Politeness in Ecuadorian Spanish

This paper examines politeness phenomena in Ecuadorian Spanish as reflected in the language of telephone conversations, and, as such, attempts to add another cultural perspective to the discussion of politeness issues and of Brown and Levinson's (1978, 1987) much criticized theory, in particular. It highlights some of the difficulties involved in the application of Brown and Levinson's theory to actual conversational data in Ecuadorian Spanish, such as the frequent occurrence of embeddedness, which brings into question their notions of positive and negative politeness strategies as clear-cut categories, and the lack of one-to-one correspondence between certain forms and their politeness value, which poses problems for generalizations. It also explores the motivations behind participants' use of certain strategies and brings into question Brown and Brown and Levinson's notion of face. In addition, it considers some features of politeness at the macro-speech level (cf. van Dijk, 1977, 1980), which Brown and Levinson do not seem to take into account. Finally, it suggests that it might be fruitful to seek explanations for some aspects of linguistic politeness in fields that deal with social behavior and patterns of social interaction (e.g. social psychology and social anthropology). It nevertheless also suggests that to arrive at a more adequate characterization and understanding of politeness phenomena in Ecuadorian Spanish, it might be useful to examine some aspects of its history and the development of what today constitute its key social institutions

Insistence among family and friends in Quiteño Spanish: from connectedness to empowerment?

Drawing on sociopragmatics and some ethnographic work in communication studies, in this paper I examine the occurrence of insistence in interactions among family and friends in middle-class Quiteño society (Ecuador) in relation to suggestions, offers and invitations. I interpret insistence in these contexts as a marker of affiliation through which an interpersonal ideology of connectedness (cf. Fitch, 1998) is recreated. However, I find that there is some generational variation in the use of this practice. I suggest that this may be an indication of a possible shift in interpersonal ideology –from connectedness towards empowerment– gradually taking place in middle-class Quiteño society

Requests in corner shop transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and coastal Spanish

Book synopsis: This collection of papers is designed to establish variational pragmatics. This new field is situated at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology and aims at systematically investigating the effect of macro-social pragmatic variation on language in action. As such, it challenges the widespread assumption in the area of pragmatics that language communities are homogeneous and also addresses the current research gap in sociolinguistics for variation on the pragmatic level. The introductory chapter establishes the rationale for studying variational pragmatics as a separate field of inquiry, systematically sketches the broader theoretical framework and presents a framework for further analysis. The papers which follow are located within this framework. They present empirical variational pragmatic research focusing on regional varieties of pluricentric languages. Speech acts and other discourse phenomena are addressed and analysed in a number of regional varieties of Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. The seminal nature of this volume, its empirical orientation and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in pragmatics and sociolinguistics

Explicitness and ellipsis as features of conversational style in British English and Ecuadorian Spanish

In this article I examine differences in conversational style between British English and Ecuadorian Spanish which can be the source of communication conflict among speakers of these two languages in telephone conversations, and, presumably in other types of interaction. I look at the language of mediated and non-mediated telephone conversations and examine one feature that interacts with indirectness, i.e., the degree of explicitness participants employ to realize similar acts or moves in the two languages. In non-mediated telephone interactions both British English and Ecuadorian Spanish speakers appear to display a preference for the use of explicitness in formulating various telephone management moves. On the other hand, in mediated interactions, while the British appear to favour explicitness, Ecuadorians in the present study, make use of elliptical forms. The latter, however, tend to be accompanied by deference markers. Differences in the use of explicit and elliptical utterances are interpreted as reflecting that, in certain types of interactions, Ecuadorians favour a style that can be characterized as fast and deferential, but possibly rather abrupt to the English, whereas the latter appear to favour a less hurried style which emphasizes the expression of consideration rather than deference

Opening up closings - the Ecuadorian way

In the conversation analytic tradition, this paper examines the procedures Ecuadorian Spanish (ES) speakers employ to close telephone conversations. Conversation analysts (cf. Schegloff, 1979) examined telephone talk in American English and that found that conversations are opened and brought to a close by the joint work of participants. Concerning closings, they observed, for example, that participants employ certain procedures to signal their desire to bring the conversation to an end and others to actually close the interaction. They also suggested that the conversational procedures they describe are of a universal character (cf. Schegloff and Sacks, 1974 [1973]). The examination of telephone closings in the present study reveals that similar procedures are employed in Ecuadorian Spanish. Nevertheless, it also highlights some of the features that appear to be characteristic of Ecuadorian Spanish only, that is, that seem to be culture-bound, and thus contests Schegloff and Sacks's unversality claims. The need for a culturally contexted conversation analysis, along the lines proposed by Moerman (1988) is supported here

Los marcadores del discurso en la construcción de habla de contacto en un contexto de servicio en el español peninsular

Basándonos en grabaciones de interacciones espontáneas, analizamos en este trabajo una serie de marcadores del discurso empleados en la construcción de habla de contacto, (small talk) –un tipo de habla relacional– (cfr. compilaciones de Coupland 2000a; Placencia/García 2008a) en interacciones de servicio en bares de Sevilla, durante el momento del desayuno. Mostramos la riqueza de formas en uso en la (re)creación de relaciones familiares entre camareros y clientes, que sin embargo, como ilustramos en este trabajo, parece estar supeditada a factores situacionales, entre otros. Así pues, por un lado intentamos con este análisis hacer una aportación a los estudios de habla de contacto en contextos transaccionales, en los cuales los marcadores del discurso han recibido escasa atención; mientras que por otro lado pretendemos también contribuir al análisis de los marcadores del discurso en general. Estos, si bien es cierto que ya han sido extensamente estudiados en múltiples trabajos sobre la lengua española, no han recibido suficiente atención en contextos de servicio. El propósito de la presente investigación es también aportar nuevos datos sobre el modo del que los sevillanos conducen sus relaciones interpersonales en interacciones de servicio en bares pertenecientes a dos contextos diferentes: uno en el que camareros y clientes se conocen, ya que realizan el intercambio comercial de manera habitual, y otro en el que mantienen una relación esporádica

"Ándate al páramo": prácticas lingüísticas de exclusión y prejuicios en contra de los indígenas en la interacción interétnica en Twitter (Ecuador)

This article examines the linguistic practices of Twitter users through which they discriminate and exclude indigenous people in the Ecuadorian context, and the prejudices behind these practices. For the study, the accounts of three indigenous leaders, active on Twitter, were selected and a corpus was constructed based on the responses provided by users to leaders’ tweets (i.e., 2944 responses); this was within a selected period during the 2021 presidential elections. The approach adopted is that of critical pragmatics in seeking to unveil discriminatory practices against minorities, taking into account in this case the historical and political context of their occurrence. Drawing on works on slurs (e.g., Croom 2011) and racial insults (e.g., Guimarães 2003), 329 instances of these types of insults were identified in the corpus examined; they were then grouped thematically, according to the negative beliefs about indigenous identity that they seem to (re)create (e.g., that indigenous people are ignorant, that they lack hygiene, etc.). The study shows that the racism that has been observed in face-to-face interactions (see e.g., De la Torre 2002; Placencia 2008) persists and has spread online (not surprisingly) –with multiple realizations, both conventional and nonconventional–, and it seems to go unchecked on the Twitter platform

Compliments and compliment responses

Compliments and the responses that they elicit have been widely studied in face-to-face interactions. Researchers are now turning to digital contexts, particularly social media, where complimenting is a widespread occurrence. This chapter gives an overview of the current state of the art of compliment and compliment response studies on social media. After a brief exploration of the background of compliment studies in face-to-face interaction, we provide a working definition of compliments. We then examine studies to date of complimenting behavior on social media, highlighting similarities and differences, and any emerging trends. Next, methodological and ethical considerations are explored in this relatively new area of study. Finally, we comment on directions that future research could take