch and Gregori Signes’s (1999) study on listener responses above). With reference to Grice’s Cooperative Principle (see 4.1.1), and drawing on Goffman’s (1981) notions of ‘participation status’ and ‘frame’, Musselman Shank proposed a ﬁfth maxim – the Participation Maxim (Máxima de Participación) – to explain the occurrence of these turns. According to this maxim, conversationalists should say at least something and allow others to say at least something.34 In Musselman Shank’s view, if people follow the Cooperative Principle in conversation, then it is necessary that they contribute to the construction of the conversation, which would be a monologue without their joint participation. The Participation Maxim would, then, have priority over other maxims, such as the Quantity Maxim. Finally, Musselman Shank con-

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sidered certain discourse markers (for instance, claro and um jum) and paralinguistic markers (for example, laughter) employed to realize feedback turns in Mexican Spanish. Musselman Shank (2002b) discussed strategies employed to achieve a ‘duet’ or a ‘duel’ in conversation; that is, to participate ‘collaboratively’ or ‘competitively’ in conversational interaction. Musselman Shank employs the notion of collaborative participation to refer to the shared use of the ﬂoor in the joint construction of turns (Edelsky, 1993 [1981]; Lerner, 1996) whereas competitive participation is based on the sole use of the ﬂoor where only one interactant speaks.35 Musselman Shank, nonetheless, pointed out that both types of participation can have shades of the other and, cannot therefore, be regarded as opposite poles but rather as a continuum, from the most collaborative to the most competitive. According to Musselman Shank, every contribution can have more or fewer competitive or collaborative elements that are motivated by the Participation Maxim (see Musselman Shank 2002a above), and collaboration and competition should be regarded as an expression of participants’ wish to take part in conversation. 3.5.2 The overall organization of conversation Studies by Hispanists within this area are more limited in number and include the analysis of openings and/or closings of domestic calls in Ecuadorian Spanish (Placencia 1992, 1997a), in contrast to British English (1992) and PnS (1994) (see 5.2), and PnS on its own (Ávila Muñoz, 1998); closings in answering machine messages, also in domestic contexts in PnS and BE (Valeiras Viso, 2002); openings of informal discussions or debates in PnS, Swedish and in intercultural interactions between Swedes and Spaniards interacting in Spanish (Häggkvist and Fant, 2000); and openings and closings of service encounter interactions in the context of purchasing clothes and accessories in Montevideo and Quito (Márquez Reiter and Placencia, 2004) (section 5.2). Except for those that deal with two varieties of Spanish, which we discussed in Chapter 5, we consider these works in the same order as listed above. Within the framework of analysis proposed in Placencia (1991),36 Placencia (1992) described openings of ‘mediated’ telephone conversations in ES, in contrast with BE and attempted to provide an explanation for the behaviour observed in relation to face considerations (Goffman, 1967; Brown and Levinson, 1987). The author deﬁned mediated telephone conversations as those where participants are not aware of each other’s social or occupational identity. In this type of conversation, Placencia found that the linguistic choices participants make in

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both sociocultural contexts for the realization of different telephone management requests (for example, requesting to speak to the intended answerer) reﬂect an orientation towards negative politeness (see 4.1.4), with participants using strategies aimed at avoiding, minimising, acknowledging or compensating for the imposition these requests appear to involve. For instance, (conventional) indirectness as in the following examples was found in both languages: (22) (ES) ¿Estará Ana por favor? (p. 80) (23) (BE) Could I speak to Ann please? (p. 80) Placencia, however, found that there are some differences: Ecuadorians, for example, convey deference through the choice of particular politeness formulae, as in (24) below, and/or formal forms of address, also as in (24): (24) (ES) Tenga la bondad, ¿podría hablar con el ingeniero Valencia? (p. 81) Additionally, Ecuadorians were found to make use of ‘concealed’ commands (that is, of assertions of the course of action the hearer ought to take) as in (25) below, where the use of a formal address form (ingeniero Valencia) appears to compensate for the directness of the request. (25) (ES) Me comunica con el ingeniero Valencia. (p. 80) Concealed commands were not found in the English data where consideration to the hearer appeared to be emphasized through the use of (conventional) indirectness. The expression of deference, on the other hand, is a negative politeness strategy, in Brown and Levinson’s terms, that was not found in the English conversations. Placencia (1997a) described the procedures speakers of Ecuadorian Spanish (Quito) employ to close telephone conversations in contrast with those that have been described for American English (Schegloff and Sacks, 1974 [1973]), illustrating a number of similarities and differences. The study is based on 73 conversations among family, friends and acquaintances. Placencia found that, although many of the procedures employed are similar, there are differences concerning participants’ choice of linguistic realization and/or move. For instance,

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warrants (that is pre-closing devices that announce and conﬁrm the participants’ desire to ﬁnish the interaction (see 3.3.3)) are often duplicated and reinstated in Ecuadorian Spanish, as in ya ya okay, a phenomenon that has not been reported for American English. Additionally, Placencia noted that the closing function of warrants and other utterances employed for closings is carried out indirectly, through the use of expressions of agreement. In this respect, the author suggested that explanations for the use of such forms, a phenomenon conversation analysts overlook in their analyses, can be found in relation to considerations of face and politeness (Goffman, 1967; Brown and Levinson 1987). Closing an interaction can be a face-threatening act given that, as Placencia (1997a, p. 60) observes, the end of the relationship might also be brought about if participants are not tactful. Thus, participants need to seek mutual agreement to close, employing warrants of the ‘okay’ type. Placencia considered variation in the choice of move or linguistic realization in relation to characteristics of the participants (age, social distance), the type of conversation they are engaged in (predominantly phatic v. predominantly instrumental conversations) and the frequency with which participants interact. For instance, lengthy closings, as in (22) below, between two neighbours, where the caller starts the closing section re-stating the reason for the call, were found to be more frequent among older than among younger interactants (that is, interactants between 41 and 60 years of age in the ﬁrst case, and 20 and 40 in the second), irrespective of the frequency with which they interact:37 (26) (ES) Caller: vaya vaya yo quise eh ser una de las primeras en llamarle/ Marianita y/ desearle un feliz día Answerer: /gracias/gracias Inesita Caller: Albertito Answerer: gracias muy amable pues le agradezco por su atención Caller: que pase muy bien no Answerer: gracias Caller: un ratito nos hemos de ver Answerer: gracias Inesita gusto de saludarle no Caller: para mí Answerer: que pase buenita Caller: hasta luego Answerer: hasta luego salude a todos Caller: gracias (pp. 68–9)

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Ávila Muñoz (1998) looked at the structure of openings and closings in PnS (Málaga) based on a corpus of twenty naturally occurring domestic conversations taken from corpus oral de la Universidad de Málaga – Proyecto de Investigación de las Variedades Vernáculas Andaluzas. The author described some basic patterns of openings, depending on whether the participants know each other, noting ﬁrst that responses to the ringing of the telephone (Schegloff’s (1972) ‘summons’, see section 3.3.3) are realized by utterances, such as diga, ¿sí?. By means of these utterances the person answering the phone displays his/her availability to engage in the conversation. This would be in line with Schegloff’s (1972) observations for telephone conversations in American English (see section 3.3.3). For participants who know each other, the basic pattern Ávila Muñoz (1998) described would be as follows: (27) (PnS) (ringing of the telephone) Answerer: ¿dígame? Caller: ¿Juan? Answerer: Caller: Answerer: Caller: Answerer: Caller:

sí hola soy Lucas hola Lucas ¿qué pasa? hombre buenos días ¿qué hay? mira . . . ¿tú vas a ir mañana a la oﬁcina?

‘Availability’ ‘Identiﬁcation’ + voice sample ‘Identiﬁcation’ ‘Acceptance’ ‘Preamble’ ‘Preamble’ ‘Topic’ (p. 52)38

Ávila Muñoz also remarked that, in most of the conversations he examined, the person calling wishes (implicitly or explicitly) to be recognized as quickly as possible (p. 55), so he claims that ‘swift identiﬁcation’ (identiﬁcación rápida) is desirable (p. 57). A preference for other-recognition (see Schegloff, 1979 in 3.3.3) seems to be implied in the author’s remarks. As to how swiftly participants will get to the ‘ﬁrst topic’ of the conversation once they have ascertained who they are talking to, depends, for Ávila Muñoz, on the ‘degree of friendship’ between the interactants since preguntas de cortesía may occur prior to the ﬁrst topic. When the participants do not know each other or when there is a ‘momentary lapsus’ (p. 56), there will be what Ávila Muñoz referred to as a petición de conformidad, which would correspond to what Schegloff (1979) calls ‘switchboard requests’ (see 3.3.3), as in the second turn in the following example (in bold):

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(28) (PnS) (ringing of the telephone) Caller: sí dígame. ‘Availability’ Answerer: hola ¿está Mati? ‘Greeting’ + ‘Petición de conformidad’ Caller: Mati sí// ¿quién es? ‘Conformidad efectuada’ + ‘Request for identiﬁcation’ Answerer: soy una amiga. (p. 56) Finally, Ávila Muñoz (1998) brieﬂy considered how participants coordinate the initiation of the closing of telephone conversations through the production of pre-closing devices (Schegloff and Sacks (1974[1973]), in 3.3.3) such as vale, de acuerdo, muy bien, bueno. Like Schegloff and Sacks, Ávila Muñoz (1998) found that such devices offer participants the possibility of introducing a new topic of conversation or proceeding to the closing if the other particpant agrees, as in (29): (29) (PnS) M El otro . . . bien la verdad es que está bien bueno tosiendo y tal pero vaya que no parece que tenga mucho. A Vaya dos ﬁnes de semana ¿eh? M ¡joder! (risas) bueno. A Hasta luego. M Hasta luego. (p. 64) However, according to Ávila Muñoz, the introduction of a new topic at this stage is perceived as unusual. Building on Schegloff and Sacks (1974[1973]) and Clark and French’s (1981) work on closings in telephone conversations, as well as on work carried out on the language of answering machine messages (ÁlvarezCaccamo and Knoblauch, 1992), Valeiras Viso (2002) examined the elements that make up closings in domestic answering machine messages in Spain in contrast with those employed in England. His study is based on a corpus of 70 messages in English and 70 in Spanish, collected from three private answering machines in London and Madrid. The elements Valeiras Viso focused on are pre-closing devices (‘partículas indicativas de cierre’), as in vale, bueno, venga, that signal the speaker’s wish to initiate the closing of the interaction, expressions of good wishes (for example, Espero que estés muy bien), expressions of future contact (for example, Ya hablamos) and farewell expressions (for example, un besito). Regarding

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the ﬁrst, Valeiras Viso found that, unlike telephone conversations, preclosing devices do not necessarily occur in answering machine messages in either Spanish or English, and as such cannot be taken as a deﬁning feature for the initiation of the closing in such messages. When they do occur, one difference between Spanish and English identiﬁed by Valeiras Viso is that, in the former, it is common to ﬁnd two or more of these expressions together (for example, ¿Vale? venga bueno . . .), but this is rare in the London data. Valeiras Viso suggested that this phenomenon might be a reﬂection of Spaniards ﬁnding it difﬁcult to close the message. With respect to expressions of good wishes, Valeiras Viso (2002) observed that these occur more often in English than in Spanish. He also found that expressions of good wishes in English tend to be more formal than in Spanish. As to expressions of future contact which have been identiﬁed for telephone conversations, Valeiras Viso reports that these occur in both data sets. One difference he highlights, however, is that these expressions, which are rather vague (‘speak to you later’; ‘see you later’; ‘ya hablaremos’) (p. 222), are more common in English than in Spanish. Finally, concerning farewells, Valeiras Viso noted that a much wider range of expressions are employed by Spaniards (adiós, hasta luego, un beso muy gordo, un saludo, chau) as compared with the English expressions where ‘bye’ and some of its variants (‘bye-bye’, ‘bye for now’), ‘tata’ and ‘cheers’ are used. The existence of a much wider repertoire of farewell expressions in Spanish would be an indication that Spaniards wish to convey a wider range of degrees of distance/intimacy. Valeiras Viso’s proposal is that overall, the English participants in his study prefer to keep their distance and avoid intrusion while Spaniards focus on their positive image and that of their interlocutors. Moving away from telephone talk, Häggkvist and Fant (2000) examined how informal debates or discussions are opened by Spaniards in contrast with Swedes, and with Spaniards interacting with Swedes in Spanish. This study corresponds to a new body of research that has started to emerge in Scandinavia, based on a more recent corpus of conversational data developed at the University of Stockholm and referred to as the AKSAM corpus (Tipos de actividad y estructura conversacional en hablantes nativos y no nativos del español) (see also Häggkvist, 2002 in 3.5.5, and Gille, 2001). This corpus consists of elicited intra-cultural group discussions in PnS and Swedish, as well as similar discussions in Spanish between Swedish and Spanish participants, with groups controlled in terms of their size and composition. Participants were given

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a controversial topic (for example, genetic engineering) to initiate the discussion, but they were instructed that they could change the topic at any moment, if they so wished. The authors found some similarities in the opening section of the discussion in the three groups (for example, the occurrence of silences and hesitation), but they also found some interesting differences. Openings in the Spanish group, unlike the Swedish group, were found to be shorter with one of the participants always swiftly expressing an opinion, as in (30) below, on the topic of genetic engineering: (30) (PnS) 1 Ismael yo tengo una opinión bastante pasota 2 o sea tampoco es que me lo esté planteando cada día 3 pero hombre – 4 Arturo ya lo poco que hombre yo lo poco que oigo eh 5 o sea yo estoy a favor. 6 hasta claro se puede utilizar para mal 7 pero por lo poco que oigo se utiliza para bien hasta ahora no, (p. 99) They also found that it is common for Spanish participants in monocultural discussions to express opposite views straight away, as in the following example on the death penalty: (31) (PnS) 1 Marcelo vosotros que estáis en favor o en contra? 2 Segundo yo estoy en contra. 3 Hernán pero es una postura totalmente ideologica estúpida no hombre, 4 Marcelo por? (pp. 100–1) In contrast, in the Swedish group, interactants were found to hesitate more and to be slower in offering an opinion, expending a considerable amount of time commenting on how difﬁcult it was to provide an opinion on the speciﬁed topic. Häggkvist and Fant (2000) explain some of the differences they encountered in relation to considerations of face, with Spaniards in their study displaying self-afﬁrmation (Fant, 1989) and at the same time ‘conﬁanza solidaria e igualitaria’ (p. 100) (see also Fant and Grindsted, 1995). For Swedes, on the other hand, the establishment of consensus is reported to be a priority for the maintenance of both

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group and individual face since the person needs to be seen as someone who likes to cooperate (Fant and Grindsted, 1995). In consequence, direct confrontation is avoided. Häggkvist and Fant (2000, p. 110) explain Swedish participants’ (lack of ) readiness to offer an opinion also in relation to how they perceive ‘truth’, with Spaniards regarding truth as something relative and agreed upon whereas, for Swedes, it is something objective and pre-existent that needs to be uncovered. Finally, with respect to the discussions in the intercultural groups, Häggkvist and Fant (2000) found that both Spanish and Swedish participants are reluctant to start and tend to offer each other the ﬂoor. This behaviour would ﬁt in with Swedes’ orientation towards the expression of consensus whereas Häggkvist and Fant suggest that Spaniards’ motivation would be politeness as the participants regard themselves as the ‘hosts’ (Bravo, 1998b) in the interaction examined. Other ‘new’ patterns they found that do not seem to ﬁt in with patterns in the monocultural groups include, for example, the expression of clear opinions by Swedes and an increase in formality in the interaction through comments made on how the topic should be approached. These ﬁndings seem to be in line with Scollon and Scollon’s (1995) prediction referred to by Häggkvist and Fant, that intercultural communication cannot be predicted from the participants’ own sociocultural patterns, but that new patterns of interaction can arise depending on how the participants perceive a particular interaction.39

3.5.3 The organization of laughter To the best of our knowledge, there are, to date, only a few studies by Hispanists in this area. They include Fant (1992b) Bravo (1993, 1996, 1998a), Cestero Mancera (1996) and Grindsted (1997). Below we ﬁrst consider Fant (1992b) and Bravo (1993), who examine laughter in Spanish and Swedish interactions in the context of business negotiation discourse. Bravo’s (1996, 1998a) work, also in the context of business negotiation discourse, is dealt with in Chapter 5, since the author offers a contrastive analysis of laughter in business negotiations by Spanish, Mexican and Swedish participants; that is, it involves an implicit analysis of sociopragmatic variation across varieties of Spanish. Next, we consider Grindsted’s (1997) contrastive study of Spanish and Danish business negotiations, where laughter is examined as part of joking exchanges or sequences. Finally, we look at Cestero Mancera (1996) who analyses laughter through elicited interactions in PnS in relation to three different age groups.

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As will be recalled, Fant (1992b) examined verbal and non-verbal aspects of turn-taking in Swedish and Spanish business negotiations. Among non-verbal aspects of turn-taking, Fant looked at laughter and suggested that one of the differences between Swedes and Spaniards is that the latter ‘laugh more conspicuously and far more often in group than do the Swedes’ (p. 145). He observed that, as a matter of fact, Swedes appear even to discourage laughter. He thus refers to laughter as being ‘group-oriented’ for Spaniards and ‘individualistic’ for Swedes. Bravo (1993) also examined the function of laughter in business negotiations among Spaniards and Swedes (see 3.5.1). She showed that in both cases, laughter is employed as a mitigating tool when divergent opinions (for example, rejections of an offer or of an unfavourable viewpoint) are expressed, threatening the ‘socio-emotional’ balance of the interaction. Through the use of laughter, Spanish negotiators aim at creating an atmosphere of conﬁanza whereas the function of laughter among Swedes is to maintain an apparent consensus of opinion (see also Bravo, 1996). Based on the same corpus of business negotiation data referred to in 3.5.1 (Grindsted, 1995), Grindsted (1997) examined laughter as part of her analysis of joking as a strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations. For Grindsted, laughter constitutes the second pair-part (see adjacency pairs in 3.3.1) of a ‘joking exchange’, where the ﬁrst pair-part – a joke – is produced by the joker, and the second part – laughter – by the listener, as in the following example: (32) (PnS) Sellers: A, B Buyers: C, D Situation: They are talking about the costs of having a big ﬁshing boat. B: ¡Escucha! ¡ Deja que termine! No he terminado, hombre. ¡No te lances que pareces una moto, coño! [Everybody laughs] (p. 169) Joking exchanges can also be part of a ‘joking sequence’ which is constituted by ‘an uninterrupted series of joking exchanges’ (p. 169), as in the following example: (33) (PnS) Sellers: A, B Buyers: C, D Situation: Buyers have accepted sellers’ proposal to employ their son on the big ﬁshing boat.

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D: De todas formas, a ver si metéis en vereda al chaval, ¿eh? que no nos cause demasiados problemas. A: Eso vosotros ahí al látigo. B: Vosotros al látigo. D: Delegáis en A: Sí totalmente. [A and B laugh] B: Totalmente. Totalmente. D: Nuestra ﬁrmeza. A: Con tal de que no lo tiréis por la borda. [A, B and D laugh] [C drinks water] B: Que lo devolváis por lo menos entero. C: No, como se porte muy mal lo utilizamos de cebo. B: Aunque ya sabes si lo matáis, pues bueno. Pero mira, que si lo dejáis paralítico al chaval. [everybody laughs] C: Nos nos lo echaríamos por cachos. [Everybody laughs] (p.179) With respect to the ﬁrst pair part of joking exchanges, one interesting point is that Spaniards were found to make more jokes than Danes. For Grindsted (1997), this ﬁnding reﬂects a stronger inclination, on the part of Spaniards, to employ interpersonal ‘bonding’ strategies. Another interesting ﬁnding is that Spaniards, as compared to Danes, display a higher preference for other, rather than self-ridicule in the jokes they make. This would be an indication that Spaniards are less concerned than Danes about impinging on their interlocutors’ autonomy. As to who accepts the invitation to laugh, which a joke offers, Grindsted (p. 176) found that Spaniards ‘are more likely to joke in ways which provoke laughter from three or more participants’ whereas joking among Danes elicits laughter only from one or two of the negotiators. This means that, in Spanish negotiations, members of the opposing negotiating team also get involved in the laughter. In cases where there are two (rather than three) ‘laughers’, Grindsted found that, on most occasions, it was the members of the opposing team producing the laughter in the Spanish data, whereas in the Danish data, it was normally the joker and his partner. According to Grindsted’s interpretation, these ﬁndings appear to show that Spanish negotiators are ‘more inclined to suspend their teamwork obligations . . . seeking interpersonal bonding beyond the team they belong to’ (p. 176) whereas Danes

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tend to focus on individual or team performance. Finally, Grindsted found that a larger number of jokes in the Spanish data are part of joking sequences (see example 19 above). This is interpreted by the author as yet another indication that Spaniards pay more attention to interpersonal aspects in face-to-face interaction. The last study we consider in this section is Cestero Mancera’s (1996), where laughter is examined based on a corpus of dyadic and tryadic conversations among men, women and in mixed groups in Spain. The participants correspond to three different age groups (20–34; 35–54; 55+). Cestero Mancera found that laughter occurs more often in tryadic as opposed to dyadic conversations and slightly more often in conversations with two or more women. She also found that laughter occurs more often when the interlocutor belongs to the younger group of participants in the study, being less frequent with interlocutors belonging to the second group and even less frequent with interlocutors in the third. Drawing on CA, Cestero Mancera analysed the function of laughter as a conversational tool, to end or initiate a turn, for example. She found that women employ laughter to signal the end of a turn more frequently than men and that laughter with this function also occurs more often among equals (same age group) and in conversations where the interlocutor belongs to the younger group of participants. Building on work on non-verbal communication, Cestero Mancera also examined the function of laughter for qualifying utterances. She identiﬁed the provision of conversational support as the main function of laughter in her study and she found laughter with this function occurring more often in tryadic than in dyadic conversations. The author also found that, in conversations among women, the frequency of this type of laughter is higher than in conversations among men. 3.5.4 Preference organization Although the notion of ‘preference’, like ‘turn-taking’ or ‘adjacency pair’, has also become of widespread use in sociopragmatic studies by Hispanists, there are only a few works that deal with the topic in greater detail, with concerns more akin with those of CA. One of these studies is that of Valdés and Pino (1981) on compliment responses, and another is Santamaría García (2002) on agreeing and disagreeing responses. Valdés and Pino’s work (1981), which builds on Pomerantz’s (1978) on compliment responses in American English (see 3.3.4), is based on recordings and ﬁeld notes of naturally-occurring interactions among family and friends in a bilingual community in southern New Mexico,

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as well as on Spanish monolingual data recorded in church-related activities and interactions at various community projects sites in Ciudad Juárez. It aimed to examine how bilinguals’ compliment response behaviour compares with that of Spanish-speaking monolinguals and that of the English-speaking monolinguals described by Pomerantz. Valdés and Pino found that similar overall patterns are used among the three groups. These are patterns of acceptance, rejection and self-praise avoidance, as in (34), (35) and (36), respectively: (34) (MS) A: Qué boni::tos tus zapatos. B: Gracias, muy a la orden. (p. 59) (35) (USAS) A: Te ves más joven sin bigote. B: N’ombre . . . parece que tengo cara de niño. No más tengo chanza y me lo dejo crecer otra vez. (p. 70) (36) (USAS) A: Oye, qué suave trais el pelo. ¿Te lo cortaste? B: No, m’ice permanente. Ya estaba cansada del otro hair style. (p. 71) Valdés and Pino also identiﬁed in both their Spanish monolingual and bilingual data some sub-strategies not described by Pomerantz. These include, for example, the acceptance sub-strategy consisting of a question + request for repetition or expansion, as in (37): (37) (USAS) A: Oye te quedó rico. Eres una señora cocinera. B: ¿No se te hace que se me fue la mano con las fresas entonces? (p. 69) Additionally, Valdés and Pino (1981) described some peculiarities of usage among the Mexican monolinguals and bilinguals, which include the use of politeness formulae on their own or accompanying the acceptance token, as in (34) above, among the Mexican monolinguals, and acceptance tokens with traces only of politeness formulae (in bold), as in (38), among the bilinguals:

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(38) (USAS) A: Pretty good. Ooooooh I lo::ve your blouse. B: Thank you, cuando quieras usar el pattern para hacerla yo lo tengo. (p. 63) Thus, despite the similarities in the overall patterns that Valdés and Pino encountered, the differences they found led them to conclude that ‘bilinguals are not identical to either group of monolinguals’ (p. 66). The inﬂuence of Valdés and Pino’s study can be seen in other studies on compliment responses, such as Yañez’s (1990) (see 2.4.2.2.2).40 A more recent study on preference organization is Santamaría García’s (2002). The author focuses on agreeing and disagreeing responses to a number of initiation moves (assessing, reporting) by speakers of PnS and American English. The study is based on the analysis of interactions from the Corpus Oral de Referencia de la Lengua Española Contemporánea (CORLEC) and Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE). Agreements as preferred activities have been described in the literature as occurring without any lapse upon prior speaker’s turn completion, or in slight overlap with prior speaker’s turn. Disagreement, on the other hand, has been described as frequently occurring with a delay within a turn or over a series of turns and accompanied by dispreference markers (Pomerantz, 1975, 1984). Santamaría García (2002), however, found that agreement may occur after a pause, providing a continuation of the previous speaker’s turn, as in (39) below, and that disagreement can occur in overlap, particularly in the Spanish data, as in (40) below, and may not necessarily be preceeded by dispreference markers. (39) (PnS) 1 Javi: No ese . . . ese especial de perros es muy especial. 2 Luis: Sí. Sobre to (d) o por lo . . . 3 Javi: Sobre todo la factura cuando vas pa r a(a) allí. (p. 940) (40) (PnS) José: Y si vas a la Ford que no rompes la garantía yendo a otro garaje, pues sigue en garantía el coche y eso, o sea que overlap vamos Carmen: No /overlap pero overlap garantía . . . esos cacharrazos . . . Luis: No. Eso te lo cobran entero /overlap macho. (p. 943)

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Santamaría García (2002) found collaborative turns of the type illustrated by (39) above to be as nearly as frequent in the Spanish data as the expression of agreement in overlap. This is in contrast with the ﬁndings for American English, where collaborative turns had a very low frequency and where turns in overlap were a great deal more common. As to the expression of disagreement, Santamaría García found that, unlike American English, a high percentage of disagreeing utterances are produced in overlap in Spanish, as in example (40) above. Additionally, she found very little prefacing of disagreements in Spanish compared to American English, as also illustrated by (40) above. In line with Bilmes (1988), Santamaría García suggests that, in the ﬁrst place, dispreference markers, such as hesitations, may be more adequately labelled as ‘reluctance’ markers and, secondly, that they may occur with both agreements and disagreements, motivated by politeness considerations. The following example, provided by the author, illustrates agreement occurring with ‘reluctance’ markers: (41) (PnS) Carmen: Pues está bien la entrada. Está nueva ¿eh? Juan: ¿Cómo? Carmen: Que está bien esto que está nuevo, pausa digo . . . Juan: pausa Carmen: que esto . . . Juan: Sí esto está bastante bien. Sí. silencio (p. 943) Santamaría explains that Juan in this example employs reluctance markers such as ¿cómo? (a request for clariﬁcation), and bastante given that he does not want to appear to be too proud about his ﬂat. On the other hand, she explains the expression of disagreement in (40) above, in slight overlap and without reluctance markers, in terms of the participants being friends and the imposition of the disagreeing act being very low. 3.5.5 Topic organization Topic organization as a focal point of research within Hispanic studies is found in García Gómez’s (2000/2001) analysis of gossip talk among female friends in Spain, and Häggkvist’s (2002), where the employment of topic management strategies in intercultural interactions between Spaniards and Swedish participants using Spanish as L2 is explored (see

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also Häggkvist and Fant, 2000, in 3.5.2 above). Both scholars integrate a CA type of analysis with other perspectives. García Gómez (2000/2001) examined gossip talk, that is, talk ‘which involves pejorative judgement of an absent other and which is also meant to be conﬁdential – or at least not reported to the third person’ (p. 124), based on audio-recordings of naturally-occurring interactions between female friends interacting over coffee breaks at work. Building on Goutsos’s (1997) topic structure model, García Gómez examined strategies participants employ to introduce a topic in gossip talk and to stay on topic. Among other features, the author distinguishes between ‘topic initiators’ and ‘topic approvals’. Topic initiators initiate the gossip sequence by introducing a possible ‘gossiped issue statement’ (p. 132), as in the ﬁrst turn of the following example, which requires an answer or a ‘topic approval’ as in B and C’s answers: (42) (PnS) A: ¿Sabéis ya lo de Ingrid? B: ] No dime. C: ] Yo no ¿el qué? (p.132) As such, García Gómez’s (2000/2001) topic initiators appear to have elements of Button and Casey’s (1984) ‘topic-initial elicitors’ as well as their ‘topic initial’ notion (see 3.3.6) in the sense that utterances like ¿sabéis ya lo de Ingrid? in (42) above constitute an enquiry that allows for the reporting of a newsworthy event, offering at the same time a possible topic of conversation. One interesting feature highlighted by García Gómez is that the participant producing the topic initiator in gossip sequences is the same person proceeding with the gossip once it has been approved. This is not the case in Button and Casey’s analysis where the participant producing the topic-initial elicitor is the person to topicalize the newsworthy event produced by the other participant, but not to develop it. As to staying on topic, García Gómez distinguishes between two types of devices: topic ‘supporters’ and topic ‘contributors’. The former are utterances such as no me digas ¡qué aguante! (p. 135) that are aimed at ‘continuing the topic without actually providing any relevant piece of information on the previous item’ (p. 134) (cf. backchannel items in Fant, 1989, 1992b, section 3.5.1). According to García Gómez and drawing on Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness, a key function

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of supporters is the enactment of positive politeness, emphasizing group membership and solidarity. Topic contributors, on the other hand, are those that help develop the local topic, as in the following example, where C and B ‘demand’ and ‘elicit’ more information: (43) (PnS) B: ¿Quién te lo ha dicho? A: Me lo ha dicho Pilar que se lo ha dicho ella. B: Pues como esté embarazada menudo marujeo. C: ¿Pero de cuánto tiempo está? A: No sé, pero debe de estar de poco B: ¿Se ha hecho la prueba? A: Pilar me ha dicho que está tan asustada que ni siquiera quiere hacerse la prueba. (p. 137) The other study we consider here is Häggkvist’s (2002), which combines a conversation analytic with an interpretive approach in order to explain how participants use topic management strategies for different communicative (local) and interactional (more global) goals. The author identiﬁed two types of problems in intercultural interaction: problems at the microlevel, which include phonological, lexical and grammatical difﬁculties, and problems at the macrolevel; that is, those that, in her view, are related to the pragmatic level. She found that one of the strategies employed by participants in intercultural encounters when faced with problematic sequences is to produce abrupt topic shifts. The existence of low intersubjectivity among participants leads, in the author’s opinion, to a higher frequency of abrupt topic shift. Although abrupt topic shift is not a preferred activity, Häggkvist suggested that it is preferred over repair in problematic sequences in intercultural interactions. In this respect, the system of preference Häggkvist identiﬁed is not dichotomous but can be described as scalar. Häggkvist (2002) also found that low intersubjectivity leads to the construction of what she calls ‘hyper-topics’, which are main topics for conversation to which both participants can contribute and for which no shared knowledge is required. These topics can appear without negotiation or justiﬁcation (for example, in her corpus, similarities and differences between Sweden and Spain). For Häggkvist, hyper-topics are a solution to the problem of a lack of a collective identity. Finally, another key topic management strategy Häggkvist identiﬁed for intercultural encounters is enumeración temática (sequences contain-

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ing lists of elements possibly known to both parties), which the author distinguishes from ‘listing’ (Jefferson, 1990). While lists consist of a limited number of components and are constructed by the same participant, enumeración temática is co-constructed and has a possibly unlimited number of components. Listing fulﬁls primarily a structural function whereas Häggkvist considered the establishment of intersubjectivity as a key function of enumeración temática. 3.5.6 Summary From the foregoing account, it can be seen that there is a growing body of research by Hispanists on CA topics, particularly on aspects of turntaking. A few common trends can be identiﬁed. For instance, as to speaker exchange, there seems to be less adherence to Sacks et al.’s (1974) turn-taking model on the part of Spanish speakers; that is, Spaniards (Bengoechea Bartolomé, 1993) compared to other Westerners like Swedes (Fant 1989, 1992b). Likewise, Spanish speakers seem to employ fewer verbal listener responses compared to Swedes (Fant, 1989, 1992b), English speakers (Bou Franch and Gregori Signes, 1999) or Danes, (Kjaerbeck, 1998), and more non-verbal listener responses (Fant, 1989, 1992b; Bou Franch and Gregori Signes, 1999). Inter-turn silences seem to be shorter for Spanish speakers compared to those occurring in intercultural interactions with Chinese participants (Raga Gimeno and Sánchez López, 1999). Additionally, there seems to be variation about the type of verbal and non-verbal signals employed to indicate an upcoming turn. The use of (non)verbal speaker turn-taking signals and listener responses seem to be two areas that need to be explored further in a wider range of (sociocultural) contexts. The relationship between unsmooth speaker exchange and politeness, as sketeched by Bañón Hernández (1997), is also another area that requires further investigation. Santamaría García (2002) offers a contribution in this direction in relation to Spaniards’ expression of disagreement in overlap when the participants are friends and the disagreeing act presents low levels of imposition. A number of studies also highlight the fact that gender and power (and not only culture) play a role in turn-taking. In Cordella and Forbes’s (1998) study, for example, men were found to use a higher number of ‘long turns’ and females were found to abort more utterances than males. Likewise, the female Spanish participant in Bou Franch and Gregori Signes’s (1999) study was found to produce more listener responses than the male listener. This is also an area that needs to be further explored, again, in a wider range of sociocultural contexts.

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As to the overall organization of conversation, studies on telephone talk show the greater occurrence of what could be described as involvement talk in domestic calls in Ecuadorian Spanish as compared to American English (Placencia, 1997a), or in PnS, compared to British English (Valeiras Viso, 2002). More studies in this area in different varieties of Spanish are also needed in order to determine what is universal and what is culturally determined in the structuring of openings and closings in telephone conversations. On the other hand, Häggkvist and Fant’s (2000) study on openings of discussions provides further support for the proposal that Spaniards orient themselves towards selfafﬁrmation (Fant, 1989) in that, unlike Swedes, Spaniards display readiness to express an opinion. Nevertheless, of interest, too, is Häggkvist and Fant’s ﬁnding that new patterns emerge in intercultural interactions; that is, that patterns of interaction in intercultural interactions cannot necessarily be predicted from what happens in mono-cultural encounters. In relation to laughter and joking, Spaniards have been found to make more use of both in the context of business negotiations as compared to Swedes (Fant, 1992b) or Danes (Grindsted, 1997); they also seek more interpersonal bonding (Grindsted, 1997) and display more of a group-orientation (Fant, 1992b). Additionally, Spaniards, in contrast with Swedes, have been found to use laughter for different purposes: to create an atmosphere of conﬁanza among Spanish negotiatiors, and to maintain an apparent consensus of opinion among Swedish negotiators (Bravo, 1996). Once more, other variables in addition to culture have been found to play a role in the production of laughter. For instance, laughter with a supportive function has been found to be more frequent in conversations among women than among men (Cestero Mancera, 1996). On the other hand, laughter has been found to occur more in interactions with younger interlocutors than those with older ones (Cestero Mancera, 1996). The organization of laughter, as well as topic and preference organization, are areas that also need to be developed.

4 Examining Linguistic Politeness Phenomena

4.0 Introduction The last twenty to thirty years have seen a proliferation of studies in linguistic politeness (Kasper, 1996). The increasing interest in this area has led some scholars to see politeness as a sub-discipline of pragmatics (Thomas, 1995). The English term ‘polite’ can be traced back to the ﬁfteenth century. Etymologically, it derives from the late medieval Latin politus meaning ‘smoothed’ and ‘accomplished’. In the seventeenth century, a polite person was deﬁned as one of ‘reﬁned courteous manners’ (Oxford English Dictionary of Etymology). This deﬁnition highlights the connection between politeness and the (expected) social conduct of the upper classes (Watts 1989; Watts et al., 1992; Kasper, 1994, 1996; Márquez Reiter, 2000; Eelen, 2001). Politeness is thus related to the cultivation of social manners and is associated with the consideration of reciprocal obligations and duties. Hence, polite behaviour is seen as a way of maintaining the equilibrium of interpersonal relationships (Haverkate, 1994; Márquez Reiter, 2000). Politeness is, therefore, a form of social interaction and despite being expressed by a speaker (s) in relation to a hearer (h), the act of behaving (im) politely is based on a social model or standard that dictates whether the performed act can be deemed polite or impolite (Werkhofer, 1992). This social model or standard is created and enacted by members of a particular community. From this it can be inferred that different communities may in fact have different social standards for interpreting what is polite and what is impolite behaviour. As Haverkate (1987) explains, politeness can be expressed through communicative and non-communicative acts. This chapter will focus 143

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on the expression of politeness through communicative acts; more speciﬁcally, on what Haverkate refers to as communicative linguistic politeness or non-metalinguistic politeness;1 that is, the linguistic strategies employed by conversational participants to maintain the equilibrium of interpersonal relationships. We start by presenting a brief classiﬁcation of the different perspectives to the study of politeness, and continue with a description of Grice’s cooperative principle and an account of the different views of politeness that have been most inﬂuential in the ﬁeld of pragmatics. We then concentrate on the different perspectives to the study of (Hispanic) politeness proposed by Hispanists and report the results of various studies carried out on different varieties of Spanish and based on these approaches.

4.1 A classiﬁcation of politeness models Fraser (1990) observed that it is possible to differentiate between four different views of politeness: the ‘social norm’ view (Blum-Kulka, 1990), the ‘conversation maxim’ view (Lakoff, 1973; Leech, 1983), his own ‘conversational contract’ view (Fraser, 1978) and the ‘face-saving’ view (Brown and Levinson, 1987). We will add two further approaches to politeness, namely the ‘emotive communication’ view (Arndt and Janney, 1985) and the ‘rapport management’ view (Spencer-Oatey, 2000), both of which, as we shall see in 4.3.3., 4.3.4. and 4.4.,2 have been adopted and adapted by some Hispanists to the study of Spanish politeness. The social norm view assumes that each society has its own normative or social rules that prescribe degrees of formality and styles according to different cultural contexts. These rules have been codiﬁed in etiquette manuals and preserved in the language as, for example, in the appropriate use of of tú and usted. In spite of the fact that few scholars explicitly adhere to this view, work in developmental pragmatics is illustrative of this (Clancy, 1986; Ochs and Schieffelin, 1986; Blum-Kulka, 1990; Snow et al., 1990). The conversational maxim view is best represented by the work of G. Leech and, to a lesser extent, by the work of R. Lakoff and Y. Gu. It advocates the existence of a politeness principle as complementary to Grice’s Cooperative Principle. The conversational contract view, proposed by Fraser (1978) and Fraser and Nolen (1981), is considered by some scholars (Kasper, 1996) to be the most global of the politeness perspectives. Politeness is not seen as determined by threats to face or conversational

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maxims but by the ‘expected’ rights and obligations of participants at any given time in an encounter. The face-saving view was proposed by P. Brown and S. Levinson and constitutes the model of politeness that has had the greatest impact both in terms of its applications, and of the criticisms received. The two perspectives that we will add to Fraser’s (1990) original classiﬁcation are the emotive communication view and the rapport management view. Proposed by Arndt and Janney (1985, 1991), the emotive communication view can be seen as the perspective on politeness that best captures the individual needs of the participants at any given moment in an encounter as it attempts to account for the affective signals that are involved in the speakers’ expression of politeness. The rapport management view, put forward by Spencer-Oatey (2000, 2002), on the other hand, interprets linguistic politeness as a way of managing relationships and combines aspects of the conversational maxim view (Leech, 1983), and of the face-saving view (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987) amongst others. Given that the object of study, politeness, is fundamentally a form of interaction that mediates between the individual and the social, the above perspectives implicitly or explicitly incorporate the notion of social norms. As they also make use of basic tenets in pragmatics, such as Grice’s conversational implicature, and speech act theory, it is inevitable that Fraser’s classiﬁcation, or any other for that matter (Kasper, 1996), contains overlaps. Before we proceed to a discussion of the different approaches to the study of politeness, we should refer to some of the principles of conversation that have been the starting point for some of the explanations of politeness phenomena. 4.1.1 The Cooperative Principle One of the most important contributions to the study of pragmatics has been H. P. Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle (CP) and its related Maxims of Conversation. Grice’s CP comes from the same language philosophy tradition adhered to by Austin, which may be due to the fact that Grice worked with Austin at Oxford. While Austin, as we saw in Chapter 2, made the distinction between what speakers say (locutionary act) and what they try to say (illocutionary act), Grice’s CP is an attempt to explain how a hearer might get from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning (Thomas, 1998). Grice formulated his CP and conversational maxims on the assumption that the main purpose of conversation is ‘the effective exchange of information’ (Grice, 1989, p. 28). He was concerned merely with the rationality and/or irrationality of conversational behaviour rather than

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with any of the other general characteristics of conversation that concern conversation analysts, as discussed in Chapter 3. Although the CP is not directly related to politeness, its formulation has constituted a basis of reference on which other principles, such as politeness principles, have been built and which attempt to explain linguistic phenomena that could not be explained by the CP. Grice observed that conversation is usually coherent and continuous; thus, he assumed that there must be some kind of prior agreement between interactants concerning the principles of the exchange, an agreement that makes the participants recognise common aims and speciﬁc ways of achieving them. According to Grice (1975), there is an overriding principle of conversation that participants will be expected to observe, that principle being: 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 (p. 45). According to this principle, we interpret language on the assumption that the user is obeying four maxims: quantity, quality, relation and manner. Each of these maxims consists of one or more sub-maxims that govern appropriate conversational behaviour. The maxim of quantity requires one to make one’s contribution as informative as required, and not to make it more informative than is required. The maxim of quality requires one to make one’s contribution one that is true, not to say what one believes to be false and not to say something for which one lacks adequate evidence. The maxim of relation simply states that the utterance should be relevant. And ﬁnally, the maxim of manner requires one to avoid obscurity of expression and ambiguity, to be brief and orderly. Sometimes it is very easy to observe all four maxims at once as in the following example: (1) (US) Husband: ¿Dónde están mis lentes? Wife: En la mesa del comedor. In (1) the wife has answered clearly, following the maxim of manner; truthfully, following the maxim of quality; has given the necessary amount of information, following the maxim of quantity; and has directly answered her husband’s question, following the maxim of relation.

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Grice says that the ﬁrst three maxims refer to what is said while the fourth one refers to how it is said. He adds that these maxims characterize ideal exchanges but that the maxims are often ﬂouted for a variety of communicative purposes, including politeness reasons, as in the following example: A and B are two female friends. They are shopping for clothes. A needs to buy a dress to wear at a wedding. (2) (US) A: ¿No será demasiado justo demás como para la Iglesia? B: El otro que te probaste me parece más lindo. These departures call for speciﬁc interpretation, which Grice calls ‘conversational implicature’.3 Instead of consistently observing the maxims, the speaker may ﬂout the maxims and thus imply something rather different from what s/he actually says. Thus, the act ‘invites’ the addressee to look for a speciﬁc feature in the conversation by which to interpret the speaker’s intended meaning, which s/he did not explicitly state. In the case of (2) above, the implicature is that B thinks that the dress is too tight and inappropriate but, in order not to offend, does not want to say so directly. Grice describes the observance of the CP and the systematic exploitation of its maxims as reasonable and rational behaviour and thus he assumes that they are universal. Leech (1983) and Thomas (1998), amongst others, claim that this assumption is too broad and sweeping. Krauss and Fussell (1996) argue that it is not clear what will constitute a maxim violation in that it is difﬁcult to deﬁne what an informative/uninformative or relevant/irrelevant utterance is. When it comes to the issue of universality, Hymes (1986) states that the maxims can only be considered universal if they are reinterpreted as dimensions of behaviour. Keenan (1976), in his study of Malagasy speakers, noticed that the observance of the maxim of quality was constrained by social features related to the interaction, making the maxim culturally dependent as opposed to universal. Malagasy speakers, especially men, are reluctant to explicitly state information that may prove to be false. However, as Thomas (1998) rightly observes, this ‘uninformativeness’ is systematic, and generates implicatures that are readily interpretable by members of that community. In other words, suspensions of the maxims may be culture-speciﬁc or speciﬁc to particular events. Loveday (1983), amongst others, claims that the maxims are culturally relative. He says that, in Japan, the maxim of manner is not very frequently

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attended to since clarity and explicitness can be interpreted as offensive in most contexts. In some cultures, such as the Jewish American and the Black American, contrariness and immodesty are seen as cooperative ways of behaving, while in others, such as the Chinese and the Vietnamese, cooperative behaviour means saying little enough to avoid conﬂict (Clyne, 1994). Wierzbicka (1985) goes even further and describes the universality of the logic of conversation as ethnocentric because, she claims, it is based upon the English language, a view also shared by Fitch and Sanders (1994). Despite disagreement on the idea of universality and rationality, scholars such as Lakoff (1973), Leech (1983) and Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), to mention but a few, not only acknowledge Grice’s contribution to the theory of conversation but also expand on it further. Having presented a summary of Grice’s CP, its conversational maxims and some of the criticisms voiced against it, we will now present an account of the main theories of politeness which, as remarked earlier, make use of Grice’s CP to explain politeness phenomena. 4.1.2 The conversation maxim view The conversation maxim view of politeness is the point of departure for a number of politeness models and approaches to the study of the subject. The leading voices within this view are Lakoff and Leech and to a lesser extent Gu although other scholars, such as Edmondson (1981) and Kasher (1986), have also proposed models of politeness based on the conversational maxim view. Here, we focus on the models proposed by the ﬁrst three authors in particular since these are the ones that have received the greatest attention. 4.1.2.1 Lakoff R. Lakoff (1973) was the ﬁrst scholar to examine linguistic politeness from a pragmatic perspective and one of the ﬁrst linguists to adopt Grice’s universal construct of conversational principles in order to account for politeness phenomena. She was also the ﬁrst scholar to propose an extension of grammatical rules, arguing that grammars should not only specify the applicability of grammatical rules but also include pragmatic factors. She claimed that pragmatic rules help to explain utterances that are deviant, and respond neither to a semantic nor to a syntactic problem. The politeness model Lakoff proposes comprises two rules: (1) ‘be clear’; and (2) ‘be polite’. Rule (1), ‘be clear’, subsumes Grice’s conversational maxims; rule (2), ‘be polite’, consists of three sub-rules; namely,

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‘don’t impose, ‘give options’ and ‘make A feel good, be friendly’. The ﬁrst sub-rule, ‘don’t impose’, is concerned with distance and formality; the second, ‘give options’, with deference; and the third, ‘make A feel good’, with camaraderie, that is, with making the addressee feel liked and wanted. While rule (1) attends to the need for the efﬁcient exchange of information, rule (2) addresses the interpersonal nature of the exchange; that is to say, it attends to social issues of the interaction. Lakoff explains that these rules are all present in interaction but that different cultures might emphasize one rule more than another, depending on which rule is more important in a particular culture. In other words, she claims that the rules are universal, though the preference for one rule over another will be relative to speciﬁc cultures. According to Lakoff (1990), politeness is a system of interpersonal relations designed to facilitate interaction by minimizing the potential for conﬂict and confrontation inherent in all human interchange (p. 34) Lakoff affords the CP and politeness equal status since communicating information efﬁciently is as important as reducing possible sources of friction in interaction. Deviations from the CP and its maxims may be explained by motives of politeness. Criticisms voiced against Lakoff focus on the lack of explanation of participants’ relationships and of their expectations in interaction (Brown, 1976), the equation between pragmatic and linguistic rules where the distinction between sentence meaning and communicative function is lost (see Chapter 2, and Franck, 1980), and the confusion between the descriptive and predictive nature of her rules (Eelen, 2001). Nevertheless, the author has greatly contributed to the study of politeness phenomena by extending the scope of its study, and her model has been successfully applied to research in this area (Smith-Hefner, 1981; Tannen 1981; House, 1998; Pan 1995; García, 1999). 4.1.2.2 Leech In his theory of politeness, Leech (1983) complements the CP with a Politeness Principle (PP). The PP works by minimizing the expression of impolite beliefs and maximizing the (less important) expression of polite beliefs (p. 81). Politeness is thus deﬁned as the expression of polite beliefs that are favourable to the hearer, and impoliteness is deﬁned as the expression of impolite beliefs that are somewhat unfavourable to the hearer. Leech’s extension of Grice’s CP can be seen as an attempt to

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explain the motivation behind the use of indirectness since, according to the author, politeness is the key pragmatic phenomenon that triggers the use of indirectness and one of the reasons why interlocutors deviate from the CP. Following Grice, Leech constructs his PP in a very similar way to the CP as it also consists of a number of maxims: tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement and sympathy. While the CP helps to explain how an utterance may be interpreted as indirect, the PP and its maxims help to explain the motivation behind the use of indirectness. As is the case with Lakoff’s rules, ‘be clear’ and ‘be polite’, in the event of a conﬂict between the CP and Leech’s PP, the speaker will sacriﬁce one in favour of the other. If the PP is sacriﬁced in favour of the CP, the speaker will risk the maintenance of the social equilibrium of the interaction and this, in turn, will enable us to assume that the speaker’s main aim was that of being cooperative; that is, the main objective was the efﬁcient communication of information (Leech, 1983, p. 82). Leech distinguishes between what he calls ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ politeness. The former is a characteristic of certain speech acts, such as expressives (apologies, compliments, offers, invitations, thanking and greetings), which are intrinsically polite, and directives (orders, requests, suggestions) and commissives (promises, threats, accusations, pledges), which are intrinsically impolite. ‘Absolute’ politeness is hence measured according to the costs and beneﬁts for the speaker and hearer. When the action is costly and not beneﬁcial to the hearer, the action is deemed impolite. Likewise, when the action is not costly and beneﬁcial for the hearer, it can be termed polite. Politeness is, therefore, more relevant in situations where expressives and directives are performed. ‘Relative’ politeness, on the other hand, depends on the context and the situations since the CP and the PP will operate differently in different cultures. Leech’s PP has a series of maxims associated with it. These maxims have a set of pragmatic scales, which are used by the hearer to determine the degree of tact or generosity appropriate in a given situation: the cost/beneﬁt scale, the optionality scale, the indirectness scale, the authority scale and the social distance scale. The cost/beneﬁt scale describes how the action is assessed by the speaker as costly or beneﬁcial, either to the speaker or to the addressee. The optionality scale describes the extent to which an action is performed at the choice of the addressee. The indirectness scale describes how much inference is involved in the action. The authority scale describes the degree of distance between the interlocutors with respect to the power they have

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over each other. Finally, the social distance scale describes the degree of solidarity between the interlocutors. It should be noted that the maxims are not all equally important. The author claims that the tact maxim is more powerful than the generosity one and that the approbation maxim is more powerful than the modesty one (1983, p. 133). He also argues that, within each maxim, minimization of costs and maximization of beneﬁts to the hearer are weightier than minimization and maximization of costs and beneﬁts to the speaker. In other words, for Leech, avoiding discord is more important than seeking concord. It follows that, when faced with an increased cost and social distance, the speaker will make a greater effort to give the addressee more options and increase the indirectness of the action. Leech’s assumption that politeness and indirectness go hand in hand with each other has been criticized by a number of scholars (Blum-Kulka, 1987; Siﬁanou, 1992), who clearly demonstrated that politeness does not co-vary with indirectness just as directness does not co-vary with impoliteness. We shall return to this point later in the chapter. Leech’s maxims have also been subjected to criticisms since they appear to be culture-dependent and, this being the case, different cultures are likely to place different values on the maxims and might even have a different set of maxims. Furthermore, the number of maxims could, in fact, be inﬁnite (Dillon et al., 1985; Thomas 1986; Fraser, 1990; Turner 1996). Leech’s assertion that certain acts are ipso facto polite or impolite, irrespective of the cultural and situational context, has also raised objections (Fraser, 1990). Thus, ordering, which Leech regards as intrinsically impolite, might not be so in a classroom situation where the teacher orders one of the students to do something or in the army when a general orders a soldier to do something (Márquez Reiter, 2000). A further critique of Leech’s account is the status of the CP and his PP. It will be recalled (see section 4.2.1.) that, within the CP, speakers are seen as cooperative and that conversational implicatures are explained by the non-observance of Grice’s maxims. As Escandell Vidal (1996a) rightly points out, despite Leech’s description of the PP as a coordinate construct to the CP, no implicatures are needed to arrive at the conclusion that speakers are being polite since, according to Leech, speakers may choose to be polite or not. Besides, the PP is claimed to be a psychologically real concept that facilitates communication by enabling speakers to mean more than they really say, while, at the same time, the PP provides speciﬁc stipulations on how to be polite (Eelen, 2001).

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Despite the criticisms voiced against it, aspects of Leech’s model have been applied to numerous studies and used as a point of departure for new models of politeness (Spencer-Oatey, 2000, 2002). 4.1.2.3 Gu Gu (1990) bases his theory on a revision of Leech’s PP and on the Chinese concept of politeness (limao). According to Gu (1990), the PP is ‘a sanctioned belief that an individual’s behaviour ought to live up to the expectations of respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal warmth and reﬁnement’ (p. 245). Unlike Leech’s PP, which is regulative and descriptive in nature, Gu’s is, therefore, normative and prescriptive. Gu’s PP comprises 5 maxims: ‘self-denigration’, where the speaker puts him/herself down and elevates the addressee; ‘address’, where the speaker addresses his/her hearer with an appropriate address term according to the hearer’s social status and role and to the speaker–hearer relationship; ‘tact’; ‘generosity’; and the ‘balance principle’. Gu’s tact and generosity are similar to Leech’s with the exception that the tact maxim is engaged at the motivational level when dealing with directives, and that the generosity maxim is engaged at the conversational level when dealing with commissives. The motivational level refers to the actual cost or beneﬁt to the hearer; a request to borrow a pen will, for example, not be as costly to the hearer as a request to borrow his/her car. The conversational level refers to the actual linguistic realisation of the directives and commissives and works by maximizing the beneﬁt received in the case of directives, and minimizing the cost to Self in the case of commissives. Finally, Gu’s ‘balance principle’ refers to the reciprocation of politeness; more speciﬁcally, it prescribes that, when a speaker has received the cost/beneﬁt resulting from a directive or commissive, s/he is under the moral and social obligation to pay the hearer back. Although Gu’s account of politeness has not had much impact, he links politeness with moral societal norms and, unlike other authors who have also claimed the importance of the normative versus the instrumental aspect of politeness, (Ide 1989, 1993; Matsumoto, 1988, 1989), Gu provides a framework that could be used to support or reject his claims as far as Chinese politeness is concerned. Eelen (2001) notes some contradictions in Gu’s framework. For Gu, offers and invitations are intrinsically polite acts since they are more costly to the speaker (Self) and more beneﬁcial to the hearer (Other). It will be recalled that, for Gu, politeness is a matter of moral sanctionable norms; this means that intrinsically polite acts, such as offers and

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invitations, are made out of politeness considerations and are interpreted as such. Hence, it follows that not offering or inviting someone would thus be considered impolite and socially sanctionable in Chinese. Based on his (1990, p. 253–4) discussion of a typical three-sequenced Chinese invitation/acceptance interaction, where the speaker ﬁrstly invites and the addressee declines, then the speaker reiterates the invitation and the addressee declines again, and ﬁnally the speaker insists and the addressee accepts, Gu explains that the three-sequence exchange helps the hearer to discover whether the invitation was made out of moral or social obligations or whether it was sincere. Eelen (2001, pp. 61–2) rightly observes that, contrary to what the theory would predict, it is possible for a Chinese speaker to ‘sincerely’ invite someone, as opposed to doing it out of considerations of formality. This in turn would appear to contradict Gu’s argument that certain acts, such as offers and invitations, are intrinsically polite. 4.1.3 The conversational contract view In the view of Fraser (1978) and Fraser and Nolen (1981), each participant, when entering a conversation, brings with him/her a set of rights and obligations determining what the participants can expect from each other. Such rights and obligations form the basis of the conversational contract and are established according to the following factors: conventional (generally applicable interactional conventions, such as turntaking); institutional (rights and obligations imposed by the institution); situational (participants’ relative roles, for example, status of the speaker in relation to that of the hearer); and historical (previous interactions between the participants). These rights and obligations are not static since they are determined by the participants at the outset of their interaction and may change throughout it. As such, the conversational contract view is the ﬁrst politeness approach to explicitly incorporate the notion of rights and obligations and the related notion of participants’ roles, an aspect that has been present, since the eighteenth century (see section 4.2), in the lexicographical deﬁnitions of cortesía. According to Fraser and Nolen, ‘normal’ interaction proceeds within the terms of the conversational contract; thus, politeness passes almost unnoticed and is seen as appropriate linguistic behaviour. If the participants abide by the contract, they are polite; if, however, they transgress one or more terms of the contract, they become impolite. It should be noted that, for Fraser and Nolen (1981), no utterance can be said to be intrinsically (im)polite; this would depend on the context.

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As global as this perspective is, unlike the other perspectives described so far, Fraser and Nolen (1981) and Fraser (1990) fail to outline how linguistic politeness is empirically manifested within the conversational contract. 4.1.4 The face-saving view The face-saving view, proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), has been the perspective which has had the greatest impact in the (sub) ﬁeld of politeness research. Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) were not only the ﬁrst scholars to systematize politeness as a linguistic theory, they were also the only ones to do so while satisfying the criteria for empirical theories; namely, those of explicitness, parsimony and predictiveness (Kasper, 1994, p. 3208). As in the case of the other politeness accounts, the face-saving view also makes use of Grice’s framework in that politeness strategies are interpreted as rational deviations from the CP. In Brown and Levinson’s theory, the CP is unmarked; that is to say, it is seen as the natural presupposition underlying all communication. Politeness, on the other hand, is marked; that is to say, it is signalled by the speaker who deviates from the CP when communication is about to threaten ‘face’. According to the authors, competent adult members are rational agents who will choose means of satisfying their goals as efﬁciently as possible. While the notion of rationality is seen as universal and is particularly associated with the principle of cooperation, the notion of face is associated with politeness. The notion of face is a key concept in Brown and Levinson’s framework. Their interpretation of the concept derives from Goffman (1967) and from the English folk terms ‘losing face’ and ‘saving face’. Brown and Levinson assume that all competent adult members of a society are concerned about their face, the self-image they present to others, and they recognize that other people have similar face wants. They differentiate between two aspects of face that, they claim, are universal. They also refer to two basic desires of any individual in any interaction, ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ face. Negative face is described as a person’s desire to be unimpeded by others; that is, to be free to act without being imposed upon. Positive face, on the other hand, is deﬁned as a person’s wish to be desirable to at least some other person who will appreciate and approve of one’s self and personality. According to the authors, negative face is weightier than positive face; that is to say, showing respect for the freedom of action of the hearer is seen as more important than showing appreciation and approval of the hearer.

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Face is ‘something that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost, maintained or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction’ Brown and Levinson (1978, p. 66); thus, it is in everyone’s interest to cooperate in order to maintain each other’s face. In other words, face concerns, whether positive or negative, pervade all our interactions. Another key concept in Brown and Levinson’s theory is that of rationality, which, like face, is also universal. According to the authors, competent adult members are rational agents who will choose the means of satisfying their goals as efﬁciently as possible. While the notion of rationality is particularly associated with the principle of cooperation, the notion of face is associated with politeness. Unlike Leech and Gu, who claim that certain speech acts are intrinsically (im)polite, Brown and Levinson argue that certain acts threaten the face needs of the speaker and/or hearer in that they run contrary to the addressee’s and/or the speaker’s negative and/or positive face and are thus termed ‘face-threatening acts’ (FTAs). Directives (requests, orders, suggestions, advice) and commissives (promises, threats, refusals, pledges) represent a threat to negative face since the speaker will be putting some pressure on the addressee to do or refrain from doing a particular act. Expressives (apologies, compliments, thanks) are also seen as FTAs to the speaker’s positive face since the speaker will be admitting regret for doing an FTA, as in an apology, and will, thus, be damaging his/her own face in the process. Likewise, the receiving of a compliment or thanks is also facethreatening in that the hearer might feel that s/he has to reciprocate the compliment or the thanks with another. In other words, face is constantly being threatened during the course of social interaction. Brown and Levinson, like Leech, propose a scale to evaluate the degree of politeness or face-work required in a speciﬁc situation. They argue that this assessment is based on three independent and culture-sensitive social variables: the social distance (D) and the social power (P) of the speaker and the hearer, and the absolute ranking of impositions (R) in a particular culture. While D and P are universal variables, the authors acknowledge the fact that different cultures might interpret them differently; R is culture-dependent, since the authors rightly assume that the degree of imposition of an act will vary according to the culture. In the authors’ scale, speakers add the values of D, P and R in order to know the amount of face-work required in a particular situation. Once the degree of face-threat has been assessed, participants will choose from a set of ﬁve possible strategies, which will enable them to either avoid or mitigate FTAs:

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On record

1. Without redressive action, baldly Abre la ventana With redressive action

2. Positive politeness Luisa, cariño abre la ventana

Do the FTA 3. Negative politeness ¿Podrías abrir la ventana? 4. Off record ¡Qué calor que hace! 5. Don’t do the FTA Source: Brown and Levinson, 1987, p. 69.

The above strategies are ordered according to the degree of politeness or face-work involved. The risk of face loss decreases as we move down the scale 1 to 5. In other words, the greater the face-threat, the more face-work the strategy will involve. Strategy 1 is used when there is no risk of face-loss as there is no need for redressive action. This may be because the interlocutors are intimate or because demands for efﬁciency override face concerns. Hence, the act will be realized directly according to Grice’s maxims. Strategies 2 and 3 are redressive in that the speaker tries to maintain both his/her own face and that of his/her hearer by mitigating the potential threat of the act. Positive politeness is related to the expression of approval and appreciation of the addressee by making him/her feel part of an ingroup. Negative politeness, on the other hand, is related to the need not to be imposed upon and is characterized by self-effacement and formality.4 Strategy 4 is deployed when the risk of face-loss is high, the act is realized by the employment of a hint, thus making the speaker’s intention ambiguous. In other words, strategy 4 is illustrative of the ﬂouting of Grice’s four conversational maxims. Strategy 5 includes those cases where the risk of face-loss is too great and thus nothing is said. Although Brown and Levinson acknowledge the existence of both forms of politeness, they regard negative politeness as more important than positive politeness. 4.1.4.1 The face-saving view of impoliteness Based on Brown and Levinson’s model (1978, 1987), Culpeper (1996) and Culpeper et al. (2003)5 propose a model to account for the expression of impoliteness, an aspect neglected in the face-saving framework. Culpeper’s (1996) model of impoliteness has a parallel structure to Brown

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and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) politeness model in that it consists of ﬁve superstrategies, namely, ‘bald on record impoliteness’, ‘deployed when there is much face at stake, and where there is an intention on the part of the speaker to attack the face of the hearer’ (Culpeper et al., 2003, p. 1554); ‘positive impoliteness’ (for instance, ignoring, snubbing, showing disinterest towards the hearer, using taboo words, and so on, where the intention is to damage the hearer’s positive face wants); ‘negative impoliteness’ (as in frightening, scorning, ridiculing, where the intention is to damage the hearer’s negative face wants); ‘sarcasm or mock politeness’ (where the speaker is intentionally insincere and aims at social disharmony); and ‘withhold politeness’ (where the speaker either remains silent or fails to act where politeness was the expected behaviour). The main differences between Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) politeness model and Culpeper’s impoliteness perspective is, ﬁrstly, that Culpeper’s superstrategies, instead of maintaining or enhancing face, are meant to attack face;6 secondly, they are ordered neither according to the degree of offence nor according to the social variables (P, D and R), an aspect of his model for which further research is still needed; and thirdly, the superstrategies do not correspond to one face dimension or the other in that they can be mixed; for example, positive politeness markers can be included within negative politeness strategies. Importantly, face attacks do not necessarily convey a lack of politeness in contexts such as academic and televised debates (Tannen, 1999) or political debates, where this is the expected or unmarked behaviour of participants (see 4.4.2). As we will see in section 4.4.2, aspects of Culpeper’s (1996) impoliteness model have been mainly applied to the study of Spanish political discourse.7 4.1.4.2 Criticisms of the face-saving view There have been just as many criticisms of Brown and Levinson’s theory as there have been applications of the theory to empirical studies. Objections have mainly focused on the principle of rationality, the rigidity of the social variables involved in the politeness scale, the neglect of discourse and context, and the universality of face and of their politeness strategies. With respect to rationality, Ide (1989) argues that Brown and Levinson’s theory fails to account for linguistic politeness behaviour in nonWestern collective cultures, such as Japan, where social conventions motivate the use of honoriﬁcs8 and speech formulae used for rituals. At the same time, other scholars have claimed that the framework is primarily based on British analytical logic and North American psychol-

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ogy (Held, 1989; Rhodes, 1989; Werkhofer, 1992),9 a point which is not surprising given some of the pragmatic principles, such as speech act theory, and the cooperative principle, on which the model is based. As far as their social variables are concerned, McLaughlin et al. (1983), Baxter (1984) and Holmes (1990a) claim D is a determinant of politeness. Márquez Reiter (2000), on the other hand, found that there is a negative correlation between D and indirectness10 with respect to the realization of requests; that is to say, the less familiar the relationship between the interlocutors is, the greater the possibility that the request will be realized indirectly. The same does not hold, however, for apologies, where she found that R (that is, the seriousness of the offence) together with P determined the amount of apologizing offered by the speaker. Slugoski and Turnbull (1988) argued that reciprocal liking should be part of the assessment of D and that the variables are not symmetrical. This point was also noted by Holtgraves and Yang (1992), who observed that, when one of the variables reaches a high level, the levels of the other two either fall or drop completely. Watts et al. (1992) observed that P, D and R are not independent of each other and that the degree of imposition depends on P and D. They also object to the omission of the effect of third parties in that the interactional behaviour of a speaker and a hearer is likely to be affected by the presence of third parties, as shown in examples (3) and (4) below: A is at a supermarket and, whilst looking at some of the products on a shelf, overhears a mother talking loudly to her child in the next aisle. (3) (AS) Mother: ¡Dejá de gritar de una vez por todas o cuando lleguemos a casa te voy a matar!¿Escuchaste lo que te dije o vas a seguir haciéndote el sordo? A continues shopping until she bumps into the mother and child in another aisle. The child is still ‘misbehaving’, though this time the mother is aware that whatever she says to the child will be heard by A, now that she and A are in the same aisle (4) (AS) Mother: Mami ya te dijo que así no te podés comportar ¿qué va a decir la gente que te escuche, eh? Vamos a portarnos bien de ahora en adelante ¿sí mi amor? As can been seen in the above examples, the presence of a third party, in this case A, had an effect on the way the mother talked to her child.

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It could be argued that the mother was concerned about her own positive face. Brown and Levinson’s hierarchy of strategies, from bold on-record to off-record, has also received criticisms. More speciﬁcally, if bold onrecord, for example, ‘Open the window’, is employed, as the authors claim, when no redressive action is needed, then it follows that this particular strategy does not convey politeness and that, therefore, it should not form part of a politeness hierarchy. Additionally, the strategies appear to be placed in a continuum. In this regard, Blum-Kulka (1987) and Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) have found it necessary to differentiate between conventional indirectness, as in ‘Could you open the window?’ (see Chapter 2, section 2.3.5) and non-conventional indirectness, as in ‘It’s hot in here’, and rightly observe that, in Hebrew, as in other languages, the expression of politeness is generally associated with the former though very rarely with the latter. A similar point was made by Clancy (1986) with respect to Japanese culture, where conventional indirectness emphasises empathy between the participants and a high degree of experience by the speaker, who realizes that a direct request could have a detrimental effect on the social bonds between the interlocutors. This contrasts with American English, where it is seen as mitigating negative face threat. Regarding Brown and Levinson’s categories of positive and negative politeness, ﬁndings of empirical research (Shimanoff, 1977; Craig et al., 1986; Culpeper, 1996; Placencia, 1996; Turner, 1996) have shown that the categories are not clear-cut. It is common to ﬁnd the use of one (sub)category within another, for example, a negative polite strategy with positive polite elements such as in-group markers and diminutives expressing affect, as in Would you lend us a ﬁver, mate? and ¿Se buenita y tráeme un vaso con agua y mucho hielo? Yet another criticism of the model is the focus on single politeness strategies and, consequently, the neglect of the realization of politeness within the extended discourse. A number of scholars have pointed out the importance of sequentiality in the analysis of politeness (Aronson and Rundström, 1989; Penman, 1990; Mao, 1994; Hayashi, 1996; Harris, 2001) and the need to study politeness at the macro speech act level (Placencia, 1996). The most important objection to Brown and Levinson’s model is perhaps the criticism voiced against their notion of face and their claim to its universality. It will be recalled that Brown and Levinson’s concept of face is based on that proposed by Goffman (1967). Whereas Goffman interpreted face as a public property, ‘on loan from society’ to the individual and negotiated in social interaction, in Brown and Levinson’s

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concept, the public is only seen as an external modiﬁer (Fraser, 1990) in as much as face is seen as an individual’s unalienable possession, which can be threatened but not taken away (Kasper, 1996). This, in turn, has led scholars such as Wierzbicka (1985), amongst others, to refute the notion on the basis of having an anglocentric bias. Brown and Levinson divide the notion of face into two interdependent parts: positive and negative face, of which the latter seems to be weightier than the former. Although both notions have been harshly reviewed, negative face in particular has attracted serious criticisms, mainly from Oriental scholars,11 for being too Western-oriented. It should be noted, however, that criticisms are not unanimous. Thus, while Kuiper and Tan Gek Lin (1989) and Scollon and Scollon (1983, 1995)12 have found it useful to explain the communicative norms of Singapore Chinese and mainland Chinese, respectively, Gu (1990), Mao (1994) and Pan (1995) have claimed the irrelevance of negative face to mainland Chinese culture, where the emphasis is on the individual as part of a group rather than on individual autonomy. In a similar vein, Matsumoto (1988, 1989) and Ide (1989) have claimed its inapplicability to Japanese culture. Matsumoto rejects the notion of negative face13 altogether. She argues that, owing to the emphasis the Japanese language/culture places on social marking (that is, on honoriﬁcs, sociolinguistically appropriate style), it fails to account for politeness in Japanese. More precisely, in Japanese culture, interactants orient towards the relationship with others in the group, thus showing their dependence on the other rather than on an individual desire to be unimpeded in one’s actions. On the other hand, Ide accepts the universality of Brown and Levinson’s face distinction but suggests that a complementary element, namely, wakimae or ‘discernment politeness’ (Hill et al., 1986), should be added in order to encompass Japanese social relations, accounting in this way for the normative aspect of politeness within Brown and Levinson’s strategic politeness. Tokunaga (1992) has found Brown and Levinson’s face distinction partially useful to account for the Japanese honoriﬁcs system and Fukushima (2000) has argued that Brown and Levinson’s categorization of the Japanese as a negative polite culture is essentially conﬁrmed by the results of her study. Regarding the objections to Brown and Levinson’s emphasis on the strategic or volitional v. normative aspect of politeness, O’Driscoll (1996) rightly points out that discernment politeness or the normative aspect of politeness can also be strategic; that is, it can be directed towards the pursuit of a goal. He explains that certain situations, such

Examining Linguistic Politeness Phenomena 161

as asking for a week off at work, are likely to require deliberate strategies. He also argues that the criticisms voiced against negative face, understood as the desire to be unimpeded in one’s action, are based on misinterpretations of Brown and Levinson in that the essence of this need is a universal desire to be free from ties of contact. Similar criticisms have been echoed by scholars working in Hispanic politeness. Placencia (1996) argues that Brown and Levinson’s negative politeness with its emphasis on the individual does not fully account for the deferential behaviour of Ecuadorians (Quito), who seem more concerned with their position within the group as opposed to with their freedom of action. Vázquez Orta (1995), Márquez Reiter (1997, 1998, 2000) and Hernández Flores (1999, 2004), amongst others, argue that certain speech acts, such as requests and advice, which are considered by Brown and Levinson to be intrinsically FTA, may in fact express closeness and intimacy between the interlocutors, a point made earlier by Siﬁanou (1992) with reference to Greek. In the same vein, Márquez Reiter (2000) and Hérnandez Flores (2004) claim that certain acts, such as apologies, which, according to Brown and Levinson are face-saving for the hearer and face-threatening to the speaker, also address the hearer’s and the speaker’s positive face needs, an observation made earlier by Holmes (1990a) with respect to apologies in English. Extrapolating to the realm of Spanish politeness, a criticism made by other scholars (Wierzbicka, 1991; Blum-Kulka, 1987), Bravo (1998b, 2002, 2003) argues against Brown and Levinson’s a priori categorization of the different politeness strategies as belonging to the realm of negative or positive politeness as the only contextual factors they take into account are the social variables themselves (SP, SD, R). Other scholars who have also found Brown and Levinson’s face distinction problematic have proposed modiﬁcations to the theory, thus extending it and, as a result, endorsing it. Bayraktarog ˘ lu (1991) introduced the notion of ‘face-boosting act’; or ‘anti face-threatening/ face-enhancing/ﬂattering act’ – in Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s words (1997), as complementary to Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) face-threatening act for example compliments. Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1992, 1997) is perhaps the scholar who has offered the most detailed modiﬁcations to Brown and Levinson’s theory. Like Leech and Gu, Kerbrat-Orecchioni argues that certain acts are intrinsically more polite than others (thanks vis-à-vis orders), although, unlike Leech and Gu, she argues that the potential (im)polite value of the acts will need appropriate contextual conditions for their realisation to be deemed (im)polite. Elaborating on some of the criticisms voiced

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by Craig et al. (1986), Kerbrat-Orecchioni (p. 13) distinguishes between negative and positive face, on the one hand, and negative and positive politeness, on the other. This would enable analysts to differentiate between: • negative politeness towards the addressee’s negative face (for example, softening of an order) • positive politeness towards his/her negative face (for example, a gift) • negative politeness towards his/her positive face (for example, softening a criticism or disagreement) • positive politeness towards his/her positive face (for example, a compliment, expression of agreement, and so on). She also integrates aspects of Leech’s theory as she argues that, when politeness is at work, speakers follow ‘Other-oriented’ and ‘Self-oriented’ principles. The former are favourable to the hearer and could be realized with tact (that is, according to ‘negative’ politeness) or enhanced according to positive politeness. The latter are favourable to Self and could belong in the realm of negative or positive politeness. Selfdirected principles can also be unfavourable to Self when, while protecting one’s face, one should not enhance it in an ostensive manner or, when in certain contexts, one has to damage one’s own territory or belittle oneself through self-criticism (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1997, p. 5). In this respect, Chen (2001) proposes a modiﬁcation to Brown and Levinson’s framework incorporating the notion of ‘Self-politeness’, an aspect neglected in the studies within Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategies (see 4.2.3).14 4.1.5 The emotive communication view Arndt and Janney’s (1985, 1991) and Janney and Arndt’s (1993) approach to politeness can be seen as a reaction against the ‘appropriacy-based’ view of politeness, where politeness is understood as using the right words in the right context. The authors argue that this has led scholars to lose sight of the actual individuals involved in the interaction and, as a result, they propose a model that differentiates between ‘social politeness’ and ‘tact’. The former refers to the observance of the social communicative rules of interaction while the latter refers to the participants’ need to mutually save or enhance face. Central to their approach is ‘emotive communication’, through which speakers strategically modify affective signals in order to inﬂuence each other’s behaviour according to the social norms and expectations of the interaction, thus enabling participants to control their

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natural impulses (p. 259). Politeness is seen as the part of emotive communication where the speaker behaves in a personally supportive way. In other words, in Arndt and Janney’s view the notion of interpersonal supportiveness replaces that of politeness. In spite of Arndt and Janney’s criticisms of Brown and Levinson’s framework, the emotive communicative view of politeness makes use of Brown and Levinson’s face distinction in that it claims that speakers have wants for ‘autonomy’ and ‘social approval’. Interpersonal supportiveness or politeness consists of protecting ‘interpersonal face’ and has two coordinates, namely, ‘social politeness’ and ‘tact’. Whereas the former focuses on the observance of socially appropriate communicative forms, norms, routines and ritual, the latter focuses on the participants’ need mutually to save and enhance face by providing support, empathy and avoiding offence. The authors claim that both ‘social politeness’ and ‘tact’ are universal although different communities may implement them differently. As Eelen (2001), amongst others, observes, Arndt and Janney interpret speciﬁc emotive cues as ‘supportive’ assuming that the speaker is being ‘sincerely supportive’. Since, in this approach, ‘interpersonal supportiveness’ is seen as politeness, it follows that politeness will be a matter of sincerity, a point which is contradicted by the results of empirical work on common-sense notions of politeness (Blum-Kulka, 1992). Moreover, Eelen (2001) correctly notes that ‘the equation of politeness with supportiveness leads to the theoretical interpretation of any instance of supportiveness as politeness’ (p. 70). 4.1.6 The rapport management view Spencer-Oatey (2000, 2002) has suggested that linguistic politeness should be seen as one of the many resources available for managing relationships. Spencer-Oatey’s perspective incorporates elements of Brown and Levinson’s, Leech’s and Fraser’s views while addressing some of the objections that arose against these approaches. Her point of departure is the motivational force behind the management of relations. This force comprises two components: the management of face and the management of sociality rights. Face is divided into ‘quality face’ and ‘social identity face’. The ﬁrst refers to the desire to be evaluated positively in terms of personal qualities, and it is in this sense that face is related to personal self-esteem, in other words, to Brown and Levinson’s positive face. The second is the desire to be acknowledged in our social identity roles (for example, as group leader, close friend, and so on) and, as such, it is associated with our sense of public worth. Both ‘quality face’ and ‘social identity face’ are seen as

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interrelated aspects of face. In the same vein, ‘sociality rights’ consist of two interrelated aspects; namely, ‘equity rights’ and ‘association rights’. ‘Equity rights’ has two components, ‘autonomy-imposition’ and ‘costbeneﬁt’, and refers to our desire to be treated fairly; that is to say, not to be unduly imposed upon and to receive the beneﬁts to which we are entitled, and, as such, they combine, respectively, Brown and Levinson’s negative face and Leech’s cost/beneﬁt. ‘Association rights’ refers to our belief that we are entitled to association with others according to the type of relationship the interlocutors have with each other. They relate partly to ‘interactional association/dissociation’ rights (the type and extent of our involvement with others) and ‘affective association/dissociation’ rights (the extent to which we share concerns, feelings and interests with the other). The rapport management view thus encompasses elements of the politeness theories that have had the greatest impact. It also accounts, however, for some of the criticisms voiced against them, in particular the individualistic notion of face and Brown and Levinson’s understanding of negative face. Even though Spencer-Oatey (2002) speciﬁcally states that she is interested in the motivational factors as opposed to the processes behind rapport management, from a pragmalinguistic perspective, she needs to make clear how the interactional process could be analysed according to her approach. By now it should be clear to the reader that the most inﬂuential model of politeness to date is, without any doubt, Brown and Levinson’s. New perspectives have incorporated, to a greater or lesser extent, several elements from Brown and Levinson’s face-saving view. Undeniably, criticisms of the theory, regarding its treatment of the social variables, the hierarchy of the politeness strategies, the need to move away from the micro speech act level, and the fact that speech acts cannot necessarily be seen as FTA in all contexts, are well founded. At the same time, however, it has to be acknowledged that, to date, Brown and Levinson’s model is the only hypothetical-deductive framework that succeeds in explicitly describing and explaining the linguistic strategies involved in the expression of politeness. New perspectives still have to satisfy the criteria for empirical theories (see 4.1.4).

4.2 Perspectives on Hispanic politeness Before considering the perspectives employed in the study of Hispanic politeness, we will brieﬂy consider the origin of the Spanish term cortesía.

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As in the case of the English term, cortesía is also associated with the conduct of the upper classes; more speciﬁcally, the association with life at court can be clearly found in the Spanish term cortés, a derivate adjective of the Spanish noun corte (court). The ﬁrst recorded entry of cortés can be traced back to the thirteenth century (Diccionario Medieval Español, Martin Alonso). The term derives from Latin urbanus comes and was used to refer to the qualities and conduct of courtesans as knowledgeable, prudent, considerate and discrete. The deﬁnition of cortesía, from Latin Úrbanitas Comitas, captures the aforementioned qualities of cortés and incorporates the notion of affect. Cortesía is deﬁned as the expression of consideration, respect or affect towards another person (Diccionario Medieval Español, Martin Alonso), a deﬁnition currently in use today (Nuevo Tesoro Lexicográﬁco de la Lengua Española, 2001 http://buscon.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle). In the eighteenth century, a further addition was made to the thirteenth century deﬁnition; namely, the notion of obligations towards others in symmetrical or asymmetrical positions (Nuevo Tesoro Lexicográﬁco de la Lengua Española, 1729 http://buscon.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle). However, it is interesting to note that this notion does not form part of the current lexicographical deﬁnition of the term which, as explained above, dates back to the thirteenth century. The historical association between politeness and behaviour at court, is also encapsulated by the familiar Spanish lexical phrase lo cortés no quita lo valiente.15 This phrase points out that those at court (courtly knights surrounding the great feudal lords) are not only expected to be brave but also to be polite. According to the ﬁrst deﬁnition of the phrase recorded in the Nuevo Tesoro Lexicográﬁco de la Lengua Española (1936 http://buscon.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle), education and respect for others are not incompatible with individual needs to maintain and defend one’s own rights and beliefs, a point to which we will return when discussing the politeness approaches proposed by Hispanists. This courteous behaviour became a model to which the rest of the social classes would aspire. Unlike the English term ‘politeness’, which is used by both academics and lay people to refer generally to polite behaviour, cortesía is mainly employed by academics in this respect. As Hickey (in press) rightly points out, Spanish does not have a single term corresponding to English ‘politeness’. The English term, he claims, can be captured by a variety of (Spanish) concepts such as cortesía (courtesy), educación (good manners), buenos modales (appropriate behaviour), formalidad (good, reliable behaviour), simpatía (friendliness) and ﬁno (reﬁned). All of these

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notions are present in the historical deﬁnitions of cortesía provided so far, though not necessarily reﬂected by the lay use of the term. As we shall discuss later in this chapter, the lay use of the term seems to be associated with the expression of consideration and respect towards others although not necessarily with the expression of affect. The aspect of affect, in contrast, and as we have already seen, has been present since the thirteenth century in the lexicographical deﬁnitions of Spanish politeness. The study of linguistic politeness in different varieties of Spanish has received a great deal of attention in the last two and a half decades. Despite the array of studies in this area (see 4.4), the vast majority of these are pragmatic applications of Anglo-American models of politeness, and their results can, therefore, be said to (further) support or reject (aspects of) such frameworks. However, the alleged anglocentricity or ethnocentricity of the most important politeness approaches, in particular Brown and Levinson’s, has recently led scholars such as D. Bravo and L. Fant and L. Granato to propose alternative approaches to the study of Hispanic politeness. Before providing an account of these alternative perspectives (see sections 4.3.3 and 4.3.4), we ﬁrst describe some of the pragmalinguistic research that has been carried out prior to this (see section 4.3.1), and secondly, the modiﬁcations to Brown and Levinson’s model as proposed by Hispanists (see section 4.3.2). 4.2.1 Pragmalinguistic views In 1994, Haverkate published the ﬁrst and, so far, only book on politeness written in Spanish.16 In this monograph, Haverkate presents an incisive pragmalinguistic analysis of speech act categories in Peninsular Spanish based on his proposed typology (see Chapter 2, section 2.5) and on an amalgamation of Brown and Levinson’s negative and positive face, Leech’s cost/beneﬁt scale and Fraser’s conversational contract. As mentioned in 4.0, Haverkate situates his pragmalinguistic study within the realm of non-metalinguistic politeness; that is, he is concerned with the linguistic manoeuvres deployed by interactants to maintain the equilibrium of interpersonal relationships. Following Leech (1983), Haverkate (1994) refers to polite and nonpolite speech acts. Polite acts are best represented by expressives (apologies, compliments, thanks, congratulate, welcome) and commissives (promises, invitations) as their realization beneﬁts the hearer. Like Leech, Haverkate notes that the type of politeness conveyed by intrinsically polite speech act categories, such as expressives and commissives, is that of positive politeness. With respect to non-polite acts, Haverkate

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divides them into impolite and non-impolite acts. Impolite acts are those acts which, like certain types of expressives (such as insults) have a negative effect on the hearer. Non-impolite acts are represented by directives (requests, orders) and assertives since these categories are neutral with respect to the intrinsic expression of politeness, as their ultimate aim is not to beneﬁt the hearer but the speaker. For Haverkate, therefore, non-polite acts are not necessarily impolite; in other words, politeness is not always present in interaction, a point also echoed by Briz (1995) and Bravo (1998b), amongst others, as we shall discuss later in this chapter. Since non-impolite acts (directives, assertives) are not intrinsically polite, the speaker will have to mitigate them when it is his/her intention to realize them politely; consequently, politeness will be expressed extrinsically. Haverkate provides a thorough description of the possible ways in which non-impolite acts can be politely mitigated. The ﬁrst type of mitigation described is of the semantic kind, where the propositional content of the utterance (see Chapter 2) is softened by the inclusion of a counterargument to the actual proposition being made. In this way, the speaker ‘concedes’ to the hearer that at least a counterargument could be made regarding the speaker’s assertion. Haverkate (1994, p. 119) provides the following example, amongst others, to illustrate this type of mitigation: Juegan bien, pero no van a ganar. The second type of mitigation described is pragmatic and, therefore, of special interest to us. Unlike semantic mitigation, pragmatic mitigation is extrapropositional; that is to say, it does not add any new information to the content of the act. Haverkate divides this type of mitigation into: hedged performatives (Fraser, 1975) and mitigated metalinguistic utterances on the one hand, and manipulations of the utterance’s truth-value on the other. Hedged performatives are utterances that contain an illocutionary verb (see Chapter 2) mitigated volitionally or hypothetically, thus distancing the softened illocutionary force of the utterance from its propositional content as in Querría concretar que el deporte tiene importantes valores pedagógicos and Podríamos decir que ese punto de vista es bastante conservador (examples taken from Haverkate, 1994, p. 121, our emphasis). Mitigating metalinguistic utterances, unlike hedged performatives, are formulaic, ﬁxed or stereotypical and qualify the speech act in question. Examples of these are: No quiero interrumpir, pero . . . , Sé que no tienes tiempo, pero . . . , Siento tener que molestarte, pero . . . (p. 122) whereby the speaker shows empathy towards the hearer for invading his/her territory and thus expresses ‘negative’ politeness.

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The second type of pragmatic mitigation (manipulations of the utterance’s truth-value) can be realized via lexical and deictic strategies. Lexical strategies include optional, non-formulaic use of verbs such as saber, creer, pensar and dudar as in Su hijo no tiene mucho talento para el atletismo, me parece (examples taken from Haverkate, 1994, p. 126, our emphasis) and Creo que ella es la persona más indicada para decírselo (examples taken from Haverkate, 1994, p. 127, our emphasis) whereby the speaker softens the propositional content of the utterance via the expression of doubt. Deictic strategies also fall within this category and can be related to person (tú, nosotros), place (aquí, allá), and time (ahora, más tarde). Levinson (1983, p. 54) deﬁnes deixis as concerned with ‘the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features of the context of utterances, or speech events’. Deictic strategies are orientated to the speaker’s point of reference and, on using them, speakers get closer or farther away from the proposition. Thus, a speaker who chooses to say No pudimos encontrar la calle instead of No pudiste encontrar la calle gets closer to the proposition in that s/he also claims responsibility for the action and hence shows solidarity (positive politeness) towards his/her hearer. Likewise, a speaker who says Ven aquí ahora instead of Ven is emphasising the proposition contained in the illocutionary verb ‘venir’ through the inclusion of place and time deictic elements. In earlier work, Haverkate (1984, pp. 56–8) refers to ‘focalizing’ and ‘defocalizing’ referential expressions. The former bring to the fore the role of the referent in the state of affairs described while the latter minimize the referent’s role. An example of a defocalizing expression in Spanish is the use of the pseudo-reﬂexive pronoun se as in Se terminó la leche instead of saying (Me) terminé la leche, where the speaker focuses on the end result of the action, that there is no more milk left, instead of focusing on who drank the last drop of milk and did not perhaps bother to replace it.17 Regarding the role of mitigation and politeness, Koike (1994) studied the role of negation in Mexican Spanish and American English requests and suggestions, and observes that negative suggestions such as ¿No ha pensado en X? instead of ¿Ha pensado en X? are conventionalized and therefore unmarked in terms of their mitigating effects.18 Likewise, she notes that negative and afﬁrmative requests, as in ¿No quiere sentarse allí? and ¿Quiere sentarse allí?, have a fairly equal force, although she claims that negative requests appear to be employed either when the speaker feels that s/he is fairly certain that the answer will be afﬁrmative or when s/he is being somewhat insistent. (pp. 524–5).

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Serrano Montesinos (2000, 2000/2001) notes the polite function encoded by the imperfect subjunctive, the conditional and the imperfect as Spanish honoriﬁcs. The author explains that the morphology of these moods allows the indexicalization of the utterance as a request or (polite) question while elevating the honoriﬁc to the third person with verbs such as poder and querer, as in, Quisiera que me enseñara más modelos de este aparato, ¿Podría decirme cómo se va a la estación? and Ah, pero quería (usted) que le enseñara más modelos (ahora) . . . (examples given by the author) (see also Chodorowska-Pilch, 2002 in 4.3.1). On the role of intensiﬁcation and mitigation in Spanish conversations, Briz’s (1998) work comes to mind. Unlike Haverkate and Koike, who studied the role of mitigation in relation to the expression of politeness, Briz offers a comprehensive analysis of the pragmalinguistic features of everyday colloquial conversations of Penisular Spanish, relating some aspects of the analysis to the expression of politeness. More speciﬁcally, Briz examines, amongst other aspects, the use of mitigation and intensiﬁcation in the variety of Spanish spoken in Valencia. Despite the fact that politeness was not the aim of his study, he relates aspects of the analysis to the expression of politeness. The author observes that Peninsular Spanish everyday colloquial conversation has a number of consistent characteristics – for instance, the enhancement of Self (yo) to the detriment of Other (tú) and the use of taboos and euphemisms – which, in other situational contexts, would be considered rude. Briz argues that their use is mainly motivated by the ‘argumentative’ and ‘negotiable’ character of this type of interaction, where the interlocutors’ main aim is ‘to seek agreement’ with each other. Thus, the purpose of intensiﬁcation may well be to emphasise the agreement between the participants as in Por supuesto que sí and Tienes muchísima razón (1998, p. 115), where the speaker would be observing some of the maxims of positive politeness à la Leech. Alternatively, the purpose may be to stress disagreement as in A: Me ha dicho Pepa que se ha ligado al profesor de literatura y que va a salir con él el jueves B: en serio/ ¡Mira que eres IDIOTA!/¿ ¡y tú te lo crees!? (examples taken from Briz, 1998, p. 115), where, despite the alleged impolite nature of the comment (¡Mira que eres IDIOTA!), it is not interpreted as such owing to the overriding strategic aim of seeking concord amongst interactants in symmetrical and close relationships. For Briz (1995, p. 107) then, intensiﬁers primarily serve to stress the truth of the speaker’s utterance. Regarding the role of mitigation, Briz (2003) claims that its main purpose is one of efﬁciency and ‘image’ in general and that, to a lesser extent, it is related to a politeness ‘image’. However, the author does

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not dwell on what he means by the different ‘images’. Mitigators, he argues, sometimes regulate politeness maxims (Leech, 1983) such as tact, modesty and agreement in as much as they can minimise the beneﬁts to the speaker as well as possible sources of disagreement between the participants, and thus maximize the relationship with the hearer. This is particularly the case when there is no solidarity relationship between the interlocutors (1998, p. 145). Briz (1998) also claims that mitigators can be strategically employed in cases where the interlocutors are aware of their unequal social or functional relationship, and hence of the lack of proximity between them (p. 162), or in cases where little cooperation is at work (for example, when criticizing the hearer or someone close to the hearer, or rejecting an offer where an acceptance was expected instead) (Briz, 2003, p. 22). Briz (1998, p. 158) notes that the directness that characterizes Peninsular Spanish everyday colloquial conversation would often give the impression that the rules of cooperation and politeness are being transgressed in this kind of interaction. However, these ‘transgressions’ cannot be said to be impolite, since the participants do not interpret them as such, owing to the closeness (relación vivencial de proximidad) between them. According to the author, politeness in Spanish colloquial conversations is merely strategic in that the speaker’s main purpose in deploying it is to get what s/he wants from the hearer and not necessarily to express deference, as is the case in other varieties of Spanish (Puga Larraín, 1997, for Chilean Spanish) and in other languages. It would thus appear that Briz seems to equate implicitly the expression of politeness with the lay notion of the term (see 4.0), or with Brown and Levinson’s negative politeness or Leech’s cost/beneﬁt scale, and that, for him, politeness is only at work when the interlocutors are not close to each other and when what the speaker is saying might have a negative effect on the hearer (Brown and Levinson’s FTAs, Leech’s cost to the hearer and Haverkate’s impolite acts). Not all scholars share the strategic view of (Peninsular Spanish) politeness. Escandell Vidal (1998),19 broadly basing her theoretical claims on Fraser’s conversational contract, proposed that the notion of ‘strategy’ should be replaced by that of ‘social adequacy’. For speakers to prevent undesirable effects or to enhance positive effects, she argues, they must have prior knowledge of expected courses of events and the social consequences these might have (p. 46). She divides politeness into ‘civil/social correctness’, ‘kindness/friendliness’ and ‘tact/diplomacy’ and reasons that kindness/friendliness supersedes the others in (Peninsular) Spanish.

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In sum, it could be argued that the directness of Peninsular Spanish colloquial conversations observed by Briz could be interpreted as a sign of a Peninsular Spanish orientation towards positive politeness as the default mode of politeness, a point proposed by Hickey (1991) and endorsed, to some extent, in Haverkate’s La cortesía verbal (1994). This is also borne out in Escandell Vidal’s (1996b) claim that kindness/friendliness is weightier than civil/social correctness and tact/diplomacy in Peninsular Spanish. The view that Peninsular Spanish is oriented towards the positive end of politeness has been generally accepted, as we shall see when we discuss the results of empirical studies. Before embarking on such a discussion, however, we must ﬁrst look at the (re)appraisals, proposed by Hispanists, of Brown and Levinson’s work, and at alternative politeness models. 4.2.2 Reappraisals by Hispanists of Brown and Levinson’s approach In a similar fashion to Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1992, 1997) (see 4.1.4.2), but with the manifestation of politeness in Peninsular Spanish in mind, Carrasco Santana (1998, 1999) proposed a modiﬁcation to the terminology employed by the French scholar. Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1997) argues that in Spain, as in other societies, there is a type of ‘disinterested’ (Beinhauer, 1991 [1964]) politeness, complementary to Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) strategic politeness. While the aim of strategic or ‘interested’ politeness is to obtain a beneﬁt through the polite realization of an act, and hence protect one’s face, the main purpose of ‘disinterested’ politeness is either to beneﬁt the hearer or to maintain the interpersonal relationship. This is done by showing a positive attitude towards the hearer through the realization of appropriate polite acts, such as compliments. Based on Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s (1992) anti-face threatening acts, later renamed by the author as face-enhancing acts, Carrasco Santana (1998, 1999) proposed two types of politeness; namely, ‘mitigating’ and ‘enhancing’ politeness. The former has the aim of softening those acts that threaten both positive and negative face and is always strategic. The latter, on the other hand, is independent of face-threatening acts and is manifested through the realization of polite acts according to highly valued social norms of behaviour in a given society; it has, thus, the two-fold aim of maintaining harmony and having our personal image recognized. Unlike Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1997), who talks about positive and negative face on the one hand, and positive and negative politeness on the other, Carrasco Santana (1999) refers, therefore, to

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positive and negative face on the one hand, and mitigating and enhancing politeness on the other.20 Carrasco Santana (1998, 1999) argues that Spanish society favours egalitarianism and proximity; that is to say, social distance and social power asymmetries tend to be minimized. In parallel to comments made by other scholars (Bravo, 1998b; Briz, 1998; Hernández Flores, 1999; Márquez Reiter et al. (forthcoming), Carrasco Santana (1999) explains that, when there is little or no social distance between interlocutors, the degree of interpersonal conﬁanza allows the speaker to encroach upon the personal territory of the hearer without necessarily imposing on him/her. This, in turn, would explain the high incidence of positive politeness and the direct realization of speech acts in Peninsular Spanish in relation to other languages and/or varieties of Spanish. A similar view is offered by Hernández Flores (2004) in her critique, which argues that Brown and Levinson’s theory is inapplicable to Peninsular Spanish. While Carrasco Santana (1998, 1999) follows Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s modiﬁcations and thus endorses the universality of Brown and Levinson’s model, Hernández Flores rejects it as ethnocentric and instead bases her analysis on Bravo’s (1999) ‘sociocultural’ approach (see 4.2.3.1). Unlike Carrasco Santana (1998, 1999) and by default, Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1997), Hernández Flores (2004) proposes three functions of politeness, namely, ‘mitigation’, ‘enhancement’ and ‘reparation’. The ﬁrst two would correspond to what Carrasco Santana (1998, 1999) referred to as mitigating and enhancing politeness. The last function, reparation, is triggered if possible damage to face is considered to have occurred; in this case, politeness would have a function of redressing the negative effects to face. As such, it could be claimed that Hernández Flores further distinguishes between pre- and postnegative effects of acts. In other words, mitigation is used when the speaker suspects that the act might have a negative effect and reparation is employed after the act has been deemed negative to face. It should be noted, however, that for Hernández Flores, as for Fraser and Nolen (1981), politeness is not linked to any speciﬁc act. 4.2.3 Alternative models by Hispanists Up until now, only two new frameworks have been proposed: Bravo’s sociocultural perspective and Fant and Granato’s identity, politeness and rapport management. Of these two perspectives, the one that has received more attention up to now is the sociocultural view. An example of this can be found in Bravo and Briz (2004), which expands on Bravo’s (2003) previous collection of papers.

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4.2.3.1 A ‘sociocultural’ view The sociocultural relativistic view of politeness was proposed by D. Bravo. Before we proceed with an account of Bravo’s framework, it might be apposite to present a brief description of Fant’s (1989) ‘afﬁliation’ and ‘autonomy’ categories, on which Bravo’s approach is partly based. Fant (1989) examined the communicative styles of a group of Spaniards and a group of Swedes involved in business negotiations. Although his objective was to study the cultural differences in the communicative styles of both groups of informants, and not politeness patterns per se, he based part of his analysis on socio-psychological domains. These included group-membership, self-afﬁrmation, cooperativeness v. competitiveness and face-work. He tentatively proposed three distinguishable, though related, face needs; namely, ‘autonomy’, ‘afﬁliation’ and ‘self-esteem’ face. Autonomy face is intrapersonal and deﬁned as ‘the inner representation of Self as an independent, autonomous person with an inviolable territory’ (p. 255). Afﬁliation face is interpersonal and deﬁned as ‘the inner representation of Self as an accepted member of the group to which one has an idea of belonging’ (p. 255). Self-esteem face, like many other self-images, can have both intra- and interpersonal properties and is understood as ‘the inner representation of Self as a person with a (non-lowest) position on a social scale and thereby entitled to get Other’s esteem’ (p. 255).21 Although Fant acknowledges that his socio-psychological domains are ‘highly speculative’ and only partly conﬁrmed by the empirical data of his study, he observed, amongst other things, that ‘self-afﬁrmation’ was manifested differently by both groups of informants. In the case of the Spaniards, self-afﬁrmation was manifested actively by the individual being solely responsible for his/her self-assertions. Self-afﬁrmation was thus seen by the author as the individual’s need to establish interpersonal bonds. Fant explains that for Spaniards, group membership cannot be taken for granted, but has to be established by the individual in his/her search to establish a network of personal relations (p. 253). Group membership for Swedes, on the other hand, automatically implies the individual’s submission to the group norm where s/he is afﬁliated. For Swedes, ‘group membership not only implies obligations and rights on the individual’s behalf but also that the group takes a certain responsibility for its members’ (1989, p. 252). This, in turn, would appear to explain the higher incidence of self-afﬁrmation par-

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ticularly, though not exclusively, the need for afﬁliation by the Spaniards in relation to the Swedes, and the Spaniards’ search for selfesteem face. This is mooted on the grounds that, unlike the other two types of face, which are dependent on Other’s activities, self-esteem face implies a more active attitude on Self’s behalf as the Other’s task merely involves conﬁrming or rejecting Self’s claims. Motivated by what she sees as the ethnocentricity of Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) politeness model, and in particular by her rejection of their face distinction on the grounds that it is inapplicable to Spanish language/culture, Bravo (1998a, 1998b) proposes a new approach to the study of Spanish politeness. This, she bases on an adaptation of Fant’s autonomy and afﬁliation as universal face needs. According to Bravo, autonomy is related to the image that the individual has of him/herself and with the perception that the others have of the individual as different from the rest of the group. Afﬁliation, on the other hand, is related to the individual’s and the other’s perception of him/herself as part of the group. She claims that these categories are realized in conversation by everything the speaker does in order to differentiate him/herself from the rest of the group (autonomy), and in everything the speaker does in order to identify him/herself with the group (afﬁliation). For Bravo (2003, p. 101), politeness is a question of looking good in the eyes of others (‘quedar bien con los demás’). The expression of linguistic politeness would primarily imply a commitment to the speaker’s own social image through socially and/or interactionally accepted behaviour with the aim of involving the addressee’s image in a positive interpersonal manner. Bravo argues that the universal categories of autonomy and afﬁliation should be interpreted as ‘empty’ categories. The task of the analyst would reside in ‘ﬁlling them up’ according to ‘socio-cultural hypotheses/premises’. She explains that Estas hipótesis pueden provenir de nuestra experiencia como hablantes e integrantes de una determinada sociedad ‘comunicativa’, de trabajos de corpus de habla en contextos similares; de fuentes escritas (por ejemplo, antropológicas o sociológicas); de tests cuantitativos como los que asocian variables sociales con variables lingüísticas; de tests de hábitos sociales que nos dan grandes líneas que pueden apoyar nuestras interpretaciones o de test intersubjetivos llevados a cabo por hablantes de la lengua en estudios que permiten descartar la variable ‘etnocentrista’ en varios aspectos. (Bravo, 2003, p. 104)

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One of these sociocultural premises is conﬁanza interpersonal, knowing what to expect from the other and being able to say what we need to say without fear of offending the other (Thurén, 1988, p. 222, quoted in Bravo, 1999, p. 169), which, Bravo argues, belongs to the Spaniards’ image of afﬁliation. Likewise, she found self-afﬁrmation, the speaker’s need to show originality and awareness of his/her own positive qualities (Madariaga, 1928; Thurén, 1988, p. 213, quoted in Bravo, 1999, p. 168), as belonging to the Spaniards’ image of autonomy. A number of scholars have followed Bravo’s approach (see section 4.3.3). Interestingly, up to now no further sociocultural premises have been proposed. A possible explanation for this could reside in the actual sociocultural contexts examined; namely, conversations with friends and family and discussions amongst people who know each other (well). Thus, it would be interesting to see if the sociocultural premises identiﬁed in these contexts would apply to contexts where the speakers are not familiar with each other. 4.2.3.2 Identity, politeness and rapport management Based on a co-constructive (Rommetveit, 1985; Duranti, 1997; Arundale, 1999) and teleological (means-end perspective) view of communication as well as on aspects of Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) rapport management view (see 4.1.6) and on some of the modiﬁcations to Brown and Levinson’s theory proposed by some scholars, Fant and Granato (2002) outline an identity rapport management framework in which politeness is embedded. Although their approach is not based on issues speciﬁcally related to Spanish culture, the exempliﬁcation provided in support of the theoretical concepts is in Spanish and is, therefore, included within approaches to the study of Spanish politeness. Fant (2000, 2001) and Fant and Granato (2002) understand identity as the product of a negotiation process in which individuals negotiate their individual as well as their group identity. Identity is thus seen as involving group membership, the roles attributed to individuals and groups, self-images of the individual and groups, and other-images internalized by individuals. Following Spencer-Oatey (2000), Fant and Granato (2002) distinguish face needs from rights and obligations; that is to say, the authors differentiate between Spencer-Oatey’s sociality rights and face needs on the one hand, and Spencer-Oatey’s quality face from identity face, on the other. In their theoretical exploratory paper, Fant and Granato (2002) distinguish ﬁve possible interdependent face needs, namely, the image of

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‘sameness’, ‘cooperativeness’, ‘excellence’, ‘role or relational identity’ and ‘hierarchy’. All these face needs or images are related to the place of the individual within the group. The sameness image refers to the individual’s projection of being like the others; the cooperative image with being willing to cooperate; the excellence face with having positive qualities thus corresponding to Spencer-Oatey’s quality face; the role image with being acknowledged in one’s self- or other-selected role, thus corresponding to Spencer-Oatey’s identity face; and, the hierarchy image with being acknowledged in one’s hierarchical position. Failure to achieve one or more of these images can result in social exclusion. Besides face needs in the negotiation of identity, individuals pursue personal aims and agendas as well as the aims and agendas of others. The authors argue that the reluctance a speaker might feel to request something from a hearer or to give the hearer a piece of advice could be explained by the fact that the speaker might feel that his/her interlocutor might have a different or (partially) incompatible agenda from his/her own. In managing rapport, three dimensions are taken into account: Selfdirected and Other-directed activities (managing Self’s/Other’s face, Self’s/Other’s agenda, Self’s/Other’s equity rights and sociality rights); constructive and destructive activities; and assertiveness and avoidance strategies. Constructive activities are those geared to corroborating social identity face and, as such, they are seen as polite. Destructive activities, on the other hand, are damaging to social identity face and are thus regarded as impolite. Likewise, assertive strategies (Brown and Levinson’s positive politeness strategies) actively strengthen Self’s and Other’s face, whereas avoidance strategies avoid or damage the image of Self or of the Other. The authors thus see politeness as nondestructive, other-directed, rapport-orientated activities effected by means of assertiveness or avoidance strategies. Extrapolating Dillon et al.’s (1985) criticism of Leech’s (1983) maxims (see 4.1.2.2) to Fant and Granato’s (2002) approach, it could be argued that the type of face needs identiﬁed by the authors could be inﬁnite. To date, Fant and Granato’s approach has not been adopted by other scholars, probably owing to the fact that it is very recent and tentative, as the authors themselves claim. Up to now, Fant and Granato are, however, the ﬁrst scholars, working in (Spanish) politeness theory, to have attempted to outline the different types of face needs within an encompassing identity negotiation framework. As to its applicability, only time will tell.

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4.3 Hispanic empirical politeness studies The model of politeness that has had the greatest impact in the work of Hispanists, as in the work of other language specialists, is without doubt that of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987). Aspects of the facesaving model of politeness have been applied mainly to the study of the realization patterns of (certain) speech acts in different sociocultural contexts and, to a lesser extent, to political discourse and (aspects) of the organization of conversation in different varieties of Spanish. Speech acts as well as aspects of conversation have recently been studied from the sociocultural perspective of politeness (Bravo, 1998b). The main aim of these studies, whether from the face-saving or sociocultural perspective of politeness, is the characterization of the communicative style of different cultural groups through the strategies deployed by the interactants in order to save face. In what follows, we shall offer a brief account of the studies to provide the reader with an overall, though not necessarily exhaustive, picture of the ﬁeld. It will be recalled from Chapter 3 that other studies – into conversational organization, crosscultural business negotiation and intercultural communication – have also touched indirectly upon issues of politeness. We shall start with those studies based on the face-saving view and follow with those based on the socio-cultural approach. 4.3.1 Studies of speech act realization and politeness from the face-saving point of view The speech acts that have so far received attention in Spanish are: requests, apologies, compliments, reprimands, invitations, offers and thanks. For the most part, data have been collected through the administration of discourse completion tests, role plays and ﬁeld notes (see Chapter 6). The main motivation behind their examination is the relationship between the linguistic realization of these acts and the encoding of politeness in terms of the participants orientation towards positive and/or negative politeness. The politeness of requests has been studied in several varieties of Spanish. Following Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) methodological procedures and coding scheme, Vázquez Orta (1995) studied the realization of requests in Peninsular Spanish (Zaragoza) and British English (Salford and London), collecting the data mainly via the administration of a discourse completion test (see Chapters 2 and 6) to university students. Vázquez Orta’s results show that conventional indirectness was the most

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frequent strategy employed by the informants. This was followed by unmitigated impositives, particularly in those cases where the interlocutors knew each other (well) or where the speaker had more social power than the hearer, for instance, when a policeman asks a driver to move his car. Vázquez Orta’s ﬁndings are in line with those discussed so far in that the Peninsular Spanish informants of his study exhibited less of an orientation towards negative politeness and more of an inclination towards positive politeness. Using a discourse completion test and Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) coding scheme, Le Pair (1996),22 Márquez Reiter (1997), Díaz Pérez (1999) and Ballesteros Martín (2001, 2002) examined, respectively, the realization of requests in Dutch v. Peninsular Spanish (Valencia), British English (London) v. Uruguayan Spanish (Montevideo), British English v. Peninsular Spanish (Jaén) and the realization of requests and commands in British English v. Peninsular Spanish (note that the variety of Spanish was not speciﬁed) by university students. Their ﬁndings are in line with those discussed so far in that they all coincide in reporting that the Spanish respondents showed a preference for conventionally indirect requests of the query preparatory type as in, ¿Te importa/ podrías limpiar el escritorio?, followed by direct strategies. Le Pair concludes that the Spaniards of his study employed more face-saving strategies of the negative polite type in those situations where there was a relatively high social distance between the interlocutors, while they exhibited a preference for direct strategies in those cases where there was no or little social distance between the interlocutors. Márquez Reiter (1997) maintains that the Uruguayans in her study appeared to attach more importance to positive aspects of face, such as approval and involvement. Díaz Pérez (1999) argues that the Spaniards in his study were more oriented towards positive politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987) and that ‘the higher the degree of imposition and/or social distance the more conventionally indirect strategies are employed both by the English and the Spanish subjects’ (p. 179). Ballesteros Martín (2001, 2002) maintains that the Spaniards in his study preferred syntactically more direct strategies than the Britons, who employed more routinized conventionally indirect requests. He also found that, in terms of lexical and syntactic softeners (see Chapter 2, section 2.3.5, Blum-Kulka’s classiﬁcation), the Spanish requests were considerably less mitigated than the English requests in similar situations. What is more, mitigated requests in Spanish tended to be employed when there was social distance between the interlocutors and when the speakers considered that it was their right to request something from the addressee. By the same token, if

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the speaker has more social power than the hearer and more of a right to ‘demand’, he observed that s/he is less likely to make use of mitigation. Rintell (1981) examined learners’ sociocultural competence (Canale and Swain, 1980) in relation to requests and suggestions. Using data obtained by means of structured role plays, carried out by a group of male and female Latin American participants, she examined realization patterns in both English (L2) and Spanish (L1). More precisely, she focused on levels of deference conveyed, ﬁnding, for example, that they were higher when addressing older participants in both languages. On the other hand, in Spanish (L1), the female speakers were more deferential to the males, and males more deferential to the females. With respect to suggestions, she found, for example, that in English (L2), suggestions made to the female addressees were more deferential when the addressees were older than the speakers. García (1989a) analysed, via structured role plays, the ‘stylistic devices’ (Tannen, 1984) employed in English by a group of female American speakers of English (L1) and a group of female Venezuelans (L2) in requesting and expressing disagreement with a complaint. Requests were classiﬁed into two global categories: personal or impersonal. Among speakers of American English, impersonal devices had a very high incidence whereas personal ones were more common in the Venezuelan data. García interprets the differences encountered as marking distinctive ‘cultural styles’, which she discusses in relation to Lakoff’s (1973) rules of rapport (see 4.1.2.1) and Bateson’s (1972) notion of frames of interaction. Expressions of disagreement were classiﬁed in three basic categories: confrontational, nonconfrontational and impersonal. Among the Americans, non-confrontational devices had the highest incidence in the production of responses to a complaint, followed by impersonal devices, with a very low occurrence of confrontational devices. In the Venezuelan data, on the other hand, confrontational devices were more frequent than non-confrontational ones and there were no occurrences of the impersonal type. Koike (1989) examined the recognition of requests, commands and apologies, as well as the production of directives by native speakers of American English learning Spanish (L2). She did so by carrying out three experiments: a listening task, which required participants to identify the speech act performed; a speech act production task, whereby a group of learners were asked to respond in writing, in Spanish, to role-play situations which were read aloud to them and which demanded the production of a directive; and a similar speech act production task,

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where another group of participants was asked to respond in English (L1). The majority of learners were able to identify the global speech act presented to them. On the other hand, differences were found with respect to the form directives took in English (L1) and Spanish (L2): the realization of directives in Spanish was seen as ‘less polite’ than in English, and was mainly effected via want and need statements. In contrast, in English, directives were most commonly realized through requests. The results suggested to Koike that, for the learners in her study, meaning in L2 was more important than form as opposed to in L1. As García (1989a), she explains these results in relation to Lakoff’s (1973) rules of conversation.23 García (1993, 2002) studied the realization of requests and responses to requests in Peruvian (Lima) and Venezuelan (Caracas) Spanish. Her studies were based on data elicited mainly via a structured role play performed by native speakers of the language. García examined her ﬁndings according to Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) head act and supportive moves classiﬁcation (see Chapter 2, section 2.3.5). On relating their realization to Scollon and Scollon’s (1983) classiﬁcation of Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategies (see 4.1.3), she organized them into ‘deference politeness’ strategies and ‘solidarity politeness’ strategies. Deference politeness strategies convey formality and respect and, as such, include the expression of Brown and Levinson’s negative politeness, off-record and do-nothing strategies. Solidarity politeness strategies convey camaraderie and in-group membership and, as such, include Brown and Levinson’s bald on-record and positive politeness strategies. García’s analysis shows that, when making a request, the Peruvian males and females exhibited a marked preference for deference politeness strategies mainly realized by preparatory head acts, as in Querida vecina, quiero pedirle un servicio, quiere que me: – si es posible, si usted puede darle clases de inglés a mi hermano que tiene once añitos? no sé (García, 1993, p. 132, our emphasis) and want statements, as in Quisiera que le dieras unas clases = a ver qué días puedes (p. 133), our emphasis), thus reﬂecting their desire not to impose on the addressee. When accepting a request, the Peruvian males and females showed a preference for solidarity politeness strategies. When refusing a request, however, both sexes exhibited a preference for deference politeness mainly realized through indirect refusals, such as mira la verdad es que yo doy a adultos más que nada. Lo que pasa es que tengo más experiencia para adultos pero; en qué colegio está? (p. 145, our emphasis); thus expressing respect and the desire not to offend the interlocutor. In her study of Venezuelan requests and responses to requests, García

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(2002) observes that, when making and responding to a request (accepting and/or refusing it), the informants in her study showed a balance between deference and solidarity politeness. While the head acts were mainly realized with impositives as in Yo te la mando mira media hora (p. 58, our emphasis), thus showing closeness/solidarity with the interlocutor, the possible negative effects of the imposition were heavily mitigated by the deference strategies as in Entonces, estaba recordando que tomé clases contigo y me pareció muy buena tu técnica y todo el asunto y tal, bueno entonces pensé en llamarte y plantearte la situación a ver si tú podrías ayudarle algo en inglés por lo menos (p. 65, our emphasis). García concluded that, unlike the Peruvians of her previous study, the Venezuelans were more informal and sought to maintain ‘positive’ face more actively, particularly in symmetrical relationships; this would explain, in turn, why the use of impositives was not considered threatening or imposing to the participants. Márquez Reiter (2000), in her study of the requestive and apologizing behaviour of Uruguayan (Montevideo) and British (London) university males and females, followed a similar methodological orientation to that of García (1993, 2002). Unlike García, the main bulk of the Márquez Reiter data is based on the performance of an unstructured role play performed by university students interacting with each other. The roleplay situations varied according to Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) social variables (S, P and R). They were alternated in such a way as to yield requests in all possible combinations of the variables. Márquez Reiter (2000) based her analysis on an adaptation of Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) coding scheme24 and, according to the overall realization of the speech event, considered it to be orientated towards Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) positive or negative politeness. Márquez Reiter’s (2000) results show that, overall, the Uruguayan males and females varied the way in which they framed their requests according to the social distance between the interlocutors. The smaller the social distance between them the greater the likelihood that the request would be realized directly. More speciﬁcally, requests by the Uruguayan males in same gender interactions were motivated by both social distance and social power. When interacting with females, however, they were motivated by social distance only. Interestingly, the requestive behaviour of the Uruguayan females in same gender interaction was neither motivated by social distance nor by social power. With respect to the actual strategies employed, the Uruguayan males and females showed a preference for the use of conventionally indirect

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requests of the hearer-orientated type as in ¿Te animás a atender el teléfono/ ¿Podés atender el teléfono mientras salgo?, followed by the use of mainly unmitigated impositives as in, Atendeme el teléfono (que tengo que salir), and a very low incidence of non-conventionally indirect requests or hints. These requests show, therefore, less of an orientation to considerations of negative politeness and more of an orientation to positive politeness, particularly in those cases where there is a small or no social distance between the participants. Apologies have been studied in Cuban, Chilean, Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish. Cordella (1990) examined the realization patterns of apologies in a structured role-play situation where the informants were expected to apologize for having missed a meeting with their boss. The role play was performed by a group of Chilean native speakers, male and female, living in Australia and a group of native speakers of Australian English. Cordella based her analysis on the different apologizing strategies identiﬁed in the literature (Fraser, 1981; Olshtain and Cohen, 1983; Trosborg, 1987; Holmes, 1989) and classiﬁed them into direct and indirect apologies according to whether an explicit expression of apology was employed or not. The results show that the Chileans preferred non-intensiﬁed hearer-orientated direct apologies as in Lo siento, Le doy disculpas, Le doy excusas, Discúlpeme, Le pido excusa and Le pido perdón, thus, in the speaker’s desire to support his/her own positive face (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987), ‘asking’ the hearer to participate in the act. Cordella (1990) argues that the use of hearer-orientated apologies by the Chileans appears to show that the Chileans are more group-orientated than the Australians. Márquez Reiter’s (2000, 2001) ﬁndings of apologies in Uruguayan Spanish, based on Blum-Kulka et al.’s apologizing coding scheme, show a clear preference for the non-intensiﬁed hearer-orientated explicit expression of apology as in Disculpá/e, Perdoná/e, thus reﬂecting less of a need to redress the hearer’s negative face (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987). The results also show that, when employing other apologizing strategies (such as admitting responsibility Me confundí como vos te pusiste a hablar (Márquez Reiter, 2000, p. 157) and giving explanations Disculpá porque me retrasé un poquito pero a veces pasa viste, me encontré con María, me charló y después, bueno (p. 163), the Uruguayans deployed a number of in-group markers such as diminutives and presuppositions of common values (a veces pasa viste). In this way, they also expressed positive politeness and at the same time sought to involve the addressee. The apologizing behaviour of the Uruguayan males and females was motivated by a combination of social power and severity

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of offence. In other words, if the speaker has less social power than the hearer and the offence is severe, s/he is more likely to apologize than if the offence is non-severe and if s/he has more power than the hearer. Likewise, if the speaker has less social power than the hearer and the offence is severe, s/he is more likely to apologize than if the interlocutors have equal power. More interestingly, when the interlocutors have equal power, the severity of the offence becomes weightier, that is, if the offence is serious the speaker is likely to produce more than half of the apologies than if the offence was a light one (pp. 159–67), hence showing the importance granted to redressive action particularly in symmetrical relationships. Ruzickova (1998) examined the realization of spontaneous apologies in Cuban Spanish (Havana) based on Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) apology coding scheme, and classiﬁed them according to negative and positive politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987). The overall results of the study show that the Cubans had a marked preference for positive politeness or solidarity apologies, realized mainly by giving reasons for the offensive behaviour and expressing in-group membership. What is more, the non-instensiﬁed hearer-orientated explicit expression of apology, Perdóneme la molestia, was present in the vast majority of apologies recorded. Compliments have been studied in Argentinean, Ecuadorian, Peninsular and ‘Southern Cone’ Spanish.25 Lorenzo-Dus (2001) studied compliments responses in Peninsular Spanish (Valencia) and British English via the administration of a discourse completion test to university students in both countries. Her analysis is based on Herbert’s (1989) compliment classiﬁcation and on Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) positive and negative face. The results indicate a clear orientation by the Spaniards towards positive politeness. In particular, Spanish males tended to intensify compliments with irony more frequently than their female counterparts, as in Es que conmigo se rompió el molde. Lorenzo-Dus argues that, unlike the Spanish females, who showed an inclination towards positive politeness strategies, avoiding a power imbalance, the upgrading of compliment responses by the Spanish males is also a sign of positive politeness. The aim of the upgrading is to display a desired identity, as in a witty self, and claim common ground, hence establishing rapport. Based on casual conversations between family and friends in Argentina and in Spain, Alba Juez (2000) examined a number of strategies employed by native speakers to convey praise and/or positive feelings towards the interlocutor. One of these strategies was the realisation

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of ironic compliments such as ¡Qué petiso estás, che! (Argentinean Spanish) uttered to an adolescent that has grown signiﬁcantly, or ¡Menuda casita te has comprado, macho! (Peninsular Spanish) when invited to the hearer’s new house. According to the author, Spanish speakers may use both positive and negative politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987) at the same time, thus criticizing (by means of negative irony) and praising (by means of positive irony) the hearer all at once and, in turn, presenting an ironic situation. Reprimands and responses to reprimands have been studied in Argentinean Spanish (Buenos Aires) by García (2004a) (see also Chapter 5, section 5.2.3), following methodological procedures similar to those employed in her previous studies. In this study, the informants were asked to play the roles of boss and employee and to perform a reprimand and respond to it respectively. García (2004a) observed that, when realizing the act, the Argentineans went through a continuous process of reprimanding and rebutting the interlocutor’s response as in A: Yo noto que Ud. está llegando tarde eh B: Ah serán comentarios, pero yo he procurado llegar siempre en hora A: Pero ha procurado, pero no quiere decir que lo haga (pp. 238–9). The ﬁndings also show a marked preference for solidarity politeness strategies when reprimanding and responding to it as in A: Claro, la entiendo, a todos nos pasa B: Claro (pp. 239–40). When reprimanding, an equal number of mitigators and aggravators were deployed, thus threatening both the interlocutor’s positive and negative face. In responding to a reprimand only mitigators were employed. García also notes that the female ‘bosses’ of her study tended to exert power via cooperation, while the male ‘bosses’ did so via coercion. Invitations have been studied in Latin American,26 Peninsular, Peruvian and Venezuelan Spanish. García (1992, 1999), following procedures similar to those employed in other speech act studies, examined invitation refusals by Peruvian males and females and the realization of invitations and invitation responses in Venezuelan Spanish (Caracas), respectively. Her study of Peruvian invitation refusals indicates that, when inviting, the males and females preferred deferential politeness strategies though, when reiterating the invitation, they preferred solidarity strategies. Despite the fact that both the males and females expressed respect towards their interlocutor when refusing the invitation, males tended to do so more straightforwardly, for example, Haré el intento aunque será imposible (p. 231), compared to the females, who responded afﬁrmatively albeit vaguely, for example, Sabes cuál es mi problema que el viernes vamos a lluaco, toda la familia casi todos los ﬁnes de semana vamos a lluaco (p. 219). The Venezuelans, however, preferred

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solidarity politeness strategies, for example, Sabes que es mi cumpleaños el sábado y tienes que venir (1999, p. 397), and, when responding, they preferred deference strategies, for example, Qué chévere ay Roger no puedo tengo que ir donde mi mama, allá (p. 404). She claims that the Venezuelans in her study belong to a positive polite culture, where the preferred rules of rapport are, ﬁrst and foremost, ‘be friendly’ and in second place, ‘impose’ (Lakoff, 1973). Following García (1992), Félix-Brasdefer (2003b) studied invitation refusals by Americans and Latin American (non)native speakers of Spanish via role plays and verbal reports. The results obtained indicate that refusals in English were more direct than those in Spanish and that it was more common for the Latin American group to decline an invitation directly amongst friends. Ruiz de Zarobe (2000/2001) studied the realization of invitations via the administration of an open questionnaire, where the informants, university personnel (students, academics, administrators) working in the Basque country, had to write an invitation they would extend to someone they knew well and someone they did not know that well. Ruiz de Zarobe based his analysis on Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) head act and supportive move classiﬁcation, concentrating on the former. The realization of the invitations was then analysed according to their orientation towards negative and/or positive politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987), bearing in mind the implied cost/beneﬁt to the interlocutors (Leech, 1983). The author argues that, despite the fact that invitations are considered by some to belong to the realm of positive politeness (Leech, 1983; Haverkate, 1994), their realization is only oriented towards positive politeness when the interlocutors know each other very well. This is because, in these cases, the interlocutors seek closeness and solidarity and, given the knowledge they have of one other, the invitation would not be interpreted as an impingement on the addressee’s territory. In the same vein, negative polite invitations tended to be used when the interlocutors did not know each other well, thus showing respect for the addressee’s freedom of action. Positive polite invitations were realized through performatives, as in Te invito a tomar algo; imperatives, as in Vente conmigo a cenar esta noche; interrogatives, as in ¿Te apetece/apetecería que vayamos a cenar? Interrogatives had the highest incidence overall. They were the most preferred way of inviting someone the respondents did not know well and the second most preferred, following performative and imperative invitations, of inviting someone the respondents knew well. Ruiz de Zarobe (2000/ 2001) observed that, when there was a small social distance between the interlocutors, interrogative invitations were realized in the indica-

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tive; when there was a large social distance, however, they were realized in the conditional. Chodorowska-Pilch (2002) examined polite offers in Peninsular Spanish. The author argues that offers realized impersonally or with verbs such as poder, querer, in the conditional, as well as those realized by the deployment of main verbs in the imperfect, the conditional, the future and the present subjunctive are resources used by speakers in order to mitigate the possible threat of the act and, thus, behave politely. The giving of thanks has been studied in Peninsular Spanish by Hickey (in press) in relation to the receiving of gifts. Hickey based his study on ﬁeld notes from participant observation and argues that saying ‘thanks’ in Spain is only expected in situations where the speaker has done a favour to the hearer though not necessarily when this ‘favour’ is part of the speaker’s job, no matter how onerous it might be. He also noticed that the giving of thanks in Peninsular Spanish may or may not be performed formulaically; that is to say, with ready-made linguistic devices. More importantly, in thanking, Spaniards do not tend to express deference but effusiveness and praise for others, hence showing a clear orientation towards positive politeness. 4.3.2 The (im)politeness of political discourse from the face-saving point of view Another area of interest within the study of linguistic politeness has taken place in the arena of political discourse. This is not surprising considering the conﬂicting objectives that politicians face; namely, the fact that in contemporary politics, politicians have to be contentious and aggressive rather than cooperative and conciliatory (Tannen, 1999) in order to save their own face and legitimize their own perspective. The study of the expression of politeness in (Spanish) political discourse has been mainly approached from the perspective of impoliteness (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Culpeper, 1996; Culpeper et al., 2003). Martín Rojo (2000) examined the linguistic strategies employed in seeking conﬂict and agreement in (Peninsular) Spanish parliamentary discourse with respect to Spanish policies towards immigration. Her analysis shows that the apparent contradiction between the dynamics of politeness and the deployment of impoliteness, though expected in the parliamentary contributions, can be interpreted as ‘descortesía cooperativa’ (cooperative impoliteness) in this type of discourse as in Fíjese, voy a ser generosa hasta con el presidente del Gobierno. Voy a responsabilizar al portavoz, como yo le llamo, al portavoz del Gobierno, porque el portavoz siempre está con frases como ésta (p. 130).

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Blas Arroyo (2001) analysed (Peninsular) Spanish face-to-face political debate in the context of the Spanish 1993 general election and concluded that, in this genre, impoliteness represented the unmarked behaviour. He explains that, unlike other types of conﬂictive genre, in face-to-face political debate impoliteness is vested with a ‘theatrical’ component in that utterances are rated impolite, not so much by the interlocutor to whom the offence is directed, but by the audience on whom the success or failure of the political ‘protagonists’ depends (p. 40). Blas Arroyo adds that conventional expressions of politeness generally aimed at mitigating the threat of utterances may, in this type of genre, be interpreted either as ‘politically correct rhetorical strategies’, which often help to intensify the threat rather than mitigate it, or as a ‘security valve’ to compensate for the excessive use of impolite behaviour (p. 41); for example, Me permitiría decirle que con el historial de promesas incumplidas que usted tiene encima, pedir la credibilidad de los españoles y la conﬁanza de los españoles nuevamente es un poco problemático (p. 17). According to Blas Arroyo, if any damage to the political opponent’s image(s) occurs, the damage would be to his/her positive face as in Sigo teniendo la impresión, señor González, y usted lo comprenderá, que usted de ﬁscalidas y de impuestos no sabe absolutamente nada (p. 35). Bolívar (2003), de Erlich (2003) and Nieto y Otero (2003) examined (the lack of) politeness in Venezuelan political discourse, more speciﬁcally, in the discourse of Hugo Chávez. Following Martín Rojo (2000) and Blas Arroyo (2001), Bolívar (2003) claims that, in the Venezuelan political context that she examined, the expression of ritual insults and impoliteness is two-fold as it functions as a way of damaging the image of the other and can, at the same time, result in physical violence and even death. Thus, she argues that, while the expression of impoliteness may be the norm in this type of interaction, it has to be controlled in order to prevent violence. In a similar vein, de Erlich (2003), in her analysis of aspects of Hugo Chávez’s political discourse, shows that, while Brown and Levinson’s positive and negative politeness strategies are deployed to mitigate disagreement and express solidarity, impoliteness strategies also play a role in that they serve to stress negative aspects of the opponent(s). A slightly different approach was employed by Nieto y Otero (2003) in her analysis of a political encounter between Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. Based on an amalgamation of Brown and Levinson’s positive politeness strategies and on Janney and Arndt’s (1993) notion of tact, Nieto y Otero provides an analysis of the role of ‘affect’ in the expression of politeness. Her results indicate that the positive politeness strate-

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gies employed by the interlocutors in order to enhance each other’s positive face coincided with the level of ‘affect’ expressed non-verbally. The ﬁndings also show that, when ‘affect’ is deemed negative, it was expressed without tact and that the expression of politeness brings in the expression of affect. 4.3.3 Politeness in ‘informal’ conversations from the sociocultural point of view The study of politeness in (Spanish) ‘informal’ conversations, understood for classiﬁcatory purposes only in a broad sense, and comprising unstructured simulations and conversations between family and friends, has been mainly approached from the sociocultural perspective. Bravo (1996) examined the negotiating strategies employed by Spaniards and Swedes as within the context of a training programme and claims that, while both groups of speakers mitigated their divergent opinions, the motivation behind the use of mitigation was different. While the Swedes softened their opinions so as to disguise their disagreement, the Spaniards did so to decrease the possible ‘negative social effect(s)’ their actions might have with respect to personal approval.27 Likewise, when analysing the conversational behaviour of Spanish and Swedish students discussing a topic of their choice, Bravo (2000) found that the former are more ‘dialogic’ and that the explicit expression of opinions is socially valued and probably expected by the Spaniards, who do not regard this type of behaviour as threatening. Similar ﬁndings are reported by Bravo (2002) in her study of assertions in Argentinean Spanish in the context of university employees discussing perceptions of the Argentineans by other Latin Americans. As in Bravo (2000), in this study the informants were also asked to discuss a topic of their choice. Hernández Flores (1999) offered a similar viewpoint in her study of advice-giving in Peninsular Spanish conversations between family and friends. She explains that advice arose without having been requested by the addressee and it was realized in the form of clear assertions; for example, Pili, ¿te quieres sentar tú y . . . ? (p. 45) which, in some cases, were also clearly rejected by the hearer, as in sí, no, pero preﬁero, preﬁero estarme . . . (p. 45). Hernández Flores argues that, in Spanish society, owing to the prevailing sociocultural premises of self-afﬁrmation and conﬁanza, which reﬂect, in turn, the interlocutors’ need for autonomy and afﬁliation, the giving of advice, particularly between family and friends, is not interpreted as an FTA.

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Boretti (2001, 2003), in her study of Argentinean (Rosario) conversations between friends, notes that the interactional patterns observed for the Spaniards (Fant, 1996; Briz, 1998; Bravo, 1999; Hernández Flores, 1999) are applicable to sectors of the Argentinean community in that urban middle-class friends seem to appreciate a direct and sincere style in their interactions. This is illustrated in the following example where, on serving the dish he made, the host says to his guests: Este plato me sale muy bien, le va gustar, hacélo, en tu casa hacélo, te va a gustar (2003, p. 118). These patterns are motivated by their need for self-afﬁrmation and self-esteem which, in turn, correspond to their need for autonomy, and which, by the expression of conﬁanza, reciprocity and consideration for the other, correspond to their need for afﬁliation. Similar results are also reported by Cordisco (2003) and Granato (2003) in their examination of the linguistic strategies employed by Argentinean (La Plata) university students.28 4.3.4 Politeness in service encounters from the face-saving and sociocultural perspective The expression of politeness and perceptions of (im)politeness in public service encounters have also received some attention. Placencia (2001) examined the former in the context of an Ecuadorian public institution, and Ferrer (2003) and Sánchez Lanza (2003) studied the expression and perception of (im)politeness in two Argentinean public institutions, respectively. Placencia (2001) observes, amongst other things, that Ecuadorians preferred negative politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1987) when addressing government employees so as to keep the social distance as in Buenos días señor ¿puedo pedirle un favor? (p. 203) but sometimes received instead ‘descortesía positiva’ strategies (Culpeper, 1996) as in Este es falseta campeón (p. 202) instead of Señor, me ha dado un billete falsiﬁcado. Ferrer (2003) notes that, while the behaviour of the government employees was ‘afﬁliative’ (Fant, 1989) in the Argentinean context examined, as in Vení, abuela, que te voy a atender acá, sin que hagás cola (p. 324), that of the general public reﬂected a need for autonomy (Fant, 1989) as in ¿Le puedo hacer una preguntita? (p. 327). Sánchez Lanza (2003) explains, amongst other things, that, all in all, the way in which the service was provided was considered to be ‘polite’ (amable) by members of the Argentinean public despite the fact that the behaviour of government employees did not come up to the general public’s expectations of politeness.

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4.4 Summary In sum, the results reported so far appear to indicate that in some varieties of Spanish (e.g., Argentinean [Buenos Aires], Peninsular Spanish, Uruguayan [Montevideo], Venezuelan [Caracas]) politeness appears to have more of an orientation towards positive politeness or expressing solidarity, interdependence, afﬁliation towards the interlocutor and, in others (e.g., Ecuadorian [Quito], Peruvian [Lima] and Mexican [Mexico City] to a lesser extent) both orientations appear to have equal importance. This is reﬂected not only by those speech acts considered by some scholars (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1992, 1997; Leech, 1983) to be intrinsically (im)polite or to have a certain element of (im)politeness but by the range of speech acts examined. The orientation towards the positive end of politeness does not necessarily imply that negative politeness or the expression of deference, independence or autonomy is not present. The ﬁndings appear to suggest that the social distance, amongst other factors, between the interlocutors appears to be crucial in determining the type of politeness deemed appropriate in a particular situation. As we have seen, it seems that when there is a social distance between the interlocutors, Spanish speakers are more likely to make use of negative politeness or express deference. However, when there is little or no social distance, Spanish speakers seem to prefer the expression of positive politeness or the expression of solidarity or afﬁliation. The ﬁndings of the studies reported here have also shown that the degree of positive and/or negative politeness appears to be different in different varieties of Spanish. If we were to place the different studies reported on a politeness continuum, we would ﬁnd the Argentineans, Spaniards and Venezuelans in these studies sitting at one end of the spectrum, followed by the Chilean and Uruguayans in the middle and the Mexicans, Ecuadorians and Peruvians in a slightly lower position towards the negative end of the continuum. It should be stressed, however, that this claim is based only on the results from the examination of different speech acts. In other words, in order to substantiate it, we would need to compare the realization of the same speech act in similar contexts in different varieties of Spanish. We shall return to this point in Chapter 5 when we address sociopragmatic variation.

5 Examining Sociopragmatic Variation

5.0 Introduction In the preceding chapters, we saw that the main bulk of the studies carried out in the sociopragmatics of Spanish has focused on the examination of particular phenomena (the realization of speech acts, aspects of the organization of conversation, politeness manifestations) in a variety of Spanish in contrast with another language, with English and Swedish constituting the contrasting languages par excellence. Contrastive studies of Spanish(es), however, have so far received considerably less attention and, in their vast majority, have only implicitly touched upon the notion of sociopragmatic variation (see, for example, the studies undertaken in Scandinavia, 5.2.2). In this chapter, we deﬁne sociopragmatic variation, report on the type of studies that have been carried out in this area by Hispanists, and give an account of the corresponding ﬁndings according to the aspects of sociopragmatic variation examined; namely, variation in speech act realization, variation in conversational organization and politeness variation.

5.1 Towards a deﬁnition of sociopragmatic variation When one thinks of (linguistic) variation, the ﬁrst disciplines that come to mind are dialectology and sociolinguistics. While the former examines linguistic variation according to geographic areas, the latter, like (socio)pragmatics, explores aspects of the multitudinous relationship between language, society and culture. One of the goals of (correlational) sociolinguistic research is the examination of language variation in sociocultural contexts. Sociocultural contexts can be as broad as a 191

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speech community (Hymes, 1974) or a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) or as narrow as interpersonal communication. More speciﬁcally, (correlational) sociolinguistics mainly focuses on the ways in which spoken and written discourse relates to social variation, in particular, to biosocial factors, such as age, sex, race, socio-economic class, occupation, ethnic identity, and so on. Elucidating whether such relationships are systematic and collective as opposed to idiosyncratic and persistent over time (Apte, 1989) is, therefore, its main aim. Sociopragmatics shares this concern in that it also preoccupies itself with the study of discourse in sociocultural contexts. Unlike correlational sociolinguistic research, however, the main goal of sociopragmatic research is the examination of ‘meaning in interaction’ where ‘meaning is seen as a dynamic process, involving the negotiation of meaning between speaker and hearer, the context utterance (physical, social, linguistic) and the meaning potential of what is being said’ (Thomas, 1995, p. 22). As culture is seen as a model of and for reality that individuals internalize, without necessarily being conscious of it (Geertz, 1973),1 we argue that the interactants’ assigning of meaning will, to a greater or lesser extent, reﬂect their own sociocultural knowledge and norms. Thus, one of the goals of sociopragmatics is to uncover the cultural norms which underlie the interactional features of a given social group in a given social context; that is to say, to make the interactants’ implicit sociocultural knowledge and values explicit. Therefore, unlike studies in sociolinguistic variation, which investigate linguistic performance as it correlates with biosocial factors, studies in sociopragmatic variation seek primarily to examine differences in meaning in interaction as effected by sociocultural factors, such as institutional context and family context, of the participants and of the (situational) context itself. In this sense, sociopragmatics, like the ethnography of speaking (Hymes, 1962; see also Chapter 6), understood in its traditional sense, also seeks to identify the rules and premises which motivate communicative behaviour. However, unlike the ethnography of speaking, where data are traditionally collected through ethnographic observation and analysed according to three basic units of analysis (namely, that of the speech community, speech event and speech act), sociopragmatic research makes use of a variety of data collection methods and units of analysis, as in, speech acts, the organization of conversation, and politeness strategies (see Chapter 6). Sociopragmatic variation may thus be deﬁned as the way in which speakers vary their use of language in similar situational contexts with similar communicative purposes and thus exhibit different interactional

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features/patterns. These, in turn, possibly reﬂect different cultural norms. Cultural norms or values may be seen as the preference for one state of affairs over another (Hofstede, 1984).2 This preference may be rational and appropriate for a given social group but not necessarily for others. The primary concern of sociopragmatic variation is, therefore, to identify/compare the interactional patterns of given social groups in given situational contexts. Such patterns may be derived from an analysis of their intra-cultural and/or cross-cultural interactions. Intra-cultural variation involves the comparison of the features/ patterns generated by a social group in two different situational contexts; for example, Montevideans in a requesting vis à vis apologizing situation (see Márquez Reiter, 2000). In as much as intra-cultural variation explores sociopragmatic variation in a given language by a given social group in different situational contexts, it shares many of the concerns of register variation. This is particularly so when the situational contexts are differentiated in terms of their (in)formality; that is, institutional as opposed to ordinary contexts. Cross-cultural variation or cross-dialectal pragmatics, on the other hand, entails the comparison of the features/patterns of a given social group with those of a different social group in a similar situational context. Both groups must also share, however, similar characteristics and have the same communicative purpose in mind. An example of such a comparison would be Caraqueño vis à vis Limeño bosses reprimanding an employee, (see García, 2004b). As far as sociopragmatic variation in Spanish is concerned, this has mainly translated as crosscultural comparisons of two or more Hispanic social groups interacting with the same purpose in mind in a given social context. The ultimate aim of studies of sociopragmatic variation in Spanish is to map out the interactional preferences of speciﬁc Hispanic groups in given social contexts. The knowledge gained from such studies will be of relevance to the study of intercultural communication in as much as it helps identify, and attempts to explain, (possible) sources of miscommunication between speakers who share the same language (Spanish) but who do not necessarily share the same cultural norms. It also helps anticipate when and why communication breakdowns (are likely) take place. In this regard, it may be appropriate to mention the distinction made by Thomas (1983) between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failure. Pragmalinguistic failure may result from a speaker performing an appropriate speech act in a given language in an inappropriate way because

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he/she has transferred inappropriate strategies from his/her language variety. In other words, pragmalinguistic failure occurs ‘when the pragmatic force mapped by the S onto a given utterance is systematically different from the force most frequently assigned to it by native speakers of the target language’ (p. 99). One of the examples given by the author to illustrate pragmatic failure is the highly conventionalized directive ‘Would you like to read?’ in the context of the language classroom. Thomas explains that, unlike native speakers of British English, speakers of Russian often responded with ‘No, I wouldn’t’, thus failing to interpret the intended pragmatic force of the utterance, which is that of a directive and not that of a request for information. Sociopragmatic failure, however, results from being unable to judge culture-speciﬁc conventions, such as beliefs about rights and obligations in a given sociocultural context. In other words, while pragmalinguistic failure involves the inadvertent ﬂouting of ‘linguistic’ norms, sociopragmatic failure mainly involves the unintentional ﬂouting of ‘social’ norms. Thomas explains that sociopragmatic failure is more ‘delicate’ than pragmalinguistic failure since, according to the author, the former is social rather than linguistic. As we will see, it is, however, very difﬁcult, if not impossible in some cases, to distinguish the merely linguistic from the social in pragmatics. This can be illustrated with example (1) below, provided by one of our colleagues. A and B are work colleagues in a British university. A is Latin American and B is Spanish. A had bought a children’s book for B’s daughter, Maite, in appreciation of work that B had done for her. Upon receiving the gift, B thanked A. A few weeks she had given the book to B, A and B met again. Since B did not mention the book, by way of small talk (Coupland, 2000), A asked B: (1) A: ¿Y cómo está Maite? B: Muy bien ya empieza la escuela en enero. A: Ah ¿y qué le pareció el libro a Maite? B: Bueno este tipo de libros todavía no son para la edad de Maite. A: Ah sí ya más adelante le servirá. A was expecting to receive a positive evaluation and/or thanks instead of B’s unexpected or dispreferred response (see Chapter 3, section 3.3.4), a negative assessment realized indirectly and prefaced via the discourse marker bueno. From her own perspective, however, B was being truthful though polite in that she had originally thanked A for the book and,

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when subsequently asked her opinion of the gift, she expressed her negative assessment implicitly rather than explicitly so as not to hurt A’s feelings. As, however, A’s positive face was unintentionally threatened (Brown and Levinson, 1987), B’s response caused A to utter her next turn as a face-saving strategy. Because of her own social norms, A was expecting to receive a positive response, even if insincere. B, on the other hand, felt it unnecessary to lie to a colleague she knew and got on well with. This extract illustrates a case of communicative failure in an intercultural interaction in as much as there was a mismatch of expectations between the interactants regarding the expected norms to be followed. What transpires from the above example is that B failed to understand the communicative intent and expectations of A. For her part, A asked what turned out to be an infelicitous question by extrapolating a strategy from her own ‘culture-speciﬁc conventions’ to a situational context where these ‘conventions’ may not be present. What is unclear, however, is what type of failure was at play in this interaction: was it pragmalinguistic in as much as B interpreted A’s question as a genuine request for information when this was not A’s intention; was it sociopragmatic in that both A and B failed to judge culture-speciﬁc conventions, the former by posing the question in the ﬁrst place and the latter by failing to realize that an ‘insincere’ response was expected by A; or was it both? By its very nature, pragmalinguistic failure is more noticeable than sociopragmatic failure. The latter is more of an intangible phenomenon since its identiﬁcation presupposes knowledge about the underlying social norms behind interactional patterns. In practice, however, the distinction is not as clear-cut as it may seem. Two observations should be made in this regard. Firstly, and as remarked earlier, it is very difﬁcult to differentiate between the linguistic and the social. Secondly, while it is true that, in example (1), B ‘failed’ to produce a positive assessment, where one was supposedly expected, and hence, on realizing the wrong act, failed pragmalinguistically’, it is also true to say that she did so implicitly thus responding to what she perceived as social constraints; that is, politeness. The fact that B produced a speech act which did not meet A’s expectations was, however, interpreted by A not as pragmalinguistic but as sociopragmatic failure, in that A thought that B was being rather ungrateful. In other words, had B responded with the same utterance, adding an appeasement along the lines of ‘pero seguro que dentro de unos meses le vendrá bien’, A would not have interpreted her response as impolite or her behaviour as ungrateful. She would, nonetheless, have got the message that B did not think the book

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was appropriate but that she had actually appreciated A’s gesture. Let us dwell a little on this hypothetical scenario. If B had said Bueno este tipo de libros todavía no son para la edad de Maite pero seguro que dentro de unos meses le vendrá bien, she would still have failed at the pragmalinguistic level since, in terms of A’s expectations, she would have realized the act inappropriately. At the sociopragmatic level, however, she would not have failed, at least not from A’s perspective. Although the act would have been inappropriately realized, it would have comprised an implicit positive assessment of A’s gesture. Of particular interest here is the fact that, while pragmalinguistic failure may be easier to notice, as in a negative assessment instead of a positive one, the use of a direct speech act when an indirect one was expected, and so on, is often caused by a discrepancy between the interlocutors in terms of social expectations.3 In this example, the norm for A would be to receive a positive response. Underlying this norm, however, is another very deep-seated one; namely, that A caballo regalado no se le miran los dientes (‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’). More importantly, B’s alleged pragmalinguistic failure gives us an indication of what norms B is abiding by. In other words, pragmalinguistic failure is not merely linguistic since its occurrence reﬂects possible differences in cultural norms. Another pertinent example, provided by a different Spanish-speaking colleague, concerns the ordering of drinks in a British pub. Our colleague asked the barman (2) A: A glass of dry white wine. B: What’s the one word? A: Please. In (2) above, A failed at the pragmalinguistic level and was alerted to this by the barman, who successfully managed to elicit the word ‘please’. The barman was responding to what he and other Britons see as a conventional norm. A, however, was transferring a norm from her language into English, which is, ask directly as the request is nonimposing and the service provider should welcome the business. Had she not said ‘please’, she might not have been served willingly and/or quickly. Even though the use of ‘please’ is conventional in interactions of this type, its omission can trigger in the hearer a negative opinion of the speaker. That ‘please’, even if only elliptically constructed, is still expected here may be explained by the fact that underlying the conventional norm is a more basic norm: do not impose.

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These differences, we argue, reﬂect differences in underlying norms of interaction. Studies of sociopragmatic variation aim to identify such differences by comparing/contrasting the interactional patterns of given social groups in given social contexts. Occurrences of communicative failure, pragmalinguistic and/or sociopragmatic, can thus provide us with a window into the cultural norms to which interactants orient. As such, pragmatic failure can be seen as an aid for the analysis of sociopragmatic variation, particularly in intercultural interactions, where it is most likely to occur.

5.2 Studies on (socio)pragmatic variation As remarked earlier, the studies that have been carried out in this area have, in their vast majority, dealt only implicitly with cross-cultural sociopragmatic variation as very few have identiﬁed (socio)pragmatic variation as the object of study. That they have examined similarities and/or differences in the interactional patterns of different Spanishspeaking social groups in given social contexts, however, more than warrants their inclusion in this chapter. Broadly speaking, the studies that have been carried out so far can be divided into: variation in speech act realization, variation in conversational organization, and politeness variation. It should be noted that, owing to the inevitable overlap in the analytical perspectives employed and to the difﬁculty in separating the social from the linguistic (that is, speech act realisation/politeness orientation), some studies may ﬁt into any or all sections (see 5.2.3). 5.2.1 Variation in speech act realization Studies that have explored the realization of speech acts in Spanish(es) have mainly focused on requests and have considered their realization in Peninsular Spanish vis à vis Ecuadorian Spanish, and Peninsular Spanish vis à vis Uruguayan Spanish, with particular reference to perceived differences in levels of (in)directness in these language varieties. Placencia (1994) constitutes the ﬁrst exploratory study carried out in the area of Spanish cross-cultural sociopragmatic variation. She examined differences in the openings of domestic telephone calls in Peninsular and Ecuadorian Spanish. Her work is based on (participant) observations in Spain, recorded conversations from a home in Quito, and Spanish university students’ verbal responses to a discourse a completion test (see Chapter 6). Her ﬁndings reveal that, while the Spanish participants in her study tended to use more ‘overt’ or direct forms, the

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Ecuadorians appeared to favour ‘covert’ or indirect forms with no explicit reference to the hearer. For instance, while the Ecuadorians displayed their availability and readiness for the interaction with aló as the reply to the summons, some of the responses employed by the Spaniards constituted ‘demands’ on the hearer to act; for example, diga/dígame or quién eres. Likewise, in requests for identity disclosure when one of the participants failed to recognize the other by his/her voice sample, the Ecuadorians made use of indirect forms such as (3) below, while the repertoire for the Spaniards included direct requests for identiﬁcation such as (4):

(3) (ES) Sí, ¿con quién hablo? (p. 70) (4) (PnS) Sí, ¿quién eres? (p. 70)

Placencia remarks that an overt form such as ¿quién eres? would be unthinkable for speakers of Ecuadorian Spanish who, unlike the Spaniards, showed a preference for requests in which the caller is not directly asked to self-identify (see example (3) above). Her results also show that the ES participants in the study appeared to use more formal constructions than their PnS counterparts. In response to requests for identity disclosure, such as (3) and (4) above, or in identity conﬁrmation checks, like those in (5) and (6) below, the Ecuadorians used more elaborate forms, while the Spaniards used simpler ones.

(5) (ES) Le habla Carmen or Carmen le saluda. (p. 71) (6) (PnS) Soy Carmen. (p. 71)

Placencia’s (1998) comparison of service encounters in Madrid and Quito, based on ﬁeld notes from non-participant observation, is the ﬁrst study that explicitly addresses the notion of pragmatic variation, deﬁned as ‘how language is used in context (Levinson, 1983) in different varieties of the language under scrutiny’ (p. 72). She examined interactions between members of the public and hos-

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pital information desk clerks where, she reports, the Spaniards employed what would constitute more ‘direct’ or ‘abrupt’ forms, relative to those that appeared to be preferred by the Ecuadorians. For instance, elliptical forms such as (7) below which, for Placencia, seem to have the force of a command rather than a request for information, were found to be employed more often by the Spaniards than by the Ecuadorians, who preferred fuller forms like the one in (8). (7) (PnS) . . . admisiónŸ (p. 86) (8) (ES) . . . dónde es la ventanilla 41Ÿ (p. 85) Additionally, topicalized requests, as exempliﬁed in (9) below, were found to be more frequent in Peninsular than in Ecuadorian Spanish, where unmarked forms like the one in (8) above were a great deal more common. The fronting of the subject of inquiry would explain why the Eduadorian speakers perceived the requests as more direct and abrupt. (9) (PS) . . . la cafetería por dónde esŸ (p. 86) Attention-getting formulas in the form of a directive such as oye/oiga were also found in the PnS data only. The Ecuadorians made use exclusively of apology formulas such as disculpe/discúlpeme as attentiongetting devices. Furthermore, Placencia found a higher use of ‘compensatory measures’ in direct requests by the Ecuadorians as compared to the Spaniards. These included the following: a much more frequent use of address terms to preface requests, including señorita, which conveys some deference; politeness formulas, of which there seems to be a much wider range available for Ecuadorians, particularly of the deferential type (for example, tenga la bondad); and diminutives. Finally, she describes the use of more formal forms by the Ecuadorians when compared with the Spaniards: their choice of usted over tú; their use of formal greetings such as buenos días as opposed to hola/hola buenos días, which Spaniards employ in addition to formal forms; lexical choices concerning the request verb (for example, informar rather than decir); and politeness formulae. Furthermore, Placencia proposes that combinations of these further contribute to emphasizing formality in Ecuadorian Spanish. Márquez Reiter (2002) also set out to explore pragmatic variation in

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Spanish by focusing on the use of the most preferred requesting strategy found across Spanish(es) and other languages; namely, conventional indirectness. The strategy was elicited by means of an open role play in which Uruguayan university students (Márquez Reiter, 2000) and newly-arrived Spanish university students in England had to request something from someone they did not know (well) as, it may be recalled, she had found that the less familiar the interlocutors are, the greater the likelihood the request will be realized indirectly (see Chapter 4). The overall results of her study indicate more similarities than differences between these two groups of speakers as both the Spaniards and Uruguayans in the study were shown to realize their requests indirectly with people with whom they were not familiar. More speciﬁcally, there were no differences between the two groups regarding the type of indirectness that was deemed appropriate in the role-play situations: both chose conventional indirectness. The conventionally indirect requests were mainly constructed in the present indicative and in the conditional in both language varieties. However, differences were found in the formulae employed, with the Spaniards showing a preference for constructions with Te/le importaría + verb as illustrated in (10) below, and the Uruguayans favouring negatively-phrased head acts like the one in (11): (10) (PnS) . . . ¿le importaría sentarse en otro lado? (p. 144) (11) (US) . . . Ud. no me podría adelantar algo de sueldo (p. 146) Both groups were also found to use alerters or precursors as external modiﬁers; there were, however, differences in the range available to each group. The Spaniards used, for the most part, greetings (Hola) and attention-getting devices (Oye and Mira) aimed at drawing the addressee’s attention. The Uruguayans, however, also employed apologetic verbs (disculpa/perdona) and titles (señor, gerente) for the same purpose, thus displaying a higher use and wider range of precursors. As a result, they produced overall longer and slightly more deferential preambles. Both groups were found to use similar grounders and disarmers (see 2.3.5), with a relatively similar frequency of occurrence. Differences were found, however, in the degree of explicitness of the grounders, with the Uruguayans showing greater readiness to volunteer personal information as well as to mitigate the utterances. Such factors may contribute to Uruguayan Spanish requests being perceived as more

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pleading than Peninsular Spanish requests; this contrast is illustrated in the grounders in (12) and (13) below (12) (PnS) . . . Estoy teniendo un pequeño problema. Necesito pagar un par de recibos que he recibido y no puedo pagarlos por ahora . . . (p. 146) (13) (US) . . . Venía a pedirle a ver si no me podía ayudar en la situación en la que estoy. Me llegaron las cuentas de la luz, de la intendencia y todo y tengo que pagar. Si no pago, la verdad que me echarían de la casa y eso sería bravo porque no tengo a quién pedirle prestado . . . (p. 146) There was cross-cultural agreement in the choice and use of internal modiﬁers. Both groups were found to mitigate their requests internally by means of adverbial phrases, diminutives, indeﬁnite pronouns, and adjectives. However, the Uruguayans employed internal downgraders with a signiﬁcantly higher frequency than the Spaniards, thus suggesting that, compared with Peninsular Spanish, more tentative requests are not only appropriate but also expected in Uruguayan Spanish. This tentativeness was conveyed through the use of different linguistic formulae that stemmed from dialectical differences in the two language varieties, and through a higher incidence of external and internal modiﬁers. The results of this study led the author to explain the pragmatic similarities and differences at the speech act level in terms of a distinction between tentativeness and indirectness. While indirectness ‘works at the structural level of the utterance and, in the case of requests, affects the core request or head act’, tentativeness ‘can occur in the head act and/or in the peripheral elements of the request . . . it can modify the request internally and/or externally’ (p. 136). The Spaniards and Uruguayans in the study were shown to be equally indirect and unequally tentative. 5.2.2 Variation in conversational organization To date, there are only three studies that have explored aspects of variation in conversational organization. The studies in question have focused on the amount of talk, conversational units and laughter in Mexican v. Peninsular Spanish negotiations and in the opening and closing sequences of retail service encounters in Ecuadorian (Quito) v. Uruguayan (Montevideo) Spanish. Fant (1996) examines similarities and differences in the styles of Spanish and Mexican business negotiators in simulations that form part

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of a training course. More speciﬁcally, he looks at the amount of talk and conversational units produced by both groups of speakers. The Spaniards not only uttered more words than the Mexicans but also ‘intervened’ more often and produced more turns per minute. (Interventions are ‘coherent utterances’ produced by one speaker, and turns are interventions that are recognized by both interlocutors.) While the Spaniards spoke faster than the Mexicans, they tended to reduce their speed in more stressful situations. The opposite was true for Mexicans, however. Among other features, Fant also noted some differences with respect to the amount of interaction between team members (‘lateral communication’) and between teams (‘frontal communication’). Instances of lateral communication are considerably higher among Mexican negotiators, possibly reﬂecting, according to Fant, a higher degree of group cohesion. Additionally, the author found more overlap in speaker exchange in Spanish negotiations than in Mexican ones. In this regard, Fant distinguishes between ‘interruptive’ and ‘noninterruptive’ overlap. The former occurs when the ﬁrst speaker is still speaking with all his/her strength, as in (14) below, whereas the latter occurs when the current speaker is losing his/her articulatory and intonational strength (p. 160), as in (15) below (14) (PnS) Antonio is the buyer, César is the seller César Por eso te estaba preguntando si no estabas LEstá clarísimo. Nosotros. Antonio César Proponiendo:Antonio LSomos pescadores y conocemos perfectamente el mercado de la distribución. (15) (PnS) Antonio is the buyer, César and Daniel are the sellers Antonio Una cosa es conocerlo y: y otra cosa es el acto físico de LUhm, César Antonio Montarse en un camión y a distribuir, porque ya habrá una serie de pedidos una serie de kilos que se pudiera LSí claro que no. Daniel Antonio Vender. Daniel LTodavía no habéis conseguido estar en dos sitios a la vez (Examples taken from Fant, 1996, pp. 160–1) Fant observes that Spaniards produced a higher number of interruptive overlaps than Mexicans and suggested that this could indicate a

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higher degree of tolerance on the part of Spaniards towards direct confrontation in negotiation. Bravo (1998a) also explored similarities and differences in negotiations based on simulations between Swedes, Spaniards and Mexicans, and focused speciﬁcally on the function of laughter (see Chapter 3, 3.5.1, and also Bravo, 1996). She found that Spaniards, unlike Swedes and Mexicans, displayed a preference for joking and laughter in ‘thematic’ contexts (that is, within negotiatory activities), and that they used joking and laughter to mitigate expressions of personal disapproval. Occurrences of laughter without a joking effect were rare in Spanish negotiations. In Mexican negotiations, however, joking and laughter did not coincide with negotiatory acts and were employed not to mitigate possible threats but to maintain the socio-emotional ‘climate’ at the desired level. Contexts with laughter without a humorous effect were employed to ‘show respect towards one’s interlocutor in an activity that is of a serious character’ (1998a, p. 357, our translation). Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2004) examined openings and closings, amongst other conversational aspects, in retail service encounters in Montevideo and Quito. These were recorded in clothing and accessories shops in each city. In both the Montevidean and Quiteño service encounters, openings were realized by: (paired) greetings, summons– response and summons, and offers to help. The Quiteño openings, unlike the Montevidean ones, also displayed invitations to come in. The authors found that, while the Montevidean openings were normally realized over two turns, with the second turn generally constituting the main request for service by the customer, the Quiteño openings were carried out over two to three turns with the main request for service occurring in the third or fourth turn. This difference can be appreciated in (16) and (17) below.4 16 (Mdeo.) S: Hola. C: Hola, mirá estoy buscando camisa para mi marido. (17) (Qto.) S: Buenos días. C: Buenos días. S: En qué le puedo ayudar. C: Verá ando buscando una chaqueta de cuero. The Quiteño openings were formal. This is manifested in the use of formal forms of address, for example, usted, señora, in formal greetings

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such as buenos días–buenos días, as well as in the use of additional formulae; for example, ¿en qué le puedo ayudar? On the other hand, the Montevidean openings were characterized by informality in greetings (hola–hola), in forms of address (tú/vos) and in the use of fewer formulaic expressions. That the Montevidean customers, unlike the majority of the Quiteños, produced the main request for service immediately after the exchange of greetings was interpreted as an indication of differences in space boundaries between Montevidean and Quiteño speakers. Whereas the former feel it is their entitlement to request a product, the latter seem to be more uncertain about it. This was also evidenced by the occurrence of invitations to ‘come in’ (Siga nomás) in the Ecuadorian data. While the openings in the Montevideo were shorter than in Quito, closings were longer. Both the Montevidean and Quiteño closings were realized by means of pre-closings (warrants and offers) and other closing devices; for example, 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. The authors noted that, in terms of warrants, the Montevidean speakers appeared to include forms such as bueno as well as intensiﬁed expressions such as ta bárbaro ‘okay excellent’ or muy bien ‘very well’, whereas the Quiteño speakers limited themselves to neutral forms bueno ‘okay’ and ya ‘okay’. Moreover, the Montevidean salespersons displayed (dis)agreement after the initial warrant and, as a result, added another sequence to the closing. This is illustrated in (18) below. (18) (Mdeo.) C: Bueno entonces. S: Cualquier cosita a las órdenes. C: Bueno muchas gracias. S: De nada por favor. C: Chau. S: Chau. On the whole, the Montevidean interactions were characterized by their verbosity and informality in relation to the ‘restraint’ observed in the Quiteño encounters. Longer closings in Montevideo, the authors argue, possibly reﬂect the interactional closeness that the interlocutors aimed to pursue from the beginning of the interaction, as opposed to the respectful distance the Quiteño participants appear to want to keep throughout.

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5.2.3 Politeness variation As far as politeness patterns across varieties of Spanish are concerned, most studies have focused mainly on politeness orientations and on the use of mitigation cross-culturally, as reﬂected in the realization of a number of speech acts (requests, invitations, advice, reprimands). The varieties of Spanish that have been examined so far are: Chilean vis à vis Peninsular Spanish; Chilean, United States and Peninsular Spanish; Mexican vis à vis Peninsular Spanish and Peruvian vis à vis Venezuelan Spanish. Only one study to date, of the Spanish spoken in Cuzco and the Spanish spoken in Lima, has examined cross-cultural politeness variation in the realization of compliments within the same variety of Spanish. Puga Larraín (1997), in an essay on mitigation in Chilean Spanish, compared Peninsular Spanish mitigated speech acts with their likely Chilean ‘counterparts’, as recalled from her knowledge as a native speaker of the latter variety. She noted that, in Chilean Spanish, the same speech acts would be more mitigated both in terms of external and internal modiﬁers and in directness levels (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). These are illustrated in bold in (19), (20) and (21) respectively (19a) (PnS) Quisiera-querría que vinierais a mis bodas de plata (Briz 1995, in Puga Larraín, 1997, p. 35) (19b) (ChS) ¿Sabes? Vamos a celebrar nuestras bodas de plata y me encantaría que fueras. (p. 36) (20a) (PnS) ¿Te molesta que me siente? (Briz 1995, in Puga Larraín, 1997, p. 35) (20b) (ChS) ¿Te importaría si me siento un ratito/minuto? (Briz 1995, in Puga Larraín, 1997, p. 36) (21a) (PnS) Si quieres que te dé mi opinión, no vayas. (Briz 1995, in Puga Larraín, 1997, p. 35) (21b) (ChS) Oye, yo no tengo por qué meterme pero te aconsejaría, por tu propio bien, que no fueras. (Briz 1995, in Puga Larraín, 1997, p. 36)

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According to Puga Larraín, not only are Chileans more indirect than Spaniards (they tend, for example, to disfavour the use of the imperative), they also mitigate their utterances a great deal more. According to the author, one of the reasons for these differences seems to reside in the fact that Chile, unlike Spain, is a markedly socially stratiﬁed society. In Chile, this social stratiﬁcation is mirrored in the way in which language is used to maintain non-reciprocal relationships. In Spain, in contrast, reciprocal relationships are established/ maintained through the use of language, for instance, the generalized use of tú v. usted, with people from various socio-economic backgrounds. One of the largest-scale studies on sociopragmatic variation in Spanish to date is Hardin’s (2001) pragmalinguistic analysis of the persuasive strategies in television advertising in Chile (Teletrece), the USA (Univisión) and Spain (Antena 3). Hardin examines similarities and differences in politeness, speech acts, and other pragmatic phenomena, such as indexicals and implicature, in over two hundred recorded TV adverts per language variety. Her results indicate that persuasive discourse in Spanish is highly conventionalized, and that there are more similarities than differences in the distribution of pragmatic strategies across the varieties of Spanish. At speech act level, she found that in all three of the language varieties, advertisers primarily made use of assertions of assumed facts and directives (orders, suggestions and recommendations) in order to persuade the viewer to buy the product, whereas commissives (offers and promises) and expressives (ﬂattery) were employed only as a secondary means of persuading the viewer to do so. In terms of politeness orientation, Hardin claims that advertisers employ both positive and negative politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987) although they tend to stress solidarity and familiarity slightly more than authority and distance. Solidarity was often expressed with the informal second person singular (tú) while authority and power were conveyed in the advert through the announcer’s speech and written messages, both of which included formal pronouns (usted). A more detailed analysis of her ﬁndings, however, revealed some cross-dialectal differences in individual pragmatic strategies. The US adverts made use of a greater variety of speech acts in relation to the Chilean ads, thus, according to the author, reﬂecting greater complexity in terms of participants and situations. The US adverts were also found to emphasize personal reference more than the Chilean and Peninsular Spanish adverts and contained, as shown in (22) below, the most cases of ﬂattery and endorsements.

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(22) (USAS) Burger King presenta ‘Tú sí que sabes’. Si algunos te salen muy caros y otros te dejan con hambre, sabes que sólo Burger King tiene una gran comida. El Whopper Value Meal. Justo lo que buscas. Sabor que te encanta y siempre hecho a tu manera. Con papitas y refresco, sólo dos noventa y nueve todos los días. Encuentra lo que quieras todos los días. Burger King. Tú sí que sabes. (p. 74–5) The emphasis on personal reference and ﬂattery in US adverts was explained by the importance attributed to individuality in this country and the advertisers’ belief that US viewers wish to be complimented and valued as individuals. As far as politeness is concerned, Hardin pointed out that positive politeness strategies were most frequent in the Peninsular and US Spanish adverts. The least distancing strategies were found in Peninsular Spanish, where there were very few instances of treating the viewer formally (usted). On the other hand, the Chilean adverts, (23) below, showed the highest degree of negative politeness strategies as reﬂected, amongst other things, by formal personal reference or none at all. (23) (ChS) En este mes, de corazón un mensaje de Becel. Una alimentación alta en grasas saturadas aumenta el colesterol y los riesgos de un infarto. Con Becel su corazón está protegido, porque Margarina Becel es baja en grasas saturadas y no contiene ácidos trans. Por eso, Becel es reconocida internacionalmente como especialista en cuidar el corazón . . . (p. 79–80) According to the author, these differences stem from the advertisers’ perceptions of these cultures. Both Spain and the USA are seen as cultures in which egalitarianism is valued, in the latter even more so than in the former. Chile, however, is seen as socially stratiﬁed and class conscious; thus, Hardin concurs with Puga Larraín’s (1997) insights into the pragmatics of Chilean Spanish. Curcó (1998) and Curcó and De Fina (2002) compared the realization patterns of requests in Mexican (Mexico City) and Peninsular Spanish (Barcelona). Their study was based mainly on the administration of a multiple-choice questionnaire (see Chapter 6) in which university students were asked to rate the naturalness, appropriateness and rudeness of particular requests in speciﬁc contexts. The authors observed that the use of strategies aimed at mitigating acts that threatened the interlocutors’ positive and negative face (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987), were rated differently by the Mexicans and the Spaniards. The Mexican infor-

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mants rated the use of unmitigated imperatives like Ayúdeme a revisar esto as less polite than the Spaniards and the use of diminutives as more polite than the Spaniards who, in turn, associated the use of the latter with ironic and/or negative effects. The ﬁndings also suggest that the Mexican respondents evaluated negative interrogatives as in, Oye, ¿no por favorcito mueves tu coche? as more polite than non-negative ones. The Spaniards, on the other hand, interpreted the inclusion of the negative particle (no) as less polite. Thus, unlike Koike (1994), who regards negatively framed requests (and suggestions) in Mexican Spanish (see Chapter 4, 4.3.1) as conventionalized, and hence unmarked in terms of mitigating effects, Curcó (1998) and Curcó and De Fina (2002) claim that the inclusion of the negative particle has a (polite) mitigating effect.5 Overall, Curcó and De Fina’s (2002) comparison of Mexican and Peninsular Spanish requests seems to indicate higher levels of unmitigated direct requests as more appropriate in Peninsular Spanish than in Mexican Spanish. Likewise, Mexican Spanish requests exhibited a number of characteristics, for instance, the use of the diminutive, associated with the mitigating of a threat to the interlocutor’s positive face. Based on data gathered through a discourse completion test (see Chapter 6, 6.3.4), De los Heros (2001) conducted the ﬁrst cross-dialectal (sociopragmatic variation) study of compliments in the Spanish spoken in Cuzco and Lima, with particular reference to considerations of gender and power. De los Heros’s study was similar to the work conducted by Holmes (1995). The ﬁndings reveal that both the Cuzqueño males and females exhibited a similar incidence of compliments. The Cuzqueño males, however, paid slightly more compliments to females than to males, unlike their female counterparts, who distributed their compliments equally between males and females. On the other hand, Limeño males and females showed a preference for complimenting females rather than males, with the former paying slightly more compliments than the latter. Both the Cuzqueño and the Limeño female respondents complimented their addressee more emphatically than males, particularly when complimenting another female on possessions as in the example in (24) below (24) (PvS) Me gustan mucho tus zapatos. (p. 180) While the lowest incidence of compliments was found amongst strangers in both cities, the highest incidence of compliments in both

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Cuzco and Lima was paid to hearers who had more power than the speaker. This was particularly the case when complimenting them on their appearance, as in (25): (25) (PvS) ¡Qué bien se le ve hoy, jefe! Jefe, lo felicito por todo el logro que está Ud. haciendo! (p. 189) De los Heros explains this behaviour by adducing that, in traditional and hierarchical societies, those in power expect their subordinates not only to obey them but also to behave in a conciliatory and friendly manner. This expected behaviour would include the giving of praise and compliments. In terms of dialectal variation, the author found that emphatic forms were used more frequently in Lima in relation to possessions, whereas in Cuzco they were more often employed in relation to appearance. On the other hand, male addressees in Lima were recipients of duplicated and/or emphatic compliments more often than male addressees in Cuzco. On the basis of role-play data collected in Lima (García, 1996 – see Chapter 4 and Chapter 6) and in Caracas, García (2004b) examined the politeness strategies employed by Limeño and Caraqueño bosses when they were reprimanding an employee. The results indicate that both groups of speakers showed a preference for realizing the reprimands (head acts) directly, albeit mitigated rather than intensiﬁed, and for threatening the hearer’s and their own negative face. The Caraqueños, however, used not only more but also a greater variety of strategies than the Limeños. Although this made their reprimands longer, it allowed room for negotiation since, unlike the Limeños, they accepted explanations given by the employee, afﬁrmed mutual interests, and so on. The Caraqueños also mitigated their reprimands more frequently than the Limeños, thus softening power differences between the interlocutors. According to the author, while the Venezuelan boss seeks cooperation with his/her employee and hence establishes a horizontal relationship with him/her, the Peruvian boss establishes a vertical relationship by which s/he expects the employee to abide. When responding to the reprimand, the Limeño participants showed a preference for realizing their responses through negative politeness strategies that threatened their own face rather than that of the hearer. The Caraqueño participants, on the other hand, realized their responses directly. Examples of these contrasts are given in (26) and (27) below.

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(26a) (PvS) Lo siento muchísimo. Le ruego que me disculpe pero es que he tenido un problema familiar . . . (p. 132) (26b) (VS) Un momento. Yo lo oí tranquilo y calmado cuando usted habló, lanzó una acusación y yo voy a responder. (p. 130) (27a) (PvS) Mire el problema es que en primer lugar no es cierto todo lo que han dicho, algunas veces llego tarde pero no siempre y encima yo siempre cumplo con mi trabajo y me quedo si es posible a deshora algunas vez en algún momento de emergencia. (p. 132) (27b) (VS) Debe estar loco porque yo jamás he llegado tarde, en el último mes. Nunca me he ido antes de la hora y todo mi trabajo está al día usted quiere que yo lo invito a mi departamento a mi oﬁcina para que usted vea si mi trabajo está al día o no. (p. 133) García observed that the Limeño participants mitigated their fault, and realized their responses with strategies that expressed deference, thus recognizing the power asymmetry between the interlocutors. The Caraqueños, in contrast, showed a preference for assertive and at times aggressive responses, thus reﬂecting their wish to counterbalance power differences between the participants. This, the author argued, showed that the Venezuelans approached their bosses as if they were on a symmetrical relationship, unlike the Peruvians whose linguistic behaviour stressed the asymmetrical nature of the relationship. These ﬁndings coincided with some of the observations made by De los Heros (2001) regarding the authority-conscious behaviour of Peruvians.

5.3 Summary As we have seen, the vast majority of sociopragmatic variation studies have been cross-cultural, and have compared the similarities and differences found in the interactional characteristics of Peninsular Spanish speakers vis à vis speakers of other varieties of Spanish. It could be claimed that the focus on Peninsular Spanish stems from what native speakers of Spanish perceive as important pragmatic differences between American and Peninsular Spanish, particularly in terms of directness and/or tentativeness.

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Overall, the results of the studies discussed in this chapter concur in reporting Peninsular Spanish speakers across a range of situational contexts as more ‘direct’ than (Latin) American speakers of Spanish. More speciﬁcally, in particular requests, Peninsular Spanish speakers were found to realize speech acts more directly. Furthermore, when they did realize them indirectly, they did so less tentatively than speakers of other varieties of Spanish; for instance, Montevidean Spanish. They also showed the highest degree of orientation towards positive politeness as well as a high tolerance for direct confrontation in negotiation. On the other hand, the behaviour of Ecuadorian and Chilean Spanish speakers has been characterized as indirect, formal and deferential in the contexts examined. Deference was also one of the characteristics identiﬁed in Peruvian interactions vis à vis Venezuelan ones. It has been suggested by some scholars that the deferential behaviour observed in the Chilean, Ecuadorian and Peruvian interactions analysed corresponds to the fact that Chilean, Ecuadorian and Peruvian societies are societies with marked social differences. The ﬁndings of the studies reported here have (indirectly) shown that different scholars understand indirectness differently. Some appear to equate indirect forms with covert forms and direct forms with overt ones (Placencia, 1998). Some see indirectness as belonging to both the head act level and peripheral elements (Puga Larraín, 1997) of the speech act; while others (implicitly) refer to indirectness at the head act level only (Hardin, 2001; García, 2004b). Yet others (Márquez Reiter, 2002) have proposed a distinction between indirectness and tentativeness in order to capture similarities and differences in the realization of directives across various forms of Spanish. This apparent lack of consensus regarding some of the pragmatic tools employed is not unique to the pragmatics of Spanish but belongs to pragmatics in general (Cheng and Warren, 2003). In the light of this, the units of analysis employed in the ﬁeld would need to be ﬁne tuned in order to establish similarities and differences in the interactional preferences of given Hispanic social groups in given contexts. It has also become apparent that, until now, only a few varieties of Spanish in a small range of contexts have been examined. Thus, in order to start building a fuller picture of sociopragmatic variation in Spanish, there is a need not only for crosscultural studies across different forms of Spanish but also for studies that explore a wider range of speech acts as well as similarities and differences in conversational organization. As far as intra-cultural studies are concerned, a picture has not yet emerged. Further intra-cultural studies are needed to ascertain

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whether or not the patterns observed cross-culturally in a given situational context are merely the result of the particular context rather than a reﬂection of interactional features of the social group under examination. Sociopragmatic variation across Spanish(es) is, therefore, an emerging area awaiting to be developed.

6 Research Methods in Sociopragmatics

6.0 Introduction As we saw in Chapter 1, pragmatics is a relatively new discipline whose nature of inquiry intersects with that of a number of other social sciences, such as linguistics (applied linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, semantics, sociolinguistics), sociology, psychology and anthropology. Pragmatics does not have a methodology of its own but draws upon the methodology employed in other social sciences, in linguistics, anthropology and sociology, for example. As the ﬁeld of pragmatics is broad and covers a variety of strands, from the study of (contextualized) sentence meaning (Fraser, 1998) to the study of meaning in interaction (Thomas, 1995), the way in which data are collected and analysed depends on the pragmatic perspective adopted by the researcher, as well as on the object of study. This book has focused on sociopragmatics; namely, on the study of the underlying norms of speaker and hearer meaning as reﬂected in the (appropriate) realization of speech acts, the organization of conversation, politeness manifestations and sociopragmatic variation. Furthermore, most of the empirical studies discussed in the book have concentrated on different aspects of ‘spoken interaction’, gathered in a variety of ways: from the employment of production questionnaires, aimed at eliciting instances of spoken data, to the use of naturalistic data collection methods. Rather than provide a précis on social research, the aim of this chapter is to review the main data collection methods that have been employed to study different aspects of (Spanish) sociopragmatics. This decision has been taken for two reasons: ﬁrstly, there is already available an array of specialized publications on the subject of social research and, secondly, as evidenced by the empirical studies reported in previous chapters, sociopragmaticists have 213

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favoured some social research instruments more than others, for example, questionnaires v. interviews. The ﬁrst part of this chapter discusses what natural discourse is, the collection of ﬁeld notes from observation, and recording and transcribing natural data. The second part of the chapter focuses on the collection of elicited data, speciﬁcally, on the use of role plays, rating scales, verbal reports, discourse completion tests, multiple-choice questionnaires, issues of triangulation and ethics.

6.1 Collecting ‘natural’ discourse? One of the challenges faced by sociopragmaticists comes from the sociolinguistic debate as to what constitutes natural language. Ever since Labov’s (1972) sine qua non that linguists should collect natural discourse for empirical purposes, sociolinguists have engaged in numerous debates as to the nature and even the existence of natural discourse (Coupland and Jaworksi, 1997, part II). This debate, though generally associated with sociolinguistics,1 could be claimed to background a wider ontological discussion on the nature of (social) reality. Broadly speaking, there are four different, though not necessarily incompatible, views of reality. ‘Naïve realism’, associated with positivism, which holds that one reality exists and that it is the job of the researcher to discover this objective reality; quantitative research-correlational sociolinguistics has its basis in such a view. ‘Critical realism’, usually associated with post-positivism, posits that reality exists but can only be known imperfectly owing to the researcher’s human limitations. This view forms the basis of qualitative research non-correlational sociolinguistics. The ‘interpretative/constructivist’ understanding of reality, in which reality is socially constructed and the researcher’s aim is to understand the multiple social constructions of meaning and knowledge, is reﬂected in qualitative researchconversation analysis and discourse analysis. And, the ‘emancipatory’ view, where multiple realities are recognized as inﬂuenced by social, political, economic, values, amongst others, forms the basis of qualitative research-critical discourse analysis (Cohen et al., 2000). Following Labov (1972), linguists should aim to collect naturallyoccurring discourse for empirical purposes as it is unconscious, unreﬂective discourse that will give the researcher unadulterated data. However, the mere presence of the researcher and recording device renders speech unnatural. This is illustrated in (1) below where the speaker changes the way in which he refers to a politician and his political party once he realizes that what he is saying may be recorded.

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(1) (US) A is testing her new recording equipment while her family are conversing over lunch. Family member B, is helping her with the test recording. C is unaware of the fact that the conversation is being recorded and says C: ¿Y qué podés esperar de un partido político con un líder como X?, en vez de llamarse X se debería llamar Alí Babá y los 40 ladrones, son todos unos chantas. D: [risas] C: No sé por qué te causa tanta risa si hace varios años que trabajás con X? B: Che, miren que estamos viendo si se graba la conversación o no, eh? C: Ah! lo que te decía es lo que los partidos y líderes políticos de hoy día deberían tener más presente la opinión del pueblo a la hora de presentar la rendición de cuentas. This is what Labov (1972) referred to as the ‘observer’s paradox’. This led Labov to claim that our goal as linguists should be to ‘observe the way people use language when they are not being observed’ (p. 61). As a result, linguists, where possible, have put in practice ingenious ways of recording natural discourse in order to minimize the effect of the observer’s paradox. (In his 1972 study of the social stratiﬁcation of ‘r’ in New York City department stores, Labov succeeded in doing this.) One way of recording natural discourse has been to hide a recording device and tell the informants only after the data have been collected that they have been recorded, and ask, at that point, for their permission to keep the tapes. While this approach guarantees the recording of unadulterated discourse, it does not necessarily guarantee the informants’ consent to keep or make use of the tapes, so the researcher runs the risk of ending up with no data.

6.2.1 Naturalistic data: ﬁeld notes from observation A less ‘imposing’ way of collecting naturally-occurring discourse is achieved through ﬁeld notes. Field notes are part and parcel of ethnographic research2 irrespective of whether the researcher takes a participantas-observer role or observer-only role.3 In a participant-as-observer role, the researcher is either a member of the group under examination, or acts or attempts to become a member of the observed group. In cases where the observer is a member of the group, s/he will function as both observer and informant as his/her knowledge of the community in question will aid the analysis of the data. As a member of the group, it is likely that s/he will be expected to behave like the members who are

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being observed. In this sense, those observed ‘are likely to ﬁnd it aberrant for observers to inquire about or record behavior which they are assumed to know, and little tolerance will be shown for violations of rules’ Saville-Troike (1997, p. 127). In cases where the researcher is not already a member of the community in question, s/he will attempt to establish close relationships with the members of the community under study (Labov, 1972; Milroy, 1981) in order to gain a better understanding of the values and beliefs of the group examined. In these cases, it is important to bear in mind that the portrayal of an (assumed) identity for the sole purpose of obtaining data can not only be deceptive but unethical, particularly when the identity adopted by the researcher clashes with some of his/her own values (Wolfram and Fasold, 1974). In both cases, the researcher will engage in the activities appropriate to the situation and observe the activities members of the community engage in. As such, the researcher will need to have an increased level of awareness in order to tune in things usually tuned out (Spradley, 1980). In an observer-only role, the researcher is present at the scene of action but does not participate with the members of the community to any great extent. Instead, s/he observes the interaction from an ‘observation post’ in his/her capacity as ‘spectator’. Irrespective of the role the observer may take, it is humanly impossible to jot down all the instances of the discourse observed without the aid of a recording device. Hence, researchers make use of ‘condensed notes’, ‘expanded accounts’ and ‘ﬁeldwork journals’. Condensed notes are taken during actual ﬁeld observations and, as the term suggests, they are a condensed version of what actually occurred in the ﬁeld: from features of the sociocultural context where the data were collected to (un)connected utterances and non-verbal signals. Expanded accounts are expansions of condensed notes. After observation and/or condensed note-taking, the ethnographer recalls details (that is, key phrases of the interaction which were not recorded on the spot) and, in this way, the ethnographer expands the account. Fieldwork journals function like diaries in that besides containing condensed notes and expanded accounts, they have a personalized record of experiences, ideas and reactions to/from informants during ﬁeldwork (Spradley, 1980). In other words, ﬁeldwork journals account for the ﬁeldworker as an important research instrument. This account is by no means ‘objective’ as it is the researcher who makes the decisions about what to study, how he/she should go about it and whose voice is to be represented/reported in his/her research. Moreover, even if the ethnographic work seeks to understand culture from an emic perspective (that is, to effect culture-

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speciﬁc-studies from within the system), the presence of a researcher adds an element of artiﬁciality not only to the actual discourse that is being observed but to the ﬁndings as well. This is the essence of the observer’s paradox. In this sense, we agree with Wolfson (1976) who argues, together with other scholars (Stubbs, 1983; Figueroa, 1994), that no single, absolute entity answers to the notion of natural speech. Furthermore, what constitutes natural data ‘is not decidable on the basis of their type and/or the role of the researcher within the data. Rather, the status of the pieces of data as natural or not depends largely on what the researcher intends to ‘do’ with them’ (Speer, 2002, p. 513) and also, on what claims are made on the basis of the data gathered. In other words, if our aim is to study the realization patterns of certain speech acts according to certain social variables (for example, social distance, power, imposition, age, sex, and so on), the collection of naturally-occurring speech acts might be out of the question as it might take a lifetime to collect a large enough number of natural instances of the speech act in every single combination of the social variables. Hence, the researcher might opt for a production questionnaire, as in a discourse completion test, aimed at eliciting instances of certain speech acts. In view of this, the investigator should be aware that production questionnaires of this type reﬂect metapragmatic judgments; that is to say, responses which show what the informants think one should say in such contexts and not necessarily what they actually say, in other words, usage (see 6.3.4). Besides, if the researcher is interested in the actual responses to the speech act and their uptake in its social context, note-taking is likely to be insufﬁcient as the researcher will be unable to jot down from memory every single word that was uttered by the participants. As Kasper and Dahl (1991) point out, ‘[W]ith the exception of highly routinized and standardized speech event sufﬁcient instances of cross-linguistically and cross-culturally comparable data are difﬁcult to collect through observation of authentic conversation’ (p. 245). Thus, the researcher might have to opt for some sort of contrived or elicited data. 6.2.2 Recording and transcribing natural data As we have seen in the previous section, it is virtually impossible to remember and/or write down every instance of spoken discourse, thus researchers tend to record the interactions they observe. The purpose of recording the interactions could be said to be at least two-fold: the researcher will not only end up with a reliable source of information, and will, therefore, not have to depend on recalling the interaction via

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the notes taken during observation and via his/her memory of the event, s/he will also be able to play the tape over and over again to double check what happened during the interaction. It is usually after repeated listenings that details that may have escaped the researcher’s attention are brought to light. As advantageous as tape and video recordings are, they represent an additional intrusion to that of the researcher him/herself and as a result, the presence of a tape recorder and/or video recorder can be said to amplify the observer’s paradox. Goodwin (1981, p. 18) argues that although recording devices have been widely used in sociolinguistic research, their possible effects on the data should be reconsidered every time they are employed. This is particularly evident in the case of video recording as the intrusion is likely to be greater than that of tape recorder. Good lighting is essential for quality recording and multiple cameras rather than a single camera may be needed in order to capture the paralinguistic features of the interaction. If multiple cameras are used for this purpose and if the researcher is interested in, for instance, the physical distance between participants, s/he should make sure that s/he knows what the distance on the videotape represents in actual terms. Besides, a video recorder with a directional microphone with minimum movement is also needed to capture the interaction, avoid undesirable background noises and draw attention to it. Also, as the researcher him/herself may be the one doing the recording, s/he is more likely to focus on the vicissitudes of the video recording rather than on the interaction itself.4 In the event that s/he is both taping and video recording, it is important that the researcher does not cease to pay attention to the interaction per se but instead, wherever possible, makes notes of what is being observed. As with video recording, it is also preferable when tape recording interactions not to place the microphone and/or the recorder too close to the informants as this might be intimidating and is likely to exacerbate the effect of the observer’s paradox. In this respect and bearing in mind ethical considerations (see 6.5), permission to record should be sought either before or after the interaction has taken place. If permission is sought prior to recording, the researcher should allow time for an acclimatization period; that is, time for the informants to get accustomed to the presence of an outsider and/or recording device before the actual recording of the data is carried out. Tannen (1984), unlike Goodwin, argues that after a while informants get used to being recorded and are almost unaware of the presence of an outsider and/or recording equipment. Duranti (1997) also claims that the initial ‘dis-

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turbance’ caused by an observer and his/her recording equipment subsides once the novelty effect has worn off.5 Seeking permission before recording is clearly more ethical than asking for permission once the recording has taken place, as in the latter case informants might feel forced to grant consent. That the informants know that they are being recorded is, however, likely to adulterate the data, at least at the initial stages of the collection procedure. As a result, the researcher might have to discard initially collected data that show traces of ‘disturbance’. As simple as this may sound, the task of determining the exact moment when the informants become almost oblivious to being recorded is far from straightforward, let alone objective, and will depend on the researcher’s own subjective interpretation of events. Once the data have been recorded, it needs to be transcribed. Transcribing is a research activity in itself as it involves close and repeated playings of the interaction, which, as mentioned earlier, may reveal previously unnoticed features of the interaction. Heritage (1984b, p. 238) claims that the use of recorded data offers ‘an essential corrective to the limitations of intuition and recollection’. He further argues that transcripts not only enable repeated and detailed examination of the events of interaction but also enhance the ‘range and precision of the observations which can be made’. Moreover, transcripts allow ‘other researchers to have direct access to the data about which claims are being made, thus making the analysis subject to public scrutiny’ and as the data are in ‘raw’ form, ‘they can be reused in a variety of investigations and can be re-examined in the context of new ﬁndings’. Ochs (1979) points out, however, that transcriptions are not simple neutral versions of the words on tape, as different types of transcriptions will stress different elements of the interaction, depending on the researcher’s object of study. Thus, if the researcher is only interested in the pragmalinguistic realization of a given speech act, it could be argued that s/he will not need to account for pauses and other paralinguistic features of the interaction. If, however, the researcher is interested in examining how a speech act is realized over multiple turns, it is likely that s/he will have to use a type of transcription which marks overlaps, interruptions, hesitation devices, and so on. Likewise, if the researcher is examining how interactions unfold and are co-constructed by the conversational participants, s/he is likely to make use of Jefferson’s (1986) system of transcription, developed to capture features of the interaction that have been found to be of crucial importance for conversation analysts (see Chapter 3). In other words, the transcription system employed will largely depend on what the researcher intends

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to do with the data, irrespective of the type of data collected, and on whether the data are naturalistic or elicited (see also, Edwards and Lampert, 1993). The usefulness of a transcription system that accounts for pauses and overlaps, amongst other conversational elements, is illustrated in examples (2) and (3) below, where it facilitates the examination of optional and/or canonical elements in the openings (see Chapter 3) of service calls in the context of a given company. (2) (US) 1. A: CSC Coordinación de Servicios buenas tardes (.) habla Claudia. 2. B: Ho:la sí buenas tardes≠ (.2) mirá para para::: m::: (.) para que vayan por un paciente para cuidarlo mañana de noche::≠ (Márquez Reiter, 2003) In example (2) at line 1, the call-taker (A) offered situational identiﬁcation by providing the name of the company to which the caller got through, a greeting and self-identiﬁcation by providing his/her own name. However, the fact that there was a micro pause, (.) before the uttering of self-identiﬁcation, potentially implicates a response (for example, buenas tardes ‘good afternoon’), and makes the proffering of self-identiﬁcation contingent upon lack of caller uptake. This is also illustrated in (3) at line 2, where the caller produces an overlap close to what he must have interpreted as a turn completion, returns the greeting and thus prevents the call-taker from self-identifying. (3) (US) 1 A: Coordinación de Servicios buenas[tardes≠] 2 B: [Sí] buenas tardes≠ = mirá: habla el hijo de la paciente (.) Agustina Perei[ra≠] (Márquez Reiter, 2003) In other words, had the researcher chosen transcription conventions that do not account for pauses and overlaps, s/he would not have discovered that the proffering of self-identiﬁcation is an optional element in the openings.

6.3 Elicited data Studies in Spanish sociopragmatics (see Chapters 2 and 4) have favoured the collection of elicited data over naturalistic data. However, as this

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section is preceded by a discussion on naturalistic data collection, we will start by looking at negotiatory ways of eliciting data (that is, at role plays) and continue with a description of non-negotiatory elicited data (that is, discourse completion tests and multiple-choice questionnaires). 6.3.1 Role plays One type of research instrument that has been employed to enable researchers to collect a large enough number of speech acts and control social variables is role play. In role play, informants participate in simulated social situations or scenarios, generally in dyads, ‘intended to throw light upon the role/rule contexts governing ‘real’ life social episodes’ Cohen et al. (2000, p. 370). Different types of role plays have been identiﬁed according to the nature of the participants’ involvement; that is, whether the participant is asked to act or imagine him/herself in a situation or to act as if s/he were another person. The vast majority of role plays employed in (inter-language and crosscultural) pragmatics have been imaginary performed ones; that is, the participants have had to act as if they were another person. This allows the researcher to control for the different possible combinations of explanatory variables (for example, +/- social distance, +/- power, +/ranking of imposition, sex). It could be argued that the interaction yielded by such role plays are based on the beliefs and/or similar past experience the participants have had about the situational context and the roles that have been assigned to them. For this reason, it is important that the participants are familiar with the scenarios and the roles they have been allocated even when the roles themselves are imaginary ones. Hamilton (1976) differentiates between ‘performed unstructured’ and ‘performed structured’ role plays, a distinction better known in pragmatics as ‘open v. closed’ role plays. In unstructured or open role plays, the participant is not restricted by the researcher’s/interlocutor’s initiation; s/he participates with another informant/interlocutor in another role and the role play is, thus, interactive. Within open role plays a further distinction can be made between those in which conversational outcomes are prescribed and those in which they are not. Example (1) below illustrates the instructions given to both participants in an open role play where the conversational outcomes are prescribed, while example (2) shows an open role-play where no conversational outcomes are prescribed.

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(1) 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. (Taken from García, 1996) (2) Participant A You are a university student. You need to get a book from the library to ﬁnish your assignment on time. The library is closed and there is only one person you know who has the book you need, one of your lecturers. On the way to his/her ofﬁce you meet him/her in the hallway. What do you say? Participant B You are a university lecturer. While leaving your ofﬁce you meet one of your students in the hallway. Respond to him/her. (Taken from Márquez Reiter, 2000) To the best of our knowledge, no study to date has compared the type of data yielded by an open role play with the outcomes prescribed with the data yielded by the same open role play without the outcomes prescribed. Still, a number of observations can be made. In both kinds of role play (as shown in examples (1) and (2) above), the role of the participants as well as the initial situation for both participants is speciﬁed. The main differences is that, while in (1) both participants know in advance what the outcome of the interaction will be – the boss will reprimand the employee and the employee will disagree with the boss’s assessment of the situation, in (2), only one of the participants, A, knows what the communicative goal of the interaction is beforehand – s/he needs to borrow a book. Unlike A, participant B does not know the speaker’s communicative goal in advance. It could thus be argued that type (2) is likely to give way to (more) negotiation than type (1) as it means that the researcher can focus not only on how things are being talked about but also on what is being talked about. As such, open role plays where the conversational outcomes are not prescribed provide both ‘communication’ and ‘message’ orientated interaction (Márquez Reiter, 2000) in that communicative acts (for example, speech acts) are ‘more freely’ organized and negotiated precisely because the ultimate outcome is not prescribed. As Kasper (2000) argues, irrespective of whether the conversational outcomes are prescribed or not, open role plays: allow observation of those aspects of conversation that are fairly independent of particular contexts and goals, but unlike authentic

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discourse and elicited conversation, they also permit us to design contexts and roles that are likely to elicit speciﬁc speech events and communicative acts (p. 323). In a closed role play, the participant or actor responds to a written/oral scenario description and to an interlocutor’s initiation. The interlocutor is generally the researcher him/herself (Cohen and Olshtain, 1981; Rintell, 1981) or a participant with similar characteristics to that of the actor. The main aim is to elicit single turn speech acts from the actor. It is in this sense that closed role plays are sometimes referred to as oral discourse completion tests, albeit without the hearer’s response. As with any research instrument, and particularly in the case of open role plays where the conversational goals are not prescribed, careful steps should be taken in their design to ensure that the communicative act, as in, speech act/event, under examination takes place during the interaction and that the scenarios contained within the role plays are ‘natural’ and ‘realistic’ enough for the participants. 6.3.2 Rating scales Rating scales (see Osgood et al., 1957; Oppenheim, 1966) have generally been employed in sociopragmatics and inter-language pragmatics to assess the values of the independent variables, for example, +/- social power; +/- social distance, +/- imposition, believed to inﬂuence the dependent variable; that is, speech act realization. In this sense, rating scales can be seen as a preliminary exercise aimed at developing a valid and reliable research instrument. For instance, in Márquez Reiter (2000), a non-prescriptive open role play was employed to collect requests and apologies. The scenarios of the role play were chosen on the basis of intuition and observation and, prior to the role play performance, a multiple choice questionnaire, where the social variables were assessed via rating scales, was administered to a population with similar characteristics to the one that subsequently participated in the role play. The main objective of the multiple-choice questionnaire was to conﬁrm the intuitions and observations on which the researcher had built the scenario. Below is an example: Situation A new trainee has brought his/her brand new laptop to work. An employee who has been working for the company for some time now asks the trainee to lend him/her the laptop for a while.

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1 2 3 4

The speaker has more power than the hearer; The hearer has more power than the speaker; The speaker and the hearer have equal power; Other (please state).

Although they have received very little attention, rating scales have also been employed in Spanish sociopragmatics (see Curcó, 1998 and Curcó and DeFina, 2002, for the few who have done so) to elicit, as illustrated below, perceptions on the degree of politeness encoded in different requests, from the least polite to the most polite: 1 2 3 4 . . .

May I ask you where Jordan Hall is? Might I ask you where Jordan Hall is? Could I ask you where Jordan Hall is? Would you mind telling me where Jordan Hall is?

Source: Adapted from Clark and Schunk, 1980.

Rating scales are particularly useful in assessing the strength of feeling, attitudes and/or judgements the respondents may have. Moreover, different patterns of probability can be tested across a large population of potential respondents. They can also be used to aid the analysis of the data; that is to say, as an additional resource to help interpret the results obtained. Nonetheless, it should be borne in mind that the respondents’ choice of option may not accurately report what they actually do and that they may wish to add further comments, in which case, a category entitled ‘other’ should be added. It is important that the categories of the rating scales are discrete (that is, mutually exclusive), and that they exhaust the range of possible responses that the informants may give. As with any type of research instrument, it is of utmost importance, too, that the instrument be piloted and reﬁned accordingly. 6.3.3 Verbal reports Verbal reports (see Ericsson and Simon, 1984; Cohen 1996), also known as post-performance or retrospective interviews, have usually been used in conjunction with role-play data (Félix-Brasdefer, 2003a; Márquez Reiter et al., forthcoming). The main rationale behind verbal reports is that the information that has been processed and stored in the participant’s short-term memory while s/he is carrying out a task is reportable

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and veridical (Kasper, 2000). Thus, immediately after the role play, the participants are interviewed in order to examine the linguistic information generated during the role play, and to comment on the social perceptions of the situations they had just participated in. Verbal reports can be seen, therefore, as a means of collecting supplementary data and as a way of supporting the validity of the data obtained via the role play. 6.3.4 Discourse completion tests The most widely employed research instrument for investigating the linguistic realization of communicative acts has been the discourse completion test, a type of production questionnaire. Discourse completion tests, (DCTs), originally developed to compare speech act realization patterns in inter-language pragmatics (Levenston, 1975; Blum-Kulka, 1982), comprise scripted dialogues describing socially-differentiated scenarios. There are two main types of DCTs: with and without rejoinders; that is to say, with or without the hearer’s response. In the case of DCTs with no rejoinders, the scenarios are followed by a blank space/line that the respondents complete by providing the speech act under examination. In DCTs where the hearer’s response is included, the respondents have to ﬁll in the missing turn by providing the speech act under examination; to put it differently, respondents have to complete the ﬁrst part of an adjacency pair. Below is an example of a DCT with a hearer’s response and another of a DCT without the hearer’s response. It is 11pm, and you are about to go to sleep. Your neighbours next door are having a party and are making a lot of noise. You: Excuse me, ..................................................................................... Neighbour: Sorry about that. (Taken from Vázquez Orta, 1995)

You have just started your new job in the mailroom. It is nearly time for lunch and you have just realized you need to pack 3 more parcels before you can go to the canteen. If your boss, Cristina Miranda, would help you, you could go down to the canteen with the others. What do you say to your boss? You: ........................................................................................................ (Taken from Le Pair, 1996)

Rose (1992) compared native and non-native speakers requests in DCTs with and without rejoinders and found no signiﬁcant differences in the

226 Spanish Pragmatics

responses given by non-native speakers to the two types of DCTs. On the other hand, he found that, native speakers’ responses to DCTs without rejoinders were lengthier and made more use of external modiﬁcations and supportive moves. Similar results have been reported by Johnston et al. (1998), who argue that the lack of a rejoinder or hearer’s response, seems to produce greater linguistic investment. Similarly, Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford’s (1993) examination of rejections by native and non-native speakers in open questionnaires, and in dialogue type DCTs (that is, DCTs where the ﬁrst conversational turn is included after the description of the scenario) shows that dialogue type DCTs with rejoinders helped non-native speakers of English, vis à vis native speakers, frame their answers. Billmyer and Varghese (2000) compared the effects of enhancing the situational prompts of the DCT scenarios by adding information on a number of social and contextual variables. Their results indicate that, while enriched DCTs did not affect the production of the head act or internal modiﬁcations, they triggered, in both native and non-native responses, the production of signiﬁcantly longer and more elaborated requests in terms of external modiﬁcations. Although it has been claimed that DCTs with rejoinders elicit more ‘natural-like’ data than DCTs with no rejoinders, it is worth considering that this may be the result of the linguistic competence of the (nonnative) respondents as opposed to an effect of the research instrument itself (Kasper, 2000). Comparative studies of DCTs and role plays6 (Rintell and Mitchell, 1989; Turnbull, 1997; Félix-Brasdefer, 2003a) have shown that DCTs generate non-representative and simpliﬁed data compared to role plays, and that data elicited by means of a DCT represent a subset of the strategies found in open role-play data, as, for example, in Félix-Brasdefer’s (2003a) own data. Data collected through DCTs have also been contrasted with ‘natural’ data (Bodman and Eisenstein, 1988; Holmes, 1991; Hartford and Barlovi-Harlig, 1992; Aston, 1995; Beebe and Cummings, 1996; Turnbull, 1997; Yuan, 2001; Golato, 2003). The results of these studies show that the language yielded by DCTs is shorter in length, simpler in wording, less negotiatory and less emotionally involved than naturally occurring language. As Golato (2003) explains, the language elicited by DCTs is metapragmatic as respondents are expected to write down what they believe to be situationally-appropriate responses, based on their accumulated experience within a given setting. In this sense, ‘the DCT is a valid instrument for measuring, not pragmatic action, but symbolic interaction’ Golato (2003, p. 92). Although (non-enhanced) DCTs do not elicit the amount of padding, external modiﬁcations and support-

Research Methods in Sociopragmatics 227

ive moves that accompany head acts in non-contrived data (Johnston et al., 1998), they provide the researcher with a controlled context where a large amount of data can be gathered rather efﬁciently without the need of transcription. Moreover, the language elicited by DCTs can help as a point of departure for classifying the type of formulae and strategies that occur in natural occurring interactions (Rose, 1992). 6.3.5 Multiple-choice questionnaires Multiple-choice questionnaires (MCQs) comprise a description of the scenario followed by a choice of responses, from which the respondent has to select one. In this sense, MCQs, like DCTs, provide the researcher with metapragmatic judgements as to what the respondents believe would be appropriate responses in given situations. Responses to DCTs have also been compared to those of MCQs (Rose, 1994; Rose and Ono, 1995; Hinkel, 1997). The results indicate that MCQs appear to produce more hints/non-conventional indirectness (see Chapter 2, section 2.4) than DCTs. Why this is the case, however, is a question that still remains unanswered. MCQs have all the advantages of DCTs in that large amounts of data can be collected in this way while, at the same time, controlling social variables. Unlike DCTs, it could be claimed that that MCQs do not provide respondents with choices they would have made in actual conversations but merely with the opportunity to select from the list provided the most appropriate for the situations. With this in mind, it is imperative that the linguistic choices provided stem from careful observation and/or preparation (for example, from responses to a questionnaire). It could, however, be argued that, at the level of linguistic analysis, MCQs offer an advantage over DCTs in that the linguistic realization of the communicative act is already provided by the researcher who, in turn, will only have to analyse the numerical v. linguistic choices made by the respondents. Despite the added analytical advantage of MCQs vis à vis DCTs, MCQs have not received as much attention. They have, for example, hardly ever been employed in Spanish (see Arellano, 2000 for an exception). Irrespective of the research instrument employed (role plays, DCTs, MCQs), it is of paramount importance that the scenarios and linguistic choices described are based on the careful preparation of the instrument, even though they are confected by the researcher. This can be done: by observation of the kind of social situations which trigger the type of language the researcher seeks to analyse; by pre-questionnaires designed to assess the naturalness of the situations and their social and

228 Spanish Pragmatics

contextual variables; and by the (pre)piloting of the research instrument. In the case of MCQs, the choices given to the respondents should be discrete; that is, there should be no overlap between them, and they should also be mutually exclusive.

6.4 Triangulation All necessary steps should be taken to ensure that the instrument used for collecting the data is both reliable and valid. Put another way, the researcher should ask him/herself: if the investigation were carried out by someone else other than the author, using the author’s method(s), would the same results be achieved? The researcher should also be aware of the fact there is no such thing as a ‘bullet proof’ method; inherent in all methods are possible sources of errors. Exclusive reliance on one method may, therefore, distort the investigator’s picture of the ‘slice of reality’ under examination. It is for this reason that the data ought to be triangulated. Triangulation, a multi-method approach to a problem, comprising the use of two or more methods of data collection, is a principle to which many researchers subscribe but to which, in practice, only a minority adhere (Cohen et al., 2000). It could be claimed that triangulation, though indispensable to many types of research, is particularly necessary in the case of qualitative research/data as the subjectivity of the informants/researcher may contribute to a certain degree of bias.7 Hence, as researchers, we should do our best to minimize the possible sources of bias/errors and one way of doing this is to employ more than one data-gathering method. Examples of triangulation that have already been discussed include: the use of verbal reports (6.3.3) immediately after a role play in order to gain linguistic/social perceptions of the scenarios the informants took part in; the employment of rating scales (6.3.2) to check judgements on the responses yielded by a DCT; having two observers (6.2.1) working independently in a given research setting as their own observational styles are likely to be reﬂected in the data obtained. This could be done either by having two researchers working from an emic viewpoint (that is, from a position inside the system) or one researcher working from an emic, and the other from an etic standpoint (that is, from a position outside the system). In the latter case, the combination of an insider and outsider perspective can be vital in noticing ‘behaviors which are not readily apparent to natives of the community, for whom they may be unconscious’ (Saville-Troike, 1997, p. 128).

Research Methods in Sociopragmatics 229

6.5 Ethics As has already been brieﬂy mentioned above with regard to the observer’s paradox (see 6.1), ethics is essential in the orientation of any research project. As a rule of thumb and, in order to plan ethicallysensitive research, the following principles should be observed: informed consent; privacy; conﬁdentiality and risk/beneﬁt assessment. We will argue that, important as ethical principles are, they are not absolute in that they should be interpreted according to the values and context of the research (Sieber, 1992; Cohen et al., 2000). It is in this sense that ‘[t]he ethical researcher creates mutually respectful, win–win relationships with the research population; . . . a relationship in which the subjects are pleased to participate candidly, and the community at large regards the conclusions as constructive’ Sieber (1992, p. 3). Written informed consent (that is, where informants choose (not) to participate in an investigation before and/or after they have been given the facts of the investigation in question) is absolutely essential in some countries (for instance, in the UK). This involves the researcher informing the participants about what exactly s/he seeks to obtain in order, amongst other things, to gain access to the data s/he wishes to collect. Informing participants as to the exact nature of the study in question may, however, bring in undesired effects (such as an increased level of self-awareness), which may, in turn, lead the informants to alter their behaviour in the presence of the researcher instead of acting ‘naturally’. We will argue that, in some cases, it is not necessary to give the exact details of the research in question. Thus, for instance, if we want to examine the use of tú v. usted in spoken interaction, we might tell our informants that we want to study how people from a particular community communicate with each other. This means that, while we are being honest in that we are not disguising our interest in language, we are not disclosing our speciﬁc interest in the use of pronouns of address. Were we to do so, the informants might express a preference for one over the other because they believe that this is what ‘should be done’ in a certain conversation. While privacy relates to persons and to their interest in controlling the access of others to themselves, conﬁdentiality is an extension of the concept of privacy and refers to the actual data obtained; more speciﬁcally it is concerned with handling the data in such a way that the participants’ interest in controlling the access of others to information about themselves is safeguarded, Sieber (1992, p. 44). The greater the sensitivity of the information and of the research context, which may

230 Spanish Pragmatics

vary from private to public, the more precautions should be taken to protect the privacy of the participants/institution. In practical terms, it means that information that could be easily identiﬁed as having been provided by a speciﬁc individual should be anonymously disseminated so that it becomes non-traceable. This should be clearly stipulated to informants when requesting their informed consent. Last, but not least, researchers should try to strike a balance between the risks and beneﬁts of the research to the participants and to the community. Crucial to risk/beneﬁt assessment is knowing where to look for potential sources of risks (such as costs, damages), and to involve a wide spectrum of players in the assessment itself so as to obtain diverse perspectives and opinions (Sieber, 1992, p. 76). In practical terms, and in the context of the studies reported in this book, we may ask ourselves what beneﬁts, if any, would members of minority groups, for example, gain from the research. In other words, while the beneﬁts of carrying out a particular research project are clear for the researcher, in sociopragmatics, the beneﬁts the research might have for the participants and/or the community have not always been taken into account.8 One way of coping with this problem would be to disseminate the results amongst the participants once the research is ﬁnalized. Apart from raising their awareness of how they use language, even this, however, does not necessarily guarantee any major beneﬁts for the actual participants, especially when compared with those obtained by the researcher. In sum, when conducting research, the researcher should show respect for the researched, acknowledge the fact that the language s/he seeks to obtain is the property of the informants and try to make sure that the researched obtain some beneﬁt out of being researched.

Notes 1

Introduction

1. An initial distinction of this type can be found in Dascal (1983) under ‘sociopragmatics’ and ‘psychopragmatics’. 2. For a detailed historical account of the development of the study of spoken discourse (el discurso oral) in Spanish from 1950 to 1999, including aspects of pragmatics as deﬁned here, the reader is referred to Cortés Rodríguez (2002).

2 Speech Act Theory: Examining Language at the Utterance Level 1. One of Grewendorf’s (2002) arguments, for instance, has to do with felicity conditions: If in uttering a performative we implicitly performed the act of making a statement and explicitly performed the act denoted by the performative verb, then performatives would be subject to two different sets of felicity conditions: the conditions for the act of making a statement and the conditions for the act denoted by the performative verb (p. 33).

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

Grewendorf, nonetheless, provides examples that show that only one set of conditions can be fulﬁlled. Achugar (2002) deﬁnes piropos as compliments with an amorous or sexual tone, normally issued to strangers in the street and normally performed for an audience. It should be noted, however, that although Achugar’s distinction between piropos and other types of compliments stands for ES, it does not necessarily hold for all varieties of Spanish. See a related idea under the notion of adjacency pairs within conversation analysis (3.3.1). In his seminal work, Speech Acts. An Essay on the Philosophy of Language, Searle (1969) outlines his overall speech act theory, offering a detailed, rule-based characterization of speech acts. Searle (1975) develops the notion of indirect speech acts, and, ﬁnally, Searle (1976) offers a taxonomy of speech acts. Searle’s 1975 and 1976 publications are also contained, with slight modiﬁcations, in Expression and Meaning (Searle, 1979). This example was obtained through participant observation. All other examples in the book where the source is not stipulated were obtained in the same manner. Goodwin and Duranti (1992) express a related criticism when they point out that, with Searle’s development of the theory, interest shifted from conventions and context to a focus on intentionality, leaving out ‘reference to soci231

232 Notes

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

etal norms or conventions that may exist outside of the speaker’s conscious intentions to communicate’ (p. 18). This view can be more clearly inferred from Searle, 1975. Example from Miranda Stewart, personal communication. Alston (1991) notes that Searle does not provide an unambiguous deﬁnition of ‘point’ or ‘purpose’, so it is not clear whether purpose is intended to mean the same as point, such as to commit the speaker to what is promised, in the case of promises, or whether it refers to the speaker’s purpose, which may be a variety of things. Alston (1991) notes that there is an oddity in having expressives as a separate category of illocutionary acts where ‘something which is a feature of all illocutionary acts is here [in the case of expressives] the basic illocutionary point’ (p. 73). See also González Mangas’s (2000) analysis of how participants in the exchange listed under (30) arrive at each other’s intended meaning. Some requests, as Blum-Kulka et al. (1989, p. 276) acknowledge, can be multiple-headed; that is, they may have more than one minimal unit realizing the requestive goal, as in ‘Clean up the kitchen. Get rid of this mess’. Blum-Kulka and House (1989) relabel this category as ‘impositives’, whereas they refer to strong and mild hints (non-conventional indirectness) as ‘hints’ only. The notion of ‘hedged performatives’ belongs to Fraser (1975). This is in contrast to the view expressed by Leech (1983), for whom a scale of (in)directness can be established and who associates indirectness with tentativeness, ‘the more indirect an illocution is, the more diminished and tentative its force tends to be’ (p. 108). This does not mean, however, that all indirectness leads to more politeness. ‘Can’t you sit down?’ is an example Leech (1983) provides of indirectness leading to less politeness. Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) basic notions of head acts and levels of directness, and internal and external modiﬁcation have been applied to the analysis of invitations (García, 1999) and reprimands (García, 1996), among other speech acts. Placencia (2000), however, notes that the application of these notions can be problematic with complex speech acts (such as, complaints, made up of chains of acts with multiple functions), where it can be difﬁcult to identify a central head act, as House and Kasper (1981) or Olshtain and Weinbach (1987) have done in their studies. Additionally, Pratt (1981) points out that people do not always speak for themselves, but ‘for or through other people’ (p. 9); that is, in some sort of institutionalized role, where the intentions are not those of the private individual. Hence, building on Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, Levinson (1979) proposes the notion of activity types within which utterances are embedded and within which they have to be examined. Allwood (1995) and Linell (1996), on the other hand, discuss related proposals under the notions of an activity based approach to meaning and communicative projects, respectively. Pratt (1981) goes even further when she accentuates the overemphasis within the theory on one-to-one, private communication: the norm within the theory is to have a speaker formulating his/her intention and a hearer

Notes 233

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

understanding that intention, while speech situations often involve multiple participants with multiple intentions toward one another. The notion of inter-act, rather than speech act, is thus proposed by Linell (1996) to emphasize the collaborative nature of communicative actions (see also Linell and Marková, 1993). In Haverkate’s (1979) view, verbs such as, ‘persuade’ or ‘convince’, which in Austin and Searle’s proposals appear as perlocutionary acts, are not speech acts as such; it is possible, therefore, to refer only to their ‘effect’on the hearer. In his 1994 publication, Haverkate follows Searle (1969), subsuming the referring and predicating acts under the propositional act. Haverkate (1984) modiﬁes his model slightly retaining the notion of allocution not as a subact, but as the strategical component of the speech act that inﬂuences the performance of the different subacts. He does so in order to ‘make it clear that speakers develop speciﬁc strategies in performing each of the subacts of the speech act’ (p. 45). See also Ortega Olivares (1985). On the function of ¿me entendés? in AS in the context of informal interactions, see Boretti (1999). It should be noted that the overview of speech act studies that we offer concentrates on those based on corpora of spoken data, usually within particular sociocultural contexts. Other studies, which are based on literary works, for example, or for which no indication of the corpus employed is given, have not been included. It should also be noted that we only report on studies published in Spanish and English. This applies to the other chapters in the book too. The label ‘single language and culture’ does not imply that researchers necessarily regard culture as fully homogeneous. In fact, variation in speech act realization is often studied in relation to considerations of stable characteristics of the participants (mainly age and sex), as well as situated features (such as the degree of social distance obtaining between the participants in an interaction, power and ranking of the imposition) (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987). This is also the case in cross-cultural studies. We refer here to situations where people with different cultural backgrounds interact in the same language, which might be the ﬁrst language for both groups, or the ﬁrst for one group and the second or later language for the other (see Clyne, 1998 for related distinctions). In the latter case, the interlanguage of the group becomes the focus of examination. In the broadest sense, Blum-Kulka and Sheffer (1993) deﬁne interlanguage pragmatics as ‘concerned with the ways in which nonnatives do things with words in a second language’ (p.196). They say that, although ‘we have been used to thinking about interlanguage as an L2 (second language) speciﬁc notion’ (p. 197), in bilingual situations like the ones they examine in their study, the participants are ‘in effect, in contact with two incongruent pragmatic systems, each realized by a culturally speciﬁc style of language use’ (p. 197). According to this deﬁnition, some intercultural studies may also be subsumed under interlanguage; however, the notion might be relevant when describing the language of one of the participants, but not necessarily of both. Intercultural encounters may take place in bilingual contexts. Nevertheless,

234 Notes

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

3

here we keep the distinction between intercultural and bilingual studies in order to distinguish those studies that deal with two cultural groups in interaction (intercultural studies) from those where members from the same cultural group, who have the inﬂuence from two or more languages and cultures, interact with one another, as in the case of Chicanos interacting with other Chicanos (see, for example, Yañez, 1990 here). See also Ferrer and Sánchez Lanza’s (1998) examination of features of requests and commands. It should be noted that Blum-Kulka and House (1989) comment on the need to examine a larger sample of Argentinian Spanish to further conﬁrm the results of their study. They indicate, nonetheless, that ‘there is evidence to suggest that they [the results of their study] reliably reﬂect a general Spanish trend for higher levels of directness than those acceptable in English’ (p. 135). It should be noted that, while for Curcó and de Fina (2002) negative questions like the ones described by Arellano (2000) also constitute mitigated forms in Mexican Spanish (although not in Peninsular Spanish), other scholars are of a different opinion with respect to Mexican (Koike, 1994), Uruguayan (Márquez Reiter, 2000), and Chilean (Hardin, 2001) Spanish (see Chapters 4 and 5). NN represents the name or term of address employed. Although Pilleux examines a few directives, assertives/representatives are the focus of his study. The reader is also referred to the work of Fitch (1990/1991) which offers an analysis that clearly illustrates the cultural embeddedness of the speech event of leave-taking in urban Colombia (Bogota).

Conversation Analysis: Examining Stretches of Talk

1. For publications outlining the CA perspective and tracking its main developments in greater detail, see Heritage (1984b, 1989); Zimmerman (1988); Pomerantz and Fehr (1997); Hutchby and Woofﬁtt (1998); and ten Have (1999), amongst others. 2. See Clayman and Maynard (1995) for a description of the perspective offered by conventional sociology vis-à-vis ethnomethodology, on which CA is grounded. 3. Although Harvey Sacks is rightly regarded as the founding father of the ﬁeld, it has to be acknowledged that it is the work of Emanuel Schegloff over more than three decades that has greatly contributed to its development, placing him as ‘the leading contemporary authority in the ﬁeld’ (Heritage, 2003, p. 1). For a list of Schegloff’s publications, see Eerdmans (2003). 4. For other sources of inﬂuence on Sacks’s thinking, see, for example, Heritage (2001) and Silverman (1993a). Heritage notes that Sacks was also inﬂuenced by the work of Erving Goffman. In fact, Heritage suggests that CA took from Goffman the notion that talk is ‘a fundamental social domain that can be studied as an institutional entity in its own right’ (2001, p. 52). This is a notion that Goffman, as Heritage acknowledges, did not succeed in devel-

Notes 235 oping since he failed to address concerns that are fundamental to CA, such as ‘how the participants understand one another in interaction’ and how ‘they share their understandings’ (2001, p. 49) On the other hand, Silverman (1993a) suggests that Sacks shared concerns with the American linguist N. Chomsky in that in the same way Chomsky (1965) attempted to construct generative rules, Sacks attempted to ‘construct an apparatus that would generate observed outcomes’ (Silverman, 1993a, p. 735). However, Silverman (1993a) is quick to underline a basic difference between Sacks and Chomsky’s approach to the study of language: unlike both Chomsky and Saussure, who are principally concerned with deciphering the rules of language beneath imagined cases, Sacks seeks to understand the rules that participants attend to in sequences of conversation. (p. 735) 5. Most of Sacks’s work was initially known through copies of the lectures he gave at UCLA and UC Irvine before his premature death in 1975. These lectures appeared in printed form only in 1992 in an edition produced by G. Jefferson 1995 [1992]. In references to these lectures within the text, LC stands for ‘Lectures in Conversation’; 1 stands for volume 1, and 2, for volume 2. The lecture number will be speciﬁed if reference is made to the lecture as a whole (for example, Lecture 1). 6. Sacks’s stance on this matter, however, may be regarded as extreme if one considers that plays, which involve constructed dialogues of varying lengths, have been written for centuries; that is, people do have a sense of sequentiality in interaction (Lars Fant, personal communication). On the other hand, we agree with conversation analysts that for linguistic analyses, reconstructions of interactions from memory can be highly inaccurate. 7. Out of line with most CA practitioners, Hopper (1999) suggests looking at social interaction as reﬂected in ﬁlm as an area of future development for CA. This suggestion is within his more global proposal for a need to build bridges with critical studies, to demonstrate through microanalyses of staged interaction how ideology is constructed. 8. Following this line of reasoning, data from simulations as these employed by a number of scholars in Scandinavia (see 3.5.1 and 3.5.3) would be more ‘natural’ than open role-play data, for example, in that the simulations were set up for professional training purposes rather than linguistic research. 9. For an introduction to transcription conventions employed by conversation analysts, the reader is referred to the following addresses, where a module/tutorial on transcription is offered: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/ faculty/schegloff/ (accessed on 20 June, 2004); http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/ ~ssca1/index.htm (accessed on 20 June, 2004) (see also 6.2.2). 10. In order to highlight that CA’s interests are not restricted to the examination of conversation, following Schegloff (1982), many scholars nowadays employ the term ‘talk-in-interaction’ in descriptions of the object of study of conversation analysts. 11. There are references to institutional talk in Sacks’s lectures, as Silverman (1993a) highlights. However, Sacks did not give much attention to this type of talk.

236 Notes 12. Hammersley (2003, p. 759) remarks that it is not entirely clear what the data for CA is. In addition to the analyst-as-member’s interpretations of the transcripts and/or recordings, the author considers (a) the features of the particular conversational interactions under study; (b) audio- or video-recordings of those interactions; and (c) transcripts of those recordings. 13. In their analyses of discourse, some Hispanists consider aspects of nonverbal language, such as gaze and gesture (see 3.6). However, non-verbal language has not been the focus of any of the studies considered and the analyses offered do not build on the work of conversation analysts in the area (Goodwin, 1984), but rather on work in social psychology where gaze and gesture tend to be analysed in quantitative terms. 14. There is another strand of research initiated by Sacks that corresponds to the study of ‘membership categorization devices’ (MCD), and that departs from core CA work and is, therefore, not considered here. See Schegloff (1995[1992]) for a consideration of some problems with this area from a CA perspective, and Silverman (1998) for a different view on this matter. For work on MCD by Hispanists, see Ciapusco and Kesselheim (1997), Kesselheim (2002) and Ramírez Saborío (2000), amongst others. 15. This is a criticism that has previously been directed towards ethnomethodology, from which CA derives (Giddens, 1977). 16. Developments in the study of turn-taking have also come from other ﬁelds, such as (social) psychology, as in the work of Starkey Duncan, Jr and Donald W. Fiske (Duncan, 1972, 1974; Duncan and Fiske, 1985). These scholars have provided a model for the exchange of turns in dyadic, face-to-face interactions that takes into account language, paralanguage and body motion. Some Hispanists (see 3.5) refer to (aspects of) their work in conjunction with Sacks et al.’s (1974) model. 17. On closings, see also the work of Button (1987, 1990, 1991). 18. For a presentation in Spanish of conversation analysts’ work on openings and closings, with examples in Spanish taken from naturally occurring interactions, see Gallardo Paúls (1993a). 19. See Chapter 6 in relation to differences concerning the social sciences paradigms conversation analysis and sociopragmatics derive from, which underlie some of the differences between conversation analysis and sociopragmatics in the approach to data collection and analysis discussed here. 20. An overt agreement as a response to a compliment does not seem to be a preferred response in American English as it would imply self-praise. Pomerantz (1978) describes how conversationalists in American English deal with the dilemma of accepting a compliment while at the same time avoiding self-praise. 21. On repair, see also Jefferson (1987) and Schegloff (1992b), amongst others. 22. See also Glenn (2003). 23. For a review of conversation analysts’ early work on topic organization, presented in Spanish, see Gallardo Paúls (1993a) and Nieto García (1995). For more recent inﬂuential work in the area, see Svenneving (1999). 24. See also Button and Casey (1985), and Button (1991). 25. It should be noted, however, that an interest in ‘natural language’ within

Notes 237

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

sociopragmatics also developed under the inﬂuence of sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication (see Chapter 1). See also Schegloff (1999) for a discussion of ways in which CA and discourse analysis can ‘co-exist’. Amongst Hispanists, see Hamel (1983) for a criticism of CA along similar lines. Some publications by Hispanists appear under the title of ‘análisis de la conversación’ or ‘análisis conversacional’ but they represent only partially ethnomethodological CA work as they include different approaches to the study of conversation. Gallardo Paúls (1996) and Tusón Valls (1997) are two cases in point. It should be noted that in this chapter, as in other chapters, we report on studies by Hispanists available in Spanish or English only. For studies on turn-taking from a sociolinguistic perspective, the reader is referred to the work of Cestero Mancera (1994a, 1994b, 1999, 2000). See also Bañón Hernández (1996). As is common knowledge, Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) three-part exchange unit is not a CA notion, but belongs to the Birmingham School of Discourse Analysis. This is yet another example of how analytic concepts from different areas (that is, CA and Discourse Analysis) can be coherently employed. Also of interest, but from a discourse analytic perspective that aims to link CA style microanalyses of interaction with discourse analytic macroanalyses of social structures and institutions (Harris, 1989), is Carbó’s (1992) study of interruptions in Mexican parliamentary discourse. The maxim reads as follows: ‘Di por lo menos algo’ y ‘Deja que los demás digan por lo menos algo’ (Musselman Shank 2002a, p. 24) Within Spanish pragmatics, see also Gallardo Paúls (1993b); for example, for a consideration of related notions (that is, ‘collaborative’ and ‘competitive’ interruptions). Based on the analysis of telephone conversations in British English and Ecuadorian Spanish, Placencia (1991) proposed an approach that combines description with explanation. This proposal includes examining four levels of talk – the underlying organization of telephone conversations, which is presented in the form of paths and moves, the surface linguistic representation of moves, the politeness orientations (Brown and Levinson, 1987) behind moves and linguistic choices, and the motivations behind politeness orientations; that is, considerations related to features of the sociocultural context. Of allied interest is Placencia’s (1997b) examination of the function of address forms in telephone conversations in Ecuadorian Spanish, including openings and closings. The presentation of Ávila Muñoz’s examples has been slightly simpliﬁed to make them more accessible to the reader. See also Bou Franch and Gregori Signes (1999) in 3.5.1 in this respect. Preference in repair sequences has also been the object of examination by Hispanists within applied linguistics as can be seen in Buckwalter’s (2001) study on repair sequences among university students of Spanish as L2.

238 Notes

4

Examining Linguistic Politeness Phenomena

1. According to Haverkate, metalinguistic politeness is associated with conversational etiquette and phatic communion (Malinoswki, 1930). 2. It should be noted that yet another approach exists, namely, Watts’s (1989, 2003) ‘politic behaviour’. Here politeness is understood as a (non)linguistic, activity aimed at establishing and/or maintaining the equilibrium or social status quo of interpersonal relationships within the wider context of ‘politic behaviour’. This approach has few adherents probably owing to the fact that Watts does not stipulate how politeness is actually empirically realized. 3. Grice distinguished between generalized and particularized implicatures. The former are context independent, as in the use of ﬁgurative language, while the latter are context dependent and arise from the ﬂouting/violation of the maxim(s), as in the case of example(2). 4. Positive politeness and negative politeness are related to Goffman’s (1967) concepts of ‘avoidance/presentational rituals’; that is, acts through which a speaker shows distance and involvement in the interaction. Scollon and Scollon (1981, 1983, 1995) suggest that negative and positive politeness address different kinds of things and that they should, therefore, not be placed on the same hierarchy. They also claim that positive politeness is geared towards addressing the general relationship between participants, while negative politeness is directed to the speciﬁc act of imposition (1981, p. 174). 5. See Lachenicht (1980) and Austin (1990) for alternative impoliteness models based on Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) framework and Culpeper et al. (2003) for a critique of these. 6. See Tracy and Tracy (1998) for a reconceptualization of face and face attack in the context of 911 calls, and for a critique of the equation between face attack and lack of politeness. 7. See also Mullany (2002) for an application of the model to the analysis of political broadcast interviews in English, and Mills (2003) for a study of impoliteness and gender identity in communities of practice. Regarding communities of practice, the reader is referred to Holmes and Stubbe’s (2003) examination of power and politeness in the work place. It should be noted, however, that Holmes and Stubbe do not employ Culpeper’s (1996) impoliteness model. 8. According to Irvine (1995, p. 1) ‘Linguistic honoriﬁcs are forms of speech that signal social deference, through conventionalised understandings of some aspect(s) of the form-meaning relationship’. 9. See also Kasher (1986) and Kingwell (1993) for criticisms to Brown and Levinson’s rationality. 10. It should be noted that Márquez Reiter (2000), like many other authors (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989), does not equate the expression of indirectness with the expression of politeness. 11. Other scholars such as de Kadt (1998), Nwoye (1989) and Strecker (1993) have raised similar criticisms with respect to the inapplicability of the notion to Zulu, Igbo and Hamar cultures, respectively. 12. It will be recalled that Scollon and Scollon reinterpreted negative politeness as deference.

Notes 239 13. Watts (1989) denies the role of ‘face’ in the enactment of politeness. For Watts, politeness is located within the wider context of politic behaviour. 14. See Craig et al. (1986) for an earlier criticism of Brown and Levinson’s lack of focus on the speaker and for the need to account for self-presentation and self-defence when analysing face-work. 15. Also no quita lo cortés a/para lo valiente, amongst other variants. Politeness does not have to be a sign of weakness, or, you do not lose anything by being polite (Oxford Spanish Dictionary). 16. See also Escandell Vidal’s (1996) chapter on politeness written in Spanish, Calsamiglia Blancafort and Tusón (1999) and Bravo and Briz (2004) on the same subject. As for other books on politeness in Spanish, up to now there has only been one monograph written in English examining one variety of Spanish v. a variety of English, namely Márquez Reiter (2000). 17. For an application of Haverkate’s (1984) (de)focalizing strategies, see Koike’s (1989) research into Brazilian Portuguese requests and Hardin’s (2001) study of TV adverts in Chilean, Peninsular and US Spanish. 18. Puga Larraín (1997) argues that the negative particle in Chilean Spanish does have a mitigating effect. 19. See also Escandell Vidal (1996) for an examination of politeness from a relevance theoretic perspective and Chen (2001) for a critique of the proposed view. 20. See del Saz Rubio (2000/2001) for an application of Carrasco Santana’s (1999) mitigating politeness to the study of US TV commercials. 21. Following Crespo (1986), Fant (1989) argues that, besides intra- and interpersonal face, there are other types of self-images that call for communicative face-work. One of these is ‘self-esteem’. 22. It should be noted that Le Pair did not ask the informants to write their responses but to utter them and proceeded to record them. 23. Also, see Koike (1998) for an examination of the realization of suggestions in Spanish by two teaching supervisors, one American (L2) and one Mexican (L1), within feedback sessions to teaching assistants. Suggestions are examined as inherently face-threatening acts and a description is given of the options available to conversationalists in the production of these utterances to minimize (or not) the threat. Of particular interest is the fact that the hearer’s reaction is taken into account in the classiﬁcation of particular utterances as suggestions or related acts; that is, recommendations, advice, indirect commands. 24. See Chapter 2, section 2.4 and Márquez Reiter (2000, pp. 83–94) for a detailed explanation of the coding scheme employed. 25. See also Achugar (2001, 2002) for an examination of piropos in Uruguayan Spanish as well as in other varieties of Spanish employing data from anthologies, interviews and questionnaires. 26. Cf. Félix-Brasdefer (2003a), where a group of Latin American speakers (from Bolivia, Honduras and Mexico) residing in the US participated in role-play simulations. 27. See also Villemoes (1995) for a study of face work priorities in Danish and Spanish business negotiation. Unlike Bravo (1996), Villemoes (1995) analysis is based on Brown and Levinson’s positive and negative face. Villemoes’s results are in line with those found for Peninsular Spanish. In a later study, however, Villemoes (2003) explores the experiences of northern

240 Notes Spaniards and Spanish-speaking business people in negotiations with southern Spaniards utilizing aspects of Bravo’s (1996, 1999) socio-cultural perspective. 28. See also Schrader-Kniffki (2001, 2003) for an examination of the strategies employed by Zapotecs and Mexicans in a conﬂicting interaction. Interestingly, Schrader-Kniffki (2001) points out that the main difference in the way in which the Zapotecs express afﬁliation and autonomy from the Mexicans is that the former are concerned with their ‘obligations’ within the group whereas the Mexicans appear to be more concerned with their ‘rights’.

5

Examining Sociopragmatic Variation

1. It should be noted, however, that cultures and, therefore, cultural norms are not generally homogeneous in as much as they are affected by gender, ethnic, ideological, and other differences. Hence, it is of crucial importance to the researcher to make sure that s/he is examining the pragmatic behaviour of a given social group beyond the commonality of a shared language. 2. Escandell Vidal (2004, p. 349) distinguishes between conventional and customary norms. She explains that ‘when norms are conventions, the individual usually perceives them as something external, socially imposed’. An example of conventional norms would be turn allocation in given situational contexts, such as chaired discussions, panel/job interviews and the like. On the other hand, customary norms ‘represent internalised, unconscious patterns that the individual follows without even noticing that he is complying with an unwritten model’. 3. In relation to direct and indirect speech acts, Wierzbicka (1991) argues that differences in indirect speech realizations across languages are not due to different conventionalized idiomatic expressions (Searle, 1975) but to differences in cultural norms. 4. In a study of corner shop interactions where participants know each other, Placencia (2004) ﬁnds that the request for a product can occur even after a larger number of turns; this is explained in terms of the phatic talk that precedes the transaction in many of the interactions examined. 5. Note that Puga Larraín makes a similar claim for Chilean Spanish and that Hardin claims it has no mitigating effect in Chilean Spanish (adverts). Márquez Reiter (2000, 2002) sees the inclusion of the particle as formulaic and dialectal in Montevidean Spanish.

6

Research Methods in Sociopragmatics

1. See Lynch (2002), Speer (2002) and ten Have (2002) for a recent debate on natural v. contrived data in discursive psychology and conversation analysis. 2. Ethnographic research has its roots in cultural anthropology. The central aim of ethnography is to understand the practices and beliefs of cultures and communities from an emic (insider) and/or etic (outsider) perspective. When referring to ethnographic work in (socio)linguistics, the ‘ethnography of speaking’ (Hymes, 1962) springs to mind. It was proposed by Hymes (1962)

Notes 241

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

in order to account for social linguistic knowledge, which had been overlooked by traditional linguistic analyses (for example, generative grammar, speech act theory, and so on). It was also proposed by cultural anthropologists, whose main concern was the understanding of particular cultural phenomena in their sociocultural contexts with the aim of discovering sociocultural laws. The ethnography of speaking has its focus on the way in which speaking is conceptualized in a speciﬁc (speech) community; that is, ‘what symbols and meaning, premises and rules there are, pertaining to communicative conduct’ Philipsen (1998, p. 284). Hence, the task of the ethnographer of speaking is to explain observed patterns of speaking according to the speech community’s codes (for example, speech acts, speech events and situations). See Spradley (1980, pp. 58–62) for the different degrees of involvement in participant observation. Exceptions to this can be found in recordings carried out in close circuit TV laboratories. See Wolfson (1976) for an opposing view with regard to the informants’ unawareness of being recorded in the context of the (sociolinguistic) interview. It should be noted that role plays where the conversational outcomes have not been prescribed have not yet been compared to other research instruments. See Silverman (1993) for a critique of triangulation as a positivistic notion in that a single unit of analysis in the interpretative/constructionist paradigm may not always be measured more than once and even if it could be, the fact that it is measured by means of more than one method does not necessarily ensure consistency or replicability. See Cameron et al. (1997) for an enlightening discussion on ethics, advocacy and empowerment for both the researcher and the researched.

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References 273 Zimmerman, D. (1988) ‘On conversation: the conversation analytic perspective’, in J. Anderson (ed.), Communication Yearbook, 11 (Beverly Hills: Sage). Zimmerman, D. and West, C. (1975) ‘Sex roles, interruptions and silences in conversation’, in B. Thorne and N. Henley (eds), Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance (Rowley, MA: Newbury House) 105–29. Zimmerman, D.H. and Boden, D. (1991) ‘Structure-in-action: an introduction’, in D. Boden and D.H. Zimmerman (eds), Talk and Social Structure. Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (Cambridge: Polity Press) 3–43.

Internet resources http://carla.acad.umn.edu/SpeechActs/bibliography1.html (accessed on 20 June, 2004) This site from the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota, offers an annotated bibliography of studies on speech acts, organized by category of speech act (e.g. advice, apologies and so forth). http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ling/staff/allan/speech_acts_allan.html (accessed on 20 June, 2004) Keith Allan’s (1998) paper on speech acts and meaning is found in this site. The author considers, amongst others, the following topics: speakers, hearers and overhearers; locutions, illocutions and perlocutions within the hierarchy of acts, speech act classiﬁcation and deﬁnition; cultural diversity; speech acts and discourse. The chapter is accompanied by a useful list of references. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/schegloff/ (accessed on 20 June, 2004) Emanuel Schegloff’s home page includes an archive of his publications and a transcription module aimed at helping students become familiar with transcription conventions employed in CA. http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/emca/ (accessed on 20 June, 2004) Ethno/CA news, produced by Paul ten Have, provides information on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. As described in the page, it is a medium for the exchange of information concerning publications, conferences and other items relevant to Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis among those who work in the ﬁeld or have a strong interest in it. http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1/index.htm (accessed on 20 June, 2004) Charles Antaki’s online resources offers a tutorial for students interested in CA, with an introduction to the ﬁeld, an explanation of the transcription system employed and a sample analysis of audio/video data that aims to show the type of analyses that CA offers.

Author Index Achugar, M. 13, 73, 231, 239 Alba de Diego, V. 41, 48, 51–2 Alba Juez, L. 183–4 Allwood, J. 232 Alston, W.P. 23, 25, 232 Álvarez-Caccamo, C. 129 Antonopoulos, E. 100, 236 Apte, M.L. 192 Arellano, S. 37, 62, 65–6, 227, 234 Arndt, H. 144, 145, 162–3, 187 Aronson, K. 159 Arundale, R. 175 Aston, G. 226 Atkinson, J.M. 81–2, 84, 87, 92, 96, 104, 105 Auer, P. 123 Austin, J.L. 2, 5, 6–15, 7–16, 16–17, 20, 21, 24, 42 Austin, P. 238 Ávila Muñoz, A.M. 125, 128–9, 237 Ayer, A.J. 8 Bach, K. 12, 26, 53 Ballesteros Martín, F. 62, 64, 68, 178 Bañón Hernández, A.M. 115, 117–19, 141, 237 Bar-Hillel, Y. 1 Bardovi-Harlig, K. 226 Bateson, G. 179 Bayraktarog ˘ lu, A. 161 Baxter, L. 158 Beebe, L. 226 Beinhauer, W. 171 Bengoechea Bartolomé, M. 115, 117, 141 Benson, D. 86, 87, 97 Berlin, I. 7, 8, 9 Biletzki, A. 1 Billig, M. 90 Billmyer, K. 226 Bilmes, J. 102, 138 Blas Arroyo, J.L. 187 Blum-Kulka, S. 1, 5, 26, 30–5, 36, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 56, 57, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 88, 89, 144, 151, 159, 161, 163, 177, 180, 181, 183, 185, 205, 225, 232, 233, 234, 238

Boden, D. 87 Bodman, J. 226 Bolívar, A. 37, 71, 73–4, 187, 239 Boretti, S. 189, 233 Bou (Franch), P. 63, 65, 66–8, 115, 119–21, 124, 141, 132 Boyle, R. 101, 102 Bravo, D. 75, 112, 132, 133, 142, 161, 167, 172, 173, 174–5, 177, 188, 189, 203, 237, 239 Briz, A. 167, 169–70, 172, 189, 205, 239 Brown, P. 30, 55–6, 89, 104, 118, 125, 127, 144, 145, 148, 149, 154–6, 156–7, 161, 171–2, 174, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 189, 190, 195, 206, 207, 233, 237, 238 Brown, R. 2, 43 Buckwalter, P. 237 Bull, P. 110 Bustamante-López, I. 57–8 Button, G. 105–6, 108, 109, 139, 236 Calsamiglia Blancafort, H. 1, 239 Camacho Adarve, M.M. 1 Cameron, D. 91, 95–6, 104, 117, 241 Canale, M. 179 Carbó, T. 237 Carnap, R. 8 Carrasco Santana, A. 171–2, 239 Casey, N. 105–6, 139, 236 Castelfranchi, C. 26 Cestero Mancera, A.M. 132, 135, 142, 237 Cheepen, C. 100 Chen, R. 162, 239 Cheng, W. 211 Chodorowska-Pilch, M. 28, 51, 75, 169, 186 Chomsky, N. 2, 235 Ciapusco, G. 236 Cicourel, A. 20 Clancy, P. 144, 159 Clark, H. 26, 34, 38, 129, 224 Clayman, S.E. 104–5, 234

274

Author Index 275 Clyne, M. 148, 233 Coates, J. 96 Cohen, A. 57, 182, 223, 224 Cohen, L. 214, 221, 228, 229 Cordella, M. 71, 72, 124, 141, 182 Cordisco, A. 189 Cortés Rodríguez, L. 1, 3, 231 Coulmas, F. 1 Coulthard, R.M. 26, 121, 237 Coupland, J. 194 Coupland, N. 1, 214 Craig, R. 159, 162, 239 Crespo, E. 239 Cuff, E.C. 96 Culpeper, J. 156–7, 159, 186, 189, 238 Cummings, M. 226 Curcó, C. 62, 63, 65, 207–8, 224 Czyzewski, M. 101–2 Dahl, M. 217 Dascal, M. 1, 27, 30, 231 Davidson, D. 8 de Erlich, F. 187 de Fina, A. 63, 207–8, 224, 234 de Kadt, E. 238 de los Heros, S. 71, 208–9, 210 de Saussure, F. 20 del Saz Rubio, M. 239 Díaz Pérez, F.J. 62, 64, 178 Dillon, G.L. 151, 176 Drew, P. 85, 87, 96, 98, 100 Duncan, S. 108, 236 Duranti, A. 15, 175, 218–19, 231–2 Edelsky, C. 125 Eisenstein, M. 226 Edmondson, W. 31, 148 Edwards, J.A. 220 Eelen, G. 143, 149, 151, 152, 153, 163 Eerdmans, S.L. 234 Ericsson, K.A. 224 Escandell Vidal, V. 2, 151, 170, 171, 239, 240 Fairclough, N. 57 Fanshel, D. 26, 37 Fant, L. 83, 96, 112–13, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 125, 130–2, 132, 133, 139, 141, 142, 173–4, 175–6, 189, 201–3, 239 Fasold, R. 1, 216 Fehr, B.J. 234

Félix-Brasdefer, J.C. 63, 101, 185, 224, 226, 239 Ferrer, M.C. 28, 57, 58–60, 189, 234 Figueroa, E. 217 Fillmore, C.J. 5 Firth, A. 79–80, 81, 87 Fiske, D.W. 108, 236 Fitch, K. 148, 234 Flowerdew, J. 15, 26 Forbes, K. 124, 141 Franck, D. 37, 38, 39 Fraser, B. 24, 26, 144, 145, 151, 153, 154, 160, 167, 172, 182, 213, 232 Fredin, E. 87 Frege, G. 6 French, J.W. 129 Fukushima, S. 160 Fussell, S. 147 Gallardo Paúls, B. 99, 103, 106, 236, 237 García, C. 22, 34, 61, 63, 64, 75, 149, 179, 180–1, 184–5, 193, 209–10, 211, 222, 232 García Gómez, A. 115, 121–2, 138, 139–40 Gardiner, A. 7 Garﬁnkel, H. 80, 81, 114 Gass, S. 5 Geertz, C. 192 Geis, M.L. 40 Giddens, A. 236 Gille, J. 130 Gilman, A. 2, 43 Glenn, P.J. 104, 105, 236 Godard, D. 99 Goffman, E. 124, 125, 127, 154, 159, 234–5, 238 Golato, A. 226 González Mangas, A. 29, 232 Goodwin, C. 15, 87, 92, 218, 231–2, 235, 236 Gordon, D. 27 Goutsos, D. 139 Graddol, D. 85 Granato, L. 175–6, 189 Greatbatch, D. 87, 92, 96, 108, 110 Gregori Signes, C. 115, 119–21, 124, 132, 141 Grewendorf, G. 12, 231 Grice, P. 2, 6, 27, 29, 145–8, 235 Grindsted, A. 112, 113–14, 131, 132, 133–5, 142 Gu, Y. 144, 148, 152–3, 160

276 Author Index Guariglia, O. 26, 41, 48–50 Gumperz, J.J. 56, 87, 198 Gurruchaga, M.L. 115–17 Haberland, H. 1 Habermas, J. 48 Häggkvist, C. 121, 125, 130–2, 138–9, 140–1, 142 Halliday, M.A.K. 57 Hamel, E. 237 Hamilton, V. 221 Hammersley, M. 85, 86, 91, 111, 236 Hardin, K.J. 62, 75, 206–7, 211, 234, 239 Harnish, R.M. 12, 26, 53 Harris, S. 159, 237 Hartford, B. 226 Haslett, B. 110–11 Hassall, T. 34 Haverkate, H. 26, 33, 36, 41–8, 57, 58, 143–4, 166–8, 171, 185, 233, 239 Hayashi, T. 159 Heath, C. 87 Held, G. 158 Herbert, R.K. 183 Heritage, J. 81–2, 83, 84, 87, 90, 92, 98, 99–100, 101, 104, 105, 108, 110, 219, 234–5 Hernández Flores, N. 63, 161, 172, 188, 189 Hernández Paricio, F. 54 Herrero Moreno, G. 41, 48, 52–5 Hickey, L. 1, 3, 71, 165, 171, 186 Hill, B. 160 Hinkel, E. 227 Hjelmquist, E. 96 Hofstede, G. 112 Holdcroft, D. 12 Holiday, A. 8 Holmes, J. 72, 158, 161, 182, 208, 226, 238 Holtgraves, T. 103, 104, 107, 109, 110, 158 Hopper, R. 85, 88, 109, 110, 235 House, J. 5, 61, 64, 73, 149, 232, 234 Hughes, J.A. 86, 87, 97 Hutchby, I. 85, 234 Hymes, D. 2, 56, 147, 192, 241 Ide, S. 152, 157, 160 Irving, J. 238

Janney, R. 144, 145, 162–3, 187 Jaworski, A. 1, 214 Jeanneret, R. 122 Jefferson, G. 56, 79, 80, 81, 84, 86, 92, 104, 105, 141, 219, 235, 236 Johnston, K. 226, 227 Kannetzky, F. 21, 26 Kasher, A. 1, 148, 238 Kasper, G. 5, 31, 73, 143, 144, 145, 154, 160, 217, 222–3, 225, 226, 232 Keck, G. 7 Keenan, E. 147 Kelly, A. 87 Kempson, R. 8 Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. 161–2, 171–2, 190 Kesselheim, W. 236 Kingwell, M. 238 Kjaerbeck, S. 84, 114–15, 141 Knoblauch, H. 129 Koike, D. 26, 61, 84, 168, 179–80, 208, 234, 239 Koschmieder, E. 7 Krauss, R. 147 Kuiper, K. 160 Labov, W. 2, 26, 37, 214–15, 216 Lachenicht, L. 238 Lakoff, R. 2, 27, 144, 148, 148–9, 179, 185 Lampert, M.D. 220 Le Pair, R. 34, 56, 61, 64, 178, 225, 239 Lee, J.R.E. 109 Leech, G. 1, 15, 24, 30, 36, 44, 51, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149–52, 166, 170, 176, 185, 190, 232 Lerner, G.H. 125 Levenston, E. 57, 225 Levinson, S. 1, 3, 7, 13, 16, 30, 37, 55–6, 88, 89, 101, 104, 118, 125, 127, 144, 145, 148, 154–6, 156–7, 161, 168, 171–2, 174, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 189, 190, 195, 198, 206, 207, 232, 233, 237, 238 Lindström, A. 100 Linell, P. 38, 39–40, 87, 232, 233 Lipski, J. 58 Lorenzo, N. 63, 65, 66–8, 71, 183 Loveday, L. 147–8 Luke, K.K. 99 Lynch, M. 240

Author Index 277 Madariaga, S. 175 Malinowski, B. 238 Manes, J. 72 Mao, L. 159, 160 Markee, N. 79, 110 Marková, I. 233 Márquez Reiter, R. 26, 27, 29, 32, 34, 35, 45, 61, 62, 63, 64–5, 68, 71, 83, 125, 143, 151, 158, 161, 172, 178, 181–2, 182–3, 193, 199–201, 203–4, 211, 220, 222, 223, 224, 234, 238, 239, 240 Marriott, H.E. 87 Martín Rojo, L. 186, 187 Martinich, A. 12, 25 Matsumoto, Y. 152, 160 Maynard, D.W. 234 McHoul, A. 87 McLaughlin, M. 158 Mey, J. 1, 8 Milroy, J. 216 Mills, S. 238 Mitchell, C. 226 Moerman, M. 88 Moeschler, J. 54 Moreno Cabrera, J.C. 53 Morris, C. 1 Moyer, M.G. 115, 123–4 Muelder Eaton, M. 25 Mullany, L. 238 Musselman Shank, R. 124–5, 237 Neu, J. 5 Nieto García, J.M. 236 Nieto y Otero, M.J. 187–8 Niño-Murcia, M. 57–8 Nolen, W. 144, 153, 154, 172 Nwoye, O. 238 Ochs, E. 85, 144, 219 O’Driscoll, J. 160–1 Olshtain, E. 31, 57, 73, 182, 223, 232 Ono, R. 227 Oppenheim, A. 223 Oreström, B. 119 Ortega Olivares, J. 41, 46, 50–1, 233 Osgood, C.E. 223 Pan, Y. 149, 160 Parret, H. 6 Pavlidou, T.S. 99 Penman, R. 159 Philipsen, G. 241

Pilleux, M. 74–6, 234 Pino, C. 70, 71, 100, 135–7 Placencia, M.E. 12, 17, 26, 28, 32, 33, 38, 39, 61, 62, 68–9, 71, 72–3, 94, 99, 100, 102, 104, 107, 125–7, 142, 159, 161, 189, 197–9, 203–4, 211, 232, 237, 240 Pomerantz, A. 70, 89, 90, 100, 101, 135, 137, 234, 236 Porter, R.E. 112 Potter, J. 83 Pratt, M.L. 20, 232–3 Psathas, G. 81 Puga Larraín, J. 62, 170, 205–6, 207, 211, 239 Py, B. 122 Raga Gimeno, F. 115, 122–3, 141 Rall, M. 19, 28, 74, 75, 76 Ramírez Saborío, L. 236 Rapley, M. 87 Rasmussen, G. 100 Reyes, G. 1 Rhodes, R. 158 Rintell, E. 61, 179, 223, 226 Roger, D. 110 Rommetveit, R. 175 Rosaldo, M.Z. 19, 30 Rose, K. 225–6, 227 Ruiz de Zarobe, L. 63, 185–6 Rundström, B. 159 Ruzickova, E. 28, 71, 183 Sacks, H. 56, 79, 80, 81–2, 86, 92, 93, 94–5, 98, 99, 104, 105, 106, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 126, 129, 141, 234–5, 235–6, 236 Sadock, J. 5 Samovar, L.A. 112 Sánchez Lanza, C. 28, 57, 58–60, 189, 234 Sánchez López, E. 115, 122–3, 141 Sanders, R. 148 Santamaría García, C. 54–5, 135, 137–8, 141 Saville-Troike, M. 216, 228 Sbisà, M. 6 Schegloff, E.A. 38, 56, 79, 80, 81, 86, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97–8, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 119, 126, 128, 129, 234, 235, 236, 237 Schieffelin, B. 144 Schiffrin, D. 1, 5

278 Author Index Schlick, M. 8 Schrader-Kniffki, M. 19, 63, 68, 69–70, 230, 240 Schunk, D. 224 Scollon, R. 132, 160, 180, 238 Scollon, S. 132, 160, 180, 238 Searle, J.R. 2, 5–6, 6, 14, 15, 16–36, 42, 44, 45, 48, 74, 109, 231, 232, 233, 240 Serrano Montesinos, M.J. 169 Sharrock, W.W. 96 Sheffer, H. 56, 233 Shimanoff, S. 159 Siebel, M. 25 Sieber, J. 229, 230 Siﬁanou, M. 99, 100, 151, 161, 236 Silverman, D. 97, 234, 235–6, 236, 241 Simon, H.A. 224 Sinclair, J. McH. 26, 121, 237 Slugoski, B. 158 Smith-Hefner, N. 149 Smithson, J. 88, 90 Snow, C. 144 Speer, S.A. 83, 217, 240 Spencer-Oatey, H. 65, 144, 145, 152, 163–4, 175 Sperber, D. 29 Spradley, J. 216, 241 Stokoe, E. 88, 90 Strecker, I. 238 Streeck, J. 37, 38, 40 Stubbe, M. 238 Stubbs, M. 7, 217 Svenneving, J. 236 Swain, M. 179 Swingewood, A. 80, 111 Taleghani-Nikazm, C. 100 Tan Gek Lin, D. 160 Tannen, D. 117, 149, 157, 179, 186, 218 Taylor, T. 7, 91 ten Have, P. 83, 87, 234, 240 Thomas, J. 7, 15, 18, 23–4, 31, 36, 96, 99, 104, 120, 143, 145, 147, 151, 192, 193–4, 213 Thomason, W. 110 Thurén, B.M. 113, 175 Tokunaga, M. 160

Toscano Mateus, H. 58 Tracy, K. 89, 238 Tracy, S. 238 Trenchs, M. 73 Trosborg, A. 182 Turnbull, W. 90, 158, 226 Turner, K. 151, 159 Tusón Valls, A. 1, 237, 239 Valdés, G. 70, 71, 100, 135–7 Valeiras Viso, J. 125, 129–30, 142 van Dijk, T. 57 van Rees, M.A. 40–1, 91 Varghese, M. 226 Vázquez Orta, I. 34, 61, 64, 68, 161, 177–8, 225 Ventola, E. 96 Verschueren, J. 2, 3, 5, 6, 26 Villemoes, A. 239–40 Vincent, J.M. 26 Wagner, J. 80, 100 Walker, J.D.B. 12 Warnock, G.J. 12 Warren, M. 211 Watts, R. 143, 158, 238, 239 Weinbach, L. 73, 232 Weizman, E. 35–6, 46 Wells, G. 96 Wenger, E. 192 Werkhofer, K. 143, 158 West, C. 117 Wetherell, M. 83 Wierzbicka, A. 26, 30, 148, 160, 161, 240 Wilson, D. 29 Wittgenstein, L. 6–7, 37 Wolfram, W. 216 Wolfson, N. 70, 72, 217, 241 Woofﬁtt, R. 234 Wooton, A.J. 88, 89, 109 Wunderlich, D. 48, 53 Yáñez, R.H. 70, 71, 137, 234 Yang, J.M. 158 Yépez, L.M. 12, 71, 72–3, 100 Yuan, Y. 226 Zahn, C. 103–4 Zimmerman, D. 83, 87, 117, 234

Subject Index

abrupt topic shifts 140 absolute politeness 150 accountability 81, 102 address (forms of ) 152 adjacency pairs 92–4 advertising 206–7 afﬁliation 173–5 agreeing responses 137–8 agreement (maxim) 150 alerters 31–2, 66–7 allocutionary acts 42–4 allocutionary devices 43, 44 Anglo-American School of Pragmatics 3 answering machine messages 129–30 apologies 23–4, 182–3 CCSARP 31–6 approbation (maxim) 150 assertives 24, 53, 74–6 association rights 164 audio-recordings 82–6, 217–20 authority scale 150–1 autonomy 173–5 back-channelling 113 balance principle 152 behabitives 14–15 business negotiations conversation analysis 114, 133–5 sociopragmatic variation 201–3 camaraderie 149 classiﬁcation of speech acts in Spanish 48–50 closings 105 service encounters 204 telephone calls 98–9, 126–7, 129 cognitive pragmatics 2, 3 collaborative participation 125 commands 57–8 commissives 14–15, 24, 25 studies on 74–6 competitive participation 125 complaints 73–4 compliments 70–3, 183–4, 208–9

compliment responses 70, 135–7 components of speech acts Austin 12 Searle 17 condensed notes 216 conditions for speech acts 21–4 conﬁdentiality 229–30 consent 215, 218–19, 229 constitutive rules 19, 21 constructivist/interpretative view of reality 214 context 89–90 conventional indirectness 27–9, 33–5, 159, 199–201 conventional norms 240 conventionality 18–19 conversation analysis (CA) 3, 4, 41, 79–142 incorporation by Hispanists 111–42; organization of laughter 132–5; overall organization of conversation 125–32; preference organization 135–8; topic organization 138–41; turntaking 112–25 main contributions 91–107; organization of laughter 104–5; overall organization of talk 97–100; preference organization 100–4; sequential organization of talk 92–4; topic organization 105–7; turn-taking 94–6 origins 80–2 politeness in informal conversations 188–9 relevance for sociopragmatics 107–11 variation in organization of conversation 201–4 working methodology 82–91; data analysis 87–91; data source and data collection and transcription 82–7 conversation maxim view of politeness 144, 148–53 279

280 Subject Index conversational contract view of politeness 144–5, 153–4 conversational implicature 147 conversational units 202–3 cooperative dissentives 54 Cooperative Principle (CP) 145–8, 151, 154 cortesía 164–6 cost/beneﬁt scale 150 critical realism 214 Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns project (CCSARP) 31–6 cross-cultural variation 193 cultural norms 193–7, 240 customary norms 240 data collection observation 215–17 observer-only role 215–16 participant-as-observer role 215–16 declarations 24 deference 149, 179, 211 deference politeness strategies 180–1 defocalizing expressions 46–7, 168 deictic strategies 168 dialectology 191 diminutives 32 direction of ﬁt 25 directives 24, 27 pragmalinguistic studies 57–9 sociopragmatic studies 60–70 directness 67 levels of 33–5 see also indirectness disagreement responses 137–8 disarmers 32 discernment politeness 160 discourse analysis, and speech act theory 36–41 discourse completion tests (DCTs) 225–7 discourse markers 50–1 discourse units 114–15 dispreferred responses 54 dissentive expressives 53 dissentives 52–5 distribution rule 97 elicited data 220–8 closed (structured) role plays 221, 223 discourse completion tests 225–7 multiple-choice questionnaires 227–8

rating scales 223–4 open role plays 221, 223 verbal reports 224–5 emancipatory view of reality 214 emotive communication view of politeness 144–5, 162–3 enumeración temática 140–1 equity rights 164 essential rules 23 ethics 229–30 ethnography 240–1 ethnomethodology 80–1, 111 exercitives 14–15 expanded accounts 216 explicit performatives 11 expositives 14–15 expressibility, principle of 20–1 expressives 24 dissentive 53 pragmalinguistic studies 59–60 sociopragmatic studies 70–4 external modiﬁcation 32 face concept of 154–5, 159–60 management of 163–4 quality face 163–4 social identity face 163–4 face needs 175–6 face-saving view of politeness 144–5, 154–62, 164; criticisms of 157–62 Hispanic empirical studies 177–88; political discourse 186–8; service encounters 189; speech act realization 177–86 impoliteness 156–7 reappraisals by Hispanists 171–2 face-enhancing acts 161 face-threatening acts (FTAs) 155–6 felicity conditions 9–10 ﬁeld notes 215–17 ﬁeldwork journals 216 focalizing expressions 46–7, 168 gender and laughter 135 and requests 67 and turn-taking 117, 120 generosity (maxim) 152 gossip talk 139–40 greeting sequence 98 greetings 59–60 group discussions 130–2 group membership 173–4

Subject Index 281 head acts 31–2 hearer, role of 38 hedged performatives 167 hierarchy of strategies 155–6, 159 Hispanists empirical politeness studies 177–89; informal conversations 188–9; political discourse 186–8; service encounters 189; speech act realization from face-saving view 177–86 perspectives on politeness 164–76; alternative models by Hispanists 172–6; pragmalinguistic views 166–71; reappraisals of face-saving approach 171–2 uptake of speech act theory 6, 41–77; empirical studies 55–76; theoretical developments 41–55 work incorporating CA analytical concepts 111–42; organization of laughter 132–5; overall organization of talk 125–32; preference organization 135–8; topic organization 138–41; turn-taking 112–25 how-are-you sequence 98 hyper-topics 140 identiﬁcation-recognition sequence 97–8 identity 175–6 illocutionary acts 12–14, 15, 16–18 illocutionary forces, classiﬁcation of 14–15 illocutionary point/purpose 25, 232 immediacy 114 imperatives 30 implicit performatives 11 impolite speech acts 167 impoliteness face-saving view 156–7 political discourse 186–8 see also politeness impositives 44–6, 57–8 indexicality 81 indirectness 33–5, 149–50, 159 directness-indirectness pole 45–6 Searle and indirect speech acts 26–30 sociopragmatic variation 199–201, 211

indirectness scale 150 informal conversations 188–9 informed consent 229 initiative/response patterns 113 insertion sequences 93 institutional talk 87 instructions 68–9 intensiﬁcation 169 intentionality 18, 36–7 interlanguage studies 56 internal modiﬁcation 32 interpretation acts 42 interpretative/constructivist view of reality 214 interruptions 117–19 variation and interruptive overlap 202–3 intra-cultural variation 193 intuition (use of ) 91 invitations 58–9, 184–6 joking exchanges 133–5 see also laughter language choice 123 language games 6–7 laughter 135, 142, 203 organization of 104–5, 132–5 leave-taking 59–60 lexical strategies 168 linguistic communication acts 42 limao 152–3 locutionary acts 12–14, 15, 16–18 logical positivism 8 maxims of conversation 281 conversation maxim view of politeness 144, 148–53 Grice 145–8 quality 146–7 quantity 146–7 manner 146–7 relation 146–7 meaning in interaction 192 metapragmatic 217, 226, 227 minimal responses 39 mitigating metalinguistic utterances 167 mitigating politeness 171–2 mitigation 167–70 requests 65–6 semantic mitigation 167 sociopragmatic variation 205–6 modesty (maxim) 150 mood 10–11

282 Subject Index multiple-choice questionnaires (MCQs) 227–8 naïve realism 214 natural discourse 214–20 ﬁeld notes 215–17 recording and transcribing 217–20 naturally occurring interactions 82–3 negation 168 negative face 154, 160, 162 negative politeness 156, 159, 162 negotiations see business negotiations non-conventional indirectness 29, 33, 35, 45–6, 159 non-impolite speech acts 167 non-interruptive overlap 202–3 non-polite speech acts 166–7 norms 193–7, 240 obligations, rights and 153 observation 215–17 use of two observers working independently 228 observer-only role 215–16 observer’s paradox 214–15, 216–17 offers 186 opacity [pragmatic] 35–6, 46 open (unstructured) role plays 221–3 openings service encounters 203–4 telephone calls 97–8, 125–6, 128–9, 197–8 orders 46 organization of conversation 97–100 Hispanists’ empirical studies 125–32, 142 variation in 201–4 other-oriented principles 162 overlaps 84 see also interruptions; turn-taking participant-as-observer role 215–16 participation maxim 124–5 performatives 9–12 perlocutionary acts 11, 12–14, 15, 16–17 perspective 32–3 persuasive strategies (advertising) 206–7 polite speech acts 166 politeness 3, 4, 29–30, 104, 143–90 absolute politeness 150 be clear 148–9

be polite 148–9 classiﬁcation of politeness models 144–64; conversation maxim view 144, 148–53; conversational contract view 144–5, 153–4; emotive communication view 144–5, 162–3; face-saving view 144–5, 154–62, 164; rapport management view 144–5, 163–4 deference 180 disinterested politeness 171 discernment politeness 160 enhancing politeness 171–2 functions of politeness: enhancement; mitigation; reparation; Hispanic empirical studies 177–89; informal conversations 188–9; political discourse 186–8; service encounters 189; speech act realization 177–86 Hispanic politeness 164–76; alternative models by Hispanists 172–6; pragmalinguistic views 166–71; reappraisals of face-saving view 171–2 impoliteness 156–7 interruptions and 118–19 mitigating politeness 171–2 negative politeness 156, 159, 162 positive politeness 156, 159, 162, 171 relative politeness 150 self-politeness 162 social norm view of politeness 144 social politeness 162–3; variation 205–10 solidarity 180–1, 185 politeness markers 51 Politeness Principle maxims Leech’s maxims: Agreement 150; Approbation 150; Generosity 150; Modesty 150; Sympathy 150; Tact 150 Gu’s maxims: Self-denigration 152; Address 152; Tact 152; Generosity 152; The Balance Principle 152 Politeness Principle (PP) 149–52 political discourse 186–8 polyadic sequencing 113–14

Subject Index 283 positive face 154, 160, 162 positive politeness 156, 159, 162, 171 pragmalinguistic failure 193–7 pragmalinguistic studies Hispanic politeness 166–71 speech acts 57–60 pragmatic failure 120–1 (pragmatic) mitigation 167–8 pragmatic variation see sociopragmatic variation pragmatics deﬁnitions 1 interdisciplinary nature of 2 origin 1–2 pre-closing devices 39, 98, 105, 129 preference organization 100–4, 135–8 preparators 32 preparatory rules 23 privacy (research ethics) 229–30 see also conﬁdentiality production questionnaires 217, 225–8 promises 22–3, 69–70, 74 propositional acts 16–18 propositional content rules 23 pseudo feedback turns 124–5 108

sociopragmatic studies 60–70 sociopragmatic variation 199–201, 207–8 studies of politeness 177–82 research methods 4, 213–30 collecting natural discourse 214–20; ﬁeld notes 215–17; recording and transcribing 217–20 elicited data 220–8; discourse completion tests 225–7; multiple-choice questionnaires 227–8; rating scales 223–4; role plays 221–3; verbal reports 224–5 ethics 229–30 triangulation 228 retrospective interviews 224–5 rights and obligations 153 risk/beneﬁt assessment 230 ritualized performatives 10 role plays 221–3 rules for speech acts essential rules 23 preparatory rules 23 propositional content rules 23 sincerity rules 23

ranking of impositions 155, 158 rapport management 144–5, 163–4 identity and 175–6 rating scales 223–4 rationality 155, 157–8 reality, views of 214 recordings 82–6, 217–20 redeﬁnitions of speech acts 37 referring expressions 46–7 referring strategies 46–7 reﬂexivity 81 regulative rules 19 reinforcing devices 46 rejoinders, DCTs with 225–6 relation, maxim of 146–7 relative politeness 150 reluctance markers 138 repair mechanisms 102–4 reparation (function of politeness) 172 representatives/assertives 24 reprimands 184, 209–10 requests 46 CCSARP 31–6 for permission 51–2 pragmalinguistic studies 57–8

Searle’s taxonomy of 24 self-afﬁrmation 173–4, 175 self-denigration 152 self-esteem 173–4 self-oriented principles 162 self-politeness 162 self-repair 103 semantics 1–2 sequencing 16, 38 sequential organization of talk 92–4 service encounters 189, 198–9, 203–4 silences 122–3 sincerity rules 23 social adequacy 170 social distance 155, 158 scale 150–1 social norm view of politeness 144 social politeness 162–3 see also tact social power 155, 158 sociality rights 163–4 sociocultural context 2 sociocultural pragmatics 2, 3 sociocultural view of politeness 172, 173–5, 188–9

quantiﬁcation

284 Subject Index informal conversations 188–9 service encounters 189 sociolinguistics 191–2 sociopragmatic failure 193–7 sociopragmatic variation 3, 4, 191–212 deﬁning 191–7 studies on 197–210; conversational organization 201–4; politeness 205–10; speech act realization 197–201 sociopragmatics relevance of CA for 107–11 research methods see research methods studies on speech acts 60–76 solidarity politeness strategies 180–1 speech acts 3–4, 5–77 and analysis of discourse 36–41 Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) coding scheme for head acts 31–2; external modiﬁcation 32; internal modiﬁcation 32 classiﬁcation of speech acts in Spanish 48–50 Hispanic empirical studies of speech act realization and politeness 177–86 incompleteness 38–40 origins of speech act theory 6–36; Austin 7–16; Searle 16–36 supportive moves 31–2, 67 uptake of theory by Hispanists 41–77; empirical speech act studies 55–76; pragmalinguistic studies 57–60; sociopragmatic studies 60–76; theoretical developments 41–55 variation in realization 197–201 static view of language 38 status 116–17 strategy hierarchy 155–6, 159 structural functionalism 80 structured (closed) role plays 221, 223 summons–answer sequence 97, 98 supportive moves 31–2, 67 supportiveness 163 sympathy (maxim) 150 syntax 1–2

tact 150–2, 162–3 talk-in-interaction 79 see also conversation analysis talk shows 121–2 telephone conversations conversation analysis 86–7, 97–100, 125–9 sociopragmatic variation 197–8 television advertising 206–7 tense 10–11 tentativeness 201 thanks 186 third party, effect of presence of 158–9 three-sequence exchange 153 time, conception of 74 topic approvals 139 topic contributors 140 topic-initial elicitors 105–7 topic initiators 139 topic organization 105–7, 138–41 topic supporters 139–40 transcription 83–6 natural data 217–20 transition-relevance place (TRP) 95 triangulation 228, 241 truth-conditional semantics 8 truth-value, manipulations of 168 turn-allocation component 95 turn-constructional component 95 turn length 124 turn-taking 94–6 Hispanists’ empirical studies 112–25, 141 universality 147–8 unmentioned mentionables 105 unstructured (open) role plays 221–3 uptake 11, 13 verbal reports 224–5 verdictives 14–15 veriﬁcationism 8 video-recordings 82–6, 217–20 want statements

33–4