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6. Pragmatics and Discourse: Doing Things with Words in Spanish as a Heritage Language
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C H A P T E R 6 Pragmatics and Discourse DOING THINGS WITH WORDS IN SPANISH AS A HERITAGE LANGUAGE Derrin Pinto, University of Saint Thomas W HEN TAKEN SEPARATELY, linguistic studies on Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) and those involving pragmatics and discourse analysis represent two research trends that have both flourished during the past two or three decades. It is somewhat surprising, then, that when considered together, the body of research in pragmatics/discourse that incorporates SHL is still in the developing stages. One explanation for this may simply be a matter of time, because relatively speaking these are both young areas of enquiry that do not belong to long-standing research traditions. The same could be said for research on SHL, which did not fully come into its own until the 1980s and 1990s. Another contributing factor could be that the interdisciplinary fields of pragmatics/discourse cover such a vast range of topics and theoretical perspectives that no single line of research on SHL has been particularly prominent. Taking into consideration this disparateness, in order to locate a homogeneous focus among diverse areas of research that are often only loosely interrelated, this chapter only addresses pragmatic/discourse issues linked to how heritage speakers (HS) in the United States use Spanish in oral interaction. Pragmatics/discourse research on different varieties of Spanish has progressed greatly during the past two decades. Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2005) dedicate an entire book to summarizing research on Spanish pragmatics— encompassing speech acts, politeness, and conversation analysis—and not only was the bibliography already substantial at the time of publication, it has continued to grow since then. There are also academic journals, among them the internationally reputable Spanish in Context, that are dedicated largely to Spanish pragmatics and closely related interdisciplinary fields. Although bilingual and 121 122 DERRIN PINTO multilingual perspectives on Spanish in contact with other language communities only make up a small portion of the research, there are indications that this area is going to thrive in the years to come. Just to cite a few examples in the existing literature, investigators have examined Spanish in contact with Basque in northern Spain (Barnes 2001); Zapotec in Oaxaca, Mexico (Schrader-Kniffki 2004); Quechua in Ecuador and southern Peru (Hurley 1995; Harvey 1991); and numerous other indigenous languages throughout Latin America (Brody 1995; Torres 2006). TOPICS THAT ARE RELEVANT TO SHL Because there is not enough space to provide an overview of the history and development of the interdisciplinary fields and subfields of pragmatics and discourse analysis, this section is limited to a brief discussion of the major lines of research most pertinent to SHL. The threads that appear to be attracting the most interest thus far are speech acts, discourse markers, and personal pronouns, whereas other topics such as oral academic registers and spontaneous oral discourse have also received some attention. Certain other issues that overlap with discourse/pragmatics, especially code-mixing and identity, are addressed in chapters 7 and 9, respectively. Perhaps the unit of linguistic expression most typically associated with pragmatics is the speech act. The notion of the speech act was primarily developed in the writings of two language philosophers, John Austin and John Searle, particularly How to Do Things with Words (Austin 1962), Speech Acts (Searle 1969), and Expression and Meaning (Searle 1979). Briefly, speech acts can be understood as attempts by language users to perform specific actions, such as making statements , asking questions, making promises, expressing gratitude, requesting, and apologizing (Searle 1969). During the last thirty years, there has been great interest in examining the production and interpretation of speech acts in the hybrid fields of cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. Although speech act studies in cross-cultural pragmatics generally compare and contrast the linguistic behavior of two or more (native) speech communities, the interlanguage focus incorporates second language (L2) learners and often compares their linguistic performance to one or more native-speaker groups. Two influential edited collections that have contributed to the international visibility of these avenues of research are Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies (Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989) and Interlanguage Pragmatics (Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993). Many studies on speech acts also concern (im)politeness, another topic that interconnects disciplines and subdisciplines. The most prominent theories on politeness have stemmed from Brown and Levinson’s work (1978, 1987), which attempted to establish a universal framework for politeness based on the notion of ‘‘face.’’ Although widely...